Shep Wardlaw
I grew up with a guy named Shep Wardlaw. He was three years older than me
and although he lived on my block I didn't interact with him until I was
twelve years old. About a week before I met him, another friend
and I were shooting fireworks from my roof. We were not trying to
hit anyone. In fact, we probably weren't even aware of who was passing on
the street in front of my house. But one of the bottle rockets must
have exploded close to Shep and his friend Seth. A few days later, I was
walking down my street and Shep and Seth stopped me and pushed me up against
a car and asked me why I was shooting fireworks at them. They told me that
I could choose my punishment, either one blowgun dart from Shep or one punch
to the chest from Seth. I chose the punch, and it was quite a punch. My
left pectoral muscle was sore for months and to this day it is slightly
deformed.
Growing up in Washington, DC, things were all about wheels. Although my first
wheels were bicycles, in my early teens my friends and I discovered roller
skates. A roller rink had closed down and was selling dozens of pairs of
used skates. The year was 1985 and they were presumably left over from
the skating craze of the 1970's. Several of us bought pairs. We liked to
skate around the neighborhood and particularly liked hitching rides on cars.
I once hitched on a guy in a VW Rabbit who put the gas pedal on the floor and
got up to around 40 or 50 miles per hour before I let go. As soon as I let
go I got speed wobbles, lost control, slammed into the back of
a parked car, flew over the parked car and landed in front of the parked car.
Of course it was a miracle that I didn't break any bones. But I was really
shook up and could hardly walk or talk. Shep was also skating on the same
hill and saw what happened. He took me to his house. Actually I can't
remember how we got there. He sat with me on the floor of his parent's
living room and kind of put me back together. He gave me a glass of apple
juice and put on some music. He knew that I was in a lot of pain and needed
time to settle. He just sat there across the room from me and kept me
company while got my strength back. We didn't say anything except for
"Are you OK, man?" and "Yeah, no problem." It was cool because if I had
gone home in such a bad state, my parents might have made a bid deal about
how stupid it was to hitch on the back of cars. It was probably my first
exposure to what could be considered a subculture, a hidden world with
different values. We both knew that hitching on cars was crazy, but we
knew why we were doing it, and neither one of us thought it was stupid.
He treated me like an injured soldier, not like a stupid kid.
Shep liked bikes a lot and so did I, but for different reasons. I liked
bikes because of the freedom it gave me, and the sense of smooth motion.
My main bike in 1985 was a Motobecane Nomad that I had put in very good
working condition. It felt smooth and fast.
Shep always had a BMX/freestyle bike because he liked doing tricks. In
addition to the usual freestyle techniques like endos and framestands, he
had an absolute fascination with riding down stairs. Shep was a tall and
lanky and it always worried me to see him crash, over and over again, while
learning tricks. And he was generally accident prone, not because of
clumsiness, but because he always pushed everything to the limit, and beyond.
In fact it could be said that that was his guiding principle. He tended to
hurt himself and break things like bikes and piss a lot of people off with
his showy, rebellious behavior.
This was the main way in which he and I were different.
I was more conservative and somehow would always stay in the background.
But he was an unusually charismatic guy and things were never routine
when he was around. Many times we got on our bikes to go riding, with
no destination and no plan, but I knew that we would find fun, guaranteed.
I think that Shep conceptualized life as some kind of cardboard box enclosing
him. His truest expression was his day-to-day performance of punching his
fist out through the box. Riding his bike down stairs was something that
you are not supposed to do. It is something that people usually don't do.
Therefore he did it at almost every opportunity.
By 1986 I also had a BMX bike and we would go riding in all sorts of places
where we weren't supposed to be. We liked riding through parks and in
underground parking lots and inside of buildings, like in the back hallways
of the three large hotels that were in the neighborhood. I never liked being
afraid of getting caught and getting in trouble. My thrill was just
exploration and the sense of being in an unusual physical space. Shep
also loved exploration, but he also liked flirting with danger in several
ways that I didn't. In addition to the physical stunts that were an
essential part of what he did every day, he also liked courting danger
in the form of authority conflict. It was a summertime ritual to go
pool hopping. He had a good memory for the location of suburban swimming
pools that could be visited at night. This usually involved climbing over
a chain link fence or, on more than one occasion, digging under the fence.
Usually we went in groups, sometimes as many as eight,
but although always seemed strange to me, he sometimes would hop a pool
by himself. I found this particularly bizarre because the main merit of the
activity seemed to be the audacity of breaking into some one else's pool
and getting the full enjoyment of it. I sometimes would ask him
what he did the night before and he would tell me this, and it just further
reinforced my awareness that we were really different.
One night while we were visiting a pool at a community center in Maryland,
Shep discovered a little pink girl's bike leaning up against a fence next to
the pool. After riding the bike around the pool a few times, doing wheelies
and skids and bunnyhops, he got the idea to ride the bike off of the diving
board and then ride around on the bottom of the pool. It never really worked
out, not because he couldn't hold his breath, but because of lack of traction
on the bottom of the pool. I insisted that the bike be put back against the
fence and I'm sure that the owner never knew what happened and never would
have imagined it themselves.
One afternoon we went for a ride on BMX bikes and got into an interesting
form of trouble. We were on Massachusetts Avenue in DC, a few blocks
northwest of Dupont Circle. A new embassy was under construction and
the gate of the fence around the site was not closed, but it was a Sunday
so we figured it was "safe" to go in. The wide smooth concrete ramp
leading into the underground parking lot was very inviting and it was
cool inside the garage. A long string of exposed light bulbs lit the
whole place. It was a big helix, similar to the Guggenheim
museum on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. But unlike the Guggenheim, this
helix had no railings preventing you from falling down the center, and
if I recall correctly, the helix made five turns, so falling in would
be bad. There was construction equipment all over the place. Some of
it was partially blocking the path, and to explore the entire space,
which we did, we had to carry our bikes over some big equipment. But mostly
we rode our bikes. After we had explored it to our satisfaction, Shep
started doing tricks on his bike. He liked "walking" his bike down the
steep incline sideways, first he would lean back into a wheelie, then swing
the front around, then lean forward onto the front wheel and swing the
back around, and so on. If the incline is right and your timing is good,
it can be pretty smooth, and was OK at it. One bike trick that he was good at
was the framestand. That is when you stand on the top tube of the frame
with the set between your shins and your hands out in the air. On a slight
hill he could keep up in a framestand almost forever. But in the steeply
inclined parking garage, his speed would get out of control too fast.
A solution to this was to do the framestand ... (to be continued)