Peter Ramondetta May Be Just Three Wives, Two Plane Crashes And An Alcohol Problem Away From Being This Generation’s He-Man Skateboarder

Watching the Real video it’s hard not to be impressed by the primal forces of Peter Ramondetta’s skate tricks. Tattooed, bearded and occasionally bloodied, he applies a heavy-handed power to the switch ollie over that big gray hubba or the hurting he puts on those big cement steps (b/s 5-0, b/s nosegrind, switch b/s kickflip). Peter Ramondetta impresses himself on semi tractor trailors and doorways, jamming the nose of his board between pillars on that one frontside blunt. His one-man legacy of brutality is maybe highlighted most by several punishing tricks executed upon an unsuspecting pink ledge.

If you were to draw up a spectrum of such squishy concepts it would maybe be possible to put dexterous light-foots such as Richard Mulder, Ronnie Creager and Austyn Gillette on one end and bruiser types such as Salman Agah, Mic-E Reyes and James Kelch on the other. You could appoint someone like Peter Ramondetta to carry on this line, a red-blooded archetype rooted in the themes and lifestyle embodied by the animal-hunting writer Ernest Hemingway. He swilled liquor, loved women and upheld the ancient tradition of bull-slaying, a truly ancient tradition.

Peter Ramondetta has yet to make public his position on bulls and their potential slaying. This is not in the Real video, unless it’s in the bonus features not featured in my iTunes edition that doesn’t possess chapter divisions either. By all accounts his lifestyle has tamed since the days of squalor at Six Newell where he, Elissa Steamer, Frank Gerwer and certain others presided over a household of decay. Ramondetta is not famed as a trophy fisherman or dangerous game hunter, unless you count that downhill handrail toward the end and that last hill with the treacherous speed bumper and all those cars with their wheels turned curb-ward. But you get the feeling that, if the situation called for it, this dude has it in him to walk up to a group of reporters covering his supposed death, run down the situation and spend the next few days catching up on his own premature obituaries.

Exalt the new god

The Real World

So while the rest of us were BBQing and firecrackering and generally getting our Fourth of July on, and DNA was counting their snowboard cash and not updating their goddam video sites, Deluxe debuted DLX-TV with a slew of clips, old and new. Which is good news for this noble country and the planet in general, seeing’s how there really is not enough footage of Peter Ramondetta lately, or Frank Gerwer ever. Highlights are the 3rd & Army session, the Civic Center ledge session and Jake Donnelly in general (his day in the life kinda drags though). Also the mighty Mark Appleyard’s Thunder commercial, which pleases my eye nearly as much as those one type of fireworks that explode, and then the tracers start going all wonky at crazy angles. Hopefully Bob can hurry up and land his next kickflip into the Amazon rainforest or whatever for the Flip video, so we can skip past it to that two-song part Appleyard supposedly has in the can already.

As a bonus, here’s a link to Ramondetta’s sadly underappreciated part in the ill-fated C1RCA vid. Here comes the cheap shot: It’s Time… to think of a better name for the next video, guys.