The lights are up, the scoreboard projected on a screen as large as the façade of a one-story building.
Lion Bone, the referee with a white mustache and ponytail, he of the sparkling helmet – like a gold and glittery stretched snakeskin – glides by.
The action has started to pick up, the physical back and forth, the two teams at elbow’s distance on roller skates, unable to throw punches, sort of throwing their bodies at each other, unable to gain leverage on their roller skate wheels.
From a dead stop, Pixie Stix was high stepping on her toe stops to gain quick momentum… like hurrying forwards in pointe shoes through an unwilling sidewalk crowd near 34th Street and 8th.
Her jammer counterpart Chopstick Murphy brought an opponent down to the wood rink floor and skated on.
It’s May 11 at the Skate Time roller rink in Accord and this season’s opener in a flat track roller derby league has kicked off with a contest between hometown heroes of the Mid Hudson Misfits and the away team, Violet Uprising, of the Dirty Jersey Roller Derby.
The seats right up against the plexiglass barrier – “suicide seating” – means just what it sounds like. Conceivably a skater losing control could barrel over, roller skates over tea kettle.
A crowd of 70 fans are sharing the risk by degrees. They’ve come out ahead of the first period, a thirty-minute stretch divided into two-minute increments, bringing collapsible camping chairs. By the second period the crowd will have doubled. The noise will have increased.
There’s a God voice amplified from the DJ booth calling the action, naming names, cracking the language whip.
Barbie Wire née Kendal Malia sits rinkside, willing the action.
“I started skating in 2008,” says Wire, temporarily inactive in the sport. “This is in Fresno, California. I was 25. My mom got recruited at a bar by these women that were going out and trying to build a team and when she came home, she goes, “Ken, you gotta do this with me! I was like, no way, Mom. I am too meek and shy. Those big, mean girls are not gonna like my tall, skinny, blonde- you know- those girls would beat my ass.”
The game works like this. One of the skaters – the jammer – wears a star emblazoned knitted swath of cloth over their helmet.
“It’s called a panty,” says Wire.
The rest of the girls are blockers.
“It’s offense and defense at the same time,” Wire explains. “The jammer scores points for each opposing player that they pass. So you’re trying to get your jammer through while simultaneously blocking the opposing jammer.”
The two jammers each start behind the pack and they must get through.
To be a good jammer, one must have the ability to duck and avoid opponents, sneak through gaps, and possess excellent footwork. It’s also essential to jump over girls lying down without slowing down and maintain awareness of everything happening on the track. These are the qualities that define a good jammer.
When the jammer breaks free, there is a moment of peace. The rink is clear and uncluttered, but the game play is timed and speed of the action is relevant. The jammer hustles around and steels herself before crashing back into the pack and the struggle begins anew.
“You can’t hit from the back,” says Wire. “You can’t hit above the shoulder or below the knee. You can’t elbow. You can’t, you know, head-butt. There’s a few ways you can knock another player out of bounds or down. You’re knocking girls down for f–king sure.”
Blocking is done with the shoulders, hips and torso. No stiff-arming.
“When it’s bad, it is bad. It is a pileup,” confirmed Tailgunner Flo, team member of the Misfits. “Imagine heavy metal skates, if you’ve ever tried to catch yourself from falling, and then imagine ten people on a track, two of them are fighting each other for the same position, while two that have stars on their heads are racing each other through this freaking washing machine cycle that we call a game.”
Which is fun. So says Flo.
“Tailbone injuries are pretty common,” says Wire. “ I had a tooth knocked out once.”
“Maybe if Sassy had practiced last week, she would have been prepared,” hectored the voice of God from the DJ booth.
To play the sport, carrying insurance is not optional. For the season opener, five referees are on deck, skating alongside the rolling melee to keep game play clean. Even though this is a recreational league, safety standards are set by the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), the premiere international governing body of roller derby. Everyone pronounces it “wiffda” and wiffda’s rules are canon.
Any skater who runs afoul of the rules is sent off to the penalty box, placing their team at a disadvantage. They have to hang around on the sidelines, helpless to intervene in an imaginary box below the DJ booth from whence calls the God voice.
A handful of EMT’s stick out not because they’re wearing uniforms, but because they are so pedestrian. Wearing street clothes and street shoes in the center of the ring, they are the only ones incapable of gliding.
“In the early 2000s, there was a big resurgence that started in Texas,” says Wire. “Then it was a little more for show. It was a little more kitschy. By the time I started, we were wearing fun skirts and thigh-highs and ruffles. It was fishnets and face paint and fun names. But then we wanted to be taken more seriously. So some teams even did away with the roller derby names, which was a really big deal too, and just started skating with their given names. But that was one thing that kind of stuck. It’s like an alter ego, their roller derby names.”
Chopstick Murphy, Jane Bondage, Tail Gunner Flo, Rainbow Blight, Sprite Lee Cricket, Phoenix NV, Bel Bearings, Nurse Ratchet, and so on. And the refs adopt names too.
Swiss Mischeif. Sassy Kaboom. Lone bone. Referee Chris Raftis calls himself Chris Raftis.
“My mother had a really great name,” said Wire. “Her name was One Lung Ho because she actually had one lung.”
Tailgunner Flo’s name is based off of Tailgunner Joe, which was reportedly Senator Joe McCarthy’s nickname in World War II – that and a positive experience she had at a biker bar raising money for charity. A man singing karaoke was a tailgunner in a biker gang, which is the one who rides at the back of the formation, and the connection struck a spark.
“And then my friend of mine, he was like, ‘You know, tailgunners shoot people from the back of the plane.’ Like a bomber, like the huge bomber war machines. And they rained down bullets. And my number was B-52, which was the Stratofortress, they had these deadly tailgunners that were just used for annihilation. And if you know Joe McCarthy and you’re familiar with McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States, he was pretty terrible.”
Fashion-wise, there’s nothing more risqué here on skates than the female form itself. Most of the skaters wear athletic shorts and tank top jerseys. Knee pads, elbow pads, mouth guards and helmets. Lion Bone wears a pleated short black leather skirt under his referee black and white vertical stripes.
During its heyday of outré fashion mingled with full contact sport, Tail Gunner Flo – formerly a skater née roller girl in the New York City of the 2008 Gotham Girls Roller Derby – has held onto her ripped up fishnets.
An ageless woman among the spectators, known for her no-nonsense attitude and sharp-angled haircut, immediately bonded with another woman who had shoulder-length, curled brunette hair. She was eager to praise Chopstick Murphy, who, it turned out, was her daughter-in-law from the Bronx.
“They all have joke names,” she tried to explain. “Chopstick, and then my son’s last name is Murphy.”
“But there’s a band who you might know as well, so it’s another pun,” observed the brunette.
The action stops and starts, the blockers struggle, the jammer finds a way through or gets knocked over the boundary lines, gets knocked down onto the wood and has to skate back behind the blockers and try to get through all over again.
Number 451, whose name remains unknown, from Jersey, was hell on wheels and absolutely unstoppable.
“Lining up for the next jam is Sexy Kaboom,” says the voice of God. “Lots of action in that penalty box.”
During halftime, two gentlemen brought their drinks outside. One had a luscious mane of golden hair ringlets with shaved sides, while the other was unshaven and wore a baseball cap. They are torn somewhere in between celebrating and commiserating.
They wanted to know: What exactly is happening in Accord? Golden mane shared that there is the feeling that the town has been built over sacred land, that the current residents and those to come, regardless of their affiliation, have been cursed to suffer together the repeating waves of flotsam and jetsam, the stylishly signaling habitués of New York City, now irresistibly attracted by the landlocked shores of this South County Cairo.
It doesn’t matter that no one knows what a hipster is anymore, not exactly. Each subsequent generation invents and then suffers at the hands of the hipster-isms created in their own age. Whether it’s the clothing, the language, the attitude or the social mores, when amplified to an insufferable pitch by the combined resources of wealth and the inexperience of youth, one can see them as clearly as a slow bopper coming down the subway platform from three cars away. The Nemesis. Comeuppance.
As I am, so you shall be, the curse of being fixed in time. Justice rained down on the head for standing still, the punishment for not dying first, as exemplified by the bad etiquette demonstrated by being a widower.
But this is only a hymn from the parking lot of Skate Time in Accord, a reflection upon the complaints of the locals, not a judgment of tonight’s entertainment.
The action became noticeably rougher in the second half. More skaters were hitting the ground, the pace had become grueling, on the scoreboard the Misfits were consistently ten or twenty points behind.
By the 14th jam, which is what the two minute increments are called, the score was 103 to 84, with 13:52 left in the game.
An old woman near the rail seemed dismayed by the presence of a male player in skates, clucking under her breath when he hip checked a dirty jersey girl onto her knees.
“Well, of course, like a skunk in with the squirrels,” she muttered.
The woman’s blunt assessment touches folksomely upon a sore spot in the sport, which like every other is now compelled to duck and cover as a sort of religious ecstasy possesses this new century. The biological binary has been revealed for what it has always been: apostasy. A sham. The non-discrimination policy posted on the Mid Hudson Misfits website reads like the articles of convention at the United Nations.
When Tailgunner Flo started out in the sport, after a stint with the Long Island Roller Rebels, it was still the Gotham Girls Roller Derby.
“Now it’s just, I think it’s Gotham Roller Derby,” says Flo. “Nowadays, I would say, to be more inclusive, maybe say skater versus saying a roller derby girl.”
But anyway, a low center of gravity and knowledge of how to use the hip as a fulcrum, as well as agility in skating decides the fortunes of the game more than OEM equipment
“The cool thing about roller derby,” says Wire, “is it’s very inclusive as far as age, and I guess I could say body type. It’s very inclusive. You need the big girls and you need the little girls and there’s a role for everybody. And there’s a lot of older women who skated when they were young. My mom was playing into her 50s. I had two girls on my team that had gotten out of prison and it kept them good and clean. I had a girl or two that helped them get out of abusive relationships because they found this empowering, you know, this switch they could flip inside themselves and switch into their alter ego and just go out and just get some aggression out and get in shape and have fun with other women.”
Pixie Stix was the only jammer, the Misfits jammer had been sent to the penalty box. She was coming fast to the wall of waiting skaters… she was shouting through her mouth guard, go go go.
Outside the ring, the roller derby has passed into a sort of irreverent moral fable with its practitioners resembling Valkyries. In Pamplona, Spain, where they do the running of the bulls, roller girls in horned helmets wielding baseball bats chase the red scarfed crowd running through the streets.
The ceremony was repeated in New Orleans as part of the Mardi Gras festivities, at least in 2010. Painted women on skates chasing the drunks down French Quarter blocks. But of course, in each case all the crowd will live, which takes some of the deadly seriousness out of the ritual.
In a moment of levity, while the next jam was waiting to begin, one of the refs, skating slowly, suddenly fell forward onto her knees, catching the ground with her arms, an unforced error in front of God in the DJ Booth and everyone. Not quite prostrate, while she held the rotunda wood floor before her, there was a holy moment witnessed of the individual alone with her emotions in a room full of skaters née Derby girls née Roller Girls.
Gravity. Nemesis.
Twenty-six jams later, the score was set. Violet Uprising had put down the Mid-Hudson Misfits.
To support the local bruisers on wheels and find out more information about upcoming matchups go to midhudsonmisfits.com.
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