Thrasher Magazine

I will be reborn. I’ve lived this life 1,000 times, at liberty, and a thousand more. Every day I die. Every day I live. Are you in or are you out? Because you got to know the war starts the minute you leave the house. When you’re in your new little fucking cave, warm, thinking about how to fucking go out there—and some got it a lot worse than you. Jesus got off the cross on Good Friday. They put him in the hall behind a rock and two days later he was gone like the wind. The river of blood constantly washes my soul. Do I need to recharge, a reboot, something from down in the depths of below? Is it possible to live one life through many eyes, the floor, the sky? As the blood pulsates through this lonely borrowed corpse, you realize that time is your relevant space-motion continuum. The dream dies when the vessel leaves to mine every goal, every end of every tunnel. Make skating look fun and you’ll always be in the spotlight. Make it look like it’s a chore and guess what? Start mowing the lawn. Clean your fucking room. So if you think about your life and how much you don’t mean anything—the church of insignificance—he’s always there take you to the Grand Canyon. You can stand in amazement at the power of water and realize your life is not even nanoseconds on the clock of the universe. 

Milton Charlie Chaplins a 12-stair hubba that smelled like feces. Waxy 5-0

Akira Shiroma, mean lein to tail. No lawn mowing for this kid

Sinister creepin’ while the kids want your brains

São Paulo was like the real grime. This park was plaza crazy and this tranny got some bunk at vert. Pedro Barros shows proper sole on the frontside rock

Akira looking kinda French with an early-grab fakie wallride in Lima

Carmen Seweranda

The macaroni is three years in the making for me. I’ve been to South America six times in the last three years. Twice I was with Grant and I asked him “What’s good?” “Get it,” he said. The macaroni has been the Holy Grail. Not a Hot Wheels track loop, but a fullpipe to take a left turn in. It will be like a carve across the ceiling—frontside/backside loop—much like I used to play as a child. It seems more like a cylindrical rush than just a straight shot through the middle. Chris Miller was here and got rained out. Peter took his turn, sitting on the couch thinking about it. He isn’t here. I take the best skaters to the gnarliest spots for the love of the game. To see it done live is an epic day, indeed.

Quick up three stairs to flat-bank kicky, Louie Lou

What you do, it’s who you are. What I do is dirt roads, broken stairs, alleys that go nowhere. The nowhere man. That’s what it’s all about. Lost in oblivion. Well, have a seat. I hear it a lot. People say to me, “Must be great keeping up on things.” My brain is constantly processing information, whether it’s red shoes or someone’s got their hands in their pockets. I’m just over-analytical of everything. It’s ridiculous sometimes. I catch myself and think, What are you doing? What do you care? I don’t care, per se, but I have to constantly stay abreast of every situation: what’s hot, what’s not, what’s here with us now. Live in the skin that you surround your view with. You are the people you hang out with. The friends that you see every day are the fabric of your life. Being in your own skin can be a pleasure and a pain. Sometimes it’s reversed. The pleasure becomes the curse and the macaroni may not happen today, but it is here. It is dry ground and some sort of fucking Formica particleboard concrete. It could be pouring rain and you can still skate. It wouldn’t matter. Let the rain come and wash me away. Someday the rain will come and wash us from all the Mondays in existence, all that is pertinent to the world around you. Look around and all you see is death. Does anybody smile? Does anybody laugh? At whose expense is the laughter? Where does the bus stop? At the end of the rainbow there is always a pot of gold. How you cash it is up to you.

Kid’s only 22. Time is comin’. Jhancarlos González, frontside flip

I’ve been going on the Voltron trips since 2004—different riders, younger faces, all the same common goal: to keep on going, to keep moving. What are you if you don’t have that? How are you to know if the road goes on forever? I’ve been doing this for 40 years—miles, traffic lines. I live your life in a fucking weekend. Sometimes I don’t even know where I am going. Houston? Shanghai? It’s a hard life. Living like this is addictive because we have to go home to four rooms. In one room you’ve got to live with the self as I have. Rest is like data and sand in the desert church of insignificance.

When Nitro goes max, better get the camera. Pedro ollie 5s over the hip in São Paulo. The macaroni is in this park

Seventeen-million people in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The skyline is eternal. A million stories from thousands of skaters. We do a big demo at the middle of a two-week road run and shit gets mental. Broken decks, welded trucks and black homemade wheels—we got it good. The bowl part of the show was packed. On every inch of deck were screaming über fans. No age limit, no fresh princes and in the middle of it all a skater with no feet. Kid ripped—noseblunt double handflip makes. Always smiling. Makes you realize it’s all good if you boil it all down. The street crust: just a cardboard slab, a tarp and one random item of clothing. Fort Wayne sucks? Yeah, go try Vagraction. Go there and live on the street. This dude even snaked me. Crazy shit. Your shoes are all cashed? This dude ain’t even need ’em. Stay happy; life is good.

Get out of the van. Get off of the ground—Jhancarlos, boardslide transfer

Van repellent: get out of the car. Quit sitting on your ass. You can’t see the world from there. Go talk to somebody. Find out what’s really going on around you while I wait for big data to take over your mind. Go out there and just find it yourself. Someday a rain will come and wash us from the ends of the earth to the curbs in front of your house. Nothing will ever be the same. You can run; you can hide. But you’ll always find you are where you lurk, where you live, where you die. You can’t run away from yourself.

The graffiti lets you know it’s Brazil. The tailgrab makes you know it’s Grant. Nosegrind

Bridget Morales gets a little help from her dad on this hella sketchy rock fakie. I was cringing

As I get older, I never sleep much. I wake up early. Sleeping is the cousin to death. When you’re a kid, you sleep because you’re growing. I knew a dude that grew six inches one summer. He had to get operations to put everything back together—maybe so he wouldn’t live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Anyway, fuck him. I was out bombing hills in the morning. The early bird catches the worm. I seen these local kids. They’re in line. A posse at the top of the hill. I start flying down the fucking thing. This one guys says, “No one’s ever done it naked before,” because I didn’t have a helmet or leathers on. They gave me a ride back up to the top and asked me my name. I told them I was Steve Randle, the world’s greatest skater.

Jhancarlos dump trucks while the crew avoids the skillet grill

Maximum Overdrive lookalike Giovanni Vianna full Cabs the top-five block in the world. Crawdad had a cover here, nollie flip, cuz’

So, Lannie, you’re a dude who’s not afraid to go shirtless. 
Is this your regular style on the road?
There was a time in my life when shirtlessness was the preferred top-of-body experience, but I would say at the current moment I limit it to at least once a day per skate trip.

Do you ever just say, “Fuck it!” and leave the house without a shirt altogether?
Yes, once on a Fallen trip to Thailand I just stopped bringing shirts with me to the van in the morning about halfway through and everything was peachy. Topless in Thailand!

So let’s get to this wicked sunburn. When did you realize you had gone past the rich tropical tan you were aiming for?
I honestly didn’t even realize it until the next morning when Thrasher Dan commented on how red I was and took my Coppertone baby photo, but I wasn’t abnormally concerned.

Okay, then what sent you to the hospital?
I just started feeling fuckin’ wild out of nowhere midday and normally I would blame this on a common hangover, but once I started not being able to see and getting dizzy is when everything got really bad. I started convulsing and asked Grant and Collin to yell “E.R.!” to the front of the bus. The hospital was surprisingly nice, especially since I had Diego and Pedro roll me through in the wheelchair and translate for me. I could imagine it would have been a much less pleasant experience without them. They pretty much just gave me meds, let me know I had been poisoned by the sun and I.V.’d me up for the dehydration. In the end I invited the doctor to the Volcom party we had later that night. I’m not sure if he went, though. I was bedridden for the next 36 hours. Besides a most righteous sunburn, it made me have crazy flu-like symptoms and really bad anxiety. It definitely fried my skillet a tad; still dealing with that part now. I didn’t even know this could happen from a sunburn! All these people were reaching out to me telling me their gnarly experiences of being in the hospitals for days. Who fuckin’ knew?

Were any of your beautiful tattoos affected?
One of my least favorites looks like it fully got road rash from bombing a hill or something. It scarred up and shit and turned into leather.

What lessons did you learn from this experience, if any?
Stay lathered, hop in the shade and always build a palm-frond-warrior Chiquita-banana-lady hat when possible.

What advice would you give to a fellow shirtless rock ‘n’ roller planning to party in South America?
I would say rock on responsibly. Shotgun waters in the shade every other Priest track.

Another day another parasite. I get out early and I find the lurk. São Paulo, Brazil and Lima, Peru both felt like the cities who they were. From the streets of the TL to the coasts of the most beautiful beaches in the world, these eyes have seen it all. I’m preachy, but I got a story for all who wanna listen on the road to nowhere. I’ve been there. I get on the airplane, go on long road trips thinking about how things have just changed in so many different ways, from subtle accents to table manners. The folly of man that has been brought upon by so-called progress. Progress that most people see as genuine is in the palm of their hand—tell a joke, swap a recipe, look for a line on new tickets to go someplace. A microcosm of my world can be found on the airplane. People fighting over the last chicken or fish on a complimentary meal. Guess what? You paid $850 for the ticket. It can go either way. Stick with the fish. I you really want to get sick, stick with the chicken, because it’s genetically engineered process cage poultry. Sometimes people understand. Sometimes they don’t. The big-ticket line is first come first served. Certain people seem to think that that’s the best option—like the best parking space is the closest. I tend to park further away so I can have moments to clarify before I get to the final show.

Biker shit? Yep. Ol’ Spider tailslides a whopper. Shit was rugged

This bear-trap back lip was at the end of a very gnar day. Good job, Jhancarlos

They say that if you know you ain’t telling and if you don’t know you ain’t talking, so it seems to work. We got a new branch of Hell Ride industries. We come down there and we fix it; we skate it. We plant the seed for the next generation to come through and make it right. I had to build this bomb. I was a little kid playing baseball. I got into skating. Shows over. I took it over the way I wanted to do it. You had better wheels? They were mine. You can’t skate the ramp? Burn it down. We were always just the bad kids. It’s permeated everywhere in my life. I hang out with my friends because they know how to skate. We showed them the path. You’re picking up where we left off. Yeah, it’s like that.

Bikers make DIY shit and a skater named Spider nailed it. Ollie transfer. Told you it was like that