The Dime Glory Challenge is a full day-long daredevil-style skateboarding event where 50 of “the greatest professional skateboarders of all time” come together to perform increasingly “fucked beyond repair” stunts in front of 6,000 people. It draws crowds of baggy-jeaned young men with tousled hair in expensive t-shirts, cool young parents with tattoos and silver rings holding babies wearing noise cancelling headphones over their barely hardened skulls, girlfriends, thirsty hoes, girls who can skateboard, tweakers, Americans, unsupervised Québécois children, and most of my ex-boyfriends, which is a term I use loosely. Dime is a skateboarding-inspired streetwear brand that was born out of the city of Montreal but popularized mostly by wealthy international students. My good friend Mark is their lifestyle and ecommerce photographer. We met at university though we became close through strictly un-academic disciplines, like competitive drinking and Philosophy class.
My confidence in him was such that I didn’t buy a ticket to the event – I just assumed the position of Girl Who’s Friends With Mark and waited to be admitted at the pearly white tent, where we cut the queue and an old Toronto friend of Mark’s gave me his extra ticket. My strategy, which was to leverage the power of friendship and clout and love and light and smiling and happiness, ultimately worked quite well and left me with a privileged glow that I only get under the French Canadian sun.
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I had allowed one New Yorker passage in my rental car from Brooklyn to Montreal – Liam, a friend of Mark’s. Liam is a talented young skateboarder and engineering student. It was a last minute thing. He sheepishly slid in my DMs, saying he’d “mixed up Tuesday and Wednesday” when booking his flights and did I want some company? Before the 7 hour drive, we’d only met once before on a date. I had dismissed Liam for being 4 years younger than me and for being too much fun. We got a couple casual beers that he paid for with crumpled bills, and he asked thoughtful questions and stole blatant, unpracticed glances at my boobs while I answered them. He was clearly smart and sensitive, and he had thick eyebrows, unfairly curly eyelashes and a slightly hoarse voice that suggested he laughed really hard and often. At the time I’d considered pursuing him over more appropriate, albeit more rapidly balding options.
After a day in the car together, he became like a hot step son to me. We’d discussed sex, dating, blended family dynamics, the girl he couldn’t get over, the reasons I could still get married to a nice guy even though I have a lower back tattoo, our hopes, dreams, favorite Drake albums, existentialism, and other things we thought equally important.
After we got into town, a group of us went out together to a wine bar. I was talking with my hands a lot and smiling. Liam came close to my face and pointed at me with his free hand while the other clutched a beer. “You’re such a vibe right now girl,” he said. “You should be more like this in New York.” I said I would try.
Mark ran out of VIP wristband favors so he requested that I finesse my way in to the section myself which was done with ease, thanks to David the security guard, who told me that he doesn’t usually do this but my face card is “lethal” – I could go up to VIP as long as I didn’t come back down.
My friends in VIP told me to enjoy that, to drink it all in. Oh my god dude, they said through giggly sips of Molson Export, That’s so awesome.
Then Ivan came and sat next to me. Though we’d admitted to being in love with one another a few years ago at mismatched times, our relationship is pure and platonic now, in that we no longer speak unless it’s to reflect fondly on what absolutely never was. He told me now he’s in school to learn to build cabinets, “since I’m not too good at computers,” he’d said. He sat next to me and drank and smoked and laughed at my jokes at his expense while I counted his new gray hairs. He made jokes at my expense too, pointing out not one, but two of my old flings in the ring; handsome friends of his that I’d once engaged in short-term relationships with to make him jealous. “Look, there’s your boyfriend,” he said, nudging my elbow off the arm rest and pointing.
The athletes performed — impossible stunts that sent them through the air while spinning their boards as if their bodies had a gravitational pull over absurd and random obstacles or between columns of flames at the tops of ramps that seemed to reach all the way up to heaven. Refreshment stands started to run out of beer by the afternoon because people were smoking and drinking in the stands in the way they only do in Europe or the American South. The star of the night was born-again Christian, entrepreneur, and pro skater Ryan Scheckler. Every time he went up, the crowd stuck their arms in the air, making a V-shape that reminded me of Jesus on the cross. He did his signature trick jumping over an inflated sarcophagus erected on a ramp made to look like ancient pyramids. The crowd went wild. I missed it because I made accidental eye contact with JP, someone I hadn’t seen since a tearful breakup that happened 5 years ago in a loft apartment with tastefully exposed brick.
JP was rolling his own spliff the same as he always had. His hairline was intact, and his glasses frames had a tasteful thickness that effectively communicated the aspirational nature of his job as the village graphic designer. His gaze moved from the action below slowly but surely towards me. We looked at one another and pretended to notice one another for the first time. His knees were uncomfortably backed up against the seat in front of him, reminding me how tall he is. Hello, he smiled and waved enthusiastically with one hand while pinching the half-rolled spliff in the other.
While I wasn’t born in Canada very much on purpose, these are the moments I feel most at home. After I left Montreal I struggled with the culture shock that was really more a brief period of intense mourning that came with the realization that most people are not attractive or well-dressed. Even in a city like Montreal where people don’t make that much money, the message was always clear and universal: get hot or die in the snow. And don’t ash in the fur. Being well-groomed makes people want to kill you in America. Here at the ex-boyfriend convention, my new American fear crept in.
Blushing and afraid, I turned to Ivan who was already looking at me, watching me be watched. I asked him, “Would you marry a girl who has a lower back tattoo?”
He laughed and shook his head. “You’re a punisher,” he said.
“Well, yeah. I’m here to punish you.”
So he said in his deadpan way, “I couldn’t get serious about anyone who didn’t.”
I leaned back and motioned for him to pass me his cigarette.
During my vacation, nobody told me that they went to school in Connecticut with a glint in their eye. They lived in two languages and had normal opinions, unlike those of so many Ivy League post-grads whose idea of socializing is to strategically alienate and rage bait randoms at the bar, reluctant instagram mutuals, and highly temporary sexual partners. At one point during my trip, just to see what would happen, I’d asked Mark “how high a body count is too high for a girl” to which he responded lovingly, with a inpatient exhale of a cigarette generally reserved for French-speaking construction workers, “Sarah, shut the fuck up – I don’t believe in that stuff.”
Skaters are like theater kids with better outfits. Something about facing corporeal death on a regular basis makes the earnestness come out – a desire to perform, to rehearse, to familiarize oneself with the lore, the aesthetics, the preferred brands. I looked around the stadium, I scanned the faces, and realized that before I left here, no one had ever been truly cruel to me. Or at least, they didn’t think that hard about it if they were.
