SkateTown, USSR

We never intended to lead an insurrection. True, we’d spent the summer convincing our sponsors to donate Hype! skateboard decks, golden Seismic wheels with high-performance Spitfire bearings. We wanted to black market our sidewalk cruisers to the angry, acned, fledgling former members of the former Soviet Union, spraining wrists, road-burning shins, and spreading our World-Class Extreme Sports democracy. By we, I mean me, Thomas “The Beach” Beachy, my pal and co-conspirator Jefferson “Sped” Runner, and Agrafena, the chestnut-haired czarina/chicken smuggler/punk rock warlord we were both smitten with/obsessed over/terrified of. On Agrafena’s urging, Sped and I dedicated ourselves to schooling the disenfranchised youth of the breakaway republic of Transnistria on our tricktionary of skateboarding footflips and grinds. We taught those Ivans how to 180-frontside ollie, and when they landed sketchy, we made sure they sucked then savored the pebbles and creosote embedded in their own broken bleeding skin. Looking back, I suppose there were certain neon signs that we were leading a revolution, possible indications Sped and I might wind up incarcerated in a Moldovan gulag. But we were just b-boys vibing on our international celebrity. We mostly wanted to get laid.

A year ago, Sped and I could barely name the fifteen nations that asserted themselves as autonomous entities after the crumbling of the USSR. Now it’s all we argue over. That and Agrafena, which one of us she meant to save. Sped paces our prison cell’s dirt-on-ceramic floor, twisting his studded eyebrow ring, confident that Moldova, a broke-ass kingdom, never should have been allowed to exert its hegemony over the good people of Transnistria. I bite my golden lip ring and try not to argue. After the money laundering, the passport fraud, the human trafficking, after being frisked by bodyguards sheathed in bulletproof leather jackets toting Kalashnikovs with modified Kobra sights, after watching Agrafena, whose name means “Wild Horse” stick her sharp pink tongue out at a Moldovan henchman during a “Free Transnistria: Skate Back the Night Rally,” after she’d stuck that same cherry tongue in Sped’s ear while finger-clutching and double-pumping my groin, since the morning after of our awkward threesome, I’m no longer certain that Transnistria should be a country.

We’d met Agrafena at a skate park in Plovdiv. Sped and I were reigning over a half-pipe competition, catching sick Bulgarian amplitude when Agrafena, our only real rival, challenged us. If we lost, she wanted us to tour a sliver of disputed land between Moldova and Ukraine. Transnistria, she called it, a wannabe nation neither Sped nor I had heard of during our first season on the Slavic Pro-Am Skateboarding circuit. Since I’ve confessed to competing against a girl, I suppose I should also admit that Sped and I were not good enough thrashers to battle in our United States, that we recognized these limitations, trusted our trust funds would keep us flush, and took off for Eastern Europe, the easiest and cheapest sports market to conquer. I had a college semester’s worth of Polish; Sped’s Belarusian nanny had taught him how to insult strangers in Russian. We figured our shortcomings could be translated into hope.

From what Sped and I have pieced together during our confinement, Agrafena had always planned on engineering an uprising. Even as a pigtailed teenager overseeing her family’s chicken-smuggling empire, Agrafena had armed herself with English and a love of American popular culture. Right before we were arrested, she even quoted American Idol Kelly Clarkson’s certified gold single “Breakaway.” In our last moments together she commanded us to “Take a chance/Make a change/And breakaway.”

But on the gray Bulgarian morning Sped and I packed up our gear, Agrafena appealed to our sense of history and patriotism. She asked me, “You are Thomas?” Smiled at Sped and questioned “And you Jefferson?” We acknowledged our real names. “Thomas and Jefferson.” She smiled, her mouth a bitten ruby. “Come to Transnistria, Thomas/Jefferson. Declare for us our independence.” She then whispered in my...