So I’ve been sitting on my ass, temporarily out of work for the last few days, thinking of what to write about. Unemployment is a sweet ride, but it’s a real bummer for your motivation. There’s only so many times I can take Liverpool to the title on Xbox before my motor skills expire for the day. Still… smashing Man United 4-0 in a fantasy world will never get old.
Now that I’m finished with skateboarding employment once and for all, I’ve been thinking about all of the weirdo’s that I dealt with on the daily. The junkies, drunks, hippies, hare-krishna’s, skate-fans, sponsored prima-donna’s and has-beens.
They have a frustrating way of leaving an annoying mark in your memory like a cigarette burn on brand new duds. The worst of all however…. Is The Lurker.
Anyone who has ever worked in a skateboard shop knows what a lurker is. This ‘unfortunate’ is the kind of desperate loner who clings to skateboarding like the last life raft on the Titanic. Fucking skateboarding and its egalitarian rulebook.
At least with Snowboarding you need to have a little coin to stay involved, skateboarding takes everyone in like a ‘lost men’ shelter at 4am. Surfers have an even tougher entrance fee, because if you cant punch 15 cones on the way down the coast, you’re left holding the towel and fetching chicko rolls.
All the weirdo’s wash up in skateboarding…. And spend their lives in skateshops.
The Lurker will fritter anywhere from 1 to 8 hours making your day a living hell, and they’re either compulsive liars or social pariahs. They follow you around the shop, telling you about their fantastic lives of injuries, feats of skateboarding greatness and personal relationships with pro skaters, wether you feel like listening or not. You have no choice.
Unlike a skatepark where you can roll away, the skateshop employee is confined to the counter, and no amount of busywork, customer service or general indifference will deter the lurker from soaking up the attention, because essentially, they have no other friends.
I’ve heard every story you can imagine. Everything from unfortunate tales of contagious conjunctivitis, fictitious sponsors and friendships, to tales of social events that you know for a fact, simply did not happen.
The problem with lurkers however, is that no matter what you try, they wont be deterred. Oblivious to their own offensive personal hygiene, and a manic stare called – according to one pervious employee – ‘weird eyes’, Lurkers leave you with the feeling you’ve haven’t showered after a night sleeping on the floor at Warnie’s house. Dirty and weird.
At times I felt like John Cusack in High Fidelity. Jack Black and that other oddball keep coming in, crapping on about the most obscure and insignificant facts, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.
Like John, as yet another Lurker creeps toward you at the counter like a pervert with a pocket stuffed with roofies, you wish for the glory days when he was a daring young actor and always got the girls, despite the hi-jinks.
This story is nothing without anecdotal evidence of course. His name isn’t Warren, but its pretty close. Warren would be in the store at least once a day. He would try on 5 or 6 pairs of shoes, analysing everything from the stitching to the quality of the insole glue application, without buying a single pair. He would examine at least 10 boards from the highest part of the wall and dismiss them all for being a crap shape.
Warren would soak up about 4 hours of your life each day, leaving you to add a new punch hole in the wall in the back room.
The truth was that Warren could barely stand on a board, let alone perform a passable manoeuvre! In the countless years he’d hung around like a noxious weed, I think I witnessed him land one trick….. a nollie.
This well known evidence didn’t stand in the way of a good story though. Rumour had it that he claimed to be a sponsored snowboarder (cos anyone can claim that shit), filming for international videos, bro’s with any pro that was in town at the time, and at one point he claimed to be the brother of one of our staff! It was always a really weird.
He’d bring in product with barcodes from a nearby surfshop where he worked, claiming it was from a ‘package’ from his famous pro friends. Swapping product is the exclusive and desperate domain of struggling amateur skateboarders, one that Warren desperately wanted to be part of. We later found out he got fired from that shop for stealing.
The problem with compulsive liars like Warren was that no matter how many times you caught him lying, he would simply keep lying to get out of it! I even specifically asked him once, why was he so fucking retarded. He didn’t know what I was talking about…. But continued on to tell me about the party he went to the previous night at Dustin Dollin’s house.
It always made me wonder what would happen to these guys in later life. They’re the sort of people who becomes really unsuccessful con artists, or better yet, become victims of really good con artists! I’ve seen at least one lurker metamorphose into a full time Hare Krishna.
They’re the type of guys who become Pyramid scam salesmen, and end up on a week long feature running from Today Tonight’s camera man with a towel over their head.
But I’ll leave them to that wonderful man Hank Rollins…. There’s someone much scarier waiting for them.
The worst thing is however, that while I’ve done my best to rid these weirdo’s from my life. I’ve just traded up and taken a job serving alcohol to alcoholics. I just got a job in a bottleshop.
I’m an idiot. At least I know that already.
