Hosoi Read online

  TO MY LOVING MOTHER, WHO IS IN HEAVEN,

  MY WONDERFUL FATHER, MY BEAUTIFUL

  WIFE AND ADORABLE CHILDREN, AND TO ALL MY

  FRIENDS AND FANS WHO HAVE SUPPORTED ME

  THROUGHOUT MY LIFE

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Intro

  01 Risen Son Fallen

  02 Flight Paths

  03 Skate and Destroy

  04 Birth of a Counterculture

  05 They Called Me Christ

  06 Too High

  07 The Sharks and Jets Ride Again

  08 Back to the Streets

  09 High Above the Clouds

  10 Aloha to Reality

  11 Vert is Dead; Long Live Vert

  12 Cracks in the Foundation

  13 Out of Focus

  14 A Junkie Like Me

  15 All is Vanity

  16 Christian in Name Only

  17 The Ultimate High

  18 One Love

  19 Light in the Darkness

  20 Who’s Calling the Shots?

  21 Doing Life

  22 The Price of Admission

  23 The One and Only

  Photographic Insert

  Resume

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHRISTIAN HOSOI HAS ALWAYS HAD STYLE. THE FIRST TIME I EVER SAW HIM WAS IN A MAGAZINE, BLASTING A FRONTSIDE OLLIE TO DISASTER IN A SMALL BOWL. HE LOOKED ABOUT MY AGE (TEN AT THE TIME), BUT HAD LONG HAIR AND COLORFUL PADS. MOST IMPORTANT, HIS BODY FORM WAS THAT OF A VETERAN PRO SKATER LAUNCHED INTO THE AIR. I WAS IMMEDIATELY INSPIRED TO LEARN THAT TRICK, WHICH I EMULATED IN THE OASIS SNAKE RUN ON MY GIANT SIMS ANDRECHT BOARD. I KNEW I WOULD NEVER LOOK THAT STYLISH, BUT I HAD TO TRY. EMULATING CHRISTIAN TO NO AVAIL BECAME A CONSISTENT THREAD IN MY SKATING OVER THE NEXT DECADE.

  CHRISTIAN AND I BECAME FRIENDS NOT LONG AFTER, AND EACH OTHER’S TOUGHEST COMPETITORS FOR YEARS TO COME. BUT THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF BEING COMPARED TO HIM WAS THAT HE COULD MAKE THE MOST BASIC TRICK LOOK GOOD. SO WHEN HE LEARNED SOMETHING NEW, HE DID IT LIKE NOBODY ELSE. HE DID IT IN A WAY YOU WISHED YOU COULD, BUT KNEW YOU WOULD NEVER ACHIEVE. A PRIME EXAMPLE IS WHEN WE BOTH LEARNED 540S: MINE WERE MECHANICAL, SPINNING FLATLY AND PRECISE. HIS WERE FULLY FLIPPED, AT LEAST SIX FEET HIGH, AND SEEMED TO BE SUSPENDED IN A SLOW-MOTION MIDAIR DANCE. IN ORDER TO COMPETE WITH SUCH STYLE, THE ONLY DEFENSE WAS TO LEARN MORE TRICKS THAN ANYONE. AND THAT WASN’T ALWAYS ENOUGH.

  EVENTUALLY, SKATE FANS IN THE ’80S DIVIDED THEMSELVES INTO TWO GROUPS: STYLE VERSUS TECH. YOU CAN GUESS WHICH SIDE OF THE FENCE I LANDED ON. BUT I ALWAYS TOOK CUES FROM CHRISTIAN TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO GIVE MY LATEST TRICKS A LITTLE MORE FLAIR. THE ONLY DRAWBACK TO THAT APPROACH IS THAT IF HE LEARNED THE TRICK, IT WOULD BECOME HIS BECAUSE HE DID IT IN A WAY THAT WAS MUCH MORE FUN TO WATCH. IT WAS AN AMAZING TIME OF INNOVATION AND EXPERIMENTING FOR BOTH OF US; WE WERE YOUNG AND SEEMINGLY INVINCIBLE.

  AS SKATING’S POPULARITY WANED, HE AND I BOTH HAD STRUGGLES. WE DESPERATELY WANTED TO CONTINUE OUR CAREERS AS PRO SKATERS, BUT THE INDUSTRY WAS CHANGING…MEANING THAT THE PREFERRED STYLE OF SKATING WAS MORPHING INTO STREET-INSPIRED MOVES. EVEN THOUGH WE BOTH HAD A HARD TIME ADAPTING, CHRISTIAN MANAGED TO KEEP UP AND PULL SOME OF THE HARDEST STUFF WITH HIS EVER-STYLISH WAYS. BUT IN THE EARLY ’90S, IT BECAME VERY DIFFICULT FOR EITHER OF US TO MAKE A LIVING SOLELY FROM OUR SKATING SKILLS.

  I LOST TOUCH WITH CHRISTIAN IN THE FOLLOWING YEARS BUT HEARD SECONDHAND STORIES OF HIS TOUGH TIMES INCLUDING HEAVY DRUG USE. I DIDN’T WANT TO BELIEVE THE RUMORS, BUT MY FEARS WERE REALIZED WHEN I HEARD THAT HE HAD BEEN ARRESTED AND PUT IN JAIL. AS HIS TRIAL AND SENTENCING NEARED, I WROTE LETTERS OF SUPPORT TO THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY, HOPING THAT CHRISTIAN’S TALE COULD BE ONE OF CAUTION FOR YOUTH TODAY, AND THAT HE COULD TELL HIS STORY PERSONALLY IF HE WERE RELEASED. I HAD FAITH THAT HE WOULD COME OUT ON THE OTHER SIDE WITH STYLE, AND RETURN TO THE SPORT THAT CAME TO DEFINE BOTH OF US. HE HAS SINCE DONE THAT AND MORE, AND WE (AS SKATERS AND PEERS) ARE LUCKY TO HAVE HIM BACK. THIS BOOK IS PART OF THAT PROCESS. ENJOY THE STORIES OF SUCCESS, EXCESS, AND DEBAUCHERY. BUT LEARN FROM IT, AND REALIZE IT IS TOO EASY TO TAKE YOUR OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRANTED AND LOSE YOURSELF IN THE PROCESS.

  CHRISTIAN’S REDEMPTION IS INSPIRATIONAL, AND HIS SKATING CONTINUES TO EXUDE THE BEST STYLE; I’M STILL JEALOUS OF HIS FRONTSIDE OLLIE DISASTERS…BUT I’LL KEEP WORKING ON THEM.

  —TONY HAWK

  JIMMY’Z AD CAMPAIGN, LATE 1980S. COURTESY OF JIMMY’Z.

  They called him Christ, and his legions of disciples would follow him anywhere. Now, years past his competitive prime, the name Hosoi continues to inspire many dedicated followers. He was one of the top athletes in the world through most of the 1980s, but few beyond his chosen sport knew much about him in that era. That’s because skateboarding was only decades old at the time and riding well beyond the margins of polite society. It’s also because he disappeared right at the peak of his power. Rumors flew suggesting everything from his having lost his mind to his simply having lost interest in the sport he’d helped create. Nobody who knew him well would have been surprised if he’d turned up dead as a result of a drug deal gone south or his heart giving out from pushing too hard for too long. What is surprising is that he landed in one piece and lived to tell the tale. And what a tale it is.

  At this writing there are more kids learning skateboarding than there are entering Little League baseball. In the early ’60s, however, skateboarding—or sidewalk surfing, as it was often called—was an undisciplined activity practiced almost exclusively by teenage surfers in their off-hours. About that same time, the boy who would one day become a man, and eventually Christian’s father, Hawaii-born Ivan Hosoi was surfing the biggest waves he could find on Oahu.

  Ivan soon imported his island style to the U.S. mainland, where he joined kids in risking their necks on homemade skateboards after nailing metal roller skates onto two-by-fours. Next came molded plastic foot-long skateboards with clay wheels. While clay led to newer, better tricks, hitting even the smallest pebble could warrant a trip to the emergency room.

  It took urethane to rocket skateboarding into the future: the soft stickiness of the new wheels allowed riders access to steep walls, empty swimming pools, vertical movement, and flight. The wheels also, inadvertently, moved youth culture forward as kids around the world imitated the lives of punk-rock saints Jay Adams and Tony Alva, who had fallen under the influence while blasting to new heights and redefining what it meant to be young and wild in America.

  In 1967, Ivan and his wife, Bonnie, had a son they named Christian Rosha Hosoi. The family soon moved to Berkeley, California, where Ivan attended graduate school in art. By the mid-’70s the Hosois had relocated to Los Angeles, where punk rock had proven a backlash against the generally passive hippies and had composted perfectly into skateboarding.

  EARLY 1967. MOTHER, BONNIE, WHILE FATHER, IVAN, HOLDS FRAME. MY FIRST OF MANY PORTRAITS. HOSOI FAMILY COLLECTION.

  While a synthesis of the L.A./Berkeley art scene, surfer cool, street smarts, and the psychedelic revolution, Christian was also his own person—a blend of ideas born in his own brain from a massive collage of experiences. The result was to turn the act of riding a skateboard into high-level performance art. Eventually the act would be performed far above thousands of gasping fans who realized that levitating at such altitudes could prove lethal. Everywhere he went, from Hollywood to London, he was celebrated as the best vertical and aerial skateboarder in the world.

  That unofficial and underground title wouldn’t mean much to anyone but the few thousand hard-core skaters who lived and died by his every move, if Hosoi hadn’t also been a factor in a bigger world. He was, as anyone on hand will tell you, the sport’s first and most enduri
ng “rock star” and its most charismatic entertainer to date. It is well established by skate historians (yes, there is such a thing) that ’80s skating belonged to Hosoi and his only real rival, Tony Hawk. Hawk readily admits, “When Christian was on fire, he was unbeatable.” With a seemingly endless variety of his own rapid-fire tricks, Hawk emerged victorious more than anyone, including Hosoi. Yet it was the newly anointed high-flying Christ, bad-boy flag waving in the face of conformist patriotism, who often won the crowd. Where Tony was technical innovation, Christian was aerodynamic soul, sometimes trumping Hawk’s amazing new “finger-flipping” tricks with dramatic moves of his own, like his signature Christ Air. His electrified performances caused him to stand out like Jimi Hendrix at a folk music festival.

  I first saw Hosoi and Hawk skate a demo at a San Diego tradeshow in the mid-’80s. Tony was rifling off his quick-fire tricks, while Hosoi flew faster and higher with an immaculate style. As would happen each time they faced off, the crowd was split nearly equally in their favoritism. Later, partisan passions would bleed into the stands as fans clashed over the love of their favorite idol.

  Hosoi’s worshipful followers, the twenty-four/seven drug pipeline connected directly to his brain, and more money than a teenager should ever possess could deceive anyone into thinking he might just be some sort of fast-rolling messiah. It would take the slamming of a prison door to silence such nonsense, forcing him to face life soberly for the first time in his life.

  I first met Christian Hosoi personally in 2004, when I interviewed him for Risen magazine in Nellis Federal Prison Camp, on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada. He had the same cocky strut I had observed from afar and in skate films as he approached the empty prison cafeteria accompanied by a single armed guard. Like every prisoner there, he wore a pressed khaki uniform, though he was distinguished by his own style of short, spiked hair. He had been forgotten by the masses and he knew it. Yet he was neither bitter over nor jealous of the rising fame and fortune of Tony Hawk. I found Hosoi open, warm, and joyful, displaying no signs of the deterioration that often lingers after a lifetime of drug abuse.

  He was a couple years into what was expected to be a ten-year imprisonment for trafficking narcotics over state lines. As a representative of skateboarding he had been a failure. As a messiah he was a bad joke. With reality pounding at the door, he was forced to confront some dark and empty spaces that no drug, sexual conquest, or screaming crowd could ever fill. Just as he always had, he was about to fly higher than anyone had ever thought possible.

  OPPOSITES GOING IN THE SAME DIRECTION. TONY HAWK AND ME. © GRANT BRITTAIN.

  HUNTINGTON BEACH. OP PRO SURF CONTEST, 1986. JUST BEFORE A MAJOR RIOT BROKE OUT. © IVAN HOSOI.

  “I’m five years old and out pursuing my first love, climbing trees. The scene of this activity is Play Mountain Place, an alternative preschool off La Cienega and Washington Boulevards in Los Angeles. I’m way out on some limb, and nothing my teachers or anyone else can say or do will get me to come back down. I just keep climbing higher and higher, swinging from branch to branch, hearing the cracking sounds that eucalyptus makes just before it snaps. But I’m not worried; I’m stoked and wondering why the other kids in my class don’t join me. Years from now I’ll make a lot of money doing things nobody else wants to do with me.”

  In that case it’s to blast the world’s highest aerials on a skateboard. A lot of people said I was the best in the world in the late ’80s. The record books show otherwise—that I often beat the world’s best, but more often took second place to a guy named Tony Hawk. But record books don’t tell the whole story. They don’t say that I was known to be the most popular skateboarder of my time, and the highest paid. They don’t say that my nickname was Christ and that I was the inventor of the Christ Air. They don’t say that I was an outlaw and have lived in defiance of most laws, including gravity, most of my life. Everything has been one big experiment to see how far I can push things. And I pushed them further than anyone thought possible. I thought I got away with everything, but I was wrong. In January 2000, at thirty-two years old, I would find out just how wrong.

  BUSTED

  It’s one of those classic clear Southern California mornings. It’ll probably be even nicer where I’m headed, Hawaii. But I’m not going there for vacation or for the weather. I’m going because of the substance I’ll be carrying beneath my clothes: crystal methamphetamine.

  I’ve used other drugs since I was a child, but for the last seven years I’ve been snorting, smoking, and even shooting meth every day. Everything about meth—from scoring it, to lighting the torch, to blowing glass pipes as smoke fills my hungry lungs—is addicting. But I’ve done enough for a dozen people and I plan on quitting soon. I’ll shock the world and be bigger than ever when I make my comeback in skateboarding.

  But that will have to wait, because I don’t want everybody to know where I am, not right now. I’ve been living underground for about five years, fleeing misdemeanor bench warrants after being busted three times for possession. Being on the run is just another rush—fun and crazy. The way I like it.

  The guy at the hotel in L.A. gives me the dope to transport. I smoke some of it—for quality control purposes, of course. Just as he promised, it’s killer. It’s been iced up, meaning cooked down into rock form to be distilled for purity. I’m a courier—what they call a mule—so I pay nothing for the ice. I put everything into a hip sack, fasten it to my body, and conceal it all beneath my baggy clothes.

  As arranged, a girl picks me up at the hotel and speeds me to the airport, where I’ll use my one-way ticket to Honolulu, on the island of Oahu. Once there I have an address where I’ll drop off the pound and a half of quality ice. The street value of this in the Islands is around $60,000, about four times what it is in California. My take is a fraction of that amount, about $2,500—not much, considering I’m taking most of the risk. Still, it’s not bad since I thrive on risk and haven’t collected a paycheck in some time. Ten years earlier I could have made this much for skating a couple of demos.

  I could still get paid well from a number of sponsors if I cleared up my warrants, but to do that I’d have to serve at least thirty days in jail. Thirty days is a long time for someone like me, used to doing whatever I want.

  I’ve been through a million airports and never once been searched, so with the meth tucked into my hip sack, today should be a walk in the park. I stroll through security and nobody even blinks. Glad to be through that stress point, I go to McDonald’s for a snack before boarding. As I’m eating, I get a weird feeling and begin to sweat. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before; only later will I realize that it was an inner warning signal telling me something wasn’t right. At the moment, though, instead of heeding it as a warning, I fight through the feeling and talk myself down. I pat my forehead with a napkin, take a deep breath, and am fine again.

  After an uneventful flight, I exit the plane carrying a skateboard, something I always have with me. It’s midday and the terminal is almost empty. As I head toward baggage claim, I notice a guy watching me. Even on drugs I’ve never been the paranoid type, but something’s up with this guy. Despite the lack of uniform, he gives off cop vibes.

  I hustle past him but can sense him following me as I continue beyond the baggage claim area. I consider ditching my luggage as I aim toward the nearest exit, repressing the urge to sprint. As I reach the sidewalk the guy says, “Excuse me, sir; can I talk to you for a second?”

  I turn around and say, “What is it?”

  “I have a suspicion you’re carrying narcotics, and I want to see your ID.”

  “I don’t know where you get that idea,” I say defensively. “You can search my bags if you like.”

  “Actually,” he counters, “we need to search you.”

  “Sorry, but that’s illegal; you don’t have any reason to search me.”

  As he’s talking, I’m scanning the area for someplace to run and dump the stuff. I’m looking along
the sidewalk when I see two guys watching me. Then, off to the side, I notice two more guys. I’m surrounded by chain-link fences and plainclothes cops in tennis shoes. There’s got to be some way out of this; there always is. Think, think, think!

  BLOWING A RING OF METH. THIS PHOTO SPARKED A LIFELONG LOVE AFFAIR. © AMBER STANLEY.

  Running won’t work, but talking just might. Friends say I could have been a lawyer, given the way I can spin words when I need to. I put on my most innocent face and lie straight to the cop’s face about my reasons for being in Hawaii. He’s not buying it, though—not for a second. “I’m gonna get the dog,” he says.

  “Go get the dog,” I agree, trying to call his bluff.

  This all happens on the curb, just outside the airport. By the time the dog arrives and circles my bag, everyone nearby is watching the scene. The dog doesn’t do anything unusual that I can see, but the cop says that it’s given some sort of sign and that they now have the right to search me inside. I shrug and go with them.

  The back room they lead me to is stark white with fluorescent bulbs flickering overhead. The place is immaculate except for a Styrofoam plate with partially eaten fried chicken and potato salad making a meal for flies. The cop who’s apparently in charge is a thick-necked jock with gelled hair.

  To me this is no big deal; something will work out. I’m not busted yet. Six or seven more cops cram into this little room, and one of them asks again to search me. I repeat, “No, that’s illegal.” This guy must have seen every old detective movie ever made. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he says. I’d laugh in his face, but this has quit being funny.