jackassworld

Following our previous night out in San Jose at the Blank Club, a bar owned by former professional skateboarder Corey O’Brien, the guys motivation to get up and do much of anything was greatly diminished. Plus, no one was really looking forward to the prospect of hitting up the new Lake Cunningham skate park first thing out of the gate. So with the help of our San Jose “fixer” Reeps and Santa Cruz music mogul Sneaky Greg, we hooked up a backyard mini-ramp session to ease into the day. Wee Man made workable use of the ramp’s awkward extension, while Chris Pontius finally felt like getting back onboard following his extreme hamster ball experience at Moñtana de Oro.

Mid-afternoon we followed Reep’s over to the new multi-million dollar Lake Cunningham park, which is basically the equivalent to an Olympic training facility for skateboarders. Some real architectural masturbation went into this shapely pile of concrete, the vast majority of which was lost on us. Or maybe we were just being babies because the park required full pads and the people operating it refused to sign the paperwork we needed for filming purposes. Anyway, the park is scary big and I guess it took out three people the previous day, one of which included legendary professional Steve Caballero, who was practicing for the upcoming World Cup/Tim Brauch memorial contest on Sunday, September 28. I’d brashly assumed the place was going to be too big and daunting for the average kid, but there was a 12-year-old girl doing frontside grinds in the big bowl, while a 4-year-old boy was rolling into shit that I wouldn’t even consider doing in full Road Warrior pads. So at this rate, who knows, maybe a whole new breed of X-Gaymes skater will emerge. Hopefully the little bastards will have the foresight not to do any reality TV shows about their dramatic lives. We left Lake Cunningham without ever pulling our boards out of the van and instead grabbed some 12-packs and went over to another backyard mini-ramp construction for an infinitely more fun and relaxing time.

The night eventually ended for us back at the Blank Club, where we learned, once again, that alcohol, Morrissey cover bands, and live webcasts don’t always mix. Dave England committed a few online no-nos that will probably result in our Ustream account being banned, but oh well! Enjoy this shit while it lasts. Thanks again to Corey and Reeps for showing us some good old fashioned hospitality while we were in town!

(photo by Sean Cliver; San Jose, CA; 2008)

Day #3: The boys were running on about 63 percent, so not much skateboarding from any of us really happened. I guess you can say we all had the Blank Club on our minds. That’s Corey O’Brien’s bar in downtown San Jose. The reason I’m talking about the Blank Club is because it was my first night out drinking on this trip. Also, most of you may not know this, but I used to ride for Sonic Skateboards. This was Corey and his brother Gavin’s company. I have a lot of history with these dudes. I have now learned that me out on the town can turn into a lot of trouble by just showing up. Everywhere I go it’s really hard to drink like a gentleman. Every dude in the place wants to by me a shot. If I drank every drink I was offered I would show up by 10:00 and be carried out by 10:30. Anyway, I denied a lot of dudes (and chicks, too). So I just wanted to post a RAD picture of Gavin and me. Enjoy. Still on the road, I will have more soon. —Wee Man

P.S. Just so you know, I drink German and Mexican beers and I’m never afraid to get “MERLOTED”!

Mike’s Ray Ban sunglasses and I have a strange relationship. They keep breaking on me. I’ve worn two different pairs of his Ray Bans and on both occasions, they broke while on my face. It’s a curse of some sort. The first time I put his Ray Ban sunglasses on, I went to the park and we filmed some stuff. When I came back, I thought it would be funny to tell Mike that his Ray Bans were scratched. (more…)

While paused at the train trestle to watch a naturally occurring Lost Boy, a/k/a gutterpunk, pick out a Norwegian-themed song of his own creation on an old acoustic guitar, Loomis Fall disappeared from our pack only to reappear on top of the trestle in true vampiric fashion. However, while he did make a very conscious effort to make sure his smokes were in a secure pocket, Loomis’s iPod slipped out while he was hanging from the rung of a ladder. Down it plummeted, 45-feet or so to its watery demise below the trestle where we could still see it faintly glinting in the sunlight. Loomis was, understandably, quite devastated by the lost pod. Not only because he loves music like none other I know, but he now no longer had the comfort of subtly tuning out Ehren in the van.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Santa Cruz, CA; 2008)

Every dog has its day and so it came to pass on Thursday in Santa Cruz that we somewhat had ours. Most everyone woke up feeling a little behind the eight ball and never really caught up with whatever half-ass idiom I can throw in here next. Luckily our day wasn’t that severe in nature with our first stop being the train trestle made famous in the movie Lost Boys. Being the joyful dicks that we are, Preston Lacy was ushered down to the bridge to see if he could conquer his acrophobia and make it across the tracks without stroking out, which, to his credit, he did (there and back again, in fact), but not without secreting a bucket of sweat in the process.

Following a run in with a quartet of drifters that were surprisingly well versed in the lore of the Lost Boys and jackass, we zigzagged our way over to the new Wormhoudt public skate park facility through a web of Santa Cruz streets that were surely mapped out by a city planning commission of tripped-out stoner hippies. It was here that most everyone realized they were a bit sore and beleaguered from the previous days combination of skateboarding and driving, and the further combination of frying pan-like conditions, a pinball-like street course, and massively huge bowls (and full-pipe) didn’t help matters. Still, we frittered away the minutes at the park until we made the mystery decision to go visit the Mystery Spot—the premier Santa Cruz tourist trap located up in the redwood outskirts of the city.  What exactly is the Mystery Spot? I don’t know. They couldn’t tell us. Supposedly no one can. But it’s nestled up on a hillside and it makes you dizzy and nauseous with its strange twist of physics. So we all basically paid five bucks to get carsick but not in a car. The only thing that wasn’t a mystery about this spot is that it is precisely the kind of place that Ehren will wind up as a tour guide later in his professional life.

The whole optically unsettling thing being demonstrated here at the Mystery Spot is that the board they’re all standing on is actually running uphill. So, in theory, Wee Man should look even smaller when he’s standing on the far right—not the far left.

The last mystery spot on our Santa Cruz itinerary was finding Derby Park, a classic ’80s skate creation featured in the second Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade video, Future Primitive. It’s strikingly different than most parks built nowadays, which makes it refreshingly fun. And the fact that it’s located in a genuine park with trees and shit makes it all the more better. The locals here have all the kinks and lines dialed in and can rip the place like no other, so most of us just sat back in the shade and watched. Perhaps the Mystery Spot had affected our crew in an even more mysterious manner, because our resident blue-eyed diehard skateboarder, Mike Kassak, took a break from his board to sit and snap some photos of the locals, while our resident jolly diehard filmer, Rick Kosick, took a break from his camera to sit on a bench and not shoot the locals. Mysterious indeed.

Have you ever seen those little league baseball camp commercials on ESPN? They have kids in uniforms doing really weird militaristic/robot drills? When I saw those years ago, I realized that skateboarding could use a little discipline, a little training and hard work. You skate for fun? Yeah, right. You skate to win. You skate to be better than your bros. I know I do. There’s nothing satisfying about making a trick by yourself. I only learn tricks so I can do them in front of my bros to show them how much better I am than them. So if you’re a real skater like me, you’ll enroll in my skate camp. DO IT! Don’t be a pussy. And if you rearrange the letters in my name, Eric Nevada, it actually spells someone else’s name. Unlike Johnny Knoxville. If you rearrange his fake name you get stupid shit like “vex honk jolly inn.” What the hell does that mean? That’s not radical. Eric Nevada will show you what radical is.

Back in the days of Big Brother, Jeff Tremaine and I would usually detour the magazine’s “skateboard” road trips through some form of viewable nature setting (my favorite still being the Shark Valley Everglades stop we made on the Tamiami Trail with Clyde Singleton in 1999). Keeping this tradition alive and well, we hugged the coastline up to San Simeon, after skating an age-old ditch in Cambria, to observe its now famous farting elephant seal population. Unfortunately all the fat fucking bull males were out to sea dodging Pacific great whites, while the females and “teenage” males occupied the beachfront waters (I say unfortunately because the bulls can measure up to 16-feet in length and frequently throw down with each other in these Sumo-like fights to establish dominance in the mating game). Trekking out to an outcropping, Chris Pontius toed the Wildboyz line but never entirely crossed it (plus it’s just not the same without Steve-O), as some curious males bobbed in the background. Losing light and visibility with a massive fog bank that had engulfed the Big Sur coastline, we opted to err on the side of caution and double back down Highway 1 to take the 101N up to Santa Cruz instead. Hence, the live show we continually pushed throughout the day did not really take place until 1:00am PST after Mike G. attempted to check us into two wrong hotels before finding the right one.

(photos by Sean Cliver; San Simeon, CA; 2008)

Following our live night out in San Luis Obispo (the feed of which did not include a random hairdressing moment between Preston Lacy, Ehren McGhehey, and Chris Pontius in the wee hours of the morning), everyone was a bit slow off the mark to rally in the parking lot for a breakfast run—everyone being Dave England, that is. After a good 45 minutes of everyone standing around in the parking lot—everyone not including Dave, that is—we finally loaded up the vans and sent one in the direction of Montaña de Oro to do some inflatable prep work, while the other pulled out of the hotel and literally drove 50-fucking-feet across the street to park at a breakfast spot. (I don’t know, for whatever reason this struck me as funny at the time.) Anyway, after a mass ingestion of the Butter Barn’s cholesterol bomb, we headed out to the coastal cliffs to join professional workhorses JxP Blackmon, Scott Manning, and Mike Kassak. Most everyone enjoyed the very scenic overlook of the Pacific Ocean (the majestic beauty of which prompted Dave to shit his ass out, while Preston simultaneously unloaded his biscuits and poached egg in a remarkably unrelated bodily incident a few bluffs over), but not so much the sight of a fully-inflated, Zorb-like, clear vinyl ball wedged into the ice plants atop a sizable sand dune. The only one who didn’t shy away from the idea of seemingly whimsical roll down the dune and onto the beach below was Chris Pontius (if only because he’d done something very similar in Russia on Wildboyz). But, as we soon found out, no two rolls are apparently the same; in fact, this one was a lot more like a “car crash,” in Chris’s own descriptive words. At least it was one he could still walk away from, though, because the futuristic jellyfish of an orb was not so fortunate. It was pronounced dead on arrival.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Los Osos, CA; 2008)

I have to admit there are certain perks to traveling in the company of “celebrities.” Case in point, on the second day of our road trip we stopped at a legendary Central Coast skate spot in Morro Bay known as “Giant Food,” a long semi-transitioned bank with a semi-transitioned curbish-lip on top. The bank has long succumbed to the effects of time and erosion, but that didn’t stop Mike Kassak and Dave England from whipping out a number of tricks. Nor, for that matter, did the police officer who rolled up mid-session. We all expected to be getting the traditional boot, but instead the officer just hopped out to watch for a while. I’ve said it before (at a strip club in Las Vegas for Greg Wolf’s bachelor party, specifically) and I’ll say it again: It certainly does help to have the “Golden Midget” in your back pocket to bridge any and all potentially troublesome encounters.

(photo by Sean Cliver; Morro Bay, CA; 2008)

Well, it’s been over a month since I wrote Southwest Airlines, but they finally responded. And while Mr. Espinoza composed a very polite response, it’s essentially a very long winded way of saying, “Yeah, we got your letter and we read it.” He “recognizes” my frustration, but offers no solutions. Worst of all, I didn’t get dick. Usually they throw in some free drink tickets or something. Nope. Nothing. Stingy bastards.

Still, I take some satisfaction from the fact that this guy not only had to read my big, dumb, long letter, but he also had sit down and write his own big, dumb, long letter. HA! I showed them! Fucking fuckers.