Hella Nation - Evan Wright [19]
“I need to cruise and drink for a while,” Greco says. “Then the feeling to do hammers comes up on me. I just let it happen.”
“There are no rules in pro skateboarding,” says Jeremy Fox, the manager of the team for Flip Skateboards. “It’s more like the music industry, where popularity is a factor. Skaters are like rock stars. Kids don’t want a Phil Collins of the skate world. They want Marilyn Manson.”
LUNCHTIME, GRECO HAS CHUGGED all the Gallo and walks aimlessly across the white carpet of his apartment hunched forward with his arms hanging down, like a Cro-Magnon illustration on an evolution chart. His face is slack and his eyes unfocused. Reynolds follows him across the room with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of 409, picking up trash and wiping off surfaces. He keeps a wary eye on Greco, like a parent watching a toddler. Greco crashes over to the CD player and pops in another Ramones disc and turns up the volume, cranking it. “Jim, keep it chill,” Reynolds says, cutting across the room to turn the sound back down.
Reynolds, tall, with moppish, fair hair, sleepy eyes and an unflappable demeanor—he is depicted on his signature boards as the Shaggy character from Scooby-Doo—is Greco’s physical and temperamental opposite. In the scheme of their odd-couple relationship, he is the neat-freak, the worrier, the caretaker. A Tony Hawk protégé, Reynolds has been a pro skater for nearly a decade. He scored his first major shoe deal a couple of years ago and has been featured as a character in the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, the number-one-selling Nintendo and PlayStation game last Christmas, for which he recently received a royalty check for nearly $100,000. Still, when it comes to Greco, Reynolds is in awe. “I can’t tell if Greco is completely insane or the smartest person I ever met,” he says.
Greco sits on the floor across the room from Reynolds. He has put one Vans sneaker on his foot. He holds the other sneaker in his hand. “Andrew, where’s my other shoe?” he asks.
“It’s on your foot, Jim.”
Half an hour later, Reynolds is behind the wheel of his gold 2000 Cadillac Eldorado driving to an L.A. skateboarding spot near a high school. Greco is in the passenger seat. Before leaving the house, Greco discovered a half-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He waves both arms, singing along with “Sympathy for the Devil” playing on the stereo, and swigs from the bottle.
Reynolds begins to get impatient. “Put the bottle down, Jim,” Reynolds shouts over the music. Driving down a straightaway, he vents his growing anger by tapping the brakes, ever harder. Greco flops back and forth as if he’s on a wave ride.
Finally, Reynolds pulls up next to a trash can in a residential neighborhood. He shuts the music off, leans over and shoves Greco’s door open. “Jim,” Reynolds says firmly, “put the bottle in the trash.”
Greco looks up, gazing at Reynolds with bleary-eyed disbelief. “What? You’re throwing me out?” Earlier in the year, while speeding down the 405 freeway in fellow Piss Drunk and female pro skater Elissa Steamer’s brand-new $40,000 SUV, Greco had attempted to urinate out the window. Steamer had pulled over, punched Greco in the grille and kicked him out of the car. He was later found wandering the eight-lane freeway, attempting to flag down cars, and was arrested for public drunkenness. Greco seems to think today is a repeat. “OK, I’m going, Andrew,” he says. He reaches for the passenger-side door handle, but the door is already open. He grabs air and tumbles partway out of the car, into the street.
“Jim, I’m not throwing you out,” Reynolds says. “Just the bottle, OK?” Greco slides back into the car. He guzzles the last of the Jack Daniel’s and says, “I thought you were kicking me out.”
Reynolds pries the empty bottle from Greco’s fingers and places it on the curb by the trash. “No, Jim, I’m not throwing you out.”
Greco heaves himself onto Reynolds’s chest, sloppy and emotional.