The Wizard (Part 1)

Let's talk about roller skates. Not the ones with a brand new key that Melanie sang about...not the strange things with all the wheels lined up end to end either. I mean quads. Four wheels on each foot and one wheel on each corner.

I've spent what has to amount to years with those things laced to my feet. Of all things to last a lifetime...why skates? I was asking myself that the other day as Kellie and I kicked around which rink we wanted to hit on one of my rare Friday nights off.

I met Kellie at a skating rink by the way...just as information. 

We still like to go when we can and still hold hands like kids when the lights go down and a slow song comes on. But maybe I should start at the beginning...

The actual year is pretty hazy but it must have been sometime after '77 because I'm reasonably sure I was out of high school before I went skating for the first time. I don't remember how it came about that I got talked into going. I liked ice skating on frozen ponds when I was younger so maybe it was the idea of skating while not ending up as frozen as the water...I'm just not sure. I was working on the farm at the time and it's possible my girlfriend suggested it for something different to do...I really don't know. Somebody came up with the idea because it certainly wasn't on my radar at the time.

Regardless, I somehow I ended up at a little place on Judd Falls Road in Ithaca called 'Ides Skate City'. It was next door to a bowling center and owned by the same family that ran the lanes. Over the years, skating had faded from popularity though and for a while the building was used as a warehouse for equipment from a factory. At some point, a couple of guys (who I found to be very sketchy...more on that later) thought they could cash in on the booming skate craze, leased the building, cleaned out the junk and opened it back up as a rink.

As I remember it, the still-original floor had water damage ripples on the far end from a very leaky roof and it always developed puddles when it rained. There was no surface finish like they use now so they sprinkled powdered rosin over the bare wood to give it grip just like in the old days when both floors and wheels were hard-rock maple. The dust was incredible on a busy night.

The rental skates I took my first spin on were ancient and equipped with incredibly slippery wheels. The leather was crispy from a million sweaty feet and most of the laces had three or four extra knots that made it impossible to tie them right. They also had loose-ball bearings that occasionally fell out and scattered everywhere if the lock nuts backed off. Hitting one of those little BBs with super hard wheels was like instantly nailing your foot to the floor and a hail-mary nose-dive almost always ensued. 

I remember carpet covered plywood boxes for benches, carpeted walls, a tiny snack bar, skate rental counter, bare cinder block restrooms and a DJ booth all crammed in one end by the door. A few flashing lights and six speakers on the walls made it sort of disco-ish and there I was. Something must have clicked even as I was staggering along the wall holding on for dear life because it wasn't long and I was there an awful lot. 

The DJ most of the time was a guy called Flash. Mixing was still in the future so he just played random songs that he liked back to back and droned out the announcements in the same flat monotone used by almost every rink DJ I've ever heard right up to this day. 

"Clear the floor please. Clear the floor", "Couples only on the floor please. Couples only"...it's like a litany that never changes. 

He gravitated to country rock and oldies so I learned to keep my feet under me to 'Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress' by the Hollies and 'Can't You See' by Marshall Tucker. They did an all-oldies night once a week for the fifties and sixties lovers and Tuesdays was organ music on 45's that got a pretty good crowd of waltz and tango couples. They never had a live organist like some of the older, established places did but nobody seemed to mind. Flash gamely played it all and eventually lowered himself to take occasional requests if he was feeling mellow.

I soon found out that there was another rink job called 'Skate Guard'. Mostly it consisted of rolling around with a whistle in your teeth, scolding the tag-players and whip-crackers and helping the fallen back to their feet. I think it pretty much paid  in free admission and soggy pizza at the time.

That job belonged to another character known as Wild Bill. He was probably as old as my father and skated on ancient wheels under an ever-present cowboy hat. Everybody that worked there wore the same hideous orange bowling shirts (courtesy of the lanes across the parking lot) with the rink name in big letters on the back. Bill looked a little odd with a ten gallon hat perched over that shirt but he made up for it when he cut loose and really skated. He had the most incredible, very fast shuffle footwork when he got going and we loved to try to keep up and copy the steps. I think he might have been the one who first taught me how to go from wobbly forward to wobblier backwards. Once I figured it out though, there was no stopping. I never broke any bones during all that...but I sure did fall and hurt a lot. 

To this day, I don't know what the attraction was...but I was there. Saturday matinees, weekends, weekdays...didn't matter. And like anything else, if you do something often enough...you're bound to get better. I got so I could keep up with Wild Bill. Then I got faster.

Somewhere along the line, I decided I'd had enough of scuzzy rental skates and plunked down some cash for the first set of my own. Sure-Grip Super X plates and All American wheels, the cheapest Reidell boots there were, sealed bearings that didn't fly apart and away I went! I tinkered with different wheels. I found out how to tune the trucks the way I wanted. I was well and truly hooked.

Finally, the owners decided I was there all the time anyway so they might as well put me to use. I got an orange shirt, a whistle and no longer had to pay admission. I'd race through chores at the farm...shower, change and be there when the door unlocked. My girlfriend openly wondered what I'd gotten myself into...or more probably...what she'd gotten herself into.

This was the '80's remember and the skating boom was in full swing. Some Saturday nights the floor was so packed you could hardly move. We needed four or five skate guards on our tiny floor just to cover the crashes. We routinely ran flat out of rental skates and some people were using mismatched sizes made out of broken pairs just to get out there. The snack bar ran out of everything. Flash broke down and started playing better music under pain of after-session beatings if he didn't. 'Knock On Wood' brought on a stampede. 'Working Day and Night' was a train wreck waiting to happen if someone went down. 150 mostly out of control people at high velocity in a dark room could never get around that poor soul who lost his footing. The pile-ups were epic.

The off-skate area was shoulder to shoulder too so one unchecked-full-speed exit from the floor into the milling crowd looked and sounded a lot like the bowling alley next door. It was an absolute free for all and I loved it.

I wound up working there as much as I was farming. Skate-guarding morphed into after-session cleaning, working the snack bar and skate rental counter, selling tickets, fixing broken skates and covering the booth so Flash could get a break. I swept up the rosin dust, swamped out the disgusting restrooms, cooked a million hot dogs and became in all senses of the term...a rink rat.

One thing kept leading to another as time went along. I figured out how to build new skates from scratch so I became the resident 'pro' in what was hilariously called a pro shop. I got my hands on the turntables and records and that became yet another story. Music started to matter a lot more. 

I became a fixture. I would work the sessions and then come in early to skate some more (I had a door key by then). I can't even imagine how many miles I put on. I just kept on skating. I wore out set after set of wheels and bearings until I scrimped up enough for a whole new pair of skates. This time around they were Century plates with jump bars (I didn't know how to jump too well yet but the bars looked really cool and nobody else had them), a much nicer grade of boots and Fafnir speed bearings inside Powell-Peralta wheels that rolled like glass. It felt like I just got a new Corvette.

A whole pack of 'rats' developed out of nowhere at Skate City as well. Names and faces...some I can remember...some not. Some I still know...others long gone. They were the circle of friends I never had before. I finally had something...something I didn't even know I was missing.

And somewhere...sometime...someone started calling me Wizard. Whoever you are...wherever you ended up...I hope you know that it stuck.