Ramp Riders. Part 1 of at least 60.

I'm a pacifist.

That's something my mom taught me to say when I was a kid. I still say it. It was part of her lesson on Ghandi, and Jesus, and The Way Of the Peaceful Warrior, and counting coup. I believed her. It was tougher to take a punch and not give one back.

Then I got older and I wanted to learn to fight. I wrestled anyone who would wrestle back, Cole, Dad, Karl, whoever. Jeff Gaskin beat me everytime. I love wrestling, but it's friendly. Wrestling is play fighting.

I learned to fight at Ramp Riders Skatepark. 3001-3 Locust street in mid-town St. Louis. On the Northwest corner of Locust and Garrison. Just behind the Harbor Light.


Ramp Riders sometime between 2000 and 2003

The first thing Ramp Riders taught me was the importance of having a clubhouse. A clubhouse is a place to go that your mom has no idea about. A Tattoo shop would make a good clubhouse. Garages are the best kind of clubhouse.

When Ramp Riders was our clubhouse, we called it The Park. It was in a hot zone of perfect clubhouses. The Harbor Light, the building immediately to the North was the ultimate club house for people who spent their entire lives boozing and driving everyone else away. The only people left to abuse were a group of people so devoted to the idea that everyone is worth saving that they formed an army.



For the Salvation Army no one is beyond saving. Anyone can stay at the Harbor Light so long as they can scrounge up $2 per night. Two dollars was easy to find in the ashtrays and cup holders of the cars outside Ramp Riders, and the winos figured out surprisingly quick how big a rock has to be in order to go through a car's window on the first try.


Blood And Fire

Our clubhouse was an old, two and a half story brick building. It was built to be a coach builders building. Factory and showroom in one. My bike brought me to The Park. The one that Tom and Wayne, Squints, Andy and JJ were building with wood, sweat and drywall screws in between legendary games of gay chicken.*


We should start making plaques


Tom and the guys were building the park as fast as they could get wood. Save some money, buy some wood. See if you can get your buddy at the lumber yard to cut us a deal, or at least forget to scan something.

Then when the wood showed up they brought it in and attached it to the first thing they built, the box jump with the grind-ledge down the middle. Actually, the first thing they built was the mini ramp. But they built that in Tom's backyard when he was spending a lot of time at home in South County.

That all happened before I was there. Before The Park opened. Cole found Ramp Riders first. He heard the streets whispering that someone was opening a skatepark in St. Louis. So he rode down there and looked in the mail-slot. It looked dark and dirty.

Then he went back to look in again and Tom was there. Tom was stoked that a 15 year old kid would ride his BMX bike from Ladue to Mid-Town to look in the mail slot of his unopened skatepark... for a second time. He told Cole to come back on Opening Day and bring some friends. When Tom extended that invitation, the clubhouse opened for me.







These photos are definitely not from opening day. They are meant to set the scene.

Cole and I were there on opening day. Our parents helped us buy Emperor's passes numbered 1 and 2. Unlimited access to the park for one year. Cole was number one.

Cole and I weren't new to bike riding when we found Ramp Riders, we had both been riding bikes everyday since we were 3 years old. But Ramp Riders taught us the language, culture, and history of Freestyle BMX.

And just like that we weren't two brothers riding alone in Mid-County.

At The Park we met the dudes that were doing the same things at the same time in Bridgeton, South County and Belleville. Now we were part of a tribe. A group people that got off on fighting with gravity and using our bikes to show the world what we thought of it.

I learned to fight with the Ding-A-Lings and the Sprockets and The Mud Butts. And with Tom and The Waterlilies and the skateboarders. We were all fighting together against fear, and gravity, and expectations.

Those days were a frenzy of physical pain and ecstatic joy. The pain came from finding out for yourself that gravity is never going to concede. The joy came from successfully cheating a physical force. The uninitiated think that gravity is a law. I know plenty of people that can bend that law unrecognizable with a BMX bike.

This is only Part 1 on Ramp Riders.

I have to wait for the internet to get bigger before I can tell you about everything the clubhouse that Tom built meant to me. All the friends I made there. How I learned to be myself. Learning to understand fear.

Ramp Riders became my second home. My second family. My home where it was OK to hang my old shoes from the power lines out front. My home caddy-corner from the car wash that the Ghost Dogg Riders Motorcycle Club used as their clubhouse (The third awesome Clubhouse in the hot zone). My home where I got to have raw hamburger fights, and blow the lids off of old washing machines with quarter sticks of dynamite, and prove that a bucket brigade can put out a fire in an overgrown vacant lot. It was also where I learned to be a teacher, and where I learned for myself the importance of letting yourself be a student.



Ghost Doggs


When this lot was overgrown, litter-strewn and on fire. We put it out with buckets.

Ramp Riders was also my second job. Where I got interviewed by a newspaper reporter on my very first day.* Where I sold giant pickles to kids so filthy that their sweat left visible tracks down their cheeks. They would hand me a sweaty and crumpled dollar bill and I would put a fat pickle in their dirt black hand.

It's where I taught myself how to program a cash register. The top of every receipt read "Ramp Riders: You Are Not Special."

Where I had to explain to parents on Beginner Night that the Ghost Doggs always held drag races on Monday nights and it was nothing to be alarmed about. Where I learned the importance of giving your all to something you love.

Ramp Riders is where I learned that I didn't have to learn to fight another person. There are bigger things to fight against, things that you will probably never beat. But you will learn a lot if you try.

To this day I've never punched somebody as hard as I can.

Maybe I should start with whoever turned our clubhouse into a high end women's boutique that sells organic beauty products instead of leaving it as a filthy, sweat-drenched museum.



3001-3 Locust now. Stealing change from car ashtrays has never been more satisfying.



*Gay Chicken is a game straight dudes play. The idea is to do something so gay that your opponent can't let himself top it. The best game I ever witnessed ended with JJ's hand down Wayne's pants. JJ was squeezing Wayne's naked dick and Wayne EVENTUALLY had to quit when he started getting hard!

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