Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
"I’m just looking at who’s here,” Joel Ashrafzadeh tells me, “seein’ if I know anybody. What it looks like—what’s going on.” We scan the bright white concrete of the Jefferson Barracks Skatepark. The mood’s desultory, with just a handful of skaters crisscrossing. Joel’s wearing long black shorts and a T-shirt, and the bottom of his skateboard is muted and arty, hand-done. He doesn’t like flash. A few younger boys, clad in mom-bought bright colors, ride skateboards with handles. Joel, 16 years old and a seasoned skater, shrugs. “Easier to keep their balance, maybe,” he says kindly.
Just below us, a pale redhead in an Abercrombie & Fitch shirt is shooting a video of a tall, skinny African-American guy as he leaps steep concrete steps, lands, flips his board, and—wipes out. He lies on the sun-soaked concrete for a minute, laughing, until his friend extends a hand and drags him to his feet.
I turn around, and Joel’s on his board, swooping down the steepest curve of the bowl and back up, the speed carrying him. His expression’s the same as that of a figure skater gliding backward: rapt, caught in the grace of the curve. He rides his board along the coping and down to the pyramid in the middle, jumps, and flips the board.
“That was carving,” he says when he returns, “going up and turning on a slope. I did a 180 at the pyramid. Grinding’s going along something narrow that’s between your wheels, like a rail or an edge.”
He’s got form. His hips swivel as he jumps a set of four stairs, then curves around a semicircle. A chubby kid in a ball cap watches, open-mouthed. Like me, he’s bound by gravity.
Joel gets a running start, jumps smoothly onto his board, and pushes off for extra speed. After flipping the board in midair, he glides over a row of ripples in the concrete.
“You don’t even have to know anybody, really,” he tells me. “If I just came by myself”—and not with a motherly middle-aged reporter who’s a friend of his mother—“I’d talk to people here at the park. But you kind of just get into a mode: You are in yourself, thinking, when you’re doing tricks.” He pops his board into the air and catches it. “This is pretty mellow today. If there’s a bunch of your friends here, though, you get more excited, and you want to skate harder.”
Taking the cue, I step back, say I’m going to talk to some other kids. The redhead is Ryan Buffa, and he’s 21 years old. He comes here from Collinsville. He and his friend Monté Hall have been skating for about 10 years.
“It’s—the satisfaction,” Monté explains. “Chasing perfection, in a weird way.”
He’s just lost a temp job, and he’s embarrassed that his girlfriend’s supporting him—got to get his act together, he says. But out here? Anything’s possible. “Sometimes I just surprise myself and do something I don’t even imagine. Some days, I don’t even know how I’m standing up.” He grins. “If you are just doing it for style, it hurts, but still, it’s just beautiful.”
An isolated kickflip (I looked it up), and they’re gone. I see Joel and Monté put their hands up for an easy slap as they skate past each other. “I didn’t know you knew him,” I say later.
“Yeah, I’ve known him for a while,” Joel says. “I think I met him at the skate park that’s getting torn down on Kingshighway. He’s a rapper.”
We leave just before the skies open. “Skating in the rain will rust your trucks,” he informs me. “That’s the part that holds the wheel on.”
Born in midcentury California when the waves were too flat to surf, this sport’s an odd mix of practical and freewheeling, disciplined and transgressive. In Manhattan, skaters push grocery carts full of ramps all over the city, claiming their ground. They skate on subway tracks and long skinny stair rails, jump the barricades of routed urban life. All over the world, skating bonds people so tight, they “don’t even need a language,” somebody says in the movie We Are Blood.
Joel says he’d know somebody skated just by meeting him. “It’s hard to explain; it’s just a look. You can know by maybe how somebody dresses or how they act.”
I wait.
“Kind of more laidback, maybe. Cooler. Not full of themselves, just…confident.”
Makes sense, I say. They’re taking risks.
“If you skateboard, you develop less fear over stuff, and it kind of goes back to your real life,” he adds. “When something happens to you, your emotions of fear and pain are less because you’re used to, like, falling and stuff. It kind of changes your mindset a little bit. I just realized that recently. I’ll see people freaking out, really scared of this or that, and I’m still relaxed about it.
“One of the main things is, you don’t have to be a certain person to skate,” he continues. “Literally any type of person can skateboard as long as they want to. Any race, any size, it doesn’t matter at all. When I’m at a skate park with a group of skaters, none of them are judging how you look or anything like that. It’s just hanging out. ’Cause you don’t care—you’re just wanting to skate. That’s all you want to do.”
