In other words, you killed the spot. No one else can lay claim to it, lest they live in your looming shadow. And if you and your friends can do that to enough spots in this town—well, you will damn well kill Vegas.
Some kids think they already have, and they possess the footage to prove it. They're an informal crew of young skaters, picked in large part from the fertile skating grounds at Valley High School and mentored by an aerodynamics professor at UNLV, and they spent six months providing the scenes for a movie that depicts the exuberance of usurping ownership over a city, spot by spot. It comes wrapped with an appropriate title: Kill Vegas.
KILL VEGAS (4 stars) Director: Jason Rossi.
Stars: Travis Myers, George Campoverde, Chris Hammond—better known as Hammy— Anthony Zubaite, among several other local skateboarders.
Rated: PG-13. Now available at Las Vegas skate shops, amazon.com or duncemedia.com.
Entertaining. From start to finish.
The film is a full-throttle surge in which some of Las Vegas' stellar skateboarders demonstrate their brazen and aerobatic skills at various sites in Las Vegas, most of which are recognizable to any resident and deemed O.G. by local skaters. It's laid out over a rock and rap soundtrack featuring apt songs such as Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," and its succession of scenes are awesome, in the most literal sense of the word. And not just for the deft tricks, which alone are worth the cost of the movie ($19), but also for the mad stunts these kids pull off, such as flying off rails and into lively streets, skating some of Las Vegas' raddest spots in nothing but underwear, and lighting a skateboard on fire, only to perform tricks on the flaming thing. The stuff is exhilarating.
Aude Desir, founder of Inverse Skating, a company which promotes the Las Vegas skate scene, teamed up with UNLV professor Jason Rossi to create the film. Rossi had purchased a $5,000 Sony camera to document Las Vegas skaters and their spectacular tricks, and in six months he had accumulated so much extraordinary footage that he and Desir decided to turn it into a full-length skate video.
It worked. Rossi and Desir, both of whom grew up skating and maintain the youthful zeal synonymous with skateboarders, spent more than $7,000 to create a film unlike any other in Las Vegas, not merely because the talent it showcases is unsurpassed in this city, but also because it highlights the anguishes and triumphs inherent in the life of skating.
With perceptive ingenuity, Rossi captures the sheer physical pain required in the trial-and-error process of mastering a new trick; and in specific scenes throughout, Rossi captures the jubilance of accomplishing those tricks—a joy just as organic and intense as any other.
After watching Kill Vegas, I said to myself: I need to meet these kids. Not just to shake their hands and tell them I was overly impressed with their moves, but, of greater importance, to see them in action. And so UNLV professor Jason Rossi set up a session on Wednesday night, November 22, to kick off the extended holiday weekend, and we hit the streets. Skaters come out on holidays, for that is when the public, in general, stays in; and Rossi's crew most often hold their cyclonic sessions when Rossi doesn't have to teach the next day, for not only does his $5,000 Sony camera best capture their personalities in motion, but Rossi oftentimes has to intermediate between authorities and his skaters.
And that's because skating, though more mainstream than ever in this country—on account of the X-Games, says Josh Lavietes; as well as the Internet, adds Rossi—is still looked down upon by shop owners, by the eyes behind neighborhood watch programs, and, above all, by the police. It's a major reason skaters often come out at night.
"There's a certain solitude," says Rossi. "At night, the kids can be by themselves."
(Plus, on film, the skaters just look more badass at nighttime, under the portable lights Rossi brings for them.)
Tonight, George Campoverdes was there, with his straight long Indian hair and flat-billed baseball cap, his hole-torn jeans and Ice Cream flat-sole shoes. Anthony Zubaite, part Italian and part Hispanic, and wearing fit-form black jeans halfway off his ass and his inseparable flat-soled Vans, was there, and like the rest of the crew (and most skaters around the world), he is thin. Hammy was there, too, his afro larger and more splendid in real life than in the video. Travis Myer, a gangly black kid who speaks with a surfer's drawl and who looks much younger than his 16 years and who happens to be the best young skater in Las Vegas, was there as well. Although they all carry with them an inviolable sense of cool, and though they all once went to Valley High School together, no two seem to be alike. And their coevals in the skating world are just as diverse. One look at any skating park in town and you can see the skating subculture refracts a spectral demographic. Rich kids, poor kids; hip-hop kids, punk kids; male kids, female kids; young kids, old kids (like Rossi, 33 now)—they all skate, and they all can do it well.
"You don't have to be genetically gifted to skate," says Rossi. "With skating, nerdy, skinny kids have a chance to be cool."
It's true. You don't need much to start. Just the natural stuff: a little creativity, some balance, and whole lot of resilience. And then you have to learn insanity. For the skater doesn't need to be blessed with a daredevil's bravery, Rossi says, but rather, he needs to accrue a tolerance for pain (which is also to say, he needs to diminish the fear of it).
George ignited the evening with an extemporaneous stunt: He hopped up on a wall just wide enough for his skateboard and a little pushing room, at least seven feet above the ground, and started building speed like a small plane down an aircraft carrier; and then he took off, neither flying nor falling through the air, but soaring against it—against the wind, against gravity, and against all of the laws which bound him to a boring stasis, for as long as he possibly could. Then he landed without event, skated on, and gathered his bearings for the next act of rebellion.
University officials tried to stop skaters from utilizing their campus as an obstacle course several years ago, carving niches in its low walls and benches across campus that would stop the kids from grinding. It worked in that sense, but it couldn't stop the Georges and Hammys and Anthonys from grinding down the rails to its many irresistible staircases, which is exactly what the boys did on this November night.
I watched them as they did five-o grinds, tre flips to front board slides, kick-flip krooked grinds on 9-foot handrails—oftentimes failing in theatrical fashion, their boards slipping from underneath them, their hands and knees scraping along the cement, their bodies slamming against the ground, rolling along the red and brown fallen leaves until their momentum waned.
"All the kids these days are looking for sponsorships," Lavietes had told me. "They all want to turn pro, move to California and become stars."
That's an understatement. George was once taken off to the emergency room in an ambulance after a hard fall; Anthony's segment on Kill Vegas elicits one long sustained "ooooooowwwwww," and on this night, Hammy would demonstrate the aching byproduct of becoming a good skater: trying to Smith grind, his foot hit the handrail and he went free-falling. His body hit the ground with a harrowing THUMP. There was silence. Then, from his motionless body, two words protruded: "I'm dead." When he rose to his feet 10 minutes later, leaving mouth-blood behind on the concrete, it became apparent that he had busted his hip and ass bone, he had cut up his elbow and shins, and he had suffered enough damage to call it quits for the night. And then he confirmed it with two words that also seemed to come from death: "I'm done."
I asked Anthony if his friend was alright, and with a worryless grin, he said: "He's fine; he'll be skating again later on tonight." It was true: He would.
"We made this video," Rossi says, "so the world can see just how good these Vegas kids are. Also, I want them to realize that, if they want, they can make a living off of skating. Perhaps not a wealthy one, but definitely a fulfilling one."
Not if the cops have anything to do with it. A UNLV police officer, patrolling on bike, told the kids to stop. Used to the resistance, Rossi jumped down from the tree from which he was filming his skaters. "Are we okay?" he asked the officer, with all due politeness and with an irreproachable feign at naivety. I later asked the officer why skateboarding was a problem, and he told me that it's not everyday skating he's concerned about, but rather, the high-flying aerodynamic stunts—
"Because we're liable if someone gets hurt."
Despite Rossi's good mediation, George and Hammy started to get wise with the officer, in the smart-ass way kids do with their fathers. For, in the end, that's exactly what they are: just kids. Beyond the movie, the local sponsorships they've earned thus far, the moderate glory they've garnered from the Southern Nevada's skating world, they are just kids looking for a little attention and a lot of fun, who are still motivated by promises of Taco Bell, and whose minds are preoccupied first and foremost by girls. Girls, girls, girls.
"You know," Hammy told me, his voice booming large from his horse jockey's body, still injured from his fall, "I only skate when there isn't a party to get to."
Skating is bigger now than it was in the '80s, when it caught its first winds of popularity, everyone tells me. And Rossi's kids have helped make Las Vegas one of the premier cities for skateboarding in the United States.
Which isn't to say Las Vegas didn't have a lineage of great skaters or a history in skating before them. The city established the Desert Surf park in the Spring Valley community in 1976, and even when it closed down a decade later, kids were still skating in empty backyard swimming pools and at vacant high schools. The arid desert seasons permitted street skating throughout the year, and professionals such as Kenny Anderson, Rag Doll and Vinny Vegas earned their badges of courage on Las Vegas city streets.
The Clark County Parks and Recreation Department tells me that, because of demand, there are now more than 20 skating parks in the Las Vegas Valley. Twenty-six to be exact, says Lavietes, and all within a 20-mile radius of the Strip, which presents an interconnectedness between parks and crews unavailable in metropolitan areas with much larger geographic landscapes. They include some that are comparable to the very best in the nation, like the skating park in Anthem, just off of Eastern Avenue. That's where Rossi and his skaters went after UNLV police asked them to leave the university. There, more than a hundred kids scurried about on their skateboards. Travis, George, Hammy, and Anthony were met with mass familiarity and even some idolization, and they skated with the joyful countenances of wild animals, their inviolable sense of cool intact, as midnight passed by our insomniac town.
Skating has become so big in Las Vegas that Clark County has hired a skating program director, Hektor Esparza—who at 31 years old has been skating, in Las Vegas, for two-thirds of his life—and it has given him five employees to oversee the development of young skaters in the county. Esparza facilitates the Winchester Skating Park, open until 10 p.m. every day of the week, and on the first Saturday of every other month he hosts a skate and art show at Winchester that attracts more than 300 attendees and 70 participants.
The county recognized just how popular skateboarding had become, and instead of working against the kids, they opted to work with the kids, Esparza says.
Esparza teaches a school of skateboarding he founded two years ago, called East-West Skateboarding, and it is modeled after the martial arts paradigm, in which Esparza is also well-versed.
He says: "Just like martial arts, there are two components to skateboarding: the sport of it, and the art of it."
He operates six classes at four locations—Desert Breeze and Winchester skating parks, and Sunrise and Hollywood recreation centers—and they are heavily attended. Students work their way up three levels of merit, and the curriculum includes not just physical education but historical and cultural education as well.
"We try to teach them to be complete skaters," Esparza says, scrunching the fedora hat on top of his head with irrepressible enthusiasm. "Teach them how to cultivate energy and focus, to treat the board as a living extension of the skater—you know, to be a real gnarly dude."
Moreover, he says:
"You know, it's always been that when kids in Las Vegas got good, they went to San Diego, where all the photographers and sponsors are. Now, they're staying here. And what's more than that is, kids are going to start coming to Las Vegas to skate now.
"Between the parks and the street skating, we're becoming as good as anyone."