Last Thursday: Ninety minutes past midnight and 14-year-old Efrain Garcia was still on the Strip, having just skateboarded past the Luxor, bike cops trailing, sweat beading his forehead and the butt-ends of his jet-black hair seeping, snake-like, from under a black skull cap: “I know it’s past my curfew, but I came out here to skate with friends and have fun.”
Never in Manny Heim’s 18 years had he seen so many people like him in one place at one time—nearly 600 skateboarders of all shapes, sizes, colors and ages (a spitting image of Garth Algar from Wayne’s World, Heim’s got a perfect skater’s body: all bones, no muscle). Boulder City, where he lives, has a sparse skateboarding culture, much less in the way of venues and jack-shit in terms of solidarity. “Tonight,” he said, flush from skating the Strip, “feels good.”
Just so happened that Vickie Penska and her fiancé Elvis Aguirre were staying at the T.I.—“being tourists in our own town.” Made it easier to enjoy Go Skateboarding Day with her son Pete, a 14-year-old with nine years of grinding experience. Her nephew, 14-year-old Dallas Creswell, told his mom (Penska’s sister), who told Penska about skateboarders traversing Strip. Just so happened she had a camcorder and camera and was chronicling everything at the risk of pissing off her other son: “He didn’t know about this event.”
Congress declared June 21 Go Skateboarding Day. Citizens of the local skateboarding republic exercised their self-granted right to grind the sidewalks from the Frontier to the Mandalay Bay, three miles to glory. Starting point was the Frontier, where the energetic atmosphere was suffused with kinship. Atop a white tour bus, a handful of skateboarders exhorted their comrades who, in turn, pumped their skateboards in the air as if they were black fists—say it loud, I skate and I’m proud.
No sooner than the skateboarders took the sidewalks did cops swoop. Targeted were the youngest—curfew-violators—and those foolish enough to skate in the street and (what were they thinking?) detour through casinos. Some officers seemed overly zealous, jostling youngsters not even old enough to drive. In front of Caesars Palace, one mother pleaded with a cop to let her son and his friend go: “They’re good kids. I’m out here watching them. They didn’t do anything wrong.” It worked.
Still, it was something to see: deft maneuvering around pedestrians. Full-on sprints across the street to beat red lights. A relay of skaters, one behind the other, from Flamingo to Tropicana. A skateboarding Elvis (Go Skateboarding Day creator Don Brown) talking his way out of an arrest. And it was something to hear: the tha-thwuck, tha-thwuck of boards hitting the sidewalk cracks and the boom of landings off the curb and the occasional “aw, f--k” from a trick gone awry.
As organizers passed out water to the skateboarders at Mandalay Bay, Chris Turnell, assistant manager of the Industrial Ride Shop in the Galleria Mall, beamed like a kid who landed his first kick flip. Vegas has a do-it-yourself skating culture. “If there’s a crack, we fill it with dirt. We make it happen.”
White T-shirt drenched and sucking wind, Pharmacy skate shop owner Doug Jorgensen, 27, leaned on a car for support. He hadn’t skated like that in 12 years, but was glad he did. His and Turnell’s shops helped spread the word. “There was a real risk in doing this. We weren’t trying to cause trouble. We just wanted to have fun.”
Photographs by Richard Brian