Roller disco, like disco itself, and a lot of other stuff, started out as a gay and Black thing and then spread to the masses. Or maybe it was a culmination of the seventies-a ripening, or overripening, of grooviness. Maybe it was the polyurethane wheels, an innovation borrowed from skateboarding, which made for a smooth and pleasingly quiet glide around a manic and congested town. We spooled around counterclockwise and pulled moves-crack the whip, shoot the duck-to “Off the Wall” and “Funkytown.” Parents threw kids’ birthday parties at the Roxy roller disco, in the badlands near the west-Chelsea piers, or closer to home, in Yorkville, at a basement lair called Wednesday’s, on East Eighty-sixth Street. Sometimes we skated to school, swerving in and out of traffic, without helmets or pads. Some kids had sneaker skates, the spawn of a track shoe and a monster truck others had the figure-skating boot.
When I say roller skates, I mean the old quads, each with two side-by-side pairs of polyurethane wheels and a rubber toe stopper. That put an end to the teasing, but the refrain lived on in our cockroach brains, and it still pops into my head, now and then, when I’m on the move, via one wheeled conveyance or another.įifth grade was 1980, the year of the city’s great roller-skating boom. He took a swing at one of the guys giving him a hard time and then tossed him into a mountain of garbage bags on the curb. “Wheels, wheels, wheels,” delivered in a mocking, mewling voice, became a regular taunt, until one day after school, out on East Eighty-sixth Street, near the Papaya King hot-dog counter, J.J.
” Boys being boys, or brutes, we gave J.J. The poem, titled “Wheels,” described people getting around the city on buses, bicycles, skateboards, and roller skates: “Big wheels, little wheels. had a poem published in the literary magazine of our all-boys elementary school. In the fifth grade, my neighbor and good buddy J.J.