(Disc.: Don't own LoD. I don't own Blackbird, either.)
(A/N: So this takes place around '76 and doesn't follow real-life timelines/movie timelines, meaning it's not historically accurate. If things seem out-of-order from what you're used to, that's why. Let's say it exists in a parallel universe. I did not want to rehash the movie events, as that's been done, but plot points may appear. See other notes at end for additional info.)
"Blackbird fly, blackbird fly; into the light of the dark, black night.
Blackbird fly, blackbird fly; into the light of the dark, black night.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night; take these broken wings and learn to fly,
All your life."
-Blackbird, the Beatles
Chapter 1: An Arrival and the Birth of a Tomboy
August 1965
"Skip – Jezebel Lola. Belle – daddy. Take care of her. Belle, be good for daddy, and I'll be back soon to take you home."
The stout, frail brunette thrust a squirming three-year-old into her father's unexpectant arms, and he struggled to keep ahold of her restless body as she screamed defiantly and swatted at his face with both small, chubby hands.
"C'mon kid, cut it out…" a seventeen-year-old Skip mumbled, shifting the child lower on his hip and trying to hug the fight out of her.
That was her mother. Between then and now, she'd never seen her again. Skip Engblom didn't have the slightest notion about raising a little girl, barely older than a child himself; that was how she'd met Philaine and her son, Jay. Jezebel was at their apartment constantly whenever they were living in California; she could remember the first time she'd gone. It was that exact day, the very first – he couldn't even handle the first day alone with her. She remembered it so clearly….
"Lane, can you take care-a her for me? Name's Jezebel." Skip held an ever-squirming, angry little girl by the hand. Philaine agreed.
The girl's frizzy, curly blonde hair stuck out in all directions, and she was dressed in a flowery blue romper she hated. She'd been a precocious child to Skip's luck, and was out of diapers by eighteen months old. The blue leather sandals strapped to her feet slapped the pavement repeatedly as she desperately attempted to run back down the steep stairs of the apartment complex.
"Suuure, Skip," Philaine answered in her breezy, California-hippie-mom way, taking her hand and gently ushering her through the door.
"I'll… come back fer 'er in, like, two days, Phil, you're a lifesaver – thanks."
Jezebel remembered an older kid sitting on the living room floor, about three inches from a television screen playing Saturday morning cartoons. He twitched his fingers lightly on his knee, absorbed in the screen; bright colours flashed across it, capturing her attention, and she vividly remembered glancing from the TV to the boy, torn between her two options momentarily before deciding to charge forward and tackle him.
"Ow, ma! Get 'er off!" The blond boy shouted as he lay on his side like a slug, face pushed into the carpet, and Philaine nonchalantly wandered over to peel the younger child's fingers from his shoulder where she'd been shoving it repeatedly into the floor.
"Jayboy, this's Jez, or you can call her Bella. We need to take care of her, together. You treat her like your sister. You don't ever hurt her, okay Jay baby?" His mother implored, patting him on the head as he sat up, freed from the toddler's grip.
He left her at their apartment for fourteen days. Fourteen days before the idiot finally came back for me, she thought. It was the first of many two-week periods she would stay, give or take any number of days. To his credit, Skip was relatively young – Jezebel's mother had gotten pregnant shortly after her sixteenth birthday, and fourteen-year-old Skip had been the unlucky partner in her escapades. She was gone within four months, and she hadn't contacted him before that day. He had never even seen her as an infant.
"Where yew go?" The toddler asked in her tiny voice when her father returned to collect her two weeks later.
"I was in Hawaii baby, I'll take you sometime. I won a surf contest," was all he offered as he collected her, now dressed in Jay's old t-shirt and jeans Philaine had pulled from a box of smaller clothes in a forgotten closet.
She wordlessly handed him the box of clothes, as well, then added, "Skip… get this wahine some real clothes, 'k? She hates these snap-up… pants-dress-things she was wearing when ya dropped her off."
That experience marked her birth as a tomboy. Another time, when Jay was seven and she was just about to turn six, he came home from the elementary school with Tony and Stacy, two boys she'd met many times before. All three were on brightly-colored plastic skateboards. The other two were eight or nine, and she was pretty sure Stacy, ever the meek one, was mildly afraid of her frequently-flying fists which he'd witnessed her use against Jay on multiple occasions. At this point, they were nothing more than cheap, plastic, toy boards, but she really wanted to try them. She ran outside and down the steps excitedly to meet them, eager to use those weird boards – however you were supposed to use them.
"I wanna try," She protested in her stubborn, nearly-six-year-old voice.
"No Belly, you'll hurt yourself – go watch Mickey okay?" Stacy coaxed the way he usually did when they didn't want to be bothered; he was frequently the go-between, since he tended to be the more gentle one of the group.
"NO! I SAID, I WANNA TRY! LEMME TRY!" She shouted hot-temperedly, stamping her bare foot on the cement as she lunged for him. He stumbled back quickly on his spindly legs, expecting rapidly-swinging punches as instead fat, fake crocodile tears sprang to her eyes, the result of months of practice at the skill of crying on-command.
"Okay, okay! You can try, just quit hollering or ma'll come!" Jay had given in, as usual; even at that age, she knew what she wanted and got it. And he knew not to get in her stubborn, pig-headed way. Even if he could be as equally pig-headed and stubborn, he knew what was good for him – and what his mother would say if he ever purposely hurt her, physically or otherwise.
That was how she learned to skate. She was constantly practicing, though she never really seemed to improve much beyond the basics. 'I'm still not very good', she mused to herself, thinking back on her arrival and early years – at least the flashbacks she could remember. She didn't care; She loved it anyway, just about as much as she loved surfing. She was professedly good at surfing. It was hard being one of the only girls (excluding her best friend Peggy) to hang out with a bunch of boys. Most new people she met assumed she'd slept with one (or more) to get into the crew, which was as far from the truth as possible.
June 1976
As established, Jezebel saw herself as Jay's non-biological little sister. That year, she was fourteen, about to turn fifteen; Jay was going-on-sixteen; their friends Tony and Stacy would turn nineteen in the fall; Peggy was already nineteen, the eldest of the group, and the rest were somewhere in between. She told herself she'd never dream of dating any of the eldest; it would be too weird. She skated, they skated; she surfed, they surfed – everything they did, she'd probably done it, too. She drank, cursed, spat, and pulled pranks; she partied (perhaps sometimes a little too hard), and hung out with the same crowd. Two things mainly set her apart from the boys, namely frequently-applied, heavy black eye makeup and certain 'bodacious assets', as Tony would call them.
Entering Zephyr shop one stuffy, summer afternoon, having just returned from some errands she'd been running, she stepped behind the counter and leaned against it, trying to get as close to the box fan as possible. After a few moments spent staring blankly at nothing, since there was absolutely nothing going on, she turned to Chino, a long-haired Hispanic man who worked for Skip, Craig, and Jeff.
"You do know you're named after a pair of work pants, Uncle?" She quipped smartly before he cuffed her on the ear with his open hand and she jumped away from the fan and sprinted off.
"Like I ain't heard that before, kid!" He yelled as she disappeared into the back room where Skip was shaping a surfboard.
"Yeah, um, put on a respirator Jez! Shit, don't inhale this crap, Jesus," he said, pointing with his sander toward the wall where a number of work tools and supplies hung.
"Sure, Skip," she answered, doing what was asked of her for once. Catch flies with honey, not vinegar, she reminded herself as she returned to his side once more, upturning a 10-gallon bucket to sit upon.
"That board for me?" She asked conversationally, her voice slightly muffled through the mask, knowing very well the answer would be some long, drawn-out version of 'no'.
The respirator mask he wore shifted up and down as he answered in his typical, light-hearted way: "Are you a pro surfer? Not yet? Didn't think so. Ya can have any-a them boards you want out front. This here is a custom order, fer some guy out on Oahu. You feel me, kid? Big bucks..."
"Ah. Well shit, if that's how you wanna be!" She laughed, then held out her hand mock-expectantly. "Anyway, I'm gonna need a small loan of $20."
"Fer whaaaat, exactly?" He asked, dragging out the sound of his letter 'a', scraping at the board some more without looking at his daughter. He'd come to expect these types of antics when she really wanted something.
"Well see, I owe Alva for a bet I made," she continued.
"Which was?"
"Man, what's with the third-degree?" She frowned, pretending to be hurt.
"Wanna know where my hard-earned money's goin' in this business transaction," he mumbled.
"I bet 'im I could go longer without brushing my teeth. And I won," she told him proudly, needlessly pointing to her teeth beyond the mask.
"Ugh, gross," he began before adding, "so, what was the incubation period?"
"Two weeks," she grinned.
"That's my disgusting girl," he congratulated without looking up from his work. "Now I ain't giving ya no loan, so get back ta the counter! And put Baby Paul to work when he comes in, will ya. Nathan's off on some surf thing."
She fully frowned now. She'd half-expected this, but there was always a small glimmer of hope he'd change his answer and fork over the cash. Ah well, can't blame a girl for trying!
"And brush yer teeth, Li'l Bit!" He shouted as she tossed the disposable respirator into the trash and bounced back out front.
Reaching under the counter, she took a rather large swig of vodka from the bottle stashed there, on top of which she was ever-so-professionally lounging, counting that as her teeth-brushing for the day. Alcohol kills bacteria, right? she thought amusedly. There were a few browsers, but other than that, the shop was pretty much empty. Chino had defected somewhere, probably out back messing around, so it was just her up-front. Usually browsers would've been kicked out by now, but she really didn't care if they were there or not. Zephyr, a local shortening of the shop's official name: Jeff Ho Surfboards and Zephyr Productions; a dingy, dusty-looking storefront from the outside, but most didn't mind. They just wanted to surf, or in some cases skateboard, and needed a place to buy supplies. They didn't need anything fancy. At least, that was how she usually explained it.
She sat behind the counter alone for about half an hour before Peggy skated through the front door, which they usually left hanging open for lack of air circulation, waving two tickets in her face. Peggy was at least five years older than her, in college, and the most awesome person she knew. She treated her as her self-proclaimed mature, older-than-her-years self, instead of like a little kid as others tended to do, and Jezebel treated Peggy like the older sister she never had.
"Dude, who? How? Where? When?" She set the liquor bottle carefully back in its place, since she was an absolute klutz and prone to breaking and dropping things, and also because she definitely wasn't supposed to be drinking it.
"Oi, oi! Who, she says!? Who else? The Sex Pistols, 'course! I won 'em from the radio. It's in Del Mar, next week. I just got one question for you… YOU WANNA COME?!" Peggy shouted melodramatically, shaking the younger girl by the shoulders.
"Are you insane? Of course I wanna go, you dolt!" Jezebel screeched back, bouncing off the counter and onto her feet.
"God Save the Queeeen!" They shouted in ear-splitting unison, leaning back-to-back.
As may now be apparent, the pair were obsessed with the band The Sex Pistols. They'd even spontaneously adapted some British slang into their everyday vocabulary.
"Peg, are these back-stage tix?" She asked suddenly.
"Hell to the yes!"
"Let's go gloat. Skipper, we're goin' out! Get your ass out here and run your own damn shop, I'm too young to work here anyway!"
She never could picture Skip fully as a father figure. It wasn't as if he cared that she spouted profanity at him, he was just 'Skip', hardly ever 'dad'. He was a stoner who partied and struggled with alcohol. The only 'limits', as he put them, he would set were to not get so drunk and fucked up she got pregnant before she was out of high school, like like her mother and he had. She figured she could hold down that rule; she claimed to not be remotely attracted to any of the Dogtown boys. And anyway, how could anyone see Skip as a father figure? In reality, she knew he cared; but, he cared about all the guys on the two competition teams. Just because he was a biological parent didn't mean she had to be affectionate toward him. He was basically a big kid himself.
A couple years prior, Skip decided to start a skateboarding team for the guys who were always surfing, skating, and hanging around the shop. He already had a surfing team, but skateboarding was starting to get big in town again as an actual sport, and Skip wanted in on the cash he could make from the fad. They even had dark-blue 'Zephyr' t-shirts made to wear to competitions. And even he had to admit he also genuinely tried to keep those 'grommets', as he and his friends would often call the kids, out of trouble. They were all good kids, for the most part, some just tended to get a little carried away. Especially if you put them in a crowd, that could get pretty rowdy. Take Jay, for example – he presented a tough front, as outwardly he was rude, loud, and obnoxious – but he did take care of his mother, and Jezebel, too. The boy loved his mother more than Jezebel loved chocolate, which was a whole lot.
Tony was just all-around arrogant, but he'd protect his sisters, perceived or otherwise, with his life. The guy was over-protective of his actual sister Kathy with one of his own best friends, whom she was dating. He didn't even like Kathy and Stacy touching, and Stacy was probably the safest one of the group. He'd run between the two and shove them apart the moment they were within four feet of each other. Tony had some experience helping to design Vans skate shoes, and was getting into making his own skateboards.
And Stacy – well, Stacy was just… himself. He was indescribable – had a job, a car, a watch, and was incredibly loyal. He could be pretty straight-edge, though he would indulge in the occasional joint or an alcoholic beverage.
The two girls tossed their boards to the ground and skated out the door, although Jezebel immediately collided with Paul Cullen, who was coincidentally entering as she attempted to exit.
"Sorry, Baby Paul, it's in a really shitty state today. Not like it isn't that way any other day, but it's horrible. Also I think Skip needed some boards stocked. See ya later!" She apologized, reaching out to ruffle his bleached blond bowl haircut.
They proceeded out the door (unscathed, this time) and down the street, heading for the middle-school playground where everyone else was most-likely gathering. First person they caught up to was Shogo; Jezebel admittedly had a huge crush on him, even if he was much older (Wentzle was pretty cute, too, in her humble opinion, but a little too wild and crazy for her liking). So there went her theory that the older Z-boys were too 'old' to hold her interest. That left just about Tony and Stacy as off limits in that age category, since they'd been in her life the longest. And Red Dog, but that was a completely different story.
"Sho, we're goin' to a Sex Pistols concert!" Peggy screamed from about 50 feet away with her impressive lung capacity.
"Ah no fair, I wanna go! Where hell ya get those!?" Shogo rarely freaked out about anything, but then again, the Sex Pistols weren't just anything, or rather anyone.
"WKLN, stupid! Where else?!" Jezebel shouted; that was pretty much the only station to which most of them listened.
Next, they (or rather Jezebel) ran into Jay – she literally collided with him; or, that is, he ran into her. It didn't seem to faze him much, though. She had to stop running into people today!
"Dude, guess whose concert we're going to, Jayboy?" Jezebel asked stupidly, untangling her limbs from his, searching on hands and knees for her board which had flown under the nearest picnic table.
"Huh… the Easter Bunny? I hear he gets a pretty good crowd," he smart-mouthed, trying to right himself and climb back onto his board.
"Shut up, jackass. We're going to see the fucking Sex Pistols…." she started, brushing herself off as she stood.
"God save the Queeeeen!" She and Peggy shouted simultaneously again, resuming their famous, back-to-back 'Charlie's Angels' reminiscent pose.
They went around to different friends over the next hour, announcing their triumph to everyone, until a few decided to take matters into their own hands and tackle the pair.
"Enough already!" Was the last thing Jezebel heard before her back hit concrete and she felt herself being pinned down on each shoulder by Jay and Tony.
She giggled hysterically, unable to catch her breath; having two big guys on top of her was not optimal for breathing. "Ger' off!" She lamented breathlessly.
A/N 2: If Skip seems too young to be the main character's father, that's the point – he was supposed to have been a teen himself when the birth happened. If my info is correct, he would've been 28 in '76 (b. Jan '48), making his kid exactly half his age here. Also, I was young when I started this and didn't do much research, so have now adjusted ages from my original story to make more sense after having done some research. Important dates: Jezebel (OC), b. July '62 (age 14 in Jun '76); Alva/Peralta, b. Sept/Oct '57 (age 18 in Jun '76); Muir/Red Dog, b. 1958 (age approx. 17 in '76); Adams, b. Feb '61 (age 15 in June '76). Also, I'm pretty sure the Sex Pistols were nowhere near America in '76, but whatever. Like I said, not historically accurate!
A/N 2: Inspired by other story writers in this archive, and after doing some researching, I've revised this story and tried to replace some of the made-up characters from the film with people who would've been around the scene at the time. I like trying to give a more expanded view. However, it still stands that I don't own any likenesses of any real, living or dead people and only own the rights to my completely made up characters (Bret, Mariana, and so on).