The Viking is a 26-year-old professional aggressive in-line skater from Denmark. He's visiting Boston after winning the vert competition at this year's X-Games in Newport, R.I.
Halgreen enjoys an unusual pre-competition ritual: "[I] drink a couple of beers so I relax. Then I just skate."
With Halgreen's three-foot-long red pony tail flying behind him, he rides down the ramp and then pumps up the other side. Then he plants both skates on the near coping and executes a shifty royale, leaning his knees, ankles and hips in the opposite direction of his movement on the coping.
His lead foot grinds along its instep, with the trailing foot grinding on the outside of the frame and boot.
Halgreen returns to perform a 360-degree spin, twirling five feet above the half pipe, his head dangerously close to the metal rafters. He slides to the flat bottom of the ramp on his knee pads.
He grabs a hold of a bottle of Coca-Cola and takes a few sips. He sighs, as though something's missing.
"Where's the beer?" jokes The Viking.
On another day, Sean McCarthy of Sterling waits to launch down into the vert ramp. Sterling, an assistant manager at a Brooks Pharmacy store, visits Maximus as often as he can.
A long scar, caused by a skateboarding accident in 1992, runs vertically down McCarthy's left leg. He tore his medial colateral and anterior cruciate ligaments while attempting to execute an ollie down a bank and now wears a padded brace to stabilize his knee.
"It's been said many times that this is a fountain of youth. A lot of pain, but it keeps you young," says Craig Martin, a friend of McCarthy.
Drexel, a German shepherd owned by Ram Hannan, the co-owner of Maximum, bounds up the stairs to the half pipe platform to announce the arrival of his owner, who's clad in a white sleeveless T-shirt that accentuates the tattoo running down his entire left arm.
Hannan calls Drexel, who has bounded away from the ramp to sniff some daisies. Then Hannan gets ready to skate for 15 minutes before heading home to Somerville to relieve the babysitter.
He's impatient with bystanders asking about the relationship between the city of Cambridge and his skatepark.
"As long as there are enough people willing to come down here and make it happen--you know, devote their personal energy, time, love, care and endless hours of fabrication and destruction--it's gonna continue to be here," he says.
"It's hidden in the 'ghetto,' well, certainly the lowest income zone in all of Cambridge. Cambridge, is, like, the most flavorful, racial temperate zone in the world I've found...or certainly in America."
Klein agrees: "Pretty much it's a nice happy place. It's a place where people can pretty much do their thing within the shadows of a very rigid social structure."