Then his father raised a hand, as Martins recalls, slapped him hard across the face, and took the skateboard out of his son's hands. But he'd never said no to his father before, and as they confronted each other on 42nd Street, he hesitated. They drifted to East New York, in Brooklyn, but got kicked out of that apartment, and were now living out of a hotel in New Jersey.īy the time Martins ran away, he'd already decided he wasn't ever going back. Not so long ago, they lived in a nice high-rise on the Upper East Side. His mother was, as Martins put it, a “farm girl” from Virginia. Martins's father, a Nigerian immigrant, was a sharp-dressed man who ran a magazine for the growing Nigerian-American community and a P.R. By his account, things at home weren't great in general. But his parents blew it for him, he says, and he missed the audition. He wanted to attend the art high school, LaGuardia, where he could develop his gifts for drawing and playing the flute. He'd been going to high school at the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, on 116th Street. It was 1996, just as the New York skate scene was blowing up, and brands like Supreme and Zoo York were gaining a foothold downtown, exerting a strong pull on the young Martins. “Fola,” said the elder Martins, using his son's middle name. They were on 42nd Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, when they ran into Martins's father, who was waiting for the bus. A couple of weeks after he ran away from home, 16-year-old Kunle Martins was skating in midtown Manhattan with a couple of friends.
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