Breakneck

Ollie back to 1989, when I was saving for a new skateboard. I already owned a Santa Cruz Tom Grosso(?) mini that I bought off a guy at school with one blue and one green eye who loved to talk about skateboarding, and who once instructed me to find out for myself a bit more about one particular aspect of skateboarding, to which I replied, "I'll do that for homework." His nickname for me was "runner boy", because I was doing a lot of distance running at the time. I needed $340 to buy a new deck, trucks, wheels, bearings and accessories from Cheapskates in Henderson, and the obvious pathway to my dreams lay in sacrificing my two-week school holiday for a job breaking necks at the Waitakere Chicken Hatchery, where my sister had worked before me. She had the unenviable task of sorting the reject chicks from the good ones, then breaking their necks using a special thumb technique. I wasn't given that job, and instead ended up on forgettable tasks like cleaning and stacking plastic trays and hosing out tanks etc. I saved my $340 and proceeded to Henderson to get me some wheels etc. The skateboard deck I picked had graphics depicting death, eg skulls and/or demons, which didn't impress my dad, a church pastor, so he gave me the choice of either returning the deck to the shop or scraping off the graphics using a brick. I took the deck back and swapped it for a Santa Cruz Jeff Grosso 'toybox', featuring a picture of a toybox.