Charles The Champ's Spanish Victory

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words by James Morley

or years, Barcelona has had a reputation amongst skaters for being one of the greatest places in the world for a skater to experience culture, beautiful women and amazing spots. The opportunity to go on a skate trip to Barcy with some good friends seemed perfect. The whole trip would take place over one month, with Saint Hubert, QC’s Charles Deschamps, Repentigny, QC’s Will Cristofaro, and Whitby, ON’s Bobby De Keyzer taking over the skateboarding side of things, along with Sam Fidlin and I splitting the photo work, and Jordan Moss filming.

Due to some unforeseen circumstances, Will had to head home halfway through the trip, and Bobby and I arrived for the second half. While everyone’s skating on the trip was mind-blowing, it was Charles’ moves that stood out the most. With the goal of finishing his Slub Bucks video part in mind, he was on a mission. During our Spanish Inquisition, there is no doubt in my mind that Charles laid the kind of beating on Barcelona’s skate spots that will convert any nonbelievers, and he had a great time doing it.

Aside from the skating, the trip was nothing short of surprising. With friends’ prior experiences in mind, and coverage from the popular destination, Charles thought that we were in for a normal trip with good times along the way. Turns out… he was wrong.

Throughout the following tale, Charles reflects on his experiences with crazy drivers, fights, drinking, pressure washers and more during his destructive path in a skateboarding mecca.

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Alberto and Ana

One night, our crew decided to grab a few beers and head down to the beach to relax after a long day of skating. Everything seemed normal before it started getting weird when a couple of middle-aged locals approached us and began shaking our hands and speaking enthusiastically in Spanish. We soon found out that their names were Alberto and Ana, and they seemed extremely happy to see us for whatever reason.

away from us. After the encounter, Charles remarked: “They were fucking crazy! They were talking shit about us in Spanish, and we were laughing with them, not understanding what they were saying!” After the couple left, a local let us know that Alberto had been calling us “skater fags” and saying that Bobby was “the smallest one, but the biggest douchebag of them all.”

Strange… indeed.

After a brief conversation, which consisted of us speaking to them in a hybrid of broken English and Spanish, Ana got upset with Alberto. She stole a can of Estrella Damm from a street vendor, poured it all over him, and pulled him

We figured that their opinion of us was the same as most of the city’s citizens, as Charles explained when I first arrived: “We’d skate spots, and the locals were over all the noise; they’d throw stuff at us from their windows. I got attacked with lemons one time.”

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Red Lights

One thing you might often forget while skating around the streets of Barcelona is that for many who live there, the roads are the main method of transportation. Any time of day, they’re filled with taxis, cars and motorcycles going about their daily business. This wouldn’t sound like such a big deal to anyone from a major city, but the difference is in the drivers’ attitudes. It seems that in Barcelona they just don’t care about pedestrians.

No matter what the situation, crossing a street is like playing a real life game of Frogger. It comes down to waiting for the right opportunities and making progress when you can, because any rushed steps could put you in front of an unforgiving (and most likely accelerating) vehicle.

“It’s not that bad, but sometimes it can be really fucked-up,” Charles mentioned while recollecting one night’s series of strange vehicular happenings. It all started when Bobby got caught on something and shot his board into the street. Luckily, it was during a red light, and a couple of cars stopped before the end of the block so that his board would be safe and retrievable. However, a speeding taxi drove in like a bat out of hell, with no apparent regard for the fact that we were about to pick up the board, and just drove straight over it.

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Pressure Washed

Our apartment was located near Las Ramblas, which is a main market area that’s usually packed with tourists. The city workers around here are often pressure washing the streets, trying to keep them clean. One day, Charles and Jordan were out getting food, and noticed an old man sitting on a bench near the area where some street cleaners were working. They slowly made their way towards the man, and eventually, he became an obstacle between them and a job well done.

“One of the workers asked him to move so he could wash the bench,” Charles explained back at the apartment. “The old man didn’t want to move. They argued for a little bit, and when the tried to continue his job, the old man pushed him from behind. The worker was pissed and soaked the old man from head-to-toe by the pressure washer, which blasted off his hat and toupee. It was fucking awesome.”

The Stalker

A few times throughout the trip, the fame gained by Charles, Bobby, and Jordan’s trip to The Berrics as “Minor Media” in 2010 made our crew recognizable to other skaters. In one case, we gained a stalker, who we referred to as “Primo” throughout the trip. After recognizing us at a spot, he tagged along for a few days. As was the case with the rest of our crew, Charles’ opinion of Primo was less than good.

“He was alright for the first day, but he started to fan-out on Minor Media and shit. He was from LA, and was visiting his brother for a week or so.

Primo was so stoked and wanted to skate with us all the time. He even wanted to chill with us at our place, and managed to stay there one night.”

Our issues with Primo came to peak when one day after we decided to not answer his calls from the street. He tried to get our attention by throwing rocks at our window, and nobody wanted to let him in. We hoped that he would just go away, but he climbed up to our balcony and knocked on the door. The locals must have thought he was stealing things from apartments because when we left to go skate, a man on a moped tried to run Primo down, and attempted to punch him in the face. Our crew scrambled and got away from the situation, but it was clear that we needed to cut Primo loose.

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Street Dwellers

At night, the streets of Barcelona are filled with strange characters: homeless people, human statues, and performers of all types. The street folk, with the vastest numbers, are the drug and alcohol dealers.

“They got annoying sometimes, but it was so funny to mess around with them,” Charles remembers. “We’d always stare at them, so they would think that we wanted stuff. They were always really driven to sell their drugs and shit, and would even ask little Bobby if he wanted to buy weed, hash, or cocaine.”

On one of the last nights, Charles drank some of Barcelona’s finest, strongest Absinthe before leaving the apartment to go walk around and find stuff to do.

At one point, a dealer offered Charles a beer. Seeing as he was already under the influence, he thought it would be a good idea to trade his iPhone for a single can. The dealer was all for it, but we eventually convinced him to sell it for only one Euro (about $1.50 CAD).

Right after opening his newly acquired beer, Charles saw some clowns on stilts in the distance. Without thinking about the consequences, he ran up, and offered them his beer if they would fight him on the spot. Luckily, they could tell he wasn’t in his right mind, and flat-out refused.

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The great thing about our apartment’s location was that the beach was only a short skate away. One day, we decided to spend a day there. While we were minding our own business, we saw two guys fighting. One of them ended up on the ground, and he ended up on the receiving end of a mean bionic elbow drop. The victorious fighter walked away, but the victim of the vicious blow was left unconscious on the ground. At first we thought he was dead, but after a while some cops came and checked on him. When asked to recollect the situation, a shocked Charles said: “It seemed so normal to the police. They didn’t care. A soon as they knew he was OK, they left him knocked-out in the sand.”

In the end, Charles’ opinion of Barcelona changed from what it was before the trip, summing it up in simple terms: “With all the crazy shit that happened to us, I can easily say, without a doubt, it’s the most fucked-up place I have ever visited.”

Visit concreteskateboarding.com to watch Charles Deschamps’ part from Slub Bucks.

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