2001-02-15 - 22:32:40

Three years ago, I went rollerskating on Valentine's Day. That particular V.D. (big laff) was extremely uneventful. It was the only February 14 in the last six on which I didn't either have a pretty solid Valentine or find a temporary one at the Jape House. (That's a story I'd rather not go into right now, but no, it was not Jeff Ponstein.) Pretty amazing considering how long I usually go between girlfriends.

But the big skate in the nine eight was good, I tells ya. It was the first time I had been rollerskating since junior high, when they put a bunch of us hormone-crazy Catholic school boys on a bus to meet up with a bunch of mysterious girls from the local school for rich brats. There's no story to be told there either. Sorry. Not nearly as interesting as the setup might suggest.

Anyway, I'm used to going rollerskating in Canton, Michigan, at the Skatin' II Station. The place where they don't let you go out to your car and come back in because you might be sniffing glue behind a dumpster or playing kissyface with the local junior high harlot or god knows. Where white thirteen-year-old boys come to frolic and front with their fubu gear and misplaced rage. Where their female counterparts clique together in the center of the rink, circling the wagons and freaking the floor (not to be believed until seen) during the bumpers and the grinders. Where the arrival of three carloads full of bespectacled Ann Arbor hipsters in tight t-shirts and vintage pants heralds a veritable beachfront invasion. Where no one over 22 is addressed as anything except "mommy" or "officer."

The point is that I'm used to experiencing rollerskating as a juvenile, faux dangereux suburban ghetto-tastic weekend fun-fest. Well-lit, with that distinct melange of burnt rubber and not yo' cheese wafting through the air. Sure, there are always one or two showoffs with the skills to make Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu swoon. But all in all it's an amateur's world, and if you ain't falling on your face, you're par for the rink.

New York is different. This is true about any subject you happen to be discussing, but it's especially true of rollerskating at the Roxy.

First: No kids.

Second: Pros, baby, and every one of them stuck in a 1983 time warp, the last year that rollerdisco was an acceptable compound word, the last year they made clothing specifically for the activity.

One man was wearing this outfit: Rollerskates, tube socks, short shorts, FANNY PACK, beer gut, wifebeater, mustache, headband. And that honky could skate.

Third: All roller-stank drowned out by the dank that was puffed on every couch around that rank (er, rink).

Fourth: Spitting both saliva and epithets (a favorite activity of the kids in Canton) replaced by a not-so-subtle game of grab-ass played by middle-aged men and women alike. The rollerpros' victims were both female and male. Not one person in my group skated away unscathed. We all had valentines by the end of the night, in a fucked-up prison sort of way.