when he was hurt he would bust out his
kickflip blunts and fingerflip variations.
"Those are for the kids," he told me.
Although the team has previously been
referred to as "Ugly Americans," it
should be made clear that neither
Enrique Lorenzo nor JB Gillet were born
of "the Great Satan." They are Spanish
and French, respectively.
Enrique learned early on in his quest to
master the English language that an easy
to circumvent battles with vocabu-
lary and diction is to just smile and
laugh. He's got you conditioned so that
way to
sometimes you laugh just
ugh just looking at
at him.
One of Enrique's favorite ways to kill
time was to play the "What would you
do if you came home and..." game-a
brain-teasing exercise he invented. The
game is played by asking those around.
you what they would do upon coming
home and discovering their family mem-
bers and the family's pets in incestuous
"How do these people
get anything done?
This whole country
is like one big bar"
situations. For example: "What would
you do if you came home and your
brother was sucking the dog's dick?" The
game has many possible combinations
and Enrique tried out almost every one
of them on us with varying levels of per-
versity and taboo-breaking. Keep in
mind his thick Spanish accent. He didn't
seem to mind that it was kind of a one-
sided
sided game.
JB Gillet is from Lyon, France, and even
though he was the only one of us who
spoke both French and English, he might
as well have spoken Yiddish for all the
s a translator.
help he was as a
"What's he saying, JB?" we would ask.
"I don't fucking know," he'd reply.
Though he was reluctant as an interpreter,
he was exceedingly helpful in exploring the
differences between our cultures.
"I never seen a fucking French toast in
France," he told me.
Damn straight.
After a quick recovery in Paris, we took
the train to Bordeaux, France with our
guide, Morgan, for the first demo.
Riding the train in Europe isn't like rid-
ing the train or the Greyhound in
America. It's clean and there's a bar to
get drinks and snacks. And if there are
teen runaways or people with dumps in
their pants aboard, it's not as obvious as
in the States.
In Bordeaux the demo was at a big pub-
lic square called Malraux. The boys were
greeted by about three hundred feisty
fans and a video camera paparazzi num-
bering in the high teens. Marcus got the
ball rolling by throwing a NorCal-caliber
nollie flip down seven big steps, and
Daewon and Enrique took it up another
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notch with some long manual tricks.
At this demo an interesting crowd behavior emerged: trick-induced
herding. That is, whenever a pro would get close to a trick, a Death
Star-style canyon of people would form. The top of the narrow chan-
nel would be fanned out and the bottom would be closed up approx-
imately four feet from the landing. Needless to say, there was definite
incentive to keep a low profile when demoing. Any landed trick could
mean an instant channel of fans and the accompanying make it or
break it pressure.
a
That night, the hosts put on a party called "La Soirée du Skate" at the
Club Bikini where skate fans could pay twenty francs to watch videos
and party with the boys.
While in Bordeaux we also went and drove Go-Karts. Unlike the
souped-up lawn mowers we had driven in America, the French Go-
Clockwise front left: Precision backside 180° to fakie
5-0 on an icy Marseilles bench by Enrique. Belgian
locals risk being trampled to death at their spot.
Pharmacy or the official French Lucky bearings.
distributor? You decide. Daewon switch nosegrind
shove-its on the same Marseilles, France block where
he also conquered the elusive rocket noseslide.
Karts are mini race cars-fast as hell and, well, dangerous. You could
really get jacked, as JB found out when he slid out and got rammed by
another racer. The place also, like everywhere in France, sold alcohol.
"How do these people get anything done?" Shiloh mused. "This
whole country is like one big bar."
A second train ride the next day got us to Toulouse and a night at the
Videotel-a hotel named for the fact that every room had a VCR. The
boys relaxed while partaking of some "art films" that were available
for rental.
"Man, I think I need an enema or something," Shiloh moaned as we
rolled up to the first demo in Toulouse.
A wacky concrete park was the spot and the locals were all busting
out with some likewise flip tricks. Like bastard children of Ron Knigge
and Chris Fissel, the locals had triple flips and body varials that were
hard to decipher with our American
minds. The demo lasted about fifteen
minutes and caused an instant traffic
jam as the two hundred or so spectators
all tried to scramble, along with us, to
the next spot.
By the time we reached Mato, the
warehouse-style park, for the second
demo, the small space was already
packed ten dudes deep in every direc-
tion around the street course.
It's
à a proven fact that matter how
good you are, it is virtually impossible
to take out the people that skate a
skatepark every day.
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