I spent the summer of my 18th year driving around in circles, staying up all night, and drinking buttloads of Jolt Cola. I think I saw the sunrise more that summer than any other in my life, including last summer, when I got off of work at 6am every day. I played a lot of games of Risk (to completion) and spent a lot of time on the beach and on Skyline Drive.

One night up on Skyline, a couple guys and I came across this dude named Brad, a 30ish grimy little fucker who was sitting on the hood of his car getting totally shitfaced. Somehow we struck up a conversation, and when he asked us our names, we all spontaneously decided to alter our identities for the funny.

My name was Keith Spade, and I and my companions were not from silly old Duluth, oh no. We were from California. And we were professional skateboarders.

Brad, it turned out, was drunk enough and/or stupid enough not to doubt this story at all. In fact, he was downright excited about it. And the more excited he got, the more elaborate the story became. It was kind of a vicious circle that way. We were staying at the Radisson. We had a manager named Ian, who was probably pissed off at us for staying out so late. Either that, or he was knee-deep in babes and blow (the story oscillated as we speculated which version of Ian was funnier, but Brad never caught on).

For awhile, we told Brad all about the cool things we'd seen during our stay in Duluth. I told him I though that the Angled Tower was pretty rad, and he literally slapped his hand against his forehead. "No, no, NO! Not the Angled Tower...it's called the Enger Tower!" I asked him if he was sure, because I could have sworn it was the Angled Tower. He was sure.

"Hey, hey, hey...have I got something for you guys!" Brad screeched. "You're gonna love it!" He scrambled around inside his car for awhile, then came out wielding one of those keychains that says "Fuck you" and "Eat shit" when you press a button. We didn't love it.

"What do you do for fun here in Duluth?" I asked Brad.

"Mainly, I come up here and party all the time," he said. I got mock-excited about this, and asked him where the parties were tonight. He just waved me off, rather than explain that "party" was just his term for "sitting alone in the car in a secluded area drinking an entire bottle of SoCo."

There's a cement wall on Skyline to keep your car from rolling off the cliff when you park there, and toward the end of the night, we huddled in conference. Then we went back to Brad and explained to him that since he was such an awesome dude, we were going to perform one of our skateboarding tricks for him. The thing was, we didn't have our boards with us, so we'd have to do the best we could. He thought this was pretty awesome, so we counted to three and then simultaneously ran at the knee-high wall, jumped up on top of it and then quickly jumped down. That sealed the deal as far as Brad was concerned. We fucking ruled.

By this time the sun was up, and Ian was really pissed off back at the Radisson. Brad was wrecked. "Hey," somebody said, "Why don't you come with us to our next stop? There's room on the tour bus."

Brad thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Of course he'd come with us. (I can't remember where we were headed next. I want to say Fargo, but I'm not sure.) All he had to do first was go home, grab some clothes, borrow some money from his mom, and he'd be good to go. We said we'd meet him at the Radisson.

He never showed.

To this day I like to imagine a slightly grimy 30ish man, drunkenly shaking his mother awake in an attempt to borrow some money so that he could go on tour with some professional skateboarders from California.

She must've been so proud.