So Rollerworld rolled on. It was a dream and a nightmare all at once. There were some really, really good skaters around and we'd be on the floor for hours sometimes. People came from out of town but we started to realize they didn't come back very often. The writing was on the wall.
We still ran some huge sessions in the winter but summer was just dead. There was never any air conditioning so even night sessions were sometimes nothing but sweat baths. Leaving the doors open to get some air invited bugs, a parade of kids trying to sneak in or out, more trouble with alcohol and the inevitable fights. On humid July and August nights, it was exhausting to get through six hour sessions...even if only 20 or 30 people showed up.
Suddenly, things weren't so bright as they'd been in the beginning. One of the owners converted the old lounge/office/locker rooms from the tennis courts into an apartment of sorts and lived there full time early on and nothing good came of it. I wondered often how they got this one past the zoning officers but nothing seemed to happen.
This guy was sketchy at best and even though he made me a 'manager' (which meant pretty much nothing except I worked more), I very much doubted what we were up to.
At some point, he brought in a half-built hotrod coupe and a worn out Caddy limousine that were supposed to be classy but just seemed shoddy as hell. There was a lot of pretenses going on and there started to be an undercurrent that all was definitely not well. He eventually made a pass at my girlfriend and that was nearly the end of all of it. Yeah...things were going downhill fast.
Through all that though, we skated. We tended to travel more to other places since at that time, there was dozens near-ish to choose from. Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, anywhere we could find. Everywhere, skating was still big but the cracks were showing.
At work at RollerWorld, we seemed to have more troubles. To get more cash at the door, they allowed people in that in times past we would have barred. Drunk kids, non-skaters just hanging out led to fights in the bathrooms and parking lot. We apparently couldn't afford security anymore so the off-duty cops disappeared and it got worse. We started hearing that parents wouldn't let their kids come anymore. Some of it was the owner's predilection for partying and young girls. There was a fight in the restroom that ended up with a razor blade and a badly cut girl. It was like a downward spiral.
I stopped being a full-timer and only worked a session or two skate guarding or running the DJ booth. The fizz was gone and it was time to call it a day. There was no money so it was back to only running the lights and heat when we absolutely had to. The snack bar didn't have snacks and the rental skates were falling apart. I can't really remember the last time I skated on the big floor but I know by then it was just dirty, cold and dismal. There had been too many bad nights of finding drunks in the dumpster, breaking up fights in the bathrooms, cleaning up puke in the corners and watching it all fall apart. The monster went under and became a mall. Last I knew, there was still a couple of the stores in it with hard rock maple floor that once upon a time...had my wheels on it.
For a while, I wound up working at a rink in Camillus where I'd load the saddlebags of my Harley with skates and records and ride up to do sessions on the weekend. That was fun for a while too but in the end, they couldn't keep it going for a lot of the same reasons and it folded up when the money ran out.
RollerWorld had a brief and awful reprise at another location in an old building downtown. The same creepy guys took a shot at doing everything on the cheap once again after it failed so spectacularly the first time. The floor was flakeboard and absolutely the worst. The roof leaked. It was full of really shady people. The sound was recycled from the place on Triphammer Road and was also really bad. I went there once, stayed about an hour and vowed never to do that again. It closed up for well and all after only a few months. I never felt bad about it.
So it all came back to where it started. The rinks were gone and have never yet returned. I'd like to think the craze will come around again someday before I'm too old to totter around the floor but I'm not counting on it.
In the meantime, I still skate when I can. Someday I'll be retired and hopefully can still show the newbies a thing or two. I've got a couple of grandkids to get on wheels someday as well so I can't give up yet.
