The Wizard (Part 2)

Back to Skate City...

The '80's rolled along and skating and I went with it. Some strange new things came along with all the prosperity at our little rink...the need for an off-duty deputy to keep the peace was one. There was an armed, uniformed officer working every Friday and Saturday night to quell the parking lot fights, kick out or keep out the drunk teenagers and be a presence...just in case. They had their hands full some nights since we were open from 7 till 1 am and that's a lot of time for stuff to happen in the restrooms and behind the building. There was a cemetery right next to the parking lot that they had to keep an eye on too. A whole bunch of cheap beer got slugged down among the tombstones on a detour from the cars to the admission window. We had to go rescue one of our patrons one night when he had a couple too many, leaned on a headstone, knocked it over and pinned both arms under about a thousand pounds of marble. It kept the security guys busy and amused.

Something else new was a urethane floor coating that finally (sort of) got rid of the rosin dust. We put it down one summer and did it all wrong. Who knew anything? Everybody was giddy from the fumes and we ran out before we got it all coated. The owners tried to stretch it as much as possible so it went on thin and streaky. It peeled almost immediately and made for some treacherous corners but at least it wasn't bare wood.

At some point we also acquired a new DJ who wound up with the name Dangerous Dan. He was open to more kinds of music than Flash but had a tendency to play what he liked instead of what we could skate to. A couple of local AM radio jocks played there occasionally as well...Charlie, Joel...last names escape me but they brought their own stacks of 45's and we learned. Somebody heard that you could mix songs together and make new ones if you had two turntables (which we just happened to have) so suddenly we had twenty minute versions of 'Rappers Delight' stitched into 'Good Times' and 'Another One Bites The Dust'. It was probably awful but we were the rankest of amateurs working on a mixer board with rotary pots and a crossfader that nobody knew how to use. We loved it.

Private parties became a thing that we did on weeknights. They ran the gamut from church groups to frat parties.
The former were some of the biggest nights we had bar none. They could pack the place and at the very least tended not to destroy the bathrooms.
One of the latter comes to mind when a Cornell science department showed up with a cooler full of lab-made 200 proof alcohol. We didn't know about it until after the first broken wrist and the total redecoration of the restrooms. It was bad...very bad.

There were open session Christmas parties, Halloween parties, you name it. 

The joint was jumping. I worked sometimes from 1pm till 3am. Skate guard a matinee, clean the place in between and then open back up for the night session. Clean it up as best we could after we closed at 1 and then, more often than not, go hit Sambo's Restaurant (how politically incorrect is that name now?) for all-you-could-eat fried shrimp and fries. It was a wonderful, awful time.

I kept learning new stuff on skates from wherever I could pick it up. Out-of-town skaters started showing up now and again with their own crazy moves and steps. Packs of kids from Pennsylvania showed what shuffling in a pack looked like. We had a few freestylers and artistic types and they were pretty amazing to watch but the formality of it never really caught my interest that much. 

I stole some of the jumps and turns but I was bound to be a true session skater even way back then. I tinkered with all kinds of weird wheels since I got them cheap on my employee discount. Gone were the impossibly hard 'All Americans' and 'Fomacs'. In their place there was a set of speed wheels, then a set of 'Roller Bones', even a short-lived set that actually looked like red softballs...interesting but pretty awful for edges. I've got boxes of old wheels in the garage still.

For all of it though, I really didn't know much about skating itself. I started seeing a couple of magazines about skaters instead of the trade rags from the RSROA and in them were pictures of huge rinks packed with people all over the country. Skating was big stuff and we didn't even realize it. Our horizons were getting a lot broader than the little place on Judd Falls Road.

I can't remember when we did it or where we went but at some point, a bunch of us loaded into some very iffy vehicles and went to another rink. Syracuse or Binghamton is likely because it wasn't that far but suddenly there was a lot more out there. Rinks were all over the place and we traveled whenever we could. 

Everywhere I went, I picked up a little more...another move or another song and kept on learning. 

By now, farming was pretty much gone and I worked almost full time at Skate City. I spent days rehabilitating wrecked rental skates that should have been retired years ago. There was endless, hopeless cleaning to do. The restrooms were a catastrophe almost every night. The rug soon got torn and the owners wouldn't replace it. There was a lot of buzzing about the same owners and very young girls after the sessions. A story went around about one of them looking down the barrel of a revolver held by a very irate father. The holes in in the endeavor were starting to show through in more places than the carpet.

But threadbare as it was becoming, I was still there. Wizard was my sort-of official name because well...everybody had to have one. Then one day, another rumor became a fact...we were moving. The same less-than-reputable operators had decided to quit leasing the building (or the owners threw them out...never knew for sure) and buy a place across town.

Now my time was divided between helping to get the new place ready and running the old one in the interim. The saga of Roller World was underway. That's the next chapter...