“The smoky red light is bad isn’t it? Yeah. You want to avoid that.”
— Philip K. Dick, UBIK
While she stands at the rink railing, Felisa Funes, a dark haired woman dressed in a cape and additional flowy apparel, tells the story of a man with a goatee and coiffed hair who she knocked down roller skating.
“To keep him from falling,” explains Funes, “we were manhandling this poor man, trying to catch him. He slipped and then we caught him and we squeezed him. Then he slipped again.”
Standing next to her, Sigward Deiche, laughs happily. Wearing a striped linen shirt and white denim jeans, Deiche, with his hair chin length, describes his outfit as something a CIA cocaine smuggler might wear.
“You body checked him,” agrees Deiche. “And then you were groping him.”
“He had a little sequined ascot kind of thing,” says Funes. “And we were like, clutching and, like, just grabbing him. Poor guy.”
“You were trying to be decent and you just made it worse,” Deiche.
At the memory, Funes is overcome by laughter.
“And he’s like, ‘I’m okay. I’m okay.’ And then he just bee-lined to the side…”
“I saw a girl starting to go down,” Deiche offers, inspecting his fingernails. “Wobbling off her skates and she grabbed another girl’s ponytail and yanked her down backwards with her.”
“I thought they were friends, but they didn’t know each other.”
Wearing a taxi driver’s hat, a woman in tight short-shorts skates by. Then a ship’s captain. A bearded man in a loose floral dress. And then a man shirtless and pantless, sporting a banana hammock paired with just a silver sequined vest combo. He wears a giant squirrel head over his own. In endless iterations, Maya, this illusion which is life.
Over one hundred souls turned up to attend the fourth annual Catskill’s Roller Disco, Sean Nutley’s inspired throwback located at this 10,000 square foot roller rink in Accord. Risking bone breaks and salty tears, food and alcohol was available for a price.
The party pulled in attendees from surrounding townships, New York City and at least one confirmed couple from Berlin. Neon lights cast the happenings in a liminal multi-hued glow somewhere between futurism and no future at all. Take another loop around the polished and waxed wooden floor. The tide of roller skaters never ends.
Photographer and painter, Swan Moon and Jason Burgess came in together from Los Angeles just for the party.
“We were in Venice right before we came and there’s this freestyle skating that happens. Swan was roller skating, I was skateboarding,” Burgess says, showing a cell phone screen around, insisting that it be looked at. A real skate park on a real beach, Palm trees in the foreground, the Pacific Ocean in the background.
“Did you pay for that sunset,” asks a man wearing a bandanna and sunglasses. He wears a shirt with the sleeves cut off, denim shorts rolled up tight above the bottom of his thighs. “Jesus Christ, it’s perfect.”
Moon grew up in Los Angeles near Laurel Canyon, in a place with the grandiose name of Mount Olympus.
“Just outside of west Hollywood at the top of this hill,” Moon says. “It was literally like being in a suburb in the middle of nowhere. But the house was around 3500 square feet. The living room itself was like 1000 square feet. It had wooden floors. So to get exercise, I would roller skate around the living room.”
Stranger than fiction. Moon didn’t want to give her name at first because she said no one would believe it. It’s true there are more Moons in Los Angeles.
The one wearing the sunglasses, Jack Moore, polishes off a pilsner and asks the group if they believed they had lived and died before.
“I think that if we did,” says Burgess, “then everyone died in 2007. It’s like everyone’s fashion is at peak Vice, before they sold.”
“It’s definitely peak Millennial,” agrees Deiche. “Early American Apparel, leotards, really short shorts. That girl’s wearing a woven bikini,” says Deiche, pointing.
“The thongs,” Funes says, emphasizing her observation. “The ass action.”
“I think sequins especially look really good on the roller skating floor,” says Moon, “and jumpsuits.”
Deiche considers the sartorial drift.
“It’s a very analog night. And there’s no photobooth, which I appreciate.”
“But there is!” Funes says.
Deiche who claims Austrian and Dutch blood, roars in dismay and grumbles, “They don’t put photo booths in Berghain is all I’m saying.”
Deiche then explains that to gain entrance into the famous German night club, one must undergo an inscrutable selective process.
“Not by not being fancy,” says Deiche. “You just hit a weird mark that no one can predict beforehand. There’s one very tatted up old German man with giant gauges in all of his orifices who tells you whether or not you can go in.”
And then you can’t leave until the weekend is over.
About falling Manager for Skate Time Tara McFarlane has some thoughts.
“You’re going to fall,” says McFarlane. “It’s just, that’s the lifestyle. It’s a huge part of it. But we have amazing skate guards here who are trained to be on call for that type of thing. Everything is situational. So you just you take it as a circumstance. And if the person is really injured you deal with it.”
In spite of the pastime being haunted by injuries, (McFarlane wears wrist guards) she says it’s some people’s church, some people’s gym, some people’s social outing.
A curious benefit McFarlane proposes from the unique social nature of rollerskating at the rink is that along with the music, along with being surrounded by people under the neon lights, there isn’t the pressure or expectation to engage. “You’re in your own zone,” says McFarlane.
The last few years have been hard for those that need to be packed in the same room with a crowd of strangers. Missing the hot breath and the sweat of others, subconsciously deprived of the pheromone bath they crave, this may have some connection to the reported rise in numbers of those struggling with feelings of anxiety and depression.
“I think that’s why all the groping,” laughs Funes. “It’s good. It’s very refreshing. Like we’re falling on top of each other, we’re catching each other. We’re nearly missing each other. But I was smiling really big. Because it’s nice, organic, human interaction in a very friendly environment.”
We fall. We rise. We fall again.
Again and again at various happenings throughout the valley in the last few months a general mood lacking in pretense has been remarked upon so much that it’s becoming conspicuous.
The Honky Tonk night at the VFW in Kingston is a perfect example of that sort of all-are-welcome inclusivity, standing out in contrast to some of the famously pretentious and exclusive scenes still to be observed down in the Lower East Side and parts of Brooklyn over the last decade.
Locals unsure if they can take all the credit also aren’t sure who to blame and are even beginning to openly worry whether the Hudson Valley wasn’t becoming a sort of Millennial retirement community after the pandemic.
Honky Tonking? Rollerskating? Next comes benevolent societies.
But rather than some superficial version of middle American hospitality reimagined, this new mood of inclusiveness appears based on an anarchic philosophical drive that welcomes all by openly judging with no judgment and thus destabilizes rigid established hierarchies, now hopelessly confused.
If not from access to the internet nationally, then at least locally the mood seems to have emanated out of Bushwick and Ridgewood, a counter-intuitive concept until you see the train-wreck fashion combinations germinated there that eloquently display superficially the interior philosophy “I can do whatever I want.” And so can you. The only way to really be excluded now under this social expression is to not try at all.
Apathy rejected. Unless that’s your thing.
“That guy is not trying,” says Deiche, picking out a roller skater in a bland jeans and T-shirt combination, “so hard.”
But the question remains, why pay for the privilege to strap on roller skates, get boozed up and skate in circles?
“The only other times I went in circles on purpose,” recalls Moon, “I was studying Buddhism at a temple in West L.A. You’re encouraged to walk in circles and be present at all times.”
Circumambulation around a venerated object as an act of devotion.
“Have you heard of the death spiral?” asks Moore. “Ants, you know, they lay a pheromone trail. That’s how they find the way to where they’re going. How they find their way back and if the trail gets broken they just end up marching in an endless circle, going around and around and around following the ant in front until they die of exhaustion.”
“That’s not true!” objects Moon. ”Really? Because I have a really bad ant problem at my house and I’ve been thinking of how to make them die by disrupting the pheromone line.”
The center of the roller rink is empty.
“If you’re putting yourself on display,” says Burges, “you’re becoming an object. So when you’re out there moving around, you’re like a marble on a track that everybody else gets to look at. Of course, you also get to look at everyone looking at you. So there’s a certain double pleasure in seeing exactly what they’re seeing because you’re objectifying them as well.”
See and be seen.
I think when you’re roller skating, listening to really good music, you do have a sense of liberation like you’re flying. And in fact, you’re just going around in circles, but you’re so freed by the ease of movement, you’re just moving really fast.
Bliss.
A woman in a safari hat and a flowery Aloha shirt. A glittery cheerleader with tennis socks pulled high. An old gray haired man in T-shirt and jeans dancing expertly without losing forward motion. After building up speed, a punk rocker hugs his knees in a crouch, becoming a human cannonball on skates. The procession continues all the time in the background. And comes into focus.
Everyone is here. Hungry ghosts act like humans under the glow of the yellow neon. Under the reflection of the smoky red neon, humans act like animals. Avoid the green neon. Don’t trust a jealous god who won’t dance. They’ll pull you down. Like someone drowning they don’t even know they’re doing it. It’s not their fault.
As always, in the end, the roller skates have to be surrendered. Wearing referee stripes, Jaxson-Quinn stands in front of row upon row of roller skates which having been lent have been returned and having been returned will be lent again. But not tonight.
The vast room with the wooden floor is just as empty as any bar after closing time, the lights just as bright. The speakers have gone quiet. Exiting at last, outside into the liminal state between death and rebirth, the parking lot outside.
There are no street lamps. There are no stars. Spiritually on this night in Accord, the cold wind blows and the way forward is uncertain. The plot narrows. Everyone knows what this world is. But when the clouds move apart and the moon shines through from behind the clouds it isn’t so bad. The memory of bliss, and circling the empty center of it all.
Join the family! 
