Hella Nation - Evan Wright [21]
All of these influences converged on a scuzzy section of bars, warehouses, drug-shooting galleries and vacant lots inland from Venice Beach and Santa Monica nicknamed Dogtown. Here, a bunch of street kids, heavily into skateboarding, punk, booze and mayhem, pushed the sport to new limits. They called themselves the Z-Boys, and their fuck-all spirit marked the sport. More important, they showed that a bunch of street kids with no future could find glory in neglected patches of urban concrete.
By the time Greco moved to Huntington Beach to take his place on Tony Hawk’s Birdhouse team, the Z-Boys’ brand of guerrilla skateboarding had given rise to publicly traded, multimillion-dollar companies like Vans, as well as dozens of smaller enterprises whose combined sales of boards, trucks and wheels exceeded $2 billion. The spread of cheap video cameras had made it possible for legions of kids to go out on their own and capture their tricks, usually in illicit locations, then sell clips to companies for use in their promotional videos. The kids got money or product. The companies received the cachet of associating themselves with edgy street skaters.
Greco’s first apartment in Huntington Beach, paid for by Birdhouse, was a “shithole in the barrio,” says Jay Strickland, then the team manager, who lived there, too, along with Reynolds and a few other skaters. “The kids were paid a few hundred bucks a month,” Strickland says. “They lived on crap from 7-Eleven and on alcohol.” Greco’s core group of friends in Huntington Beach reflected the heterogeneous mix of pro skaters coming up in the late 1990s. “Most skaters come from sketchy backgrounds,” says Strickland, who was raised in a “biker-dude family” and claims to have spent part of his childhood living in a car with his mother. There was Elissa Steamer, who spent a good deal of her Florida youth being educated at the dog track by her father. There was Ali Boulala, a fearless eighteen-year-old from Sweden who has left the United States after various scrapes with the law. There was Australian skater Dustin Dollin, also eighteen, nicknamed Spawn, short for Spawn of Satan, because he decorated his skateboard with the words “Fuck the Bible.” Later, there would be Knox Godoy, who is almost like a younger brother to Greco. As Godoy explains it, he was born in the barrio “ghetto-style” and named after the front man of his dad’s favorite punk band, the Vibrators. “Knox hasn’t really had a mother,” says his father, eighties pro skater Steve Godoy. “But his uncle and I have raised him. So it’s like he’s had two dads and skateboarding to help him grow up.”
This crew, which grew to include more than a dozen other pro skaters, was called the Warner Avenue Mob, after the street where Greco and Reynolds’s apartment was located. The crew members spent their days and nights in search of spots to try out and tape new tricks.
When they weren’t skating or touring the country putting on demos with their teams, they were drinking beer and smoking weed. “We’d put the product we were flowed”—given by sponsors—“sell it all for cash and party,” says Steamer. No one was making much, but, she says, “Skating was not about money for us. A true skateboarder can have more fun on a few feet of curb than six normal people all day on all the rides at Disneyland.”
After a year in Huntington Beach, Greco became disenchanted with the organized aspects of pro skateboarding, especially the demos his team participated in. “They wanted me to subscribe to rules,” he says. “That’s fucked up. Skating is supposed to be free.”
At about this time, Greco rediscovered what he saw as the authentic spirit of skateboarding in Phoenix, where it was being kept alive