Spread For Big Brother Issue #85, from SHIT

I think Mike Vallely said it before me: female skaters embody the original spirit of skateboarding better than anyone else these days. They’re punk rock. And they’re like Rodney Dangerfield: no respect. At best, no one gives a shit about them, and at worst they’re hated. Which makes them all the more attractive to me. So when the opportunity arose to go on a tour of Australia with the Gallaz team (Globe’s female division), I squealed like a little girl. Some of my friends thought that I should try and bed as many of the young ladies as I could and then detail and rate my encounters with them in a tour diary, but I decided to take the opposite approach and become one of them: I wore a dress the entire trip. But first, I had to buy the dress. I hate shopping for my own clothes in the men’s section, so you can’t imagine how stupid I felt stumbling around in the women’s department, but I managed to emerge with a conservative navy blue and white flower print dress, as well as a cheetah-print miniskirt for more racy occasions. The trip was a little awkward at first. The girls didn’t know what to make of the bearded man in the dress, but once they warmed up to me, it was like we were family—a very dysfunctional family in which I became known as “Deadbeat Mom.” While Mom was more interested in female pursuits like shopping and taking pregnancy tests, her daughters were too busy skating like champs and behaving like fucking pirates—literally: one night they stole a boat. They were gnarly. Daggers through and through. They made me so proud.

Spread For Big Brother Issue #64, from SHIT

From my “Santa Cruz Wheels Product Review”: I went out with this girl, Laura, in Santa Cruz a long time ago. Chris Pontius and I would drive up from San Luis Obispo and party at Laura’s house on the weekends. Chris had developed a code word for sex: insomnia. Laura and I had only had insomnia once at the time and it wasn’t very good, and so we were nervous and shy around each other, wanting to try again, but too scared to initiate it. It was in this vulnerable and bashful state that Chris point-blank asked us, “Are you guys gonna have insomnia tonight?” We blushed and did everything in our power to ignore the question, but it was true, neither of us wanted to sleep that night. Chris laughed at us and left the room. We sat there picking at the carpet or whatever the fuck we were doing when Chris came back into the room. “You guys don’t mind if I read the paper in here do you?” We didn’t object. He spread the paper wide open and on the back, scrawled in green crayon, was the word, “INSOMNIA.” After we got through laughing, Chris left the room again. When he came back, he had a plate in his hand. “Do either of you want a hot dog?” he asked. On the plate were two hot dogs with the word “INSOMNIA” written on them in mustard. Chris left the room again. When he came back the third time, he asked us, “Can I eat my soup in here?” Of course, sit right down. Sure enough, he had found a can of alphabet soup and taken all the letters out except the ones needed to spell, “INSOMNIA.” It wasn’t long after Chris finished his soup that Laura and I laid down to take a nap, but neither of us could sleep. We had insomnia.