A South American adventure

Thrasher Magazine, March, 2005 by Michael Burnett

THOUGH SIGNIFICANTLY MORE signage in the customs area was dedicated to the illicit importation of Play Stations, it seems Peruvian law also only allows visitors to bring in one video camera and one film camera per person. I had four cameras with me, and filmer Joe K had about 11. Our only fluent Spanish speaker, marketing maven Steve Luther, had skipped ahead of us in line and was out past the machine-gun wielding guards by the time Joe and I were being corralled over to secondary screening. After sweatily moving my cameras around from pocket to pocket a few times while saying the words "si" and "bueno" intermittently, I was able to escape in about 20 minutes. Joe K was nary so lucky and got stuck for over two hours until Luther weaseled his way back to customs and freed him using some sort of Jedi mind trick.

"These are my cameras!" Luther told the agents, despite the fact that it made absolutely no sense. "He was only carrying them for me!" The agents looked at each other and then to Joe K, who nodded enthusiastically. Somehow this worked and we were on our way.

AS IS OFTEN THE CASE when flying into a foreign and notoriously sketchy land, we were met at the airport by some local skaters. Luther, Van Wastell, Johnny Layton, Danilo Cerezini, Joe K, Keegan Sauder and team manager Ohio Dave hopped into a small rental SUV with our new friend Alberto, while Ethan Fowler, Raymond Molinar and I followed the other dude, Jorge (pronounced Hor-hay), out into the cool night. Jorge led us through the heavily guarded parking lot, across a busy road and up the block to a gas station where he had parked his car. "I have tickets!" He explained, "Maybe if I go to airport parking lot they won't let me out!" As we loaded our gear into his very late model Cressida, Ethan bought a six-pack from the gas station. Grabbing a cold one, Jorge turned to Ethan and asked, "You drive my car?"

"Me? Hell nor Ethan responded.

"You?" He asked me.

"I don't even speak the language!" I said.

We looked at each other in surprise as Jorge stormed around to the driver's side. "Shees! Okay, okay," he blustered.

As we jammed in, bags on our laps, he pulled a pair of tattered eyeglasses out of his pocket, followed by a loose lens that he turned over in his meaty hand a couple of times before popping it into the left-hand socket. He turned the key and squinted hard as the Cressida screeched to life. I felt around beneath me for a seat belt. Finding none, I asked Ethan to hand me a beer.

Luther had contacted Jorge and Alberto weeks previously and had hired them to drive us around and act as skate guides for our week in Lima. This type of arrangement is pretty common these days. Though often taken for granted, these unsung and often abused Sherpas can, at best, turn your trip into a 1999 Muska-style bust-a-thon or, at worst, drive you around like you're on a damn tilt-a-whirl to look at spots that are only skateable if you think the Tony Hawk game is real.

We laughed and pounded beers as we took off across the dimly lit streets of Lima, Peru. In all fairness, the Sherpas have a difficult job. Not only are they expected to know where all the hubbas are, but where to find restaurants acceptable to the American teenager's delicate Flamin' Hot Cheetos palate, enthusiastic young English-speaking ladies ready to get weird, and weed. It is in the latter capacity that they are almost always flawlessly adept. In most cases, the Sherpas are local distributors, shop owners or sponsored dudes, but other times it's hard to figure out just exactly how they are related to the task at hand. Regardless, like Tenzing Norgay, they guide the Sir Edmund Hillarys of the skate world to their spots so that they can be "discovered" and documented by the American skate press.

I've made it a practice to try and be nice to the Sherpas even when, say, Dustin Dollin is screaming in their ear and calling them a faggot 50 times a day. I know what it's like to play the lackey (namely from my first few years on the job), so I share their shame in trying to please a car full of brats. But still, muddled in hours of wrong turns, unskateable skate spots and shitty driving, I often find myself asking out loud, "Who the hell are these dudes, anyway?"

LIMA, PERU IS A DUSTY BUS-WRECK of a city ringed with mountains that look like they've been on the business end of a family of giant gophers. It's as if there was a campaign to strip the hills and take a shit on every living plant and animal that was pulled from the rocky soil. Crime seems to be a top concern to the people of Lima. and even the more modest homes are barricaded behind walls topped with glass or razor wire. The snazzier compounds, and that's the best word to describe them, supplement their walls with live electrical line and private gun-toting guards sandwiched into bulletproof vests. These security guards are as common as dog turds and Jorge explained that although there are federal police, each neighborhood or apartment building must hire a private police force as well. We ran into these guys several times each day.