I’m not even trying to brag or anything but I am one of the hippest cats you’re ever going to meet in your entire wildest fantasy of a life, for real. I’m not talking smack. I’m just being honest with you. It turns out that I was a part of the original wave of breakers, which is a very big deal you know. In fact, I may as well tell you the whole story and start from the beginning, since I can tell you really give an Effin’ damn. That’s why you looked this way right?
I’ve got a whole lot of Shee-ott to drop on you, so listen up B-Boys and B-Girls while I lay it all on you. I’m not going to leave out any of the crazy ass details either, no matter how nuts it sounds. So cover your eyes and plug your ears if you don’t think you can hang. What I am about to tell you is not for the goody goodies out there, so if you’re one of them you better leave now before you get corrupted. I’m going to take you back to that year it all started for me.
It was 1983 in Chicagoland, more specifically; Downers Grove, Il. I wasn’t called Phil K Swift just yet, that came later, but I was still a hip cat, it’s just that nobody knew it yet. I was a legend in my own mind. I didn’t really fall into any of those clique categories that everybody else at my school was falling into; I wasn’t a jock or a burnout or a prep or a nerd – well … maybe I was just getting out of nerdom by the skin of my teeth. I eventually broke away from nerdom but that was after I figured a few things out. I’ll tell you about that later on. But as for being a nerd and such, I was a geek in nerds clothing who became a geek in hip cats clothing so I looked different than I felt but deep down inside, I was still a geek. But I became a cool-geek. Are you following me so far?
The more I think about it - I suppose that last year you could have just called me a geek or a nerd, flat out. The hip cat clothing probably wasn’t fooling anybody except me. It’s not that I had the black plastic watch with the calculator keyboard on the watch face and I wasn’t wearing floods or anything. Well, not too often at least –and I certainly wasn’t rocking red socks to my knees with green shorts to contrast the blue vinyl Velcro shoes that other geeks at my school were wearing - and proudly I might add. But I didn’t start dressing hella-cool until lately. So yeah, I was half freak last year.
I can’t claim to have never looked like any of those “total” geeks and gauche freaks but things did drastically changed for me in the 5th grade when Willy Renoir told me, “Hey dude, nice tough skin pants, did mommy pick those out for you?” It was at that moment that I had realized that I had to stop having mommy pick out my clothes.
By 7th grade, I was dressing straight up sharp because rink fashion had become my passion. I’ll tell you about the roller rink in a minute.
By 8th grade I ditched the pop bottle thick, brown framed nerd glasses and got myself some contact lenses, which opened up a whole new selection of chicks for me to botch up puppy love with.
Finally by 9th grade I put the old kibosh on mom putting a bowl around my head and giving me a giggle worthy haircut. You know the kind, it was very similar to an Amish mans hairdo, all bowl, no style, very Moe from the Three Stooges.
Anyway, I got rid of the hair combed like Moe by having my mom take me to this fancy schmancy ritzy titzy hoity-toity hair salon in Hinsdale that charged one hundred dollars for women’s haircuts and fifty bucks for young adults. Where they served champagne in the waiting room, and rich women carried their five thousand dollar dogs around in their five thousand dollar dog purses.
The first time I went there, this hottie, who was the shampoo girl, phone girl, and champagne passer outer all in one, quietly offered me a glass of, “bubbly.” She whispered to me, “Would you like some bubbly sir?” and let’s just say, she had this certain kind of perkiness that was protruding outwards.
“Sure doll face,” I said. Heck; I was only 14 years old and the next thing I knew I was sipping champagne while waiting to get my haircut and peeking at protuberances. To be honest with you, I didn’t know what she had meant when she had whispered, “Bubbly.” I was pretty naïve back then but she made it sound so sexy, so I figured I’d try.
My Mom was waiting in the car for me and with her bible thumping ways and all I didn’t think she'd much appreciate me slamming down the bubbly while I was supposed to be getting a million dollar haircut, so I only took a few sips. Anyway, this hair dresser named Penny hooked me up with a “Billy Idol” spiked haircut which was really being ostentatious and rebellious back in the early 1980’s. This new super fly hair cut ended up pushing me out of geekdom and into hip-cat-ness – just like that!
Nowadays you can have a Mohawk with blue hair, nipple piercings with chains that are attached to your eyebrow piercings and you might not even get stared at. In the early 1980’s spiked hair was atypical unless you were a rock star, well for a little while at least. When something becomes hip; everyone eventually hops on everyone else’s bandwagon. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying, “Y’all a bunch of biters” – no offense.
It wasn’t just the spiky bleached blonde haircut, cool clothes, and contact lenses that snapped me out of geekdom and nerdiness though. I’ve got some other secrets, so keep listening. BUT -I’ve got to warn you, if you suddenly become cooler than cool and the hippest of the hip cats and everyone starts hawking you; don’t go coming to me with your problems. I’ve got enough of my own.
For example, the first night that I hung out at the roller rink after my new hip happening hair cut, I had two girls come up to me and ask, “Ohhh hey, can I touch your hair and feel your spikes?” That’s when I first knew that I had really belonged. Some things – you just never forget. The rock star, messy spiked, bleached blonde hair, and girls hawkin’ me was when I knew, I was in-in like Flynn. It didn’t suck when chicks started diggin' me.
Beneath it all though, I was a guy who from time to time liked to read the dictionary for fun to polish up on highfalutin words. I was also the dude who had friends that talked about, “Emmer Effin' Punk ass Bee-otches that were going to be shown wazup when we knock ‘em out da box.” And other kinds of shiznit like that that some of my friends talked about when they were talking all tough. And some of my friends – weren’t just talk; they walked the walk.
I had some rebellious friends but the thing about me is that I was smart enough to stay away from drugs but I was also dumb enough to almost inhale Mary Jane once on the way home from school with these heavy metal burnouts that I was cool with. I’ll tell you about that later; Peer pressure can really be a Punk ass Bee otch, you know? Don’t get me wrong - I'm cool with the burnouts, it’s just that 420’s not my thing, it got me paranoid as EFF. What I am trying to say is; I am the cool dude that didn’t have to drink or do drugs to be cool. I was just cool. And since we are on the subject of cool, I’ll tell you all about it.
I know there’s a lot more to being “cool” and “hip” than just thinking you are though. What makes me a hip cat for real though? I've got the groove baby! I listen to hippest of the mix jams, I dress like a stone cold hipster and I hang out at the rink on the weekends where all of the action happens. Oh yeah, the rink – I told you I’d tell you more about it, didn’t I?
I went to Suburbanite Roller Rink every weekend night, which turned me from a kid to a cat – a hip cat, in an instant. From the moment you stepped inside the roller rink it was as if you were entering a whole new world of something salacious, mysterious, and esoteric; it was sex and drugs and music and secrets and underage this and underage that … and oh yay, there was skating too.
There are certain things that happened at the rink from time to time that I probably shouldn’t be talking about but I’m kind of a blabber mouth to be honest with you. I even tell my P.s almost everything, I put my foot in my mouth all of the time and tell them almost everything on accident. Thing is, I usually end up freakin’ ‘em out more than I need to be freakin’ ‘em out. But even though my mouth was as large as a watermelon, I had somehow managed to not tell them about the drugs that were going on at the rink, which would have put that place off limits to me. I knew if I had told them about the Mary Jane I smelled there from time to time, they literally would have freaked out. And not the good kind of freak out, like “Freak Le Chic” freak out, but the bad kind of freak out like: straight jacket, keep your ass home on the weekend’s kind of freak out.
It’s not like my P.’s had anything to worry about anyway because I skipped the whole drugs thing. It’s there and it was everywhere. But I just skipped it. I was not trying to turn my brain into mush. Drugs suck, in fact, I know two people who have died from doing drugs. They’re gone! Nuf said.
Speaking of freaking out, I just thought about something, so I’ll tell you more about the rink in a second. There’s something I’ve been dying to tell you about that I freaked out about – and this time it’s the good kind of freaked out. This thing I saw on a TV show called, “PM Magazine” did this story about inner city kids from New York that had supposedly hung up their weapons, stopped fighting, and were now duking it out via “break dancing.” Although, I would bet that this story was just media spin because I’m sure that dancing wasn’t really replacing violence in the gang banging neighborhoods. But I’m not going to get into that right now, what I wanted to tell you was, this show was playing clips of people on the ground: twisting, turning, spinning, twirling, and all sorts of cool ice crazy shee-ott. It was the first time I had ever heard of “Break dancing.” Some things you’ll just never forget. I instantly fell in love.
A day or two later, after school one day, while I was walking home with my buddy Brock Blazin’ we got to talking about this thing called break dancing, which Brock happened to see the same TV show too. I decided to bust out with some impromptu break dancing right in the middle of the street as we were walking home. I later learned that the move I was doing that day was called “down rock” or “floor rock” but Brock Blazin’ was calling it, “Scatting.”
That first day we had tried break dancing together, Blazin’ kept saying to me while I was breakin’, “Yo Phil, that’s Swift man, that’s Swift.”
I got up off of the ground and I said, “That’s why they call me Phil K Swift,” even though nobody had ever really called me that before because I had just made it up. But that’s what I said, and that’s how I got my name.
Blazin’ and I vowed from that point on to learn other break moves and become the baddest breakers ever. It eventually became our lives.