Zebra Cakes, Fudge Rounds, Oatmeal Pies, Star Crunch, Lil’ Hug, Lemon Heads, Sunnydale… When you’re a kid, all you want to do is skateboard. Jobs, rent, relationships, student loans, “your future,” whether or not the girl working the door at the place you’re going to after you give up on skating for the night will let you get in with your board — none of these things seemed like they’d be bearing down on you at any point soon. And even if you did happen to have a job, real-life ambitions, or a concern for your future that exceeds the typical, borderline non-existent foresight of an average skateboarder, all of these things got put in the backseat when you woke up on that first 60-degree Saturday in mid-March, or even in those last remaining crumbs of tolerability on the cusp of 32-degrees once December had set in.
Skating Downtown and Midtown in the same day becomes a daunting physical task once you start to exit your teen years. But when you’re younger, the day seems incomplete if you call it quits just after the sun sets. You either hop on the train, or push for forty blocks up there to save yourself the $2. Some nights were cut off early, when you’d still be out at an hour reasonable enough to bump into groups of tourists looking for landmarks they’d recognize from Sex and the City. Other times, you’d be on the streets to the point when you only share them with a calm patch of cabs, and the smell of 4 A.M. coffee creeping from the breakfast carts getting ready for the working day’s first rush of construction workers. Either way, it was skate, get kicked out, move along, repeat. No matter the hour.
As you get older, you have more things to worry about, and less time to get it all done. What was once an unavoidable debate between the 6 to Grand Central or the N to 49th Street is flipped into whether to make the voyage north of 14th Street altogether. Either you’re taking it easy because you need to be up for work in the morning, have a paper due, or succumbing to the temptation of the relative simplicity that comes with hanging out and getting drunk, there is a certain point everyone reaches that simply disables them from skating for ten consecutive hours.
When you’re fifteen, pushing around the city with little concern for what the time is, you learn how to make your money stretch. Regardless of if you had a little side hustle or got it from your parents, you restricted your options to dollar-menus, slices, 99-cent cans of Arizona iced tea, 50-cent Tropical Fantasy sodas, and Little Debbie snack cakes, for a mere quarter. Especially when you your pockets only contained some loose change, a Metrocard, and nuggets of wax, the quarter snack was the most viable option.
As soon as you reach the point when you can afford actual meals and overpriced rent for a Lower East Side hole-in-the-wall, the quarter snack becomes the symbol of simpler time, back when you were wholly content with skating on a diet that might inevitably lead to blood sugar disease down the line. It didn’t really matter though, things were less complicated, and a lot more fun.
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