FLIP: "Fuck USA!" - skating team tours Barcelona

Thrasher Magazine, Sept, 2001 by Michael Burnett

I am officially the world's worst Spanish speaker. Issues of dialect or accent don't even come into play with my Spanish skills. I can't even speak Spanish caveman. As horrible as I am (abhorrent), I'm still better than Mark Appleyard, who, being all of 18 and brimming with self-confidence, embraced the popular bark-and-point method of multilingual interaction (long ago pioneered and mastered by generations of wayward North Americans). Not that my method (the mumble-and-point) was any more effective. Not even. It just communicated my feeling of unilingual shame, which regardless of how it cleared my conscious that I was not a typical tourist, did little to get me a boat of french fries. "Patatas fritas!" Mark would happily chirp. And goddamn it, he got those fries lickety split.

Barcelona highlights include Bastien getting run over by a scooter and Boulala purchasing a chair. The former occurred in the midst of a Future Primitive-style group skate down a narrow Barcelona street. Some of the roads are so narrow and close to the entrances of buildings, you kind of think of them as sidewalks until a car speeds by four inches away from your kneecaps. We were pushing down one of these skinny paths when Bastien ollied off a curb and right into the path of a scooter with two dudes on it. The little guy managed to sidestep the front of the bike but got winged in the gut by one of the handlebar grips. The two dudes were sent flying, but everyone came through with only some scrapes and bruises. After the initial shock wore off, there was some talk of a new nickname--Bastien "Scooterwreck" Salabanzi.

Boulala stomped the stuffing out of his ankle on the first day and was gimping the rest of the trip. A bag of half-melted ice became his constant companion (along with a six-pack and a biting dog) as he tried desperately to rehab his heel. In an additional effort to reduce the swelling, Boulala kept his shoes off and his size 28/32 pants perpetually unbuttoned. He also abstained from bathing to avoid hampering the body's natural healing process. Lady Luck put her arms around Ali on the third or fourth day when we stopped at a skate spot only to discover that, by sheer coincidence, some children were selling a used dining-room chair for 500 pesetas! For the remainder of the trip, Boulala was relaxing in comfort and style, pulling out his fine chair at every stop to ice his heel and cheer on his teammates.

Everywhere I looked in Barcelona, I saw a classic photo class photo moment. As anyone who has ever taken a formal photo class will agree, photo teachers hate skateboard photos, that is unless the subject is eating shit or the shot is cropped so tightly that nothing but the rider and the sky are visible. "You should call this one 'To Air Is Human,'" they'll chuckle as they give you a C . What photo teachers love are shots of old people peering out of ornate windows, especially foreign-looking old people and foreign-looking windows. "You can see the pain and experience of a lifetime of struggle!" they'll say as they start wheeling through their portfolio. Second to old people looking out windows is old people walking with dogs. Next comes anything dealing with babies or small children. After that you've got your people with dark skin standing in front of brightly colored walls. They go absolutely apeshit for those. Lastly, anything having to do with baseball.