{"id":133872,"date":"2019-02-22T12:07:03","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T17:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=133872"},"modified":"2019-02-22T17:04:07","modified_gmt":"2019-02-22T22:04:07","slug":"skate-escape-on-minding-the-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/02\/22\/skate-escape-on-minding-the-gap\/","title":{"rendered":"Skate Escape: On Minding the Gap<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Zack Mulligan and Keire Johnson in Minding the Gap<\/em>. Photo: Bing Liu.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1949, Life<\/em> magazine called my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, a place as \u201cnearly typical of the U.S. as any city can be.\u201d Today the city of a hundred fifty thousand has one of the highest rates of unemployment and violent crime in the country; every year, it makes the lists of America\u2019s worst cities. My friends, almost all of whom have left, are so accustomed to sharing embarrassing headlines that there\u2019s an air of disbelief when something good comes out of Rockford.<\/p>\n

More than disbelief, I felt envy when the director Bing Liu won an award at Sundance for Minding the Gap<\/em>, a documentary set in Rockford, a city whose story I have tried\u2014and failed\u2014to tell. A documentary about skateboarding, no less. I grew up skating those streets. As the rave reviews poured in, I didn\u2019t read them; I didn\u2019t want to hear someone else\u2019s take on my hometown. I felt guilty, but the jealousy gnawed at me. Still, I wanted to see Rockford writ large on a big screen in Manhattan. I brought my wife and two friends to an art house cinema where Liu was on hand for a Q&A. The theater was packed full of East Coast aesthetes eager to catch a glimpse of Rust Belt cinema verit\u00e9.<\/p>\n

The film opens with a stunning montage of two of the main characters, Zack Mulligan and Keire Johnson, riding through downtown Rockford in the golden hour, popping tricks with a grace matched only by Bing\u2019s work with a Glidecam. We meet Keire, Zack, and Bing, a character himself, through montages from parties and skate parks, much of the footage filmed when they were just teenagers. Portraits of youth\u2019s joyful abandon. But that joy is fleeting.<\/p>\n

Minding the Gap<\/em>\u00a0is more than a film about skateboarding and Rockford. Shot over several years, the film employs skateboarding as a lens to examine domestic violence, race, and the enduring effects of childhood trauma, all set against the dreary backdrop of a city\u2019s decline. Bing, a few years older than the others, is unique in that he left Rockford for college and never moved back. Now he has returned, camera in hand, to find both Zack and Keire struggling with the demands of adulthood.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zack is magnetic, funny, and reckless, a kid who left an oppressive home at sixteen. Now in his early twenties, he\u2019s going to be a father. Woefully unprepared, he sometimes roofs houses and struggles to get his GED. Mostly, he drinks and skates. His girlfriend, Nina, has just turned twenty-one and waits tables. Keire, sincere and winsome, grew up under the thumb of a disciplinarian father who passed away unexpectedly when his son was in high school. Now eighteen, Keire is unemployed and lives with his mom. At home, isolated from his family, he spends his time alone in his room. On the streets, a black kid in a group of older white skaters, he endures his friends\u2019 casual racism, which litters the film. \u201cI\u2019m becoming a man, and I feel like that\u2019s something I got fucked over on because my childhood was a really shitty time,\u201d he tells Bing. The whole project might feel exploitative were it not for the compassion that comes through in Bing\u2019s interviews. Bing, too, suffered violence growing up. As he tells Keire, \u201cI\u2019m making this film because I was physically disciplined by my stepfather, and I saw myself in your story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two days before the screening, I was sitting in a coffee shop and transferring files to a new computer when I stumbled upon an abandoned project: a book about growing up, my father, shame, Rockford. Thousands and thousands of words, fragments of memories, a story I never figured out how to tell. Only a few years had passed since I\u2019d written these pages, but I had forgotten them. I started reading the first chapter. I closed the file almost immediately. I did not want to remember. Now, as I watched the film, the memories washed over me.<\/p>\n

I am three years old, staring at a glass of milk that is eye level from my seat on the burgundy vinyl booth. The booths are a hallmark of the restaurants we frequent, Greek and Albanian joints where seven bucks will buy you a chicken breast, soup or salad, a side of pasta, and dessert. My mother, who ordered the milk, tells me to drink it, but I refuse, clenching my teeth and defiantly curling my lower lip. After a few minutes, my father loses his patience.<\/p>\n

\u201cDavid, do you want to get hit?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen drink your milk.\u201d<\/p>\n

I shake my head. A strange sound fills the booth, a grunt somewhere between phlegm-clearing and spitting rancid food: \u201cAch!\u201d My father makes this sound when he turns off the news in disgust or walks away from an argument with my mother. It means, I\u2019m done here. And with that sound, he picks up the glass and dumps the milk on my head. As it runs down my shirt and pants, I burst into tears. The waitress arrives, as if on cue, and my father smiles and says I spilled. My mother whisks me to the bathroom and holds me under the hand dryer. By the time we get home, the milk has soured in my clothes.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did you get disciplined?\u201d Bing asks Keire.<\/p>\n

\u201cUh \u2026 I mean, well, they call it child abuse now,\u201d Keire says. He looks away from the camera. \u201cBut it\u2019s not really child \u2026\u2009\u201d He trails off.<\/p>\n

The scenario repeats itself: milk, pasta\u2014whatever I don\u2019t consume, I wear home. I learn to sit with my mother. I also learn that rice pudding can be thrown across a table. Another time, unable to reach me from a corner seat, my father flings a piece of cheap steak. I duck, and it bounces off the booth. \u201cYou missed.\u201d He saws off more steak, grunting with each throw as though he\u2019s serving a tennis ball. The meat hits me in the face until I slide under the table and my mother, mortified, begs him to stop.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the restaurant abuses stop, but they continue at home. Variations on a theme: I am forbidden to leave the table until I finish my dinner. I play a waiting game. If my father, tired and grumpy from commuting ninety miles each way to his job as a school psychologist in Chicago, falls asleep, I sneak away. If not, the game is brought to its close with that familiar noise: \u201cAch!\u201d He\u2019s in his sixties\u2014twenty-five years older than my mother\u2014but he\u2019s fast, and there is nowhere to run.<\/p>\n

By middle school, I have developed what teachers dub \u201cattitude problems.\u201d I curse at my father. I tell my mother to go to hell. I buy a skateboard, but there\u2019s nowhere to skate. Confined to the driveway, I roll around alone. Eventually, a friend invites me to his church with the promise of older kids who love skateboarding and punk rock. I meet Matt, a scruffy kid with a flat cap who compliments my skate shoes. Soon, he and his older brother start picking me up in an \u201985 Mercury Cougar with a three-foot skull sticker on the hood and a back seat filled with skateboards.<\/p>\n

The following year, my family moves from the outskirts of Rockford to an old colonial near downtown. Suddenly, the world opens up. All summer and every weekend in the spring and fall, Matt and I skate. Rockford has yet to build a public skate park, so we skate the streets. We skate parking garages. We skate the curbs of countless abandoned buildings and empty city parks. We are free. The streets become home.<\/p>\n

As Zack begins another trick montage, we hear his voice-over: \u201cTo other people it\u2019s funny \u2026 Oh, these guys are crazy. But in reality, [skating] is a control thing. You fucking have to control the most minute, small details to make you feel normal in a world that\u2019s not normal.\u201d Watching Keire and Zack skate those same streets, landing elaborate tricks, I remember what I wanted\u2014to be a body gliding through life, bending the universe to my imagination. In these elegant montages, and in the skate tapes I watched until they broke, there\u2019s perfect union of freedom and control\u2014flow. I never achieved it. Skateboarding requires one to be confident, reckless, fearless, or, ideally, all three. I was timid, careful, and afraid of pain. \u201cIt was kind of like a drug, in a way,\u201d as Keire says. \u201cAs long as I\u2019m able to go skate, then I\u2019m completely fine.\u201d But the drug wears off. You go back home.<\/p>\n

I am fourteen and sitting in front of a plate of watery mashed rutabaga. I loathe this bitter root, but my mother has cooked it because her mother is visiting from Sweden, and it reminds them of home. Dinner has long ended. I am alone at the table with my father, who watches TV while my grandmother does the dishes and asks me to finish my food. In broken Swedish, I refuse. She yells for my mother, which is all it takes. My father shoots up from his chair with a grunt, and I make a run for it.<\/p>\n

He cuts me off at the end of the table, beside the glass sliding door to our deck, but something snaps inside me. I push him into the door so hard that he bounces. I grab him by the shirt and slam him into the glass over and over, threatening to kill him, while my grandmother pleads with me to stop. Eventually, my mother and sister pull me off, and my father crumples to the floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cDavid, are you out of your mind?\u201d he barks as he storms off.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could have broken his hip or triggered a heart attack,\u201d my mother yells.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood. He deserved it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you stupid? Do you know what happens to you if he can\u2019t work?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\n

A couple of years later, I ask my father about his childhood. He was four when the stock market crashed.\u00a0He tells me about hunger, and his father hitting him. My grandfather, a peddler from Persia, lost his business, and his six children often went without. He spent his idle time beating my father, who fled to the streets of Chicago to roller-skate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I think of him,\u201d Bing says of his stepfather, now deceased, \u201cI get shaky and anxious.\u201d My first month at college, I\u2019m eating with a dozen new acquaintances when a sophomore seizes a lull to suggest everyone say something nice about me. I sweat until my shirt is drenched, and I flee. It\u2019s the first of many panic attacks that will strike over meals. I begin to eat alone. When I eat with others, I rehearse excuses to slip away. I sit on the outside so I won\u2019t be trapped\u2014a custom I still keep. I see therapists for years, but I never mention my father\u2019s cruelty. I\u2019m in my mid-twenties before I tell anyone\u2014and then only Matt, as I shift uncomfortably in my seat at a bar and look down, like the characters on the screen.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did you dump food on my head?\u201d I am home from my first semester of college, sitting with my father, who is watching TV from a new recliner. He is too weak to walk up the stairs to his bedroom. He has just been diagnosed with stomach cancer and has undergone his first round of chemotherapy.<\/p>\n

He shoots me an annoyed look.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to know,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou were trying to control the family with your eating habits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was five.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDavid, you were very manipulative.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe I just didn\u2019t like the food.\u201d<\/p>\n

He sighs and turns back to the television. On the side table is a glass of Ensure that I ask him to finish. He reluctantly complies. His doctor tells me, privately, that he has maybe six months. He will be dead in a week.<\/p>\n

Those times I might have deserved some sort of discipline\u2014like when I tried to slip a bully a laxative\u2014my father blamed the circumstances. I went unpunished. By most counts, he was a good man and a good father. Every night before bed, he told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him. In college, I write essays about him, lionizing him while chastising myself for the shame I felt over his age. I keep his photo on my desk and wear his watch. I commission a friend to paint his portrait for my mother\u2019s birthday. She hangs it over the mantel.<\/p>\n

Halfway through the film, Keire has found work as a dishwasher. \u201cI feel like this place just eats away at you,\u201d he says. \u201cI just don\u2019t want to get trapped here in Rockford like a lot of people have.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year out of college, I move home, broke and unemployed. Eventually, I find work at a staffing agency, where I run sex offender checks and process applications from the parade of broken souls applying for factory jobs that pay eight dollars an hour. But there are no jobs. The recession has begun, and Rockford\u2019s unemployment approaches 20 percent. I get accepted to graduate school but can\u2019t afford tuition. I apply for jobs in Chicago and New York with no luck. The city I loved so much when I sailed down its streets now feels like a prison. Matt is also back in Rockford, scraping by as a carpenter and living with his parents. We have stopped skating and spend our nights at the bar, our weekends working through thirty-racks of beer at friends\u2019 Chicago apartments.<\/p>\n

A year passes. I ask my mother whether I can check into the psychiatric ward where she works. Instead, she pays for an appointment with the ward\u2019s psychiatrist. He writes a prescription\u2014a \u201cBand-Aid,\u201d he calls it\u2014and tells me I will feel better, eventually, when I leave town. I read a history of Rockford and then learn that the author left for graduate school at Cambridge only to suffer a breakdown and spend the rest of his life in Rockford. I wonder whether that is my fate. Finally, after two years, Matt and I both go abroad, he to Afghanistan, via the army, I to Sweden, via a master\u2019s program. I\u2019m dubious about studying literature in English in Sweden, but tuition is free, and it\u2019s a ticket out. My only goal is to never move back. Two years later, though I\u2019m back, working in a screw factory.<\/p>\n

As Zack drinks more and more, his relationship with Nina falls apart, and she moves out with their son. Later, it emerges that Zack has hit her. In one of the film\u2019s most poignant scenes, Bing turns the camera on himself as he interviews his mother, Mengyue, about her ex-husband, Dennis, who beat her, Bing, and Bing\u2019s half brother. When Bing asks how much she knew about Dennis beating him, she tears up and sighs. \u201cI don\u2019t know what to say now. I wish I could do it over again, do it differently.\u201d<\/p>\n

When this scene played, I was elsewhere, transported to the moment in my late twenties when I finally confronted my mother.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou were trying to control the family,\u201d she says. We are sitting apart from each other on perpendicular couches joined by my father\u2019s empty recliner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s Dad\u2019s bullshit excuse. I was a kid.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess we were both inundated with Freudian ideas. Your father studied with, what\u2019s his name, the psychologist who spanked children.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBettelheim.\u201d<\/p>\n

She reminds me my father was beaten by his father. \u201cI had my own messed-up childhood,\u201d she says, referring to her alcoholic father. \u201cI should have done something, but I had my own insecurities and fears.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Keire is moving to Denver when the film ends. As the camera traces his Mercury heading over the river, due west, I think of the last time I was home, the Christmas before last. My mother\u2019s house, too expensive to maintain, had fallen into disrepair. Mice had infested the basement, nesting in my boxes of books. I urged my mother to sell the house and leave Rockford. She won\u2019t, though. She\u2019s two blocks from the cemetery and my father\u2019s grave. I salvaged what books I could, loaded them into a rental car, and drove to New York, seventeen hours straight, through a blizzard and freezing rain. I couldn\u2019t get away fast enough. A few days later, I wrote my mom that I would not be returning home.<\/p>\n

As the lights came on and Bing started fielding questions from the audience, an older man remarked, with surprise, that Bing\u2019s mother\u2019s home looks nice. \u201cI didn\u2019t expect such attractive homes\u2014there\u2019s a kind of haunted beauty to them. And that abandoned skate park building\u2014a beautiful example of midcentury architecture. One would think someone could do something with it.\u201d The spell was broken. I was back in Manhattan, among the people whose ranks I\u2019d wanted so badly to join. Suddenly, I missed Rockford.<\/p>\n

After the Q&A, my wife and my friends asked what I thought. But when I tried to offer an opinion beyond \u201cmasterful\u201d\u2014and it really is\u2014I couldn\u2019t put words together. The film had destroyed me. Part of me felt guilty, since several of the characters in Minding the Gap <\/em>experienced trauma much worse than my own. But Bing Liu had given me an unlikely gift. In the weeks that followed, I watched the film several more times. I shared the full extent of my humiliations and shame with my wife. And for the first time, I told my therapist, euphemistically, then openly, the tears welling in my eyes. The jealousy had faded. In its place, I found only gratitude.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

David Michael is a writer and video producer. His essays and reviews have appeared in <\/em>The\u00a0New Republic,\u00a0<\/em>Virginia Quarterly Review, and\u00a0<\/em>Commonweal, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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