I equate rooftops with playground equipment. When I was a kid and found a jungle gym I had to test it out and when I found those huge wooden structures with bridges and towers and slides I could spend hours on them. The same was true with roof tops in my teens and twenties.

My little brother turned me on to roof hopping when he was into graffiti. I was living in a Midwestern college town and my apartment was in the heart of down town. When we went up on the roofs of my block I got the same feeling as when I saw the largest of those wooden behemoths I ever found as a child. My eyes lit up.

Except for the ally entrance between the building with my apartment and the building on the other side, it was possible to travel the whole block around with out coming down. Most of the buildings were of different sizes so getting from one to another took a different method each time. From climbing a rope tied to a chimney to jumping over small walk ways, there were dozens of challenges in getting from one roof to another and up and down.

When a friend suggested I write this story I tried to think of one event on these roofs, however I decided a medley would be better.

Of course the best time for roof hopping is at night. Odds are when on a rooftop you are doing things more frowned on than just the obvious trespassing, so darkness and most Midwesterner being asleep are real bonuses. My brother was always decked out in full urban guerilla street artist mode. A pocket full of Krylon tips and a back pack full of paint cans, to this day he has done the best bombing I have ever seen. I on the other hand was satisfied with leaving my tag in highly visible, hard to get to places. The few throw ups I did I was happy to see covered up by other kids.

There were at least 12 bars on this block and I lived directly above one and worked at another, not to mention a few more right across the street. Aside from leading me to be drunk most of my time on the roofs it also led to my discovering a strange fact about most people. They don't look up.

When the bars let out at two in the morning me and some band of malcontents would be witness to some of the more embarising effects of alcohol on young adults. From the bizzare mating rituals to the fist fights with each other and the cops we became more convinced we were "above" the herd.

It didn't take long before we became invisible particapents in the show we were watching from above. >From witty comments that left our actors looking every direction except up, to rocks, bottles, spit, and piss came hurling down near the white bread college students. Leading us to believe, perhaps, we were not so far above them after all.

I would secretly judge some new aquantances by there ability to follow where I led.

On to the car jump to the tool shed shimmy up onto the lowest roof. A nice walk over to a drain pipe that gets us to someone's back porch and from there up an antenna to the next roof. Up the ten foot wall at a sixty degree angle. Up and over the slanted roof. Jump up and grab. Hold on lower yourself then drop. Show off and go hand over hand across a flimsy bar over one section of ally. Jump the span. Feet on one wall and back against another.

A friend of mine fell off a six foot loading dock a couple of years ago and broke his arm and jaw. It's amazing no one fell from the roofs when we were full of acid, pot, beer, and crank.

One of the bars on the block was on the second story and would leave there back door open. Most of my crew were varying degrees of under employed with expensive sour mash habits. I think you can see where this is leading so I'll leave out the boring details. There isn't a bouncer or donut eater I have met yet that can catch this skinny anarchist on the roof tops. Drunk or sober.

A word of advice, if you ever decide to get a bit romantic on the roof tops check the material the roof top is made of. Me and a friend once snuck off to the roofs for a quickie, but ended up fooling no one. We had been on a tar roof and we were both covered in black.

- Ajax