Cul-de-sack up

Rollerblades were cool in the early 1990s. Obviously, such fantasy couldn’t last forever.

Over time, this phenomenon metastasized to the point at which shoes were augmented to include wheels in the heel. These wheels could be popped out of the sole via a plastic hinge, giving the wearer the power to glide one to three exhilarating feet at a time.

The retrospectively unfathomable popularity of these shoes represented the overleveraged peak that triggers a market crash, the same kind of outrageous success that prompted us to ask whether Enron might not have been entirely honest. Heels on wheels, rolly-soleys—whatever they were called—invited a tsunami of cultural backlash that mercifully struck before the time of Twitter. And so it was that wheeled footgear of any sort became socially unacceptable.

Decades later, I find myself in awe when I encounter one among the remaining rollerbladers, a species that seems comparatively endangered.

Good for you, pal. Who cares what anyone else thinks? 

And then I remember that the current meanest generation—almost always kids from 9 to 16 years old—is growing up well after the height of the rollerblade era. These kids are potentially indifferent to the concept; some may not have seen a rollerblader in the wild before.

So, for those who might have forgotten, and for those who never knew, rollerblades were legitimately cool in the early 1990s.

I was legitimately not cool in the early 1990s.  I had opportunities to become cool, but I was far too socially inept and oblivious ever to capitalize on them.  Case in point: third grade.  That year we had a teacher new to my elementary school, Mrs. Paterson—not “Patterson,” but “Paterson” with just one “t,” a lesson learned well after insisting she might be mistaken.  That’s how I earned the yearlong wrath of a righteous old lady.  From then on, Mrs. Paterson and I engaged one another in a trench war, with a series of battles that left both sides bloodied, weary, and longing for our girl back home, Summer Vacation.  She expected me to be a gentleman; I expected her to kick the bucket.  On one particularly memorable occasion, Mrs. Paterson took the opportunity of a parent-teacher conference to accuse me of stealing a cupcake.  My parents asked if she had actually witnessed the theft.  Mrs. Paterson had not, but she was certain that I was always around trouble.

That aside, I did absolutely nothing to help my cause with Mrs. Paterson or anyone else that year, and in fact many things to harm it.  I was clearly insecure, because I sought attention by any means I could conjure.  I told a peer in an interview project that I wanted to be a police officer (untrue) because even though I might die young, it would be for a worthy cause.  I ran for student council, an election I won thanks to a hardcore manipulation campaign: I publicly suggested I would not win given that I wasn’t as cool as Collin, my competition.  That tactic and the result it brought about was, truthfully, too easy.  I discovered around this time that soccer—the most popular of all elementary school sports—was just not my game.  And I might have stolen that cupcake; I don’t remember stealing it, but I also don’t remember not stealing it.

In terms of things beyond my control or wisdom, third grade was also the year of: kidney surgery; therapy; my earliest sex dreams, which none of my friends had experienced and virtually all of my friends had the (lack of) balls to make fun of me for; and lastly, my favorite ensemble—long-sleeved waffle shirts in the exact same color (gray, red, olive green, navy) as the sweatpants that went with them.  In total, everything came together to make a pretty pathetic person, the saving grace being that a lot of children are pretty pathetic and none of them is yet a real person.

By the time I got to fifth grade I was slightly less oblivious.  I got a denim jacket—also legitimately cool at the time.  I was invited to some co-ed parties (I recall after my first invitation asking whose birthday it was, only to learn that it didn’t have to be someone’s birthday to have a party; this was groundbreaking news).  But then it was time to go to middle school, and these friends—friends who had taught me spin the bottle, no less—were all headed for the private rich-kid school, and I for the public rich-kid school.

The only trouble was I wasn’t a rich kid.  We lived in a cute suburban neighborhood, but that cute suburban neighborhood happened to be in the same district as all the gated communities reserved for Denver’s rich and famous, complete with mansions, golf courses, fake boobs, and metric boatloads of money.  I went to school with John Elway’s children—end of sentence.  It was probably around fifth grade when I asked my mother, “So we have a million dollars, right?”  She looked at me like I was damaged, as though for a second she wondered if perhaps she had dropped baby me one time too many.

“No.  Are you serious?”
“Oh.  But we have, like, 700,000 dollars, right?”
“No.  What is wrong with you?”

As soon as sixth grade and middle school started, I was returned to the oblivion from which I had been only briefly liberated.  I wasn’t “fast” enough, rich enough, or confident enough for such a place.  The school was all those things and in much larger numbers than I was prepared to handle gracefully.  I was not unfortunate—not even close—but I was still one of the poorest kids in school.  The only kids who understood my unique place in this demography were the kids who lived in my neighborhood.  That was where I honed my identity because that was where I had the clearest sense of what my identity was.  And that honing process took place primarily in the cul-de-sac next to my house.

But first, to quickly sum up: None of these things taken on their own is anything special for a third, fifth, or sixth grader to have done or experienced.  After all, third, fifth, and sixth graders are not yet real people and won’t become real people for at least another decade.  Given hindsight I would actually suggest I was a fairly normal child, in that I sought attention but didn’t know how to appropriately get it, put my mind to tasks but didn’t know which tasks to put my mind to, and otherwise pursued things in stupid ways and pursued stupidity by way of other things.  There were many kids just like me in other classes, in other schools, in other towns and cities and countries around the world.  And yet, only I was saddled with oblivious me.

But by the time third grade rolled around (read: wordplay), I could skate.  I could skate quite well.

Now let’s go back in time, several years before Mrs. Paterson and the Baked Goods Kleptomania Craze of 1995.  I got my first pair of rollerblades in the early, early ‘90s, at a time when I was in all likelihood still wearing Velcro shoes.  The Velcro was not because I couldn’t tie my shoes—I could—but because I was so slow in the morning, so unwilling to rise from my bed that every possible minute had to be spared to ensure a life of even modest punctuality.  (I slept in clothes for almost my entire year in kindergarten—one more thing off the next morning’s checklist.)

Those rollerblades would come in handy.  I can’t tell you how it happened the first time, but I can tell you how it happened the million times after that.  A knock at the door—it was Brent.  Sometimes it was more than Brent, but Brent was the only mainstay.  He was the oldest and the best.  And did I mention he was also the oldest?  That went a long way to making him the best.  But the best he was—at sports, insults, leadership, toughness, and punching deadleg-ridden bodies into such a wide array of blues, purples, and blacks that the great Georges Seurat would have admired Brent’s kindred dedication to the craft.  Mark Twain would have called him “Jack Sawyer,” just like he would have called me “member of Jack Sawyer’s gang.”  He was no general, no William Wallace.  Brent was Lee Marvin—we didn’t love the man, but if he said jump, well, we didn’t ask anything at all.  So whenever he knocked on my door, it was my duty to convince my mother to let me go play in the cul-de-sac.  If I failed I wasn’t just letting myself down.  I was letting the whole team down.

That team included Brent’s younger brother Matt, my neighbor Steven, and whichever other stragglers we could round up, a list that changed as the years went by.  Steven and I were always the youngest, but our loyalty paid off in the currencies of trust, skill, and eventually, likability.  We played most sports known to man—and some unknown and unseen before or since—but our primary vocation (weather-permitting) was always hockey.

I was terrible.  Just a terrible skater, terrible passer, terrible shooter, terrible avoids-falling-downer.  I was not-so-affectionately nicknamed the Big Green Falling Machine—the “Big” part a misleading but necessary syllable to make the name ring, “Green” a nod to my forest-colored helmet, and “Falling Machine” a tribute to my like-clockwork commitment to falling over, as though I were, say, a falling machine.  It was a name steeped in nuance.

I wore any pad that could simultaneously fit with every other pad on my body; my mother would have it no other way.  I was relentlessly picked-on for the protective shell of armor separating me from graver injury, or any injury at all.  I think it’s fair to say that my mother’s insistence kept me in one piece and relatively unscathed.  But I was still a terrible skater.  In one of Brent’s more insightful moments—a periodic feat akin to Lee Marvin unknowingly reciting a stanza by Maya Angelou—he stopped right in front of me, as I lay collapsed on the ground for at least the tenth time that day, and said, “You’re never going to learn how to skate if you’re not afraid to fall down.”  I don’t think Brent was getting particularly existential at, say, eleven years old; I think he was literally telling me how to learn to skate while also reminding me that I sucked at it.  But people and especially children do not often state their life philosophies and then live by them.  It’s just the opposite: they live by their philosophies and then learn to articulate exactly what those are.  So whether we knew it or not—and we didn’t—Brent and I had just started a believe-in-your-dreams support group, and he was my sponsor.

Then I got good.  No, I was not a particularly strong soccer player, and to make matters worse, no, I could not shoot a basketball with any consistency; that is to say, I could not shoot a basketball into the hoop with any consistency.  But those weren’t among the games sanctioned by the cul-de-sac community.  I could play roller hockey because I had no other choice.  Still, that wasn’t enough.  When autumn was in the air, so was the football—I had to get good at that, and I did.  When winter came around, so came the epic neighborhood-wide snow wars—I had to get good at that, too, and I did.  But one thing Brent insisted on beyond the game itself was that we go about our business the right way.  This seemed like it came straight out of the blue-collar coaching handbook, although there was only one thing Brent actually cared about in terms of the right way to handle business: “No bitching.”

This was easy coming from the guy who, for the many years I lived on the same street, remained the biggest, strongest, and most in touch with his killer instinct.  But I officially joined him on the other side of the Rubicon when a confluence of factors met to form a defining moment: football season, advancing athletic skills, my team was losing, and a group-wide trust in me that only came from years and years of, if not exactly friendship, camaraderie.

Oh, and also the sprinkler head had been removed from one spot in the front lawn, leaving only an isolated metal rod, a skyscraper hidden in the tall grass that made its exact whereabouts known when they overlapped with the exact whereabouts of my right leg.  Nothing quite like a good stabbing to make one feel alive.

In a remarkably happy twist, the metal rod entered my leg just off my kneecap, in the soft spot between the bones, ligaments, muscle tissue, and structural components.  Essentially I landed in the one place I could have landed without causing real damage.  However, this was not my focus in the immediate aftermath.  I was busy on the ground, preoccupied instead with the whole writhing in pain thing and some version of shock.  I disappeared into my mind, where I daydreamed of a landscape shrouded mostly in heavenly white except for the visual of my future self as a one-legged pirate.  But then I was returned to the physical world, calm and quiet as a celery stick.  Staring at the sky through a circle of faces, I took stock of the day’s events.  We were playing tackle football without any pads.  No one asked if we were playing tackle.  There was never a conversation or a vote.  That was just how the game was played in the cul-de-sac, and I was fine with it.  My jeans were totally ripped up, completely destroyed.  I was fine with that, too.  My knee hurt, but it was tolerable.  One of the boys asked again if I was alright.  Their faces were characterized by an unusual expression: concern.

The truth is I was fine.  And I told them so in the most impressive way I could think of in that moment: “Pain is for sissies.”  On any other occasion I would have been made fun of for this brand of social commentary, not because the cul-de-sac honored a longstanding respect for the sissy population, but because the artist formerly known as the Big Green Falling Machine couldn’t convincingly pull off that sentence.  That wasn’t my personality or place.  But they smiled, laughed, helped me up, patted me on the back, and resumed the game.  There would never again be any doubt about my role in our boy army: I was an officer.  To hell with being a gentleman.

Several hours later, I returned home to a house without my mother.  She was on a business trip, which was rare for her job.  This left me in the hands of my father—an actual medical doctor—who took one look at my leg and said, “You’re fine.  Here’s a band-aid.”  My mother—a nurse practitioner—returned two days later, disagreeing ever-so-slightly with his diagnosis: “You what?!?  Why didn’t you get him stitches?!”  Too late, by then.  It’s hard to see the scar anymore, but I can definitely feel it.  And my leg works just fine.

My father taught me many things, very possibly most of the things that make my brain work the way it does.  Toughness, physicality, masculinity—in the conventional senses—were not among his lessons.  I have an unrequited streak of blue collar in me.  I like to build and make and labor and sweat.  Unfortunately I’m only good at the last.  My father isn’t a builder of physical things or a tool belt carrier.  If he scuffed his knee, he’d be much more likely to rub some Neosporin on it than some dirt.  His interpretation of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook usually misses the hoop by about ten feet.  He’s got a framed picture of Judy Garland on the basement wall.

Where was I to learn the toughness I desired, both of body and mind?  My sister, who has always been pretty scrappy, was not a close companion in my childhood.  And my mother, like so many of her kind, is addicted to overprotection.  There was a void, and it would have remained had it not been for the boys of the cul-de-sac.  I didn’t need their love, affection, minds, or hearts.  I wanted their respect, and I needed to learn how to earn it.  They were drinking buddies before I could drink, older brothers whose lessons were more akin to “Eat your fucking vegetables, you dumbass” than, “Hey dumbass, let’s go score some fucking drugs.”

When we left Denver after ten years, I knew I would miss the cul-de-sac above all else.  It’s not as though I had any plans to keep in touch or come back.  That’s not what this was.  Our community was only ever ephemeral, lasting as long as it would before other commitments and age would get in the way for each of us.  I just happened to go first.  But I knew the good fortune of my situation as I left it.  For ten formative years, I could open my front door and be in that very situation; before the internet took shape, seizing the day had never been easier in the history of day-seizing.

These are the things money can’t buy.  When young parents buy a house, they’re essentially playing a game of statistics and averages.  Based on average income, cost of living, schools, crime rate, and a host of other boring things, we can assume a likelihood that our child will make friends and have fun and be successful and happy and stuff.  These young parents play the odds, hoping that a combination of abstract variables will take a positive, specific shape in the real world of their lives.  They may be right to do so; certainly the better and more supportive the circumstances, the more likely a kid will grow up to make friends and have fun and be successful and happy and stuff.  But there are no guarantees.  Those parents might invest very differently if they knew how their investments would ultimately mold their children.  Alternatively, what about the homeowners in the cul-de-sac who didn’t have kids like me, who moved in without knowing about the screaming boys, rollerblade traffic, and broken windows that would come to characterize their lives?  They might have invested differently, too.  If I had been one of them, I would have sold to the first buyer.

By this logic, I could have turned out far better.  But the cul-de-sac forced me to grow a pair—it saved me from being a lot worse.  I left Denver sure of myself, of my identity and place in the world (well, sort of).  And I put the clean slate I now had to good use.  I transitioned to ice hockey, and, after figuring out how to tie my skates, well, I could skate.  And pass.  And shoot.  And not fall down.  I was good.

I was twelve years old, confident and content.  Not to brag—well, sure, to brag—but I ran for vice president of student council in eighth grade and won in a cakewalk.  This is significant because all other positions needed a recount and the president had to be voted on a second time; my new middle school was sort of like Florida with better democratic procedures.  As I was keenly aware, being vice president had all the glamour of being president without any of the responsibility.  So my job was to tell jokes during the meetings, hang with my favorite teachers, and use my stature to maybe get a girl to like me back.

For the most part, my existence has been looking up since around that time.  Bear this in mind: when you’re lying on the ground in a broken heap of elbow pads, shin guards, and failure, a helmet will actually prevent you from tilting your neck too far back to hide in your shame.  This is a nice, unintended consequence of the helmet, because it makes it impossible to miss the metaphor: everything in front of you is up.