times a day. He also has a very keen sense of things sucking. "This
sucks!" he would say with every other blow to the ceiling. I'd go so far
as to say that if his Suck-o-Meter were a radiation detector, we might
as well have been in Chernobyl.
Ron would usually do little more than scream obscenities into a pil-
low, and both Tony and Chuck bailed out of the van mid-trip on a cou-
ple of occasions rather than go over the edge. Only team manager
Matt Sharkey could remain calm at all times, which is why, I suppose,
he's the team manager.
The next couple of days we got to hit the raw streets of Chicago.
A sculpture in front of a downtown museum created some perfect
recycled-plastic ledges and tables, and Stacy hit up a big tailslide to
fakie on the top just as the cops rolled up. Later, Steff found a dou-
ble-kink rail and charged (as he did the entire trip), with half a dozen
drop-drop boardslides.
That night, after a hellish mission to find an open restaurant at
11 PM (we finally settled on Pizzeria Uno, which, I agreed with
Ryan, sucked), we returned to the van to find the spare tire gone.
There was some loose talk of changing the name of the tour to
Until the Spare Gets Jacked.
After a visit to St. Louis' Altered Skates, we drove out to
Columbia, Missouri, to skate the new Cosmo park. Truly the
jewel of Midwest concrete, Cosmo has plenty of lines, vertish
sections, and even mini-handrails. Sharkey got badgered by a
rival company's sales rep who kept yelling at kids, "Don't buy
Santa Cruz!" from beneath his crooked visor. It was a truly bril-
liant bit of grassroots marketing.
Tony Tieu got tricky on the ledge and Big Ron caught air on the
122 THRASHER
SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
Clockwise from top: T2 slashes a backside Smith to drop at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Big Ron Whaley
busts out the buttas in Chicago, IL, with a frontside bluntslide. If you want to hook up with a girl from a demo, make
sure you ride to the motel in her car. If you want to backside flip big concrete signs, ask Mike Rafter. Stacy Lowery
crosses the lines of convention to power a chest-high carpet-munching tailslide.
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