By Casey Rafter
With a decade of life on the streets already showing on the skateboard’s trucks and wheels, the Action Sports Kamikaze was worse for wear, but it was destined for a revival. In 1995, young José Vadi discovered and rescued his cousin’s discarded skateboard from his garage. Vadi said the board was a Price Club brand and never was right, but he made it his own until the dilapidated trucks quickly fell to pieces.
Showing a tenacity that still follows him, he dropped $20 on a Kmart Veriflex board. Vadi began skating as a teenager, grinding metallic ledges, curbs and loading docks near his home in Pomona. He easily settled into the world of skateboarding: an early opportunity to witness and take part in a community and culture that would become his own.
Now a man who finds himself in his late 30s, recovering from a wrist injury, Vadi still considers himself an avid skater. He said writing more about skating and connecting with other skaters through his writing cements that identity.
“I feel like even more of a skater now than I was when I was a kid,” Vadi says. “It still shapes my worldview and how I build community and how I find joy and how I create joy for myself. But it’s also physically taxing the older you get.”
That sense of connection has informed his work as a filmmaker, playwright, journalist, essayist, poet and author. His work has appeared online and in print for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and Free Skate Magazine.
In recent years, Vadi has authored two books: “Inter State: Essays from California” and “Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens.”
Early grindage
As a teenager, Vadi consumed skating culture via VHS tapes sold at local skate shops and still photography in magazines. On the journey to interpret his own experiences, Vadi found a voice in poetry. He says it was his way to articulate what he was seeing and experiencing as a teenager, a skateboarder, a Californian and a myriad of other identities he aligned with.
“It was the quickest thing to access and I could write multiple thoughts into multiple short poems,” Vadi says. “Poetry felt extremely accessible and its connection to hip hop was key. I couldn’t rap, but I could write a poem.”
While in high school, Vadi had his poetry published for the first time after submitting to a PBS program called “Poetic License.” Vadi says he broke into the spoken word scene while attending UC Berkeley to study history, which opened new opportunities to develop as an artistic writer.
“That became my gateway to the literary art world of the bay,” Vadi says. “From there, I found mentors in the playwriting world and the theater world as much as the poetry world and really started finding my voice there.”
As a poet, as a skateboarder and as a storyteller, Vadi artfully draws connections within the communities of skateboarders, field workers, immigrant families and working class families he’s studied and written about — among many others — and presents similarities between them as they face displacement, gentrification, poverty and cultural shifts between generations.
The release of “Inter State” in September 2021 came only a few months after Vadi and his wife moved from Oakland to Sacramento. The move gave Vadi a chance to get closer to his sister and allowed his wife — a McClatchy High School alumni — to return to her Sacramento roots. He says the experiences between releasing a book in year two of COVID-19 and releasing “Chipped” this past April, were vastly different from one another.
“We were at the first booster stage,” Vadi said. “A lot of ‘Chipped’ is kind of making up for lost time with ‘Inter State.’… I relied a lot on podcasts and stuff you can do remotely for ‘Inter State.’”
As a former skateboarder and a current writer, bookseller and events manager for San Francisco bookstore Green Apple Books, Kar Johnson found herself easily relating to Vadi’s work.
“I was just so moved through all of reading ‘Chipped,’ because it spoke to that young skater in me, in particular, his passage about the Rockridge BART station,” Johnson says. “It was funny reading that book. This must be what people in New York must feel all the time … because so many books are set in New York. [In] so few do we get to see Oakland or Sac or anywhere in Northern California in such detail.”
In “Chipped,” Vadi assigns specific elements of culture to skateboarding including filming style, lingo, fashion and music. There are also negative stigmas assigned to the skateboarding community, which is a dynamic Vadi says he sees in communities of graffiti artists as well.
“Graffiti culture is huge,” Vadi says. “You’re finding a unique space to do your art. And you’re probably going to that space with music in your head, fueling that physical creativity. There’s a huge overlap of audiences.”
Recording, reporting, becoming the storyteller
As an artist, Vadi says his biggest deadline is mortality, but he feels an intrinsic responsibility as a writer to record history. He says he sees himself as part of a continuum of writers whose job it is to record a specific moment in time in order to better understand trends and larger social issues.
“While we’re here, we have to document or at least understand that we exist in a historical space,” Vadi says. “There’s a before and there will be a future. We’re the conduit between those two points … I think the writer’s responsibility is to be honest and aware of their surroundings.”
Johnson again emphasized the value of Vadi’s writing as a reader who sees herself in the subject matter he covers. Johnson says she’s never experienced the kind of familiarity with a setting in a book in the way Vadi’s work offers. She says it was this connection Vadi showed to these places that motivated her to reach out to him when East Bay Booksellers, in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, was lost to a building fire in July.
“I really honed in on him talking about Rockridge, because it’s a special neighborhood … it was so weird sitting in my apartment and hearing him talk about the street right outside my apartment,” Johnson says. “[East Bay’s] building’s a total wash. … They’re my neighborhood bookstore, so I just organized this event of East Bay writers to put together a fundraiser and José was the first person I thought of.”
Before the pandemic, Vadi made attempts to showcase a few pieces that would eventually end up as a part of “Inter State.” He says as a writer, he began by professing how he saw life as a Californian. Eventually, his mission evolved from being the teller to being the one posing the question to those around him: what does it mean to be a Californian?
When he read an excerpt from his essay “A California Inquiry (or California in Flames),” he discussed a fear of losing California as he watched his grandfather’s home sold off and reshaped from a plentiful garden to a flavorless yard. The responses from the readings he conducted showed him that he’s not the only one asking these questions of identity and place.
“It shouldn’t be surprising; we grew up in California schools reading Steinbeck and Kerouac. These tales of California over time,” Vadi says. “We’re so geographically diverse that we’re also geographically segmented. Whether it’s wildfires or getting priced out of their hometowns, you connect to this larger identity of what it means to be a Californian.”
This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.