Full Circle Moment: I'm Still Just That 12-Year-Old Kid
A fresh collaboration rekindles the flames of nostalgia.
When I was 12 or 13 years old, a friend somehow had gotten his hands on a VHS tape from his older cousin that he just had to show me. I grew up in a pretty conservative household, so most of my extracurricular activities always happened away from home, and oftentimes thanks to friends that to this day, I will protect their anonymity. I don’t think I am alone in this experience. In fact, I’ve known plenty of 12-year-old kids in my life at this point, and a majority of them have been very single-minded. It took a few days before I could make up enough of a story to go to my friend’s house and watch that video, but when I did. It was life-changing, to say the least.
“Just because I’m not the newest, youngest kid, I have to stop doing what I love? No way.”
As a kid, I didn’t have a lot of clothes or sneakers. I’ve told the story many times that the annual budget from my parents for sneakers was $30, and limited to one pair per year. In 7th or 8th grade, I convinced my mom to let me get a pair of Nikes that cost $60, in exchange for wearing them for two school years (the smell still burns as I think about them decades later). The following year, I started working summer jobs and really began to find myself thanks to my newfound freedom to ride my BMX or skateboard to the random jobs I worked that summer. Having that little bit of freedom, and some money to spend, meant buying things that mattered to me, and not just the things that my parents decided I should have.
Around that same time at the age of 13, I bought my first car. A 1981 Honda Prelude that was $150. It wasn’t running but the guy selling it was willing to drop it off at our house, and I couldn’t have been more excited to get to work figuring out how to fix it. I had dreams of building it into a lowrider, but that never came to be (thankfully lol), because I learned the life lesson of buying a used car and not knowing what to look for. There was more rust on that car than I would have even thought was possible to exist on one vehicle. Had I been able to get it running, I would have looked like Fred Flintstone because of all the rusted-out holes under the carpet.
About that VHS tape, though. If Jason Lee, Mark Gonzales, Rudy Johnson, and Guy Mariano are names you are familiar with, you probably watched it too. Video Days by Blind Skateboards was likely the single most influential skate video I ever watched. It starts with the whole crew riding around in a giant Oldsmobile to the song Low Rider by War and continues with some of the most important music, movies, and places in my life…The Jackson 5, Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., Willy Wonka, and The EMB. Directed by Spike Jonez, if you had any thoughts of skateboarding in the early 1990s, you know the significance of Video Days. If you didn’t, you were probably a scared parent seeing the car scene at the end of the video.
For me, though, it was the first scene of Guy Mariano holding a wide-angle lens to the camera that really caught my attention. He was just a kid, only a few years older than me at the time, and he was skating with legends. He was just a kid doing incredible things on a skateboard. It was like seeing the possibilities for myself right there on that fish-eyed lens. Not to mention, this was one of the first times I recognized sneakers in a video. Guy was wearing Airwalks and Vans Caballeros, shoes I had seen in Thrasher Magazine ads, and the latter, a shoe I consider to be one of the most important sneakers ever. In that moment, I became a Guy Mariano fan. Honestly, it’s still mind-blowing to watch those clips all these years later. While Guy was becoming a legend defining what street skating would become, I had just gotten my first skateboard for Christmas the year before. My biggest accomplishment on it was riding it through the Dairy Queen drive-thru with my uncle and my dad. And yes, they served us ice cream cones.
“I have to let these kids that are behind me, know how far they can go.” - Guy Mariano, The Berrics Interview, 2014.
As I got older, I eventually discovered that most of the physical aspects of skateboarding didn’t seem to agree with my abilities, or my size 13 feet. I mostly just used it to get around, which I hope I never grow old of. Yet, I’ve followed more than a handful of skaters for as long as I can remember, and still get overly excited when a new video drops featuring one of my favorite skaters or from one of my favorite brands. From the early days, through his return to the spotlight with Lakai, Guy Mariano, because of his transparency through the ups and downs of life, has been at the top of that list. As I’m typing this, I’m remembering an interview he did with The Berrics probably 10 years ago now, where he said, “Just because I’m not the newest, youngest kid, I have to stop doing what I love? No way. I have to let these kids that are behind me, know how far they can go.”
If you know me, you know how loyal I am to the people and brands I support. My favorite brands, in return, have often been supporters, or sponsors, of my favorite athletes, cars, or events that I love. Many of those athletes and brands I discovered long ago and continue to support to this day.
I’ve never met Guy Mariano. Yet, I feel like he’s been showing me how far I can go for the last 30+ years. This week, he launched his signature collection with Dickies, a brand I have been wearing since I was that kid working his first summer job dreaming of skating like Guy. It features a handful of pieces, including tees, shorts, pants, and a jacket, that perfectly blend and balance workwear, streetwear, and skate clothes. Perhaps it’s the perfect Venn diagram of where my own personal style lands, but from a much bigger picture, Guy Mariano having a signature collection with a brand like Dickies this far along in his career, is another example of him showing just how far any of us kids can go no matter what our age.
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