Thrashed
By: California Sunday
Tags: Skateboarding, Features, Magazines, San Francisco

Since he sees it as his job to enforce the rules of a degenerate subculture, he’s an interesting role model. But his antics make a certain sort of sense if you skateboard, because skateboarding is such a totalizing worldview. After all, the most cherished places in skateboarding are infrastructural background noise to most people: parking lots, empty schoolyards, disused plazas. It’s as if two universes exist, identical and coterminous with each other, and all you need is a skateboard in your hand to see the other. Phelps has been looking at the world this way for four decades now, so long that he can’t unsee it. It has instilled in him an active distaste for even the most lenient notions of politesse. In San Francisco, this gives him a magnetic quality: He repels and attracts strangers in roughly equal measure.

This tension was on display during our first day together, when we went to DLX, a skate shop on Market Street. Phelps bought a new board, and as he was setting it up, a young man named Alex walked in, his head tilted back in awe at the boards on the wall. He seemed to be cripplingly stoned. Out of nowhere, he asked Phelps if he knew Van Wastell.

“He’s hella dead,” said Phelps. This is true. Wastell was a rising star on Krooked skateboards, a company started by Mark Gonzales, or “the Gonz,” perhaps the most influential skateboarder of all time. Wastell went pro in 2008 and was found dead in an alleyway behind a Berlin hotel soon after. It was a curious enough story that The New York Times picked it up, but the circumstances of his death — whether it was a suicide or drunken accident or something else — were kept under wraps.

Alex pulled down his shirt collar, revealing a tattoo of a crudely drawn monster on a skateboard, the Krooked mascot. Wastell had inked it, he said. (Actually, he said: “He hella tattooed my chest, though.”)

“That’s tight,” Phelps said, somewhat dismissively. He smelled a mark — a kooky stoned kid from out of town — and it seemed he couldn’t resist. He launched into his version of Wastell’s death. Wastell was on tour with his shoe sponsor, and, Phelps explained, he was an opiate addict. His teammates decided to confiscate his stash, hoping it would help him recover. But that was dumb, Phelps said. Usually, addicts bring just enough dope on the road to get them through. When his buddies took his stash, Wastell couldn’t deal, so he jumped. His teammates were down at the hotel bar talking about how they were going to fix him up when they heard the sirens.

Alex, I later learned, was close with Wastell, who taught him how to kickflip. But if he was upset or even surprised by Phelps’s unsentimental account of his hero’s final minutes, he didn’t show it. All he offered was this: “He was the gnarliest skater, though.”

“He was pretty good,” Phelps said, peering over his glasses, preparing to adjust, in the chiropractic sense of the word, Alex’s understanding of the skateboarding canon. “He’s no Gonz. He’s no Eric Koston. He’s hella dead.”

Phelps freely admits that he isn’t very involved with the day-to-day production of the magazine anymore. At this point in his career, he’s more of a figurehead — a walking, talking case for the magazine’s claims to authenticity. (The current owner, Fausto’s son Tony Vitello, calls him an “ambassador of stoke.”) San Francisco isn’t the skating mecca it once was, either. Over the past decade and a half, most of the revered spots have been torn down or knobbed — affixed with little metal strips, rendering them impossible to skate. Justin Herman Plaza was torn down, rebuilt as another great skate spot — unintentionally — and then was knobbed. Union Square, same story. The tech boom’s well-documented effects on the city’s housing market have only exacerbated the undoing.

The skateboarding industry has been disrupted by technology just like any other media business. Thrasher has been forced to adapt and become a viable multimedia organization — hosting events at soon-to-be demolished skate spots (during which Phelps works the megaphone), co-producing a web show with Vice, and premiering videos on the site. Skateboarding magazines are simply less vital now that you can watch your favorite pros’ footage on YouTube and Instagram. In a way, Phelps is anachronistic two times over — both within his subculture, as a relic of an old order, and outside it, as an avatar of the city’s grit that geeky newcomers are pushing to the side.

On a Friday morning, Phelps and I slipped through the back doors of the 49 Van Ness, one of those accor­dion-jointed buses, easing ourselves into the seats all the way in the rear corner. The bus lurched its way downtown, and Phelps, who is a prolific monologuist, unspooled an impromptu history of San Francisco’s sordid side as the city scrolled by. Phelps used to live in an anarchist house on Mission in the ’80s; lowriders would crawl up and down the drag every weekend, he told me. As we passed City Hall, Phelps said, “This is where the mayor got murdered” — referring, of course, to George Moscone — and when the bus slowed to a halt, he pointed out the other window, at the Herbst Theatre. “I got hit by an elevator right over there.” A what? “An elevator.” (Apparently, there are some submerged in the sidewalk.)

“I’ve been bit by a horse, bit by a camel, fell off a camel, fell off a horse, hit by an elevator, hit by a horse, hit by a bus, hit by a car, hit by a van,” he said. “I’ve been a projectile pretty much forever.”

Of all the remarkable facts about Phelps, perhaps the most impressive is this: He’s not dead. When you talk to him about his career, which he calls “a cavalcade of gnar,” he delivers a lowlight reel: He’s been stabbed in the chest by a meth head in the Haight and nearly killed in a drive-by shooting in Antioch; he almost lost an arm to a spider bite he got while sleeping under a vert ramp in Oakland; he’s had two brushes with death in Australia — one when he rolled a car while barreling through the Outback dressed as a priest (so he could tell customs he was there to distribute skateboards to Aborigines), one after hitting his head on a ramp (when he came to ten days later, he found that his friends, convinced he was a goner, had taken his board and sold the parts). He’s broken both legs, both thumbs, both collarbones, and his pelvis. He has fractured his skull. He’s had seven knee surgeries — three on one, four on the other. He says his medical record is 290 pages long. “I’ve spent more time in the hospital,” he told me once, “than most people spend in jail.”