01 - Where Eagles Dare
Waxing the Void - Chapter 01
Candle wax smeared thick across the curb—all Saul had for tonight. The Misfits' "Where Eagles Dare" rumbled from Ott's hatchback as floodlights buzzed overhead at Capitol Bike Shop. Saul kicked his board, popped an ollie, and ground a clean feeble across the curb, trucks clacking against the edge. The wax made it fluid, smooth where the concrete fought him yesterday.
Dutch whooped from his perch on the dumpster, a half-empty 40 dangling loose from his fingers. "Looking smooth, man," Ott called, cranking the volume as Glenn Danzig growled through blown speakers. Their anthem—"We walk the streets at night, we go where eagles dare"—the perfect backdrop for Friday night's ritual under the shop's harsh fluorescents.
Saul skidded to a stop by the half-pipe, wheels barking across pavement. Ely knelt in the flat of the reddish-brown ramp, paint chipped thin from years of skating. He sprayed a swastika over a David Duke sticker.
"O'Neil unlocking tonight?" Saul asked, eyeing the chain looped across the ramp.
"Doubt it," Ely muttered. "Should've asked before he closed shop and bailed."
"We should cut it," Saul said.
"And get kicked out for good?" Ely snorted.
Saul lifted his shoulders in a lazy shrug. "I was gonna say that."
"Nice stickers," he added, nodding at Ely's work.
"The guy's a Nazi—everyone needs to know," Ely said. "Just doin' my part. But if he wins, we'll fight. That'll be fun too."
"You really get off on that, huh?" Saul said.
Ely flicked a half-smile up at him, saying yeah, maybe.
Saul watched Ely paint jagged lines across the stickers, the hiss of the can cutting through the dusk. Boys and girls lounge around cars or perch on the lot's edges, watching the skaters—cigarette smoke curling, voices chattering over the steady thump of Ott's hatchback.
To the townsfolk, they were just loser kids with scuffed decks and jaded eyes. But the streets sang a different tune at night: every curb a challenge, every shadow a dare. "Do a flip, faggot!" they'd shout from car windows, grinning like they'd dunked on the outcasts. The taunts were too dumb to sting, recycled garbage from small minds. Saul was one of them, a misfit by daylight standards, rolling where the tame feared to tread.
Saul shoved off, hit the jump ramp. Claire—that was her name—landed The Box clean as Ott's "Yeah!" echoed off the shop's walls. She perched on the hatchback's hood, watching with an intensity the cigarette kids lacked—like she saw through the surface of things. Unlike their practiced boredom, her eyes followed each move with genuine interest, catching details others missed. When cars drove by with their predictable taunts, she didn't flinch or glare—just tilted her head slightly as if cataloging specimens of predictable stupidity.
Next to her sat her dark-haired friend, deliberate in its quietness. Her pale face occasionally illuminated by the ember of a cigarette she shared with Claire. While Claire commanded attention naturally, her friend chose invisibility—not from any lack of appeal, but like someone who preferred watching to being watched.
The others—Dutch, the cigarette kids—barely clocked them, too caught in their own orbits, but Saul felt the pull. Claire was new to their scene, but there was a quiet edge to her, like she'd rolled where eagles dare too, just not loud about it. He should talk to her—figure out what kind of misfit she was.
He veered left, away from the lot, rolling past the Taco Bell next door. Game night had spilled over; the place packed with Black students from the high school, celebrating or commiserating their team's performance.
The lot buzzed with post-game static—Black kids in jerseys spilling out, laughing loud, their voices tangling with car stereos and the tang of cheap sauce. Saul glided through, a ghost on wheels, dodging their orbits like obstacles in a slalom. They were groundlings to him, tethered to their Friday night rituals, while he rode a different current—free, untamed, oblivious.
Three guys waved him over, friendly-like. Saul coasted up. This is cool.
"What kind of board's that?" one asked—box-top fade, stinking of Gucci cologne.
Saul popped it up proudly. "Blockhead."
Crack. He's on the ground, board ripped from his hands. Hot asphalt bit his cheek. Adrenaline spiked—he leaped up, swung wild as fists blurred toward him, slow-motion chaos. He dodged and bolted.
Skaters twist the mundane into the extraordinary, profane to the groundlings who'd sooner chase them off their precious property. The irony stung like a botched grind: Saul, fluent in the dialect of cracks and edges, couldn't read the human terrain he'd rolled into—those friendly waves a cursive lie spelling theft in fists.
Back at the bike shop, a small crowd gathered: the regular crew—Ely, Ott, Dutch—plus Claire, her shadow-like friend, and a handful of others, maybe a dozen total.
"They jumped me and stole my board!" Saul roared, panting as he stumbled in, the metallic taste of blood fresh in his mouth.
Ott lowered the volume on the stereo, Glenn Danzig's growl fading to a murmur. "Who did?"
"Assholes at Taco Bell. Sucker-punched me and took my board," Saul shouted, touching his jaw where a bruise was already blooming purple beneath his skin.
Dutch slid off the dumpster, beer forgotten with a hollow thud on the pavement. "That's bull. Nobody takes a skateboard."
"Maybe we should call the cops," Ely suggested, fingers nervously smudging the red paint on his stickers.
"Hell no! We handle this ourselves." Dutch's voice carried across the lot, drawing everyone's attention. The shop lights cast harsh shadows across hardening faces as conversations died mid-sentence.
A primal surge ignited the lot, binding the group. Skateboards slapped against palms. Cigarettes dropped, ground out under sneakers with sharp hisses. What had been scattered groups now condensed into a single unit, faces hardening with purpose.
Ott caught Saul's arm. "Maybe we should think this through—"
But the crowd surged forward, sweeping Saul along with it. He hadn't expected this—wanted his board back, sure, but not this charge into battle. Yet the momentum built with each step, individual thought surrendering to collective anger as they charged toward the restaurant.
At Taco Bell, they found no thieves, just post-game Black students filtering through the doors. "Who took the board?" Dutch demanded, confronting the nearest group. Confusion turned to defensive anger as strangers faced off, neither side backing down. Someone shoved, someone swore—the match struck the kindling.
The skaters were quickly outnumbered and fell back. Ely was still in the ramp's flat, surrounded by his swastika-smeared David Duke stickers, frantically clawing at them to cover up. "I'm anti-racist!" he stammered, pleading, knee-deep in his own mess as a group of Black students approached. No one listened—they swarmed him, fists flying. He went down fast, confetti stickers fluttering like twisted confessions, the cosmic irony of the situation completely lost in the chaos.
Chaos erupted. Skateboards cracked against skulls, screams split the air—rage and fear tangled tight. Dutch cracked a board against a shoulder, Claire's friend ducked a fist—a gunshot ripped through it all, the sound impossibly loud against the night sky. The lot emptied in seconds, tires squealing, bodies scattering. Silence fell hard, tire marks scarring the asphalt, a lone cigarette smoldering where Claire had stood.
Saul stumbled through the door past midnight, the apartment dark except for the blue glow of Vance's aquarium. His jaw throbbed. No one got seriously hurt in the chaos—just scrapes, bruises, and the collective dignity of State City's skate punks.
"Some night, huh, Rusty?" he mumbled.
Rusty lifted his head from Vance's bed, thumped his tail twice in what Saul interpreted as canine sarcasm, then settled back down with a sigh that clearly said, Wake me when you've got kibble or a story worth getting up for.
Ely had pulled his .22 pistol when the brawl hit fever pitch, firing skyward like some dollar-store desperado. "I was terrified, man! Terrified!" he'd explained later, hands still shaking as he lit a cigarette. "That's straight-up Torah-approved self-defense!" Leave it to Ely to find biblical justification for nearly giving everyone heart failure.
By the time the cops arrived, the place was empty—nothing but tire marks, dropped cigarettes, and Officer Mendoza muttering, "Not this crap again." Just another Friday night in State City, where entertainment meant either watching paint dry at the mall or finding creative ways to almost get arrested.
Saul slid into Vance's worn recliner, the fabric soft from years of his uncle's weight. The chair reclined with a mechanical wheeze that sounded suspiciously like "You should have majored in business." The apartment felt too quiet without Vance's Gulf Coast exuberance filling every corner—no tackle boxes spread across the coffee table, no hunting magazines stacked haphazardly, no endless stories about "that twenty-pound redfish that fought like a damn Buick."
The 40-gallon tank hummed gently, its light casting rippling shadows across the walls. Vance's peculiar menagerie swam inside—creatures hauled from brackish bayous and shallow marshes during weekend excursions. Two crawfish scuttled over smooth stones, antennae twitching like tiny antennas searching for alien signals. A small turtle paddled lazily near the surface, moving with all the urgency of Saul's academic career.
The creatures inside moved with purpose—feeding, hiding, surviving. No angst, no uncertainty. Just instinct and persistence. He envied their simplicity. The crawfish "king" occupied his usual spot on the submerged log, pincers hanging downward in a posture of vigilant repose. Unlike the other inhabitants that darted about reactively, the crawfish maintained its dignified stillness, surveying its domain with the quiet authority of one who knows exactly where it belongs in the world. Saul wondered what that felt like.
Saul had once asked why Vance didn't just buy tropical fish from the pet store like normal people.
"Those fancy fish ain't got no character," Vance had answered, dropping a minnow into the tank. "These little bastards survived the Gulf—they earned their keep." Coming from a man who kept a taxidermied raccoon wearing sunglasses in the bathroom, it was practically a philosophical statement.
Saul pressed a bag of frozen peas against his jaw, wincing. The cold numbed the ache where a fist had connected. He replayed the scene at Taco Bell, the friendly wave that wasn't friendly at all.
"'Hey man, what kinda board is that?'" Saul mimicked in a falsetto voice to the turtle. "Not 'Can I bash your face in?' or 'Mind if I steal your stuff?' Just casual conversation before the beatdown. At least buy me dinner first."
The turtle blinked, unimpressed by either the story or its delivery.
"Should get revenge," he muttered to the crawfish, who raised its claws in agreement. But even as he said it, he knew he wouldn't. Not his style. Saul could grind a handrail or pop a perfect kickflip, but senseless violence? That was someone else's game.
It wasn't fear that held him back—hell, he lived for the rush. Nothing beat launching off a twelve-stair rail or bombing hills at speeds that turned the world into a smeared painting. He'd broken bones, scraped half the skin off his arms, and nearly cracked his skull more than once. The ER nurses knew him by name and greeting card holiday.
The adrenaline was addictive, the chaos intoxicating. There was something beautiful about turning a mundane world upside down, about the crash and clatter of a good prank gone right. But there was a line.
The water's glow bathed his face, casting everything in that dreamlike blue. The creatures inside moved with purpose—feeding, hiding, surviving. No angst, no uncertainty. Just instinct and persistence. He envied their simplicity.
That's what gnawed at him during quiet moments like this—the creeping doubt, the sense of drifting without direction. State City College classes he barely attended, dishwashing shifts that melted into an endless smear of grease and steam, the same curbs and rails day after day. Everyone else seemed to have a plan, a trajectory. Even Ott talked about opening his own garage someday, displaying a rare ambition for someone whose life philosophy was "Eh, whatever's cool."
But Saul? He was treading water, going nowhere slowly. His guidance counselor had once asked about his five-year plan. He'd answered, "Lunch?" She hadn't laughed.
His sociology professor had droned on about social Darwinism last week—survival of the fittest as justification for stepping on whoever stood in your way. "Like our boys in Desert Storm," the professor had added with obvious disapproval. "The strong rule the weak." Nature's law, some called it. The professor had looked directly at Saul's vacant expression and added, "Some of us evolve. Others... devolve."
But if that was true, what was the point of anything else? Why bother with justice or compassion or any higher ideal? Why not just be the biggest jerk with the biggest stick?
Skateboarding had always been Saul's middle finger to that kind of thinking. It wasn't about dominating others—it was about challenging yourself, finding your flow, turning concrete wastelands into playgrounds. When he landed a trick, it wasn't because he'd beaten someone; it was because he'd beaten gravity, fear, the limits he'd set for himself.
"What the hell am I doing?" he whispered to the darkness. The question hung there, unanswered, as it had for months. Years, maybe. The crawfish snapped its claws as if to say, "Hell if I know, kid."
Saul fumbled in his pocket, pulling out the stub of candle from earlier. Wax—it made the rough edges smooth, turned concrete into something you could ride. But what could smooth the rough edges of his life? What could make this void rideable?
Saul drifted toward sleep, the frozen peas sliding onto his chest like the world's saddest dinner. In the glow of the tank, with Rusty's soft snores from the bedroom, he found a small measure of peace. Tomorrow, he'd figure out how to replace his board. Tomorrow, he'd sort through the wreckage from the bike shop. Tomorrow, he'd face Rod's smug comments in class, that pompous TA who checked his watch every time Saul opened his mouth, as if calculating how many seconds of his life were being wasted.
The last thought before sleep took him was of Claire's face in the moment before chaos erupted—curious, unflinching, like she'd seen it all before and wasn't impressed. Something about that look stuck with him, tugging at him even as consciousness slipped away. There was a certainty in her eyes that he envied—like she knew exactly who she was and where she fit in the world's jagged puzzle.
Maybe she knew how to wax her own void.
The fish swam on in their illuminated world, indifferent to the sleeping figure in the chair, or the larger questions hanging in the darkness beyond their glass walls. In the cheap tank light, with frozen peas melting on his chest, Saul finally found sleep—his mind still churning with questions no skateboard trick could answer.
Next Chapter drops 3/22/25 9am Central
ThanThanks!
©joevigo2025
(Cover art is from the 90’s band Indian Summer, possibly designed by Henry H Owings, used without permission)
Like A D Hunt, never a skater, but I like the way you brought in the termination. Always interested in people’s reflections on life and its struggles. Lets us know about all walks of life and the struggles, and the point that we are all the same regardless of our stations in life. Keep up the good work.
Never a skater, but I remember that era like yesterday. You capture it well. 👍🏻