Illenium Tour - chrisnieratko.com

Illenium Tour

[ photos by hutchison ]

I'll admit, at the age of 16, my life wasn't very interesting. I had just been kicked out of my first high school and was working toward dropping out of my second. I drank, partied, worked when necessary and assumed that my town was the world. To drive past its borders meant falling off the edge of the earth. At 16, I never cared how far it was from Atlanta to Oklahoma or what time it was in Denmark. It didn't matter to me. New York City was my backyard, and Philadelphia was my neighbor's house; what else was there to think about? At 16, nothing interested me but the moment in front of me. There were no plans for the future, no regrets of yesterday and nothing to look forward to. It was just me being 16, the way most kids live their life at 16.

Greg Lutzka is not like most 16-year-olds however. Greg Lutzka is 16 right now, at this very minute, and his world is one that makes little sense to me. It is a place where he has the universe in the palm of his hand and offers of money and whispers of greatness coming from every angle. There are people who are truly concerned for his well being and want to see him succeed. He barely needs to go to school and is on his way to Australia right now. It's as if the whole world is waiting for him to pull the sword from the stone and resurrect Camelot. Yet the kid can barely piss straight.

Here is a kid that is the model of balance and control on a skateboard, but he can barely walk without tripping. He doesnt "slam" when he doesn't make a backside noseblunt on a ten-stair, he just sits down, but he'll eat shit climbing up a set of stairs. This kid is like nothing I've ever seen before. And I hate to have my tongue so far up his ass like this, but he's mind-boggling. In a time when a video part's longest line is two tricks, it's hard to get a feel for how someone really skates. I'm sure there are other young kids like Lutzka out there right now, but I've yet to spend time with them; all I know is that not one of Greg's photos in this article took him more than three tries to make. His routine goes like this: first try, land it and jump off; second try, land it, then fall to his ass, then look at the rail, stairs, ledge or whatever and then turn to the photographer and say, "Okay, this time." And then he'll land it. He makes photography quite easy. If I were Andrew I wouldn't even have gotten my camera out until Lutzka told me he was going to do it. I'm convinced that Greg could probably do any trick he wanted first try, but he's just scared, scared that people would think him some kind of wizard or abomination in cahoots with the devil and try to lynch him or something. So he gives everyone his two flawed attempts to show them that he's human. I was with Greg for nearly two weeks on this trip, and he destroyed every spot. Nearly every spot. The only ones he'd leave alone were those that someone else wanted to shoot on. I'd go up to him and ask why he wasn't skating, and he'd tell me that it was Ruben's spot or Mike's spot or whoever's. And we'd sit and watch as the photos were being taken. Greg can only sit so long though. Two minutes, tops. Then he spazzes out and has to practice his fakie flips or frontside flips or whatever. I'd ask him about whatever trick someone else was trying and how many tries it would take him. He's modest, so he'd just say he couldn't do it or he didn't know. But he did know. So I'd prod. "First try? Second try?" But he would try to ignore me. But a smile would break his lips, a smile that would reveal his real thoughts: "I can do anything I want whenever I want, but shhhhh! Don't tell anyone." And he really can. Beau the filmer would yell out a trick for Lutzka to do, and Lutzka would do it. When Mike or Ruben were getting frustrated with a trick they couldn't land, he'd walk up and throw down a switch 180 nosegrind or a frontside flip to help get them motivated. And it would work too. They'd stick their trick soon after. But beyond his skating, my favorite thing about Greg is that he's a danger to the world around him. This kid, who is grace personified on four wheels, has zero equilibrium without his board. He falls walking down the street, off curbs, over his feet. He's the clumsiest kid I've met and, before I met him, probably the most innocent. I made it a point to change all that on this trip.

Before I get too far into it, I should mention that there were other people on this Illenium tour other than Greg Lutzka and myself. There was "Mr. Florida," Mike Peterson (a/k/a Peterdong, a/k/a Peterdick), Ruben Garcia (the worst thing to come out of Spain since Columbus), E.G. (the team guy whom Ruben called "Renegade" because he looked so much like Lorenzo Lamas in Renegade, so I began to call him Renegade), Beau "short for beautiful" Crum (the filmer), Andrew Hutchison (the photo guy and my punching bag) and Zack from Von Zipper who drove us around in a limousine. Al Partinan was supposed to go as well, but Dave Swift, the dick, broke Al's leg the day before his flight. Seems Al was shooting a blunt to fakie in the deep end of a gnarly pool, and Swift didn't want him to stick it, so he popped off a flash right in Al's eyes and made him fall down, go boom. Which sucked 'cause both Al and his hair bring a lot to this team: leadership, positivity, bounce and body. I wanted to make "Never Forget Al" shirts, but I forgot. So instead of seeing Al's Vidal Sa-sexy hair when I landed in Jacksonville, I saw Beau's shitty hair helmet. You don't know how big a letdown that can be. Imagine if they cancelled Christmas. I was all, Two more hours till I meet up with Al's hair," and then there's Beau standing there, like, "What?" It sucked.

Immediately after landing in Jacksonville we drove four or five hours to Tampa, to the Quinta Hotel, where we would post up for a week with the cockroaches that lived there while watching the clones at the contest hating on Lutzka for getting fourth. Two cops were killed the night we got to town, and my room had a microwave, which meant it had more cockroaches than most rooms. The two cops had stopped five Hispanic males and had both been shot and killed in a shootout with the Hispanics. I remember seeing a sign in the background on the TV that looked exactly like that of our hotel and began to question my safety. So I changed the channel. Then changed it again and again. Nothing on that night except the news and True Crime Stories. On True Crime Stories a man had been arrested for killing his girlfriend's four-year-old son. The police, for some reason, put the cuffs on in front of his body, as opposed to behind him, and loaded him into the back of the squad car, which had no divider between the front and the backseats. Little did they know that the man had a master key to all handcuffs, and, after freeing himself, he grabbed one of the officer's guns and shot them both dead. Later that day the man killed a highway patrolman and eventually took his own life in a 7-Eleven convenience store. The very same 7-Eleven convenience store in front of The Quinta we were staying in. Turned out, the man was a fugitive from Oklahoma who was hiding in our part of Tampa. And this all happened in front of my hotel. That was the last thought I had before passing out.

I woke up to Lutzka asking if he could take a shit in my room.
"Use your own room," I told him.
"Can't," he said, "it's not working."
"Fine, just don't fuck it up," I warned.
Oh. well, he fucked it up, fucked it up real good.
I Found out later, he was the one who broke his own toilet. Actually, Lutzka would go on to break six more toilets before the trip was over. Turns out, little Greg had never been taught how to wipe his own ass. He uses "the glove" technique used by most girls. Once he even clogged one of our toilets with a bath towel because there was no more toilet paper left and he thought the whole towel would just flush itself away. Restrooms included, Lutzka broke over a dozen toilets in less then ten days, a new world's record, I'm sure. It got to the point where he was no longer allowed to use hotel bathrooms We forced him to go to fast-food joints or shit outside like a dog if he had to go, and any man who permitted Greg to use their potty was also banned from using our hotel bathrooms. After the sixth or seventh day of this I decided to sit Greg down and have a little man-to-man talk.
'What the hell is wrong with your ass?" I asked.
He didn't know.
"It seems like you're using too much toilet paper. Do you use the glove?"
He was unfamiliar with the term. I explained to him it was the girly way of wrapping your whole hand in toilet paper, several times over, to wipe your ass.
"Yeah," he answered. "Why?"
"Well, Greg," I said, like a father to his boy, "that's faggot shit. Chicks and fags do that. Are you a chick?"
"No."
"Well, are you a fag?" I asked.
"No."
"Well, then, son, you're gonna have to cut that shit out."
"What am I supposed to do?" he wondered with true curiosity.
"It's easy. Just take a few pieces, fold them up and wipe your ass."
"But doesn't shit get all over your hand?" he asked.
"No, shit does not get all over your hand," I said. "Do you wipe your ass with the top of your hand? Do you shove your whole hand up your ass?"
He shook his head no to both questions.
Then I put my arm around him and said, "Greg, we're gonna teach you to wipe your ass even if it means shoving your nose in your own shit every time you fuck up. Okay? How's that sound?" He sat silent and alone, because I had already left the room to let it all sink in. Within a day. the toilet breaking had stopped, and everyone loved Lutzka again. I feel proud and misty-eyed knowing that one day that boy is going to go on to do great things, perhaps Skater of the Year, maybe Skater of the Millennium, and I'll be able to say, "I remember when I taught that boy how to wipe his ass."
Reeling with excitement over Greg's progress and knowing that I'm gonna make a great dad one day, I disappeared for a few days to drink margaritas on the sands of Clearwater Beach. During the time of my disappearance Ruben Garcia went to jail for dragging an orange hazard cone around Ybor. Don't ask me. He was drunk and grabbed a cone. Is that so strange? I guess to the cops it was. Two of them tackled Ruben and tuned him up pretty good. One cop was so kind he even told him, "You've

been a very bad boy, but I'm a badder boy." When I heard that, all I could think about was that cop in that movie Magnolia that wanted nothing more than to be on that show Cops. I wonder how many times that Tampa officer had practiced that line. In jail Ruben was administered some kind of strange "flu shot" that caused him to be sick for days. In hindsight I feel realy bad that I hung up on him when he called to be bailed out of jail. I thought he was kidding. How was I supposed to know? Ruben Garcia is a piece of work, and I love him because, like me, he hates everything and loves to talk shit. We'd both make each other laugh by making fun of Beau's hair, and, as Ruben would say, "He's as dumb as a cow." Ruben talks with a crazy Spanish accent that causes him to say J's like Y's. For example: Yiger Woods. Yacksinville, Yail, as in, "Why did you hung up on me when I called from yail?" He even got me into it. "Pass the yelly," and, "Look at my yohnson."

We left Tampa without anyone noticing. We went to Orlando, but Wally World was closed, so we headed to New Orleans. I think. I have special medicine that my doctor prescribes to help me with long road jaunts and ultimately causes me to forget everything and then get covered with stickers by Lutzka. I do know that leaving Tampa was when my puke / cough kicked in. I think it was a residual thing from when I was sick over Christmas, but basically it was a hacking cough that would force me to puke up the contents of my stomach. If there was nothing in my stomach, I'd puke up bile until the blood came. The only thing I could hold down was beer, so that's all I ate the whole trip. Everyone got a big kick out of my puke. Except Ruben, whose leg I was forced to puke on. See. we stopped at a rest stop, and when I went to piss, Lutzka hopped into shotgun. I tried to explain to him that I really needed to sit shotgun, but he refused to give it up.
"Why do you need to be in shotgun?" he asked.
"Because I do, you little shit, now get in the back."
But he refused. And so I got in the back, knowing full well what was about to happen. We had just eaten Wendy's, and it was less than a mile down the road before I started puking all over the backseat. I tried to get to the van door, but puked all over Ruben's leg instead. That was the last time I sat in the back. After that I mostly rode in the limousine. Oh, yeah, we had a limo to cruise around New Orleans, with compliments of Zack and Von Zipper. I sat in the back of the limo drinking alone the rest of the way to New Orleans. No one wanted to sit by the puker. I felt like the lonely movie star that isolates himself from the world to live in his glass tower of fame. If my friends could see me now.... Then I started thinking about when I used to live in Manhattan and how we'd always laugh at the kids who came into the city after the prom in their rented limos and how they'd scream and holler while poking their torsos out the moon roof. I still remember their laughs. They were on top of the world, for that one night the city was theirs. And then I'd yell to them, "First time in a limousine, huh?" And they'd get real self-conscious, as all high-school kids tend to do. Then I'd laugh, long and hard, as they slowly slid back into the limo and shut the glass-ceiling pane. I lived for those moments. I even secretly wished every night was prom night.

As soon as we got to New Orleans I felt like it was prom night, and Lutzka was the prom queen. He couldn't keep his head in the car, yelling and screaming nonsense to anyone who would listen. I kept trying to shut the moon roof with him in hopes of shutting him up. But there was no shutting him up. He was going through sensory overload with bare breasts, free booze and loose women everywhere. I believe that he was told by more than six strippers to "calm down, they're only tits." Mind you, he's 16, with an I.D. that makes him 23, and he's tripping out like a six-year-old on dust. When he took a shot and calmed down, he was actually rather entertaining. I especially liked how before going to a doorman to show his I.D., he'd stop, right in front of the guy, give his l.D. a good hard look to make sure he knew all the vital information before handing the l.D. over. Sometimes he'd volunteer his street address or date of birth to the bouncer just to prove he knew. New Orleans is home of the Hustler strip club, where we spent most of our time. And, thanks to my connections with said magazine, we were well taken care of at the club, and that's all I'll say about that.

After New Orleans we decided to go to Atlanta instead of Baton Rouge, which was fine by me, since my friends Stormy and ugly "Goddamn Am" Jeremiah Babb lived there. The only thing I remember about Atlanta was that I was stuck in a bar line, talking to a waitress, trying to get her to get me a drink, but she kept saying, "I'm off duty." And I kept saying, "With a job as important as waitressing, can you ever really be off duty? I mean, really?"

After Atlanta we drove back down to Jacksonville to chill in Mike Peterson's hood. Peterson owns Jacksonville. He is their god. More people know Mike than any player on the Jacksonville Jaguars. And we had such good times having him show us around that I'd like to tell you all about it, but I'd rather leave you with a conversation I had with Greg Lutzka's dad on the way to the airport. The setup is this: Greg was talking to his dad on the phone, and his dad expressed dislike of our Gay Issue, and I said, "Greg, give me the phone, I'll talk to your dad."
And then I says, "Hello, Mr. Lutzka. Greg says you have a problem with the Gay Issue."
Before he could get a word in, I said, "Well, Mr. Lutzka, I have a serious problem with your boy. He has broken every single toilet in every single hotel room we've stayed in on this whole trip."
He was shocked. "No, he didn't," he said.
Have you ever taken the time to teach Greg how to wipe his ass, sir?" I asked.
"Well...no," he replied.
"I know you didn't," I said, "because I had to show him myself. Did you know, up until three days ago he wrapped his hand in a glove of toilet paper three inches thick for each wipe?"
He paused for a moment to think and then said, "No, I didn't know that."
"I think he takes after your wife," I told him.
"Could be."
Then I offered some advice. "Greg's been through a lot this week. It's a lot for a boy to try and understand at one time. I think when he gets home, it'd be best if you sat him down and went over the right way to wipe his ass."
He laughed and said, "Oh, I will. I will. Can I speak to Greg now?"
"Sure," I said as I haded Greg the phone back, smiling into his embarrassed 16-year-old eyes.
As we stood in the airport terminal and said our goodbyes I turned to Greg and asked, "Greg, your dad isn't a real big guy, is he?"
"No," he answered, "he's kind of small. Why?"

The Glove

I had a girlfriend once who used the glove, and it is the sole reason I got rid of her. Basically the glove is used by dumb people, usually broads and queens, who wrap their hand in toilet paper ten to twenty times over to create a pretend-sterile butt mitt instead of wiping their ass like a normal human being. The glove is a huge waste of money, since one roll of toilet paper only lasts two or three shits, sometimes less depending on how much of a kook the person is. Not to mention, the glove is a sure-fire way to clog, break or blow up a toilet, as Lutzka has proven. The only explanation a glove wearer can offer is, "I don't want any poo on my hand." Since learning of this phenomenon, I've taken to numbering the side of a roll of toilet paper one to 15 before putting it on the roll. I now make it a point to remember what number the roll is on when I last use it, and if a friend or girl uses my bathroom, I check to see how many numbers worth of toilet paper they've used. If I suspect them to use the glove, I banish them from my home and my life forever. It's all you can do.

The Deflowering of Greg Lutzka

For as young as Greg Lutzka is, he's rather worldly. He's already tried alcohol and burns through more apples than anyone I've ever met, but for all of this, he's still a child. And we did our best to change that. In New Orleans Greg experienced a lot of firsts:

He had his first margarita. He spit it out thinking the salt was dirt.
He went to his first strip club, where he completely lost his mind and had to be sedated.
He took his first photo with what he thought was a hot chick, but was actually a dude.
He got his first lap dance, only after learning that no one wanted to hug him.
He was choked for the first time by someone ten years older than him for being annoying.
He rode in a limousine.
He used a fake I.D.
He got caught using a fake I.D.
Most importantly, he wiped his ass properly for the first time in his life.

Comments

killi
03 Sep 2008, 15:17

US toilets... I've used them. The worst about those is all that water in it. The shit swims! Imagine!!

I guess yo yanks even stick a little flag in yor shit and salute when it rotates away...

jambi
03 Sep 2008, 16:29

hahahhahahhahah