I've been alive for 24 years now, I've been a dude for all of them, and I therefore don't roller-skate. Granted, back in elementary school—before we knew what the hell a dance was, let alone a club; back when boys received their introductions to the sweet delicacies of girls at skating rinks—I gave it a try. To no avail. I was that fat kid who inched along the rink with his hands fastened to the wall the whole damn way. And because chicks back then didn't dig dudes who couldn't skate, nor did they get giggly over boys with double chins and husky-sized pants, I was hopeless, and I sure as hell didn't get the girly assistance I was looking for the one time I did venture out to the deep sea, that formidable center of the rink. The day has been branded into my memory—September 4, 1991: my 10th birthday, and the third day of my fifth-grade year—and I can recall with clarity how I wobbled out there, red, round and sweating like a damn pig on the rotisserie, feeling the eyes of my classmates as they glided around me in concentric circles like birds. The buzzards. Even to this day I've never felt as alone as I did in that eternal moment. I'd been abandoned to my fate.
I fell, of course, and in the worst way possible: straight on my ass, in the middle of the rink, with a resounding thud, to the uproar of my classmates—above all, the girls.
It was horrible. Like most boys my age, I had by then already entered my lifelong enslavement to the allure of the opposite sex, and so I took it upon myself to learn the whole devilish business of roller-skating, even if it killed me. And in about six months, and with unprecedented resilience—inspired by my tyrannical hormones, no doubt—I got the hang of it. The only problem was, by the time I did, you were definitely gay if you roller-skated.
Unless you were a girl. Then it was okay. But the truth is that our fathers' time had passed; the choreographed roller derbies of the '70s, acted out on banked rinks, were outdated, and chicks serving burgers on eight wheels weren't as hot as they had been. And girls were ditching the skates at an earlier age than their mothers had, in favor of makeup, and shopping, and scrutinizing magazines, and whatever the hell else womenfolk do in their ceaseless pursuit of prettiness.
Who, back then, would have guessed that a decade later a revival of roller-skating would sweep through the United States, picking up girls of various backgrounds looking for an escape from the culture of prettiness—girls who just wanted to be themselves, in the good company of like-minded girls? Because that's what happened: At the turn of the millennium, a new variation of the roller derby sport that had made a name for itself in the '50s arose, and girls from all over the nation formed teams, re-baptized themselves with new, flamboyant names, under which they could submit to their natural impulses, and relearned the arts and sciences of roller-skating. In 2004, the Women's Flat Track Derby Association emerged, establishing itself as the governing body over the confederation of leagues and independent teams around the nation, and it began promoting roller derby as a bona fide sport for women. And just over a year ago, two girls, Ivanna S. Pankin and Trish the Dish, brought the esprit de corps to Las Vegas.
Ivanna, a robust blond and a stellar skater, had ignited the movement in Arizona, where there were four teams, intra-league play and more than 100 girls on skates. But then she wanted something more. Her vision was to play all interleague games with unfamiliar girls, as professional sports teams do, and thus depart from the intramural atmosphere of Arizona, where all the girls had made for inexpedient play and progress, had begun to stir girly drama and had deviated the reborn sport from its purpose with their hunger for press and glamour. And so she and her girlfriend Trish, an athletic girl with one of them cool-as-hell auras about her, whom Ivanna met playing in Arizona, started contemplating Southern Nevada.
"We just had a whole different way of thinking," says Ivanna. "And then we came here to Las Vegas and made exactly what we wanted."
And that's a team of girls committed to nothing but one another and the sport itself, and who don't in reality give a damn about being pretty.
Now, almost a year later, they have the Sin City Neander Dolls, a competitive team of rollergirls, still in the process of refinement, who, sure enough, ain't all that pretty. They'll be the first to admit it. But that's not to say they're not attractive. They are. Them girls are tough and eccentric and forthright and fun; and I don't care who you are—that's sexy.
They go by names like AWOL, GI Jade and Slurpee (number 7-11); Pearly Gates, Shawna th'Dead and Bootsi Call (number 3 a.m.); and one player, a girl by the name of GoGo, told me, "Nobody calls anyone by their real names around here—I don't think I even know the real names of most of our girls."
They've made it thus far on their own, an inclusive group of girls in a sport exclusive to females, who delegate operational responsibilities among themselves. For example, Ivanna and Trish, the team leaders, have put Slurpee in charge of media requests, and GoGo, scavenging available grant money.
"We'd like more sponsors, but we don't need them," Ivanna and Trish say in tandem, as they often do. "We might be traveling by the cheapest rates, and we might be living game-check to game-check, but we're self-sufficient."
Then Trish, holding aside her inseparable cigarette, adds:
"It takes about $150 to $200 to start—to buy skates, pads, a mouthpiece, insurance, track fees, all that. And it takes a lot of commitment—we play up to five times a week. But once you start to play, it gets in your blood."
The girls go about town in bandanas with colored, unavoidable hair, cutoff shirts with showcased tattoos of the most lurid sort, short skirts with ripped fishnet stockings and the thighs of well-bred mares, and they have already left their mark in this city with their legendary carousing and godforsaken parties. And for 10 days this summer—July 28 through August 6—they'll have been joined by a thousand girls just like them, rollergirls from around the country converging their lives in Las Vegas for the second annual RollerCon extravaganza.
Hosted by the Sin City rollergirls, the conference has so far included workshops, scrimmages (at the Neander Dolls' practice rink at Flamingo Banks Park) and—of course—precipitous parties; and on August 4 and 5, this Friday and Saturday, Fremont Street will host games at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m., just as it did last week, in front of a raucous crowd of happy tourists. For many, including myself, it has been a crash course into the heart-racing sport of roller derby.
From a rinkside view, four girls from each team—blockers—line up on one line, and, 20 feet behind them, a girl from each team—the jammer—takes a stance at another starting line. The first whistle blows and the blockers skate clockwise around the track, bumping and bruising and sometimes checking one another like maniacs, in an incessant effort to gain position—a position that will allow them to play gatekeeper with the jammers, who sprint with the second whistle to catch up to the pugnacious pack, trying then to permeate it with slick bursts of speed and furtive dodges, because a team scores a point with every member of the opposing team a jammer passes (starting on her second trip through the pack). Girls—both blockers and jammers—can't ease their guard for a even a moment, because in the split second they do—BOOM: WIIIPPPEEEOOOUUUTTT!!!
Like all great sports, roller derby is a simple game at its core. It's played in two halves, 20 minutes each, divided into rounds that last up to two minutes at a time and run over with unadulterated adrenaline.
"People look at these girls and say ‘Oh, they're fat,'" says Double Agent, a congenial roller-derby enthusiast who has suffered injuries to his back, his hips, and his limbs in bouts he's refereed (always, he says, to the delight of the crowd). "But I'll tell you, these girls can move—and nothing's choreographed."
In just five years, the athleticism in the game has advanced so rapidly that Ivanna believes it will soon leave her behind. "I'm 36, I'm overweight, I drink, I smoke," she says. "In five more years it will be all 19-, 20-year-old girls, all superior athletes."
The league right now is in its developmental stages. Rules are revisited and often revised each year. Refs must still practice with teams to commit the rules and tendencies of the game to memory. Teams sprout up everywhere; girls who just entered adulthood to girls who just became grandmothers are joining; and RollerCon itself has swelled by seven days and hundreds of attendees in only its second year.
And it's been a hell of a time so far. They are an irresistible group, the viragos of RollerCon, and if there is one thread that weaves them all together, besides their craze for roller derby, it's that they are nonconformists in mind and body who nevertheless seek fellowship. Above all from those who can best relate: other girls molded from the indie spirit.
"A lot of these girls come to the sport just because they've never been part of a team before," says referee Deni, a former hockey player who often practices with the Neander Dolls. "More than anything, I think, they're looking for that sisterhood."
It's true. Girls on the Sin City team tell me there's hardly a city where, if they were ever stranded, they couldn't call on someone to rescue them, or just bide time with them over rounds of drinks. They tell me that when teams travel to Las Vegas they often invite them to stay at their homes, and vice versa. They tell me it's been, in just under a year's time, an experience of companionship like no other.
And at midnight on Saturday, July 29, I watched them consecrate these interstate friendships in a massive matrimonial ceremony held under a toenail moon. Derby marriages, they called them. Girls vowed their eternal friendship and lifelong fidelity to one another, in front of the Hogs & Heifers Saloon Downtown, and then commenced the honeymoon in the biker's bar without delay.
There was Slurpee and AWOL and Pearly Gates on the bartop, dancing in their short game skirts above bedazzled guys. There were bartenders screaming through megaphones at patrons audacious enough to be on their cell phones and not in the moment. There was Keith Richards' sinister riff from "Sympathy for the Devil," heightening the zip of the beer in the hands of rollergirls, who sang in concert with Mick Jagger:
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
Jessica Hirshon, director of marketing and special events at Hogs & Heifers, which not only sponsors the Sin City rollergirls but also plays host to their untamable after-parties, catches the spirit of the Neander Dolls with one precise exasperation: "Wow, those girls know how to party!"
And they had damn good reason, too. The girls had just won an intense bout with the Atlanta Rollergirls, 66 to 43, in front of a solid, voluminous crowd at the Cashman Event Center, improving their record to 8-3 this year.
It had been a dynamic atmosphere from the beginning, complete with music, announcers instigating the crowd into frenzies and girls of all ages, races, creeds and nationalities, acting like uninhibited goofballs. The bout's first whistle shot dead the nerves that had been plaguing the girls all day, and the pace at which the players circled the track, viscous like bumper cars, allowed the audience, sitting not just in the seats up in the stands but also Indian-style around the open rink, to see every girl's every move. Blockers battled and grounded against one another, jockeying for position around every inch of the rink, and jammers tried to snake, rabbit or sometimes even downright bull their way through the pack, the crowd cheering each time they did, as loud as a football stadium when a running back breaks free. And they roared like Romans with every hit, spill and wipeout, above all if the girl landed in their laps.
There were girls flattened, girls crushed; girls flung around the bend, girls stuffed. It's a sport with little rhythm, less grace and no mercy. There were girls cheering, girls cursing; girls glorified, even if only for that spectacular hour, and girls shining with sweat. In my 24 years, the majority of them engrossed in the mysterious ways of women, I've never seen such a sheer display of empowerment.
In short, it was just as physical and fierce as I had heard it would be before I had encountered the Sin City rollergirls last week. Which is exactly why I lost the serenity with which I used to breathe when I learned I was to skate with them.
In a typical week, the girls practice four times, with Thursday night's session set aside for rookies. Perfect for a dude like me, I figured, and so set that as my introductory date. How the hell was I to know that I'd be the only novice there that night?
Having not skated in 14 years, I arrived at Flamingo Banks early, took my roller skates to a remote corner of the park and resolved to conquer the demons of my past before practice started. I sat on a low wall, laced the damn things up and stood on uncertain legs. One baby-step at a time, I distanced myself from the wall. I gained confidence in my stability. I thought, Hell, maybe it was just the weight. Now that I'm not a butterball, skating ain't that difficult. And then: PPPHHHHEEEEWWW—there I was, suspended in the air, cursing my abominable fate, about to land so hard on my ass that I'd feel the impact of the pavement in my larynx; and then, of course, the nightmare of the fifth grade struck down upon me like a summer monsoon, and I gasped.
I didn't improve any by the time the girls arrived and practice was to start. And they didn't quell a single one of my worries, either; not with their tattoos, their size, their unsmiling temperaments, their war wounds, their stories of rage and destruction, told without remorse or pity.
Ah, hell, I thought. Twenty-four years as a man coping with this world, and it has all come to this. Ah, hell.
The girls began to circle the rink, picking up their pace as they warmed up, perspiration in the 95-degree night turning their skin slick and shiny, like a shark's. As slow as possible I put on my knee pads, then my elbow pads, then my wrist guards, then my helmet; and then, while the girls continued to circle, I prayed to the good Lord to deliver me from my evil hour.
It must have worked. I was saved from that formidable tank on account of my limitation: I still couldn't skate. And thus I was prohibited from entering the rink. And so instead of practicing that night, the girls helped me in my fruitless endeavor to relearn the fundamentals of floating on wheels. One by one, and sometimes in groups, they rolled by my side, telling me to keep my knees bent and ass out, reminding me to lean forward and to always fall on my knees—never backward—and demonstrating to me the deft movements that allow one to cross over, or negotiate the rink's bend, or come to an eventless stop.
They had compassion and patience, as if they had helped many before me (and, in fact, they had, because the good majority of Neander Dolls had come to their first practice with stories similar to mine), and one, Bootsi Call, even grabbed my hands and helped me around the track, rolling backward, enduring my incorrigible awkwardness without laughter, even when I committed the cardinal sin of falling backward, pulling her on top of me.
"That wasn't a perverted move on my part," I said, panting, sweating, red with embarrassment.
She rose, gathered herself, helped me up, and said: "Well, maybe it was one on mine."
By the time I left the rink that night, my body sore but my soul at ease, it was revealed to me that these days chicks dig dudes who can't skate. At least these kick-ass girls do, anyway.