Yayi, the Queen, lounging on an ATV.   (Photo: Brian Finke)

Huh?

When he lets her go, the dog chases after the Banshee, and Oiste!! slows just enough to let her jump into his lap. He and the pit bull pop twelve-o’clock wheelies together, logging a couple of blocks at a time. The sun has set, but Oiste!! is still wearing those Cartier glasses. He raises one arm high in the air and flashes his audience a head-shot smile.

It’s not a breakout new sport—not yet. Stunt riding today is where bodybuilding was in the early eighties, just before it exploded among suburban boys in need of a hobby. “How many blocks you got?” is the new “How much you bench?” Parking lots are the new muscle beaches. And a guy named Winky is the new Arnold Schwarzenegger—the pied piper who makes it look fun and earns money doing something that seems the opposite of a career. His DVD Wink 1100: Urban Street Legend (2002) is akin to Arnold’s Pumping Iron. But if Arnold inspired legions to hit the gym, Winky has inspired them to hit the streets—New York’s streets in particular. The city’s grid is perfect for racking up blocks. And if you’re not riding amid the PlayStation obstacles of unpredictable cabdrivers, clueless pedestrians, and surprise police cars, well, how good can you be, really?

In amateurish stunt tapes available in motor-sports shops, riders aspiring to Winky-level fame are shown behaving very badly very well all over the city. In one tape, bikers take over a section of the FDR in a Christo-like conversion of the road into a moving stage for the spectacle of wheelies and endos (a stunt in which the rear wheel comes off the ground). Another tape shows a rider toying with a single police car in the Bronx, leading it around and around a small triangular block as about thirty onlookers cheer him on. He makes a successful getaway, and the defeated squad car pulls up to the spectators, windows lowered. The cop is smiling and shaking his head in what looks like grudging admiration. He’s not mad. He had a good time. He wanted the adrenaline boost, not the paperwork.

These riders are breaking the rules, sure, but breaking them like rock stars, so the shock they inspire is mixed with a measure of gratitude for the vicarious thrill. Someone’s gotta trash that hotel room. Someone’s gotta do a wheelie through this traffic jam.

Winky might be the original biker rock star, but the two men who paid him and who more than anyone are responsible for the proliferation of internal combustion are the brothers Darrin “Dee” and Joaquin “Waah” Dean, CEOs of Ruff Ryders Records. The stunt-riding subculture of New York simmered on the streets of African-American, Dominican, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods for years before the Deans exposed it to the rest of the country in the 1998 video for rapper DMX’s breakout song, “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem.” That video—and several others from the Ruff Ryders compilation album Ryde or Die—conferred urban-hero status on Winky and his then-wife Yayi (pronounced “Jaji”) Ramos, a.k.a. the Queen, who is shown riding a Suzuki GSXR1100 in just enough clothing to keep the footage PG-13. It also inspired a biking movement that has since propagated across the country in the form of Ruff Ryders motorcycle clubs that make the Hells Angels look like a cantankerous wing of the AARP.

Dee and Waah arrive to meet me one recent evening on the corner of 97th Street and Madison Avenue in a nearly presidential motorcade of tinted-window SUVs. When word gets out in the neighborhood that the Deans are here, patrons and staff from the nearby restaurant, One Fish Two Fish, come out to pay respects. Waah, who is built like a tight end, holds court on the street corner, but Dee stays inside the SUV. He can’t walk very well anymore.

Dee’s crash is legend by now. In 2001, he bought a Kawasaki T-Rex, a sleek, low ATV with two wheels in front and one in back. Souped-up, the vehicle can reach speeds of 160 miles per hour and, of course, is illegal to operate on city streets. Dee took out his new toy one day and the police were not amused. They impounded both the bike and his much more expensive Ferrari. His lawyers obtained documents allowing for the release of the Ferrari, but not the bike. Unsatisfied with that outcome, Dee doctored those papers so he could have it the other way around. One week later in Hunts Point, in the Bronx, he crashed the T-Rex into a parked tractor-trailer with enough force to lift the big rig’s rear wheels up over the curb and onto the sidewalk.