roller skates

I never had a bicycle as a kid. I suppose I could have asked for one. I don’t think it ever occurred to me. Maybe I thought it would be too difficult. I wonder how different my life would be today if I’d had a bike. Would I be thinner? Would I be more confident in my physical abilities? Would I have strong ankles, the kind that don’t snap an Achilles tendon when you trip on your way to Harold’s Chicken Shack? Perhaps the lonely bicycle that now languishes in my garage would get more use. At least I only spent $50 on it.

But what I did have were roller skates. At least two or three pairs over the years, but the ones that stick with me were bright blue with yellow stripes. They looked like regular shoes that someone had bolted wheels on, with a polyurethane stopper on the toe that I never learned how to use properly. I just coasted until I was slow enough to grab on to something, or gently bump into a wall. Bump. Skating time over.

I go out the back door to our apartment, down the stairs with peeling green paint, in my socks. On the final step, I sit and put on my skates. I clip my Walkman to my jeans. What cassette will I skate to today? Def Leppard’s Pyromania? The Rolling Stones’ Aftermath? Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here? There’s that part right before the title song starts where the music suddenly sounds like it’s coming from a radio in another room. For a long time I thought it was a defect in the tape.

Through the winding concrete behind the condos, the concrete cracked and broken in spots I had memorized as obstacles. Out onto Cornell Avenue. Up and down Cornell, between 51st and 53rd. Up and down, back and forth. Music in my ears. Energy I don’t have any longer. At 51st, if you look left there’s the viaduct with the florist and in the deep murk of the tunnel is the entrance to the El station.

Heading back towards 53rd. There’s the apartment of a friend. He had a wonderful, fat, smiling Mexican mother whose kitchen smelled like mysterious meats and spices. When we waited for the school bus in the bitter Chicago winter, she would stomp her feet and tell us that’s the way to stay warm. It works, for a while anyway.

There’s the house of a friend who stopped being a friend. He just decided to mock me one day, in front of his other friends. Those childhood stings of ostracization. That still hurts, dude. And then I remember I did the same kind of thing to the kid downstairs, and that hurts more.

On the east side of the street is a big apartment building. I never went inside, but our TV could pick up the closed circuit camera in the entrance. It was a 24-hour show we called “Lobby.” Had the camera been angled differently, someone might have seen me skating by, in black and white.

Here is Akiba-Schechter, the Jewish school where I went to kindergarten for half a year. Much vaguer memories here. Nap time on the floor. A picture of me wearing a yarmulke, something I would never do again. A girl I thought was cute. Even back then I thought girls were cute. A teacher with a beehive hairdo, another one with glasses. One had a funny name, like Hasselrose or something. Rosenhassel? No, that’s way off. It’ll come to me as I’m drifting off to sleep one night, and I’ll be satisfied for a moment.

Just past the school (or is it before the school? I thought my memory of the layout was so much clearer) is another friend’s apartment. One day I dumped his little sister’s toys down an open manhole. For no reason at all, just to watch them fall into the black water below. She cried and their mother came out and yelled at me. What a little douchebag I was! The building had one of those rickety outside wooden stairways, held together by rusty nails and nostalgia.

And there’s a field of long weeds and grass, strewn with trash treasures. Old lighters, beer cans, shoes. Dreams of finding an envelope stuffed with hundred dollar bills. Once I flung lit matches into the grass, to see it burn. Not just a douchebag, a pyromaniac douchebag.

Across the street is an alleyway behind the Chinese restaurant where a scene from The Package was shot. I never saw the movie and I never ate there. But if you knocked on on the back door, one of the dishwashers would give you a little carton of milk, the kind you’d get with your lunch at school. Sometimes he’d give you chocolate milk.

Up and down, back and forth. The whirr-click of the wheels on the pavement, the rhythm of the breaks in the sidewalk. Whirr, click, whirr, click. The Walkman’s batteries are dying. I can’t tell right away. I gradually realize the music sounds a little slower than it should. One more circuit, 51st to 53rd and back. The sky gets dark. It’s dinner time, and I have to homework to do, which I probably won’t do.