A South American adventure

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 , 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 weaseled his way back to customs and freed him using some sort of Jedi mind trick.

"These are my cameras!" 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. , Van, Johnny, Danilo, Joe K, and team manager Ohio Dave hopped into a small rental SUV with our new friend Alberto, while Ethan, Raymond 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.

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.

In the sketchiest encounter, we ignored the pleas of a teenage security guard on a bike, only to be confronted by the bona fide SWAT team he called in as back up. As we hustled to our cars, the local skaters were left to contend with 20 or so men in full riot gear, complete with automatic weapons and snarling muzzled rotweilers.

The cops rolled up in four pick-up trucks armored with diamond-plated doors and chain-link over the windows that looked straight, out of Mad Max. In a more pleasant incident, a crew of 10 security guards came to kick us out of a spot only to be won over by free !stickers, requests for group photos and turns trying out outboards. They even took us over to a double set where a neighbor had previously kicked us out.

"These guys are making a movie!" They told her as she scowled. "Just go back inside!"

IT WAS HARD TO AVOID the watchful gaze of security, which was a pain in the ass when trying to find a place to pee. There is no such thing as a public restroom in Latin America and we'd be out on the streets all day. Anytime I'd go behind a dumpster or bush to take a leak, I'd inevitably look up and lock eyes with a man holding a gun. Talk about stage fright. Skating in Lima was difficult because almost everywhere we went that had nice enough ground to skate was also nice enough to have full-time security. Still, there was plenty to keep us busy.

We stayed in the Doubletree hotel in the high-brow Miraflores district where we soon became addicted to the old-fashioned style of customer service that occurs when the people helping you are desperately poor, Forget the sass mouth and half-assery of the American service sect; in South America the customer is still always right. Which is why the restaurant at the Doubletree would open up at three in the morning to make us sandwiches (while jamming Phil Collins through the dining room speakers), and the bartender was down to stay as long as we were--and with a smile, too! No, honestly it was kind of creepy to have grown men waiting on you hand and foot for a measly tip, and I think we mostly bummed out the restaurant staff. With short days (considering we were sleeping until 2:00pm) and long nights, much of our trip was dedicated to consuming ridiculously titanic meals. Every day ended with a trip to a fine restaurant and I felt like I was getting a food hangover after a few straight days of it. No meal was under three courses, and Johnny and Ethan would often top off their four-pound steaks and loaves of bread with a 3:00am order of chocolate cake or peach melba from the Doubletree room service.

On numerous evenings, I drank Pisco Sours, the Peruvian national booze that turned me into a veritable Chatty. It was embarrassing. I'd be drinking my Pisco Sour, enjoying a pleasant meal, and the next thing you know I'd talked about complete bullshit for five hours straight. The government should seriously look into using Pisco Sours to interrogate prisoners and spies. The shit's talking juice!

Alberto has a straight job and had to work weekdays, so Jorge and his brother drove us around in the two rental SUVs. Much has been written about the sketchy driving conditions of the developing world, but after trucking around with Jorge's brother (whose name I shamefully never actually caught), I realized that the wild driving style is less the result of poor roads and narrow intersections, and more of a cultural thing.

"You know, you don't have to drive this terribly," I told Jorge's brother as he lurched us through the city in the Peruvian jam-on-the-gas-slam-on-the-brake-honk-honk-honk style.

"Que?" He asked.

"Oh never mind," I responded, bracing my hands against the dash. There were a few points where the crew was on the verge of revolt, so horrible was his driving--but other times we would all just laugh, kind of like when you laugh on a rollercoaster.

"Oh shit! We're gonna fucking die!" Ethan giggled from the back seat.

ONE NIGHT we were invited to a party at a rich kid's house in suburban Lima. After stopping and buying boxes of wine at a gas station, we arrived to armed cops directing us into a parking space. From there, a teenager who spoke almost accent-less English greeted us.

"Hey, dudes. Welcome to my party!"

When I was a kid in junior high I had a very skewed idea of what high school was going to be like, mostly because I'd gotten the bulk of my information from the teen boner comedies I'd seen on Cinemax. In addition to the exploding brassieres and toilet bowl swirlies, I knew another important part of my high school experience would be attending wild parties in gigantic suburban homes with naked chicks in the pool, pizza on the turntable, and dudes crushing beer cans on their heads,

While reality was a harsh wake-up call (with the gigantic homes replaced by some losery 23-year-old dude's apartment and the naked chicks with a fully-clothed, frigid and heavy-set new wave girl), I was given something very rare in this life on my trip to Lima--a shot at redemption. For after walking through the gates of the compound (and that's sure as shit what it was), I realized I'd finally arrived at that wild party that had alluded me so many years ago. Though I never entered the large modern, style home, the yard was vast and featured an empty Olympic-sized pool (unskateable) flanked by a large bar area on the left and a basketball court turned into a dance floor on the right. The yard was crawling with hardy partiers and I grabbed the box of wine over my head and wandered over to the dance floor that was tricked out with streamers, disco balls and over-sized speakers belting out salsa tunes and Spanish pop hits. Alberto knew many of the gifts at the party and I was quickly whipped into awkward formation by a chesty lass with a gift for spin and a halfway decent command of English. I stomped around and laughed while she wiggled, pranced and sang along to the music like all the other teenagers.