Roller Disco Daze
I am thirteen, and I’m doing the same thing I do every day after school: hitting a tennis ball against the door of the garage over and over and over. My mother wanted me to try out for the tennis team, but I refused. Tennis, for me, has become a solo occupation.
My family has moved again, this time from Portland, Oregon, to the East Bay suburbs, where we’ve settled into an unremarkable neighborhood of split-level tract homes in varying shades of beige, each one almost indistinguishable from the next. The neighborhood has no name yet, and it is so freshly bulldozed and paved that there are no trees or landscaping to indicate that anyone even lives here.
Our house is on a cul-de-sac at the end of the street. A pack of latchkey kids a few years younger than me like to play a game in which one of them rides their bike around the edge of the circle, while the others stand in the middle and throw things at the rider to try to knock him off his bike. When they succeed, the rider usually goes home crying and someone else steps up.
After a while, I go inside where I can watch the game from my bedroom while listening to my favorite record, Saturday Night Fever. I bought it with my own money, earned by selling magazine subscriptions to my father’s work colleagues at one of my parent’s cocktail parties.
My mother keeps telling me to make some new friends, but I don’t know how to do it. I hate everything about my new school.
One day in the mail, an invitation arrives for me to go to a birthday party at a house two streets over that looks pretty much identical to ours from the outside. It’s from a boy in my Spanish class. I know who he is, but I’ve never really talked to him.
Ordinarily, my mother wouldn’t have allowed me to attend an event at the house of a boy we didn’t even know. But this time she actually drove me to the mall and let me pick out something new to wear for the occasion. I’d chosen a cotton sundress with spaghetti straps and an elastic bodice in a rust-brown paisley print.
In the 3-way mirror of Casual Corner, I thought the dress made me look very sophisticated, but a few hours later, as I sit cross-legged on the concrete floor of an unfinished basement, I feel nothing but self-conscious about how it accentuates my concave chest.
There is some soppy soft rock hit droning on in the background and it’s filling me with dread. “Sad eyes, turn the other way, I don’t want to see you cry.” We’ve already gone around seven times, and I still haven’t been chosen. “Of course not,” I think to myself, “why would anyone choose me?” wondering why I’d come to this stupid party anyway.
Around it goes again, the spinning glass Coke bottle on the floor. This time it points straight at the foxy boy with the hair. He is wearing a polyester shirt half unbuttoned in order to better show off his gold chain. In the back pocket of his designer jeans, I can see the handle of an enormous plastic comb that he pulls out periodically to maintain his perfectly feathered hairdo.
Much to my surprise, this time he points at me, without even saying my name. I step into the center of the circle and obediently pucker up. He, however, has something more in mind and before I even know what’s happening, my mouth is wide open, being probed from the inside by a foreign tongue that feels enormous and dry, like a big wad of cotton.
I gasp for air and my knees feel weak, like I just stepped into an elevator that unexpectedly dropped two floors – not really because of the actual kiss, but because of the thought of all these people watching us.
The song on the radio changes to “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer. Toot, toot. Beep, beep. I think about how, on Friday night, I will skate to this song under the flashing lights of the mirrored ball at The Golden Skate.
In Oregon, I used to roller skate on Sunday afternoons at a place called Oaks Park. It was a wholesome venue with a self-serve popcorn machine, a Wurlitzer organ and an announcer who would call out instructions to the skaters, like “Couples Skate!” or “Crack the Whip!” My Dad would drive me there after church with a couple of friends, and come back to pick us up before dinnertime.
In California, my mother was eager to find a place for me to roller skate, in the hopes that I might meet a few people my age. That’s how we found our way to The Golden Skate in San Ramon.
It was 1979, the height of the disco era, and skating happened on Friday nights. The first time my parents dropped me off there, I was too terrified to even get on the floor, and spent most of the time hiding out in the corner near the pinball machines. By the 3rd or 4th time, however, I figured it out.
I’d arrive at around 8:00 pm, wearing my favorite outfit – a baby blue satin jacket and matching gym shorts. After lacing up my skates, I would spend the next two hours racing around the rink like a gazelle. At thirteen, I was 5’7”, skinny as a popsicle stick, and at The Golden Skate, I often found myself being chased around by men with mustaches. Some of them kept trying to lure me into the back alley.
It was a dodgy business, and I couldn’t believe my parents were actually encouraging it. But even then, I enjoyed the attention. I was starting to catch a whiff of precarious power that comes with being the object of someone’s desire.
By the time I had turned fifteen, I had friends who could drive, and I no longer went to the Golden Skate. There were keg parties happening in abandoned cul-de-sacs, trips to 7-11 and plenty of other stuff to keep us up to no good.
It was 45 years before I got to lace up another pair of roller skates. An organization called The Church of Eight Wheels hosted a pop-event in my neighborhood this summer called Roller Disco Daze, with free roller skating for the entire community, complete with a DJ and equipment rental. I was a little apprehensive about making a fool of myself or breaking my ass, but I decided I couldn’t let the opportunity go by. How many more times in my life will I get to skate under the mirrored ball?
I donned some rainbow socks and rented myself a pair of purple light-up skates. As I laced them up, I heard the opening notes of my favorite Donna Summers song. I may not have the same speed and form as I did when I was 40 pounds lighter, but I am here to report that I still managed to make it around the rink.
Comments