Damn, It Feels Goof to Be a Gangsta

I’ve picked up a lot of bad habits from surf culture in my life: entitlement, poor grammar, slumped shoulders. But I think the most deplorable were the years when I dressed like a rapper. In the early 2000s, posters of Kelly Slater were supplanted by Eminem, Mac Dre, and Too Short. I started wearing pants that were so baggy they doubled as parachutes, my belt hanging loosely between my legs like a ripcord. In the event of a tornado, I would’ve been among the first to ascend to heaven.

It was an odd time to be a surfer.

As my crew rode cruiser bikes to the beach, no-handed, like the gangstas we were, our pants would occasionally fall prey to the teeth of the greasy chain. Our parents quickly learned to buy second-hand.  

In our mid-teens, we bumped and grinded on the dancefloor to Mac Dre’s “Thizz Dance,” pinching the front of our shirts and lifting them off our chests like small circus tents. I still have no idea why. We also pasted on our best “Thizz Face,” an exaggerated frown meant to show how high we were on ecstasy. I never actually took the drug during my rap phase, but I have taken it in the years since, and, I never once felt like frowning. If anything, my mouth contorts in the opposite direction. 

The origin of rappers wearing baggy clothes comes from the prison system. Inmates were often given uniforms that were too big for them and, behold, a fad was born. As an upper-middle-class surfer from a coastal town surrounded by the smell of coniferous trees, I wore my pants halfway down my ass because I could clearly empathize with the struggles of the hood. 

Surfers have always remixed other cultures and taken them to the sea. Today, the hipster phase has swept through our lineups like a cold front and many surfers now resemble characters from Portlandia. What made the rap craze unique was the lack of irony. We genuinely thought we were “hard,” as we practiced our eastside and westside gang signs and wore blue and red colors, respectively. My parents lived on opposite sides of town and I would spend part of the week with my mom, and the other part with my dad, and more than once was confronted by others to “pick a side.” Of course, I picked whichever side of town I was located at that moment.

I remember when I learned that I was, in fact, a size Medium shirt and 32-pant as vividly as being hit with the news that Santa Claus was a fictional character, (sorry to any 6-year-olds reading this blog.) My girlfriend at the time suggested that I try some smaller clothes, “just see how they looked.” As I set off on my maiden voyage riding my bike to the beach in my new, fitted pants, I realized that my decade-long war with the bike chain was finally over. Peace at last! At first, it felt constricting to wear a t-shirt that made contact with my chest and back, simultaneously, but people began complimenting my physique, and asked if I had been working out? “No,” I would think to myself, “I just tore down the Mac Dre posters and decided to grow up.”