High on Life': San Francisco’s Skaters Get Groovy | Short Film Showcase

There's never a moment where I feel satisfied with skating. It's always in you, and then when you find, when you take the skates off, you move through life skating. When I come out here to skate, I come out here to find this other space that's just incredible. My body has figured out what it wants to do, and it just has come up with all these routines that I have. I've been doing this for a long time; it's kind of a meditation. I smoke a joint, and I spend around 50 times. You know, the world is wonderful.

My first pair of inline skates, I got at the beach in Venice. We rented them and skated up and down the beach, and it was like I was a fish that had been thrown back in the water. When we got back to the rental place, we didn't give the skates back. We paid for them and skated away with them. That was really a pivotal moment in my life.

So I looked at a magazine; they had O.J. Simpson with a pair of these blue and yellow roller skates, and he's like got his little collar. He's cool. I'm like, “I want those.” I got those yellow hard wheels, and we started skating every day. My name is Terrence. I grew up in San Francisco with my two brothers. We only had two skates, so we had to share the skates. We started with one skate on one foot.

What inspired me to get back into skating was actually a comic book. It was about a whole bunch, a whole bunch of kids and high-tech motorized skis. “Dude, that's awesome.” My nickname here is Morpheus. I got this cut on my 20th birthday. Around that time, I started losing my hair for some reason. I was like looking for these type of glasses, and then Dean, all of a sudden, like I said, “Hey, what's up for this?” and said, “Oh, what water corn says. I do look like him just without that suit, but I don't want to ski in this suit.”

My nickname was Z. When I was out here, you know in the early stages, I met a girl, and her name was Tiny, and she was from Puerto Rico. She was a good pickpocketer, man. Like, wow, I just come up with a lot of electronics and stuff like that. “I got this, I got that.” I get, they say, “What, ma'am, what is it that you don't ever get?” Then they said, “You know, that's what I'ma call you. Gonna call you Z. You're getting everything from A to Z.” But she died of AIDS, man. Bless her heart, man. Marriage may not rest in peace, man. I'm just grateful to be alive and enjoy to do this, and I think I won't never take that for granted.

This same energy that we are experiencing out here is just as powerful now as it was when I first came out here, March 1979. This group here has been the epitome of what San Francisco is. You can come out to the park; you don't have to live up to any expectations. You're accepted. As long as you're cool, they're cool. You'll see a place where you get people of all ages, all colors, all races, and all walks of life coming together to have one kind of fun.

Nobody cares what you look like, how old you are, and what you do for a living. Just come out, have fun. People come by and they go, “I got to do that,” and some of them are thinking only in San Francisco, “What a bunch of weirdos.” So what if it looks weird? So what if it's not mainstream popular? If it's not for you, then it's not for you. But if it is for you, and if other people think it's weird or not cool, then don't listen to them; just listen to your heart.

You can have all the drugs, alcohol, anything you want to get you high, but no matter what, it's gonna run its course and you're gonna come down. When you get high on life without dealing with dancing, you go higher than you can ever imagine, and you can stay there just as long as you want to stay there. Then when you do want to come down, there's no side effects, and you didn't pay a thing. It was all totally free.