pigeon

skate pollution

“Same to you!”

Sadly, that’s the best I could come up with on the spot when some cool kid yelled “Skate pollution!” at me at Skateland, the first time I didn’t have to wear the dingy brown rental skates.

Skateland itself was, on the outside, also dingy and brown. Essentially a warehouse in a gravel lot alongside the shabby highway leading out of Cape Girardeau to the south — but that was all you needed, I suppose, in the very early 80s, which, as far as we knew, which wasn’t very far, was still more or less the late 70s.

But on the inside, it was a geode. Neon, ultraviolet, pulsing, shiny, dark and glistening with sequins and danger. The peculiar smell of the place like nothing else — it’s almost there, I can almost recollect it. Overtones of popcorn machine, undertones of hard floors sticky with spilled slushy. Elusive notes of pheromones, bathed in perfumes and colognes. Old shoes. Desire.

And the music. All the top 40 you could ever want. Upside down you’re turnin’ me, you give me love, instinctively! Somehow Diana Ross is all I can think of right now; she was the queen of Skateland I suppose, supplanting all lesser musical memories as of this writing. There had to have been slow songs too, though; I know this because that’s when the girls — the ones paired up with boys anyway — would all be skating backwards.

I had progressed, gradually, from skating with crude metal clamp-on skates, in our basement because the driveway at mom’s house was still gravel, to skating in the newly paved driveway but still with the spark-inducing metal skates, to finally, finally getting a real pair of actual skates that you wear like shoes, for a birthday or xmas or something. And they were glorious! Except—

My stepsister tried to be supportive, but I could tell that she was looking at them a little bit skeptically. First of all, they weren’t black, they were blue with a stripe. Second, they weren’t hi-tops, they were regular-shoe height. Third, the wheels were not standard-issue featureless smooth, they were sparkly. Finally, and most damningly, the wheel hubs made a sound to go along with the sparkle, a kind of muted, gritty crackle. (Why?? I still have no idea.)

They do look a little ... maybe just slightly ... girly, my stepsister finally admitted. But it’s fine! It’s OK! It doesn’t matter!

To my credit, I was mostly grateful for the skates. But obviously, there was a part of me that — you know how sometimes the almost thing seems even farther away from being the thing than just something that is totally, unambiguously not the thing at all?

Well, I still loved skating in the driveway, on sidewalks, in parking lots. My stepsister and I spent plenty of hours going around and around, talking, eating Now and Laters from the quick shop on the other end of the neighborhood, being each other’s confidante — every other weekend, that is, when she stayed at our house.

I don’t remember if I knew enough to dread going to Skateland the first time with my new skates, or if I was innocent enough to be going in blind. Either way, I was an odd duck. Half the kids had the dun brown rentals. The privileged half had the dead-on, exact, elite kind of skates — the ones that sold for a fortune and a half, right there at the front counter at Skateland, if you could afford it! And exactly one kid (me) had these unofficial, unserious, JC-Penney-catalog-lookin’ sparklin’ rice-krispie-soundin’ freaks of nature.

The funny thing is, my mom and stepdad could easily have afforded the status-symbol skates. But my mom was fully in charge of decision making for purchases like that, and she would generally speaking brook no nonsense when it came to everyone-else-has-them extravagances. I respect her for that — now. In most cases, even then, I think I mostly understood her point of view. But in this one highly-charged environment, this vortex on the threshold of pubescence, it would have been nice to have, maybe just this once, the proper uniform?

Ah, perspective. I did have the proper uniform, where it really counts. All the comforts I took for granted. Just being white in southeast Missouri, I mean, come on! I’m not gonna look back at pre-teen cringe and conclude anything was special about it. And it’s not even just that it hurt my feelings, when that kid rolled past me, all debonair, giving me a poisonous look and denouncing my presence as skate pollution. It did hurt my feelings of course, in fact it filled me with impotent rage. But in probing the shadowier corners of this little box of memory, I’m finding a whiff of something else in there: a protective defensiveness of my dumb skates.

I loved those alternate weekends when my stepsister came over. Together we messed up my rigorously cleaned room. We gossipped. We talked about all the juicy stuff I thought I was too cool and smart and detached to care about. She taught me what it was like to not be me. She had a directness, a matter of fact way of observing people’s behaviors that was just so foreign to me. I was always so careful. I wouldn’t say “ball” if I thought someone would hear me and snicker. She didn’t give a fuck what she said, or so it seemed to me at the time.

I haven’t talked to her for months, and I could blame it on how messed up and weird she’s been lately, but fuck me, that’s fucked up. I need to at least try. Thanks for letting me admit this, pigeon. This pigeon is a crow after all, seems like.

So, what if those goofy glittery crunchy-wheeled skates were just part of what I wore when I was allowed to be the me that I could be when I was hanging out with her? How dare some pencil-necked squinty-eyed no-imagination perma-sneering dick-brain dumbass boy think he had a say in what’s important?

Still. I still feel that way. When my one daughter feels like she has to wear makeup just to go to a grocery store for some milk or whatever. When my other daughter kept going back to a boy who didn’t know what he wanted and didn’t know how not to take his failures out on her. Phones. Fuckin’ phones, man. Conformity’s affordances are so ubiquitous now. Skateland at least had boundaries. It felt bigger on the inside than the outside; that was its danger and its charm. But this phone shit has no size. It’s just in the air, the water, the energy. Brain pollution. It has no pungent, perfect smell.

We’re going to South Dakota for spring break. We will go outside. Touch grass (lol). Hear the music of the wind in the pines. Explore. Feed the burros and talk about whatever. Maybe we’ll find a geode.