A Farewell to Phillip Wyatt

I was sitting there watching my childhood friend Chris, speak about his father who had recently died. His blondish hair was somewhat combed back and product had been lightly applied to achieve a wafting effect if desired. He read from a paper, slightly rehearsed, as I expected he would polish something he's prepared. In honor of his father. Chris was a dutiful son. Something I am not. He maintained his slight clutching of his paper to grasp onto something in case, a rail, to help his spirits when they knocked the backs of his knee's with grief. Suddenly. He was prepared. He spoke with a calmness and steadiness, a voice that had been shown to him by his father, for this was the way how to speak with power and dignity. Maybe not dignity. Maybe I'm adding that part. I don't know what he said but I'm sure he did rehearsals with his sons about public speaking. There's no doubt. Each one of his four sons had a similar vocal gate. A sort of, vocal pausing, when speaking, like that. A light vocal ptich flare at the end of certain words like 'tear' or 'career' or 'other speaking behavioral nuances'. My favorite new word. While I sat there, I imagined what I'd say if asked to speak. Something about the free adrenaline rush I get from imagining the moment, if I will be called for, and someone will need me to say something, what would I say? I felt the familiar tingle in my gut, the one that told me I can't and what gave me the right, and then I sharpened my focus, I knew I could tackle just about anything. I wasn't the biggest fan of, Phillip Wyatt. My friend however, Chris. Absolutely, I adore Chris. His father was a trickier subject. A military veteran and entrepreneur, he worked tirelessly in the pursuit of creating heaven on earth. He could create peace himself, if he worked hard enough, kept focused, stayed honest, and followed through, sprinkling romance onto the tips of his seasonal attentions for his own personal satisfaction. A guy that went above and beyond. Suddenly, Chris's speech took a turn. About how great of a father he was. About how he answered the phone when he was called. I thought of my father, and how he has never answered the phone when I called. The life Phillip Wyatt had created for his kids was magic. And I had forgotten. He had died a month ago, or so. This was his memorial. A gathering of one hundred and fifty plus peaople, sitting in a room with tables and a podium. A projector screen is draped and has the emblem AVICO from the projector manufacturer. Smart advertising. There was a full fourteen minute montage. I say ten minute montage's go fine, fourteen minutes is, well, just like anything, our lifetime is only forgotton once our lives are gone. Or at least that's how it seemed for me and Phillip Wyatt. I met him when I was kid. Just a chubby fifth grader who followed his son home from school everyday after summer school. We'd skateboard through our small quiet korean mormon town of La Cañada Flintridge, a place you could throw a parade on the main street to satisfy some social itch to belong to something in your fifties. The central park had a cute coy Gazebo at it's heart. Atop our little main artery of La Cañada rests at the basin of the San Bernadino mountains, where the Angeles National Forest meets the redoubtable Foothill Boulevard. A big-ass street that ides up and down, ungulating like a snake as the mountains moat. Running the main stretch of Southern California, you'll find yourself more often than not, on the back of the anaconda that is Foothill Blvd. That's where we'd skate. From the top of our elementary school down Foothill Blvd. We'd cut through back snakeways of the Presbytyrean church, cleared a little three stair by the vintage clothing shop, and a ramp that led to a steep curb that was always fun to stick the landing of. It was the speed and ease of the grade of the downhill. It allowed for Chris and Adrien, Tanner, Michael, Jesse and Jake, all to get better at skateboarding while having a speed somewhat on cruise control. I was just there filming it all. I was thicker. Of a larger varietal and wasn't prone to jumping our the grinding or the flip tricks. After breaking my wrists a couple times from the board slipping out from underneath me, I was a bit dissatisfied with the 'pleasure's' that came from landing tricks. I mostly took joy in the riding. The zooming. The going as fast as possible. The speed-wiggles, or if you're me and my friends, the speed-woggles. This is where any one of us idiots, at one time or another, decided to bomb a hill that was steeper than any other previous hill that had ever been bombed before. These were the hills that you told your Mom while she drove you to the YMCA that you'd never skate down when she'd ask. These are the hills that were unmarked until one unfortunate rider, meets the wiggles, has to overcome the woggles. Speed-wiggles is when you bomb one of these hills and you go too fast. Your skateboard's trucks are too loose. Any combination of these two options will create the wigs. What happens is once this threshold is met of speed and loose trucks, the board starts to wiggle, slightly at first, like a tremor or a little hiccup, but then, in some injust sort of retributionary way, the board starts to turn against you, as you overcorrect for the dishonoring the integrity of the stability. So it increases, the wizzle turns to a wiggle and the wiggle to a woggle and by this time you're either going to start to slow down in one of two ways; a big fuzzy cotton ball the size of a bounce house shows up and you can just fluff your way to a stop. Since that's not a real option, you'll most likely skid the wheel, turning your board so that it flicks up in front or behind you, as you jump off, trying to run as fast as humanly possible. And yet, your legs weren't prepared for this. They went from pure rooted stable trunks to flimsy gumby insignifcent birch twigs, flailing around like flicked toothpicks as you then tumble and skid anywhere between five to ten feet. Getting a number of raspberries and perhaps a broken wrist or ankle. Shit happens. But that's why we have friends, because they push us further than we can go alone. That's what Chris did, he pushed me further than I could go, and I think that's something he got from his father. The things I remember about Phillip Wyatt, my relationship with him, was interesting. I cherry picked things about him that I wasn't fond of. Things that mostly had to do with politics. So when I remove that lens that sometimes happens to slip in front of my eyes, I see a a much different man. When I met Phillip, as the pudgy, boisterous, truculent young fifth grader, he reached down to me with his hand outstretched, and I shook his hand, and he shook mine. And it was really weird because he wouldn't let go. He just kept holding it, firmly, as if over squeezing something that didn't require that much squeezing, I think mini-bunny you may think lemon. He looked me in my eyes and kept this gaze on me in a way I could paint for you if you asked. His sharp, steady blue eyes held a firm gaze on my eyes, which felt at the time like my soul, like he was examining my soul in this weird extended firm hand shake, and I felt once the inspection was done, which was just really a parlor trick of his that he liked, spook the fat kid, I get it, I ran off to go play in this paradise that he built, that he created, this heaven on earth for him and his family. His house was like a castle, coblestone, marble, and a giant trampoline and tennis court. On the tennis court, was not tennis, but a skate park. A real life, multiple ramp aparatus skate park. Based on the designs Chris had from his Tek-Deck finger skateboard set, he and his father designed and built ramps. Quarter pipes, large drop in ramps, and a pyramid box in the center that featured a curved lip one side of the polygon, a large rectangular flat up top, to a straight lip ridge, and at the bottom a rectangular grind box with a serivcable rail. I could never really use the rail, but I got good at riding around on those ramps. Up and down and filming Chris and crew do insane tricks on the pyramid, the multiple rails, and the quarter pipe. We wore those ramps all the way down. Between the weather and us, the ramps were made to be ramped on. There was a massive trampoline for learning front flips and back flips. Also, this is where we learned about how to launch one of your friends onto the castle balcony above. Some real houdini tricksters we were. Inside the house was a paradise of the edible kind. A pantry lined with all the fruit roll-ups, cinnamon toast crunch bars, cereals of every kind, goldfish, and ice-cream always stocked. It was as if Phillip Wyatt would have his house stocked with all this goodness just for me. It was always ready to go and I would tear through it. My favorite of all was the Iced Oatmeal-Cookie's that were kept in this glass jar. I woud take one, three, four, five, six, all in one day. Then the next day, again. I must have wiped him out. And he never made me feel wrong for any of it. The wear and tear on his hard work. The consumption of all of his food. And I mean, I take responsibility for eating most of that food. Trust. I did. Phillip Wyatt never once made me not feel completely and entirely welcome to it all. He was happy to share. After college I came back and saw Phillip again. At his annual Christmas Party he would throw. I think this might have been one of the very last he would throw at the castle house we all grew up skateboarding to on those hot summer afternoons. By now I had gone to college and was in a fraternity SAE which it turned out so too had Phillip Wyatt been in SAE when he went to college. And this is something he had found out about me by asking Chris about me and my progression. When I saw him, dressed in a dark green regal festive sports coat, standing at the bottom of his Nut-Cracker lined stairwell, with his massive twelve foot Christmas Tree dazzling out of focus behind him, there stood the smiling and sturdy Phillip Wyatt with his hand out stretched to me, in sweet reception, and when he shook my hand, he looked in my eyes, and gave me the special fraternity handshake, the one reserved for brother's. Without uttering a word, that handshake had become our own special little thing.