Hella Nation - Evan Wright [18]
“I’ve been getting fucked up a long time,” Greco says, taking another swig of Gallo. “My head’s kind of baraka, so I’m sticking to wine today, posting with my homeys.” The assembled homeys constitute a pantheon of top street skaters in the world—Andrew Reynolds, Erik Ellington, Jeff Lenoce, James Nichols. A few sit around the breakfast table passing a bong. Others lounge on the couch in front of a massive TV, watching skater videos, drinking beer, smoking blunts and futzing with wheel sets on their boards.
The Ramones blast on a boom box. Someone pounds on the front door. Greco finally opens it, and a guy named Shane steps in. “Check out the digs,” says Greco, gesturing to the gallery ceilings and the windows with panoramic views of the Hollywood Hills. “It’s high jinks,” Shane says appreciatively. “Yeah, high jinks,” Greco agrees, then adds, “Excuse me while I puke.” He beelines to the kitchen. He leans over the sink, and a shiny yellow sock of vomit jets from his mouth. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he looks up at the huge room, sunlight pouring in through the windows, and says cheerfully, “Skateboarding paid for this, motherfucker.”
AN UP-AND-COMER in the skate world since he signed his first sponsorship deal at age fifteen, Greco’s career took off last year with the release of the Baker 2g skate video. Before then, he’d just been the guy who dressed punk rock and got in fights. Since then, he has made the cover of the major skateboarding magazines, launched a line of signature boards that sold out shortly after going on sale in January and signed a major endorsement deal with Vans shoes.
The trick, or “hammer,” that made Greco a star is called a “backside nose-blunt slide.” In simplest terms, this consists of jumping a skateboard onto a handrail at the top of a staircase and sliding down backward, with just the nose of the board touching the rail. Greco pulled off his now legendary move in late August near midnight in a deserted Los Angeles business district on a flight of stairs reputed among skateboarders to be extremely challenging. His friends bribed security guards and set up a power generator, lights and video cameras in the concrete stairwell behind an office building. Greco, shaky from a weeks-long alcohol binge, made numerous approaches to the top of the stairs before he jumped the rail and “laid down a perfect hammer,” doing a trick in a way that has been accomplished by only two, maybe three other pro skaters.
The fact is, no one really knows, because there is no governing body of pro skateboarding. It remains an underground activity in which skaters gain fame by going out in small crews and capturing their stunts on video, which are then studied in minute detail by fans who scrutinize and judge everything a pro skater does, down to the way he ties his shoelaces.
Greco’s crew is called the Piss Drunx. They are a bunch of guys (and at least one female) who have been skating together for years. Most, but not all, are pros. There are no formalities that go with being a Piss Drunk, other than that some, like Greco, display a Piss Drunx tattoo—a backward P and a forward D. Many live together or crash in one another’s apartments in Southern California and Arizona.
Since forming their own company, Baker Skateboards, last year, the Piss Drunx, thanks mostly to the exploits of Jim Greco, have become the new face of pro skateboarding. And yet, for all his visibility, pro skating is, in many ways, just a part-time job for Greco. In a year, he might spend only a few weeks working on his tricks. It’s been nearly twelve months since he’s performed a trick. Now, with a follow-up to Greco’s breakout video in the works, his friends are starting to ask, When is he going to skate again?
“Jim isn’t like other skaters,” says Knox Godoy, at twelve the youngest member of the Baker team. “We skate every day, working on hammers. That’s how I do it, how guys like Andrew Reynolds do it. But Jim sits on his drunk ass for months, then