Old school

Today I went roller skating with some friends. No, not roller blading. Roller skating.

The rink was on the fifth floor of a run-down building with no elevator. Our skates were brown and weathered, with laces that had already fallen apart and been "repaired" by tying two broken strings together. The wheels were the classic 1970s orange.

When we arrived, the rink was all but empty. I had resigned myself to a sad affair, with the five of us wobbling around the rink at a snail’s pace for an hour before getting bored and leaving.

How wrong I was.

Just a few minutes after we got there, the regulars arrived, in the form of high school dropouts with punk haircuts, low slung jeans, wife beaters, black jackets, and cigarettes dangling from their lips.

Oh. My. God.

Within seconds, these "street toughs" were actually holding hands and dancing around the rink. At first, it started out simple. They zipped around at lightning speed, forwards, backwards, changing direction like it was the easiest thing in the world. Their footwork was seriously worthy of Olympic figure skating. Crossovers, twirls, skips, jumps. And this was just the warm-up.

Soon, whole chains of guys started racing around the rink together. Like, five or six of them holding hands and going super fast. The rink was shaped like a track, with two poles in the middle: one at each end. When they got to a pole, the person on the inside grabbed it and whipped the whole chain around, sending the person on the outside flying around the curve. I was lucky enough to join one of these chains at one point, and let me tell you. It’s damn scary. And I was towards the inside.

Other craziness ensued. For example, girls who fell down and pretended to not want to get back up would be picked up by several guys on skates and dragged kicking and screaming to a mountain of boxes piled in a corner, where they would be deposited without ceremony.

The coolest thing though, was when this bad-ass guy wearing army pants (and who totally could have played Bill Sykes in “Oliver”) grabbed both hands of some girl and started spinning around in a circle. After a few seconds of this, the girl fell on her stomach, and I thought the “game” had come to an unfortunate end, but the guy kept spinning and eventually the girl became airborne, flying around him as he spun wildly around on his skates. The entire rink had stopped skating and gathered around to watch and cheer. The guy never even took his cigarette out of his mouth.

A far cry from doing the hokey-pokey at a third grade birthday party, huh?