Skating With Jesus, and Other Lessons Learned

Skate Heaven is located just outside Baton Rouge; only one exit away, in fact. But the minute you walk in, it's quite clear that you've left the city limits. For one thing, everyone smokes. As Lily and I walked up to the main entrance of the roller rink, an imposing group, varying in age from 18-65, sat on the steps, smoking and sporting more than their fair share of Looney Tunes tattoos on various calves and forearms.

My kid and I were immediately the subjects of mass squinty-eyed scrutiny, as if we were prized hams being appraised for the state fair. I took a gulp and nodded. "How y'all doin," I smiled.

We bought our tickets and walked inside, and I was thrilled. The place looked like it hadn't had a makeover or even a good vacuuming since 1985, and it smelled like sweaty feet and leather and hot dogs. The dull thump of the ancient speakers playing outdated rock music was delightful, and the unintentional kitsch of the place was captivating. The walls were airbrushed with images of roller skates with wings (get it?!!), and there were biblical psalms spray-painted all over the place like graffiti.

Skate Heaven indeed.

Though Lily is a novice roller skater at best, we still had a ball. She hooked up with a family of about 14 children, most of whom were girls around her age, and they clung to the wall and practiced together while I took a few runs around the rink on my own.

Skating by myself made me wistful, and suddenly I found myself getting sucked down a nostalgia hole, to the winter I was in sixth grade. My sister Lisa and I spent every day of our Christmas vacation that year down the street at Laces (soon to be renamed 'The Rolls', and abandoned by all respectable kids because roller rinks would quickly become unsavory hangouts for burnout latch key kids and the unspeakably nerdy).

For now though, Laces was the shit.

I rocked a gray sweater vest and my Sergio Valente jeans that were two-toned: gray stonewashed in the front and denim-colored in the back. Were I able to squeeze my hand into the front pocket of those skin-tight jeans, I'd find a 5 dollar bill my mother had given me to buy Lisa and me fat, hot, salty pretzels and cokes. Instead I spent most of the money at the vending machine, buying snickers bars because I believed the tv ads promising that "snickers really satisfies" and I needed my energy for an afternoon on the rink.

On my white skates I had fiberoptic pom poms that caught the glint of the strobe lights in the ceiling. On my skates, nothing could touch me. I felt like a queen. I even had a ridiculous skate-dance I'd made up to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" that involved some strange jutting arm-movements and made me look like a retarded majorette. But I thought I was so cool.

Thinking about the roller rink reminded me about some of the kids who hung out there. I mean, Lisa and I were only allowed there for a few hours in the afternoon, dropped off and picked up right in front in our powder blue Riviera, but there were kids who spent literally every day, all day at Laces. There was a girl named Dani, who was really Danielle, but she went by Dani because it was cool and grown-up and tomboyish. Dani had naturally curly, feathered hair and vacant brown eyes, almost black. I didn't know much about Dani except that she was in my grade and was bad at math (like me), and that she walked home from school alone and her mom never came to any school functions. But at Laces, Dani was a celebrity. Everyone knew her, and she got free slushies and everything. I heard she was even dating a guy who worked there, who was in high school.

Girls like Dani scared me. They seemed older than they should, like they'd seen way more than I had, things that i didn't want to see. They made me glad to come home to my house and my 12 year old black lab, to my mother cross-legged on the couch, compulsively sucking on sunflower seeds to quit smoking, filling our ashtrays with overflowing shells.

They made me feel like it was okay to still be a kid and to appreciate kid-things, like dinner at 6 pm and the dog barking when my dad got home and ice cream with granola and even for my parents' Saturday night date, when we'd always be left in the capable, responsible hands of Kate, our next-door neighbor and my favorite sitter. But we were never alone.

Nobody expected us to take care of ourselves.

Looking at Lily, skating along and clutching the worn, carpeted wall underneath a spinning disco ball while wearing smelly, rented kid skates, I made a little promise to myself that she would never have to be alone either.

And won't be...not as long as I could help it.