In the fifth grade, my neighbor and good buddy J.J. had a poem published in the literary magazine of our all-boys elementary school. The poem, titled “Wheels,” described people getting around the city on buses, bicycles, skateboards, and roller skates: “Big wheels, little wheels . . . ” Boys being boys, or brutes, we gave J.J. a fair amount of crap for it. “Wheels, wheels, wheels,” delivered in a mocking, mewling voice, became a regular taunt, until one day after school, out on East Eighty-sixth Street, near the Papaya King hot-dog counter, J.J. snapped. He took a swing at one of the guys giving him a hard time and then tossed him into a mountain of garbage bags on the curb. That put an end to the teasing, but the refrain lived on in our cockroach brains, and it still pops into my head, now and then, when I’m on the move, via one wheeled conveyance or another.
Fifth grade was 1980, the year of the city’s great roller-skating boom. When I say roller skates, I mean the old quads, each with two side-by-side pairs of polyurethane wheels and a rubber toe stopper. We all had these. Some kids had sneaker skates, the spawn of a track shoe and a monster truck; others had the figure-skating boot. Sometimes we skated to school, swerving in and out of traffic, without helmets or pads. Parents threw kids’ birthday parties at the Roxy roller disco, in the badlands near the west-Chelsea piers, or closer to home, in Yorkville, at a basement lair called Wednesday’s, on East Eighty-sixth Street. We spooled around counterclockwise and pulled moves—crack the whip, shoot the duck—to “Off the Wall” and “Funkytown.”
The whole city seemed to be on skates. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the polyurethane wheels, an innovation borrowed from skateboarding, which made for a smooth and pleasingly quiet glide around a manic and congested town. Or maybe it was a culmination of the seventies—a ripening, or overripening, of grooviness. Roller disco, like disco itself, and a lot of other stuff, started out as a gay and Black thing and then spread to the masses. The epicenter of the fad was a famous roller disco, in Brooklyn, called the Empire Rollerdrome, but that was a long way from Yorkville. My friends and I—wiry bowl-cut squares and wise-asses, in reversible athletic T-shirts and short gym shorts (this was 1980, Your Honor)—mostly had to settle for Central Park, where we usually wound up at the Skate Circle, a congregation of skaters of all ages, colors, and orientations getting down to someone’s giganto boom box on a span of good pavement near the Bandshell. We sought out steeper sections and set up slalom courses, using our old Playskool blocks, and timed our runs, on a Casio watch that one of us got for Christmas. Back home, we watched Roller Derby on cable and “The Warriors” on Betamax. We laughed at the Punks, the overall-clad gang that attacks the Warriors in the subway-station bathroom at Union Square. The leader of the Punks is on roller skates.