Boys Will Be Wetboys

Get wet with Mike Reilly: Once we all moved into the same house, all the skate community was coming over every night, and it became like the Wetboys house. But before that, it was like writing Wetboys on my grip tape and shit like that. And people would be like, "What's up with that?" and I'd say, "It's just all of us, our group of friends or whatever." For us, it was deep for like two years before that. But then we had this video and this insane party house downtown, and it hit everybody. It was like, "We have a really sick house, no one can get in trouble, we have a place for everybody, and then, let's just do it." Everyone moved in.

In Arizona, where he moved two years ago to escape the winter, Micah screen-prints shirts and other clothing items under his own label, Bangarang! The term comes from the 1991 Disney movie Hook, which had a grown-up Peter Pan returning to Neverland. "Bangarang!" is what the Lost Boys would shout as a slang stand-in for "Awesome!" Micah was in elementary school when the film was released. He remembers loving the thought of all those boys living up in a huge tree, playing games, fighting pirates, riding around on Disney's approximation of a skateboard, sleeping where they fell. He liked that feeling, that energy.

Add in beers instead of pixie dust, and it wasn't that far from life at one of the Wethouses. Exploring alleyways, talking with hoboes, running from the cops, filming — and then coming home to a constant party.

"It was just freedom, you know?" remembers Gordie Cousino, a male-model-pretty skater known for technical flip tricks. "You'd go and just skate all day long. You'd go back, get a couple of tall cans and a fifth of Skol and get fucked up and watch the tricks that you did that day."

For Michael Burnett, editor-at-large for Thrasher magazine, regional skateboard crews creating their own identity is nothing new. In the 1970s there was the legendary Dogtown in L.A., which begat Frogtown in San Diego and Fogtown in San Francisco. In the '80s it was Team Steam on the East Coast, King Glug in Atlanta, Hesh Crew in San Diego. In the '90s, skaters in Vancouver created the Red Dragons. The Silly Pink Bunnies, originally out of San Fran, are now national. He thinks the Wetboys were heavily influenced by the Pissdrunx, "elegantly wasted rock-and-rollers" out of Los Angeles who are typified by pro skateboarder Jim Greco's drunk-addled antics. "As far as acting gay," Burnett says, "imagine that you're a nineteen-year-old in a post-Jackass world: What do you got to do? It's like what's punker than punk? How punk can you get? We can make out with a dude. So, yeah, what's sketchier than that?"

None of the rented houses lasted more than a year; bills and angry landlords inevitably forced the Wetboys to move on. The first house, a dilapidated Denver Square at Fourth Avenue and Inca Street, became the go-to place for skateboard scenesters after the release of the first Wetboy video, Til the Birds Chirp, in 2005. People were attracted by the group's good-times-for-all mindset and casual style, an urban-refugee look born more of necessity than fashion sense. Many of them lacked jobs, and they shared clothes, food and money. Some had sponsorships with skateboard companies that gave them free product, which could be sold on the street or at secondhand stores for quick cash. They slept in the back yard when the party people wouldn't shut up. They got bread from a nearby church food bank and ate huge pots of spaghetti. When making out evolved from an initiation rite into a nightly party custom, some Wetboys raised the stakes by playfully cutting unsuspecting friends. Razor blades grew into knives, knives into swords. Then a trip to the hospital ended the fun, so a truce was called. Another pastime involved masturbating on a pink teddy bear, a game one observer dubbed "Bearkakke." There were no leaders; decisions were generally made through consensus — if they were made at all. It was like an anarchist collective, but without all the hippie-dippie political shit.