When I was Kosmonaut.

ON OUR FIRST FULL DAY in Moscow someone died at the skate spot. It wasn't a skater, and it may have been a homeless person, but it was still the first time I can remember someone breathing their last breath so close to where people were crooked grinding.

"I think someone just died over there," somebody said, and one by one we walked over and checked him out--terrifically twisted at the bottom of a giant set of stairs, resting in the most disturbed position, face and shoulders down, legs and feet facing skyward. The cops came but no ambulances. There were no sirens. They gathered around and looked at him, pointing down to the ground and then up to the stairs. They stroked their mustaches.

We'd seen the same police an hour earlier. It had been dumping rain and the monument security guard, weary of chasing out the pack of 20- to 30-kids who were skating flatground in the long covered hallway, had called for back-up. The police grabbed the first kid they got to, bent his arm sharply behind his back and pressed him to a pillar, His cell phone popped out and bounced on the granite floor while everyone scattered like monkeys. We ran too, and watched as they hauled the skinny boy away. Now the same cops were back and standing over the dead guy. An hour later an ambulance finally showed up. The medics got out and looked at him. Then, without loading him up or even untwisting him, they packed up and left.

"Why doesn't somebody just take him?" we wondered out loud. Eventually they did, about five hours after he fell.

THIS WAS JUST THE TYPE of story that would have scared the pants off of Lakai team manager Kelly Bird and I as we were planning for the trip. In the weeks leading up to it we had both gathered some shocking bits of anecdotal data regarding Russia, its safety, and the possible pitfalls we might run into.

"I heard the hotels will steal your passport!" I told him.

"Yeah, well I heard packs of glue-sniffing orphans will attack you and scratch you with their dirty fingernails and give you the staph infection!" Kelly reported. "Oh yeah? Well I heard the police will steal your camera equipment, use it to shoot naked and compromising photos of you after they drug you up, and then sell it back to you for more than you bought it for with half the lens caps missing!" I blasted back.

"I think you have the wrong idea about my country," the distributor wrote to Kelly when pressed on these concerns.

"Maybe," we thought. But we were still going to have our guard up.

As a child growing up in the 1980s, a lesson that was beaten into me through art, literature, and, to a greater extent, horrible movies like The Day After, was that sooner or later we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust at the hands of the Russians. The Day After wasn't even a real movie, but some sort of made-for-TV mini-series. Nevertheless, its grim portrayal of post-apocalyptic life after the Russians had blown us to kingdom come (apparently we'd all be wandering around either blind or with our eyeballs melting out of our heads and all our hair molting off), managed to spook me the most. In one scene, I believe a family even had to eat their own radioactive dog. Other '80s Cold War fare included Red Dawn, which foresaw Soviet troops storming the US by ground (starting with local high schools and teen centers), War Games, in which Mathew Broderick stars as a precocious teen who, in an effort to change his grades by "hacking" into the school's computer with his Apple IIe, pushes the nation to the brink of nuclear war, and Rocky IV, where Stallone bad to defend the title (and pretty much the free world) against a possibly chemically enhanced and definitely stern-looking Russian killing machine and his long-legged she-trainer (played by Brigitte Nielsen). Even as a small boy I knew that, should Rocky be lucky enough to somehow defeat the boxer, there was still a great chance that Brigitte Nielsen might fuck us all to death.

Though later trends skewed more towards friendlier "the Russians are people too" fare, no amount of Yakov Smirnov "What a country!" jokes or Mork from Ork in a beard and furry hat could erase those melting eyeballs or warhead-like bosoms from my mind. Needless to say, in addition to my more recently collected stories of Russian danger, I was working with a lot of built-up emotional baggage in the old psyche as well.

Moscow is a very large, very flat city punctuated by large industrial areas, grandiose Soviet-era monuments and parks, and vast blocks of shabby-looking apartment buildings. Considering there was no advertising until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow has worked double time to pack every inch of available space with as many ads as possible. Entire buildings are covered with massive signage singing the praises of Coke or Loreal or Honda, and tacky neon facades have been tacked up onto ancient doorways for the many casinos and strip clubs. Though the streets are extremely wide, traffic in Moscow is terrible. Every day the Lakai team and I would get picked up by a van driven by a stoic man named Valentine, and we'd lurch around the city trying to find spots to skate. The action crew was Marc Johnson (presently growing his hair out), JB Gillet (French wunderkind), Rick Howard (Canadian powerhouse), Mike Carroll (SOTY 1994), Cairo Foster (new daddy), Ty Evans (shirtless), and Kelly Bird (TM and inventor of Texas street-style). The distributor, Dimitry, who has been aptly described as Sluggo Van Engelen for his beefy Viking good looks, accompanied us for a few days. For all the days, however, we were in the competent hands of a 23-year-old girl named Albina and a revolving cast of characters that included her boyfriend, Ivan, and various local skaters including a video-camera-toting kid we called The Fox, and an especially inquisitive young man we called Curious.

Albina spoke very good English and had acted as tour guide for several skate teams in the past, including Foundation, which gave her many fun anecdotes about Corey Duffel, the best of which was when he told her, "I don't have to carry passport! I am star! I am punk rock!" It was a maxim we often repeated whenever we chose to defy her wishes, which happened pretty much every 15 minutes as she ran the tour with an iron fist.

"Guys!" she would call out, "Guys[ Guys[" She said it at least 400 times a day, to corral anyone who had wandered too far from her sight, to gather us to leave, or just to let us know she was about to say something.

"Guys. Guys. GUYS!!!!"

Anyone who has traveled to France, or especially Germany, knows that in many countries they speak to each other much more harshly than we do in America. I think it can also partially be blamed on translation issues, or a new English speaker's lack of more subtle vocabulary, but, as in Germany, the Russians were regularly bumming the guys out. The kid we called Curious may have been the worst, as he zoned in on Mikey and Rick and regaled them with one offensive question after another.

"How come your part in Yeah Right is so short, Rick?" he'd ask to blank stares.

"Why you don't try harder at the demo?" he'd ask Mike.

"Why you not do good rail tricks?" he'd ask Rick.

"I think the Moscow skaters prefer the Zero style," he'd tell them both. Everyone took it in stride, but it's hard not to snap after the 15th question that sounds like a diss.

"Why don't you fuckin' skate a rail," Mike told Curious. The tension just seemed to get him even more excited.

The skate spots seemed to be very far apart, and many of what they took us to was little more than a few waxed ledges or a manual pad. Though there were many talented locals, it seems they haven't really gotten all the spots ironed out. There are several bust-free plazas and monuments, but there is also plenty of police presence and people telling you to move on. At the gap to rail where Cairo did the backside lipslide, a man who spoke pretty good English came out from the apartments above and casually sidled up to Ty. "You make a lot of noise," he said casually. "Every day you make lots of noise. It's 11 o'clock and my family tries to sleep."

"Oh, sorry," Ty said. "This is our first time here."

"I respect you," the man continued, "but you like skateboard. You like skateboard ... but I like baseball." At that point he grabbed the handle of a baseball bat that was sticking out of his bag and looked Ty dead in the eyes. Ty immediately got the message.

"WE'LL BE GONE IN FIVE MINUTES," Ty said, and they shook on it.

The Fox was under strict orders from Albina to film the guys as much as possible. This not only included uneasy requests for interviews, but also sticking the camera five inches from the dudes' faces at any possible moment--a filming style Marc especially enjoyed. As we'd often end up at dead-end spots, Rick and Mikey made a game out of filming increasingly more and more bizarre lines with The Fox that often ended via Rick's "fade out" technique, where he'd keep doing tricks despite the fact that he was no longer rolling forwards.

For food we either snacked from the many vending carts that line the streets or ate at upscale-for-Russia restaurants, where it was often us in our sweaty T-shirts sitting across from well-dressed Russian businessmen. "Businessmen" might be a nice way of putting it, as I'm pretty sure many of them were gangsters. They'd drive their Mercedes G-Wagons with blackout tint and no license plates straight onto the sidewalks in front of the restaurants and pop out with their skinny blonde ladies straight into the best seats in the place.

Because of the long drives between spots, once we got to a feasible one we'd end up posting up for several hours. The snack carts also sold beer, and sooner or later we'd all have one in hand. Pretty much everyone in the whole country did. There are no rules against open containers or anything like that, and at any time of the day or night a good 50 percent of everyone you'd see would be enjoying a cold one.

Moscow is super far north, which meant that we experienced the famous "white nights"--two hours of darkness per 24 hours from about 2:30 to 4:30 am. It was very disorienting, and even with hotel departure times around noon we would still be out trying to skate for 11- to 13-hours a day. You'd think it was four in the afternoon, look at a clock and it would be 10 at night. Even weirder was watching the sun go down while going into the bar and then seeing it come up when you left a few hours later.

We were at a manual spot around dark when three Russian dudes decided they wanted to fight us. Two were wearing shants and shitty rock T-shirts, but the biggest, most agitated one looked straight off a Soviet-era propaganda poster. He sported big boots, snug, severely hiked-up trousers and a blue button-up work shirt tucked in with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Their motivation was hard to place, but Albina's boyfriend Ivan took no chances and quickly retrieved a mouth guard from his bag and popped it in. Dimitry eventually calmed them down, but we were intrigued by Ivan's mouthpiece.

"I used to skate, but now I am into mixed fighting," he explained. "When you wear baggy pants and are into street culture, lots of people in Russia want to fight you." His answer was more interesting than we could have ever dreamed, and for the rest of the trip there was lots of talk of mixed fighting and street culture.