Schenley rink is finally open again. Everything I loved about my first winter in Pittsburgh has come full circle. Thursday night I stepped out gingerly onto an inch thick sheet of clear ice through which I could see concrete and various trapped brown leaves. The insensitive wind was accompanied by random flakes of snow flying about in several directions as I slid, oblivious to the weather, across the rink in sneakers and fascination. I followed the Rink Father and his pack of derelict but faithful minions to the garage to watch in wide-eyed youthful wonder as he filled a zamboni with several hundred gallons of white paint and hot water and drove it steaming over the new ice, leaving a whitewashed trail in his wake.
“Get a squeegee!” he shouted over the roar of the zamboni and the painful wind. We dashed out onto the ice, sliding in our shoes through a slimy white coating like watery mayonnaise, trailing awkwardly behind the zamboni. We slopped paint against the boards as best we could while dodging splash back and the white flood that spread from the back of the machine. We ran back off the ice and when the zamboni came off I shoveled the snow clumps passionately. I couldn’t wait to try out the ice.
Saturday I worked my first shift at what was to be called “a slow day at the rink.” After surviving an initial onslaught of kids at the rentals counter (“A size 7 kid’s skate, we don’t have that, what is that in an adult size??” and “How do you work the skate sharpener?”) we settled down to a rather quiet existence watching football on a black and white TV and sometimes relacing figure skates. At times, one of us would put on our skates, don a sportive neon yellow vest with “PITTSBURGH GUARD” on the back, and trade 30 minute shifts out on the ice. I waited eagerly for this, with nothing much else to do.
Now, before I describe my first experiences skateguarding, I must spend some time developing the off color cast of characters from whom I learn and share my duties with at the rink. For you to fully appreciate the oddity of my very public occupation, you must come to love and understand my co-workers. I’ve had to give them appropriate nicknames, in the rare situation they find my web site and later “trip to kill” the day after they read this and find me skating at the rink.
“Ms. Disney” is a woman who I discovered I am actually intimately familiar with, and who now orders me around at the rental counter. This is the same woman who yelled at me last winter for parking in the staff lot and who also let me in for the 19 and under price.
“These are thousand dollar skates,” she said to me, pointing to her painted neon green figure skates with the curly orange flowers adorning the boot. “I got bored,” she said, “so I painted them.” I opened my mouth to speak but no words came out. “I used to skate for the Ice Capades,” she continued. “We had to have beige skates. I got fined because right before our last performance I painted my skates pink.” What does one say to this? That takes balls, I guess. I had no hopes of skating for the Ice Capades, let alone defying them with the wrong color skates.
“Rebel” is a skinny 21 year old girl going on 12, who smokes incessantly and was game to show us her three tattoos, one of which her mom “was SO pissed about,” because it was on her lower abdomen.
“Yeah it’ll get all stretched out of shape when you get pregnant,” said Dropout, a former high school slacker who was now going to night school to get her GED, after realizing “thug” wouldn’t pay much as a career.
“You just put coconut oil on it,” said Rebel, making a rubbing motion on her stomach. “If I get pregnant I’ll use lots of coconut oil.”
Rebel had earlier made a point of very seriously showing me the skate rental counter and where all the extra skates were stored. When I questioned her about the skateguarding shifts, she said “We go out in 30 minute shifts and I’m going to go first -”
“No, I’m going first,” said Ms. Disney, walking tall into the rental room in her neon green skates. Rebel looked quietly stunned and dejected. I later learned her “dad used to drive the zamboni” (this fact was reiterated to me several times) and that this family history seemed to stir in her a sense of ownership and imagined rights. I felt mildly sorry for her, but more because she had no sense of humor than for any other reason.
All of this verbal volleying about who was going out to guard made me nervous about my own shift. I started to think that sitting behind the rental counter was a much lesser duty than actually skating, and began to wonder if I’d have to fight it out to get ice time. Well, I figured, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d have to hit someone over the head with a hockey stick.
“So where are you from?” I asked Dropout, trying to make lame conversation. I learned she was from Pittsburgh, and used to come to Schenley all the time as a “rink rat,” which I’ll explain later. “We used to just come here to fight,” she said. “You came here just to fight?” I repeated, confused. “Well, we came here to skate,” she said, “but we ended up fighting too.” I raised an eyebrow. “Why pay to get in here and fight;” I asked, “why not just fight outside for free?” “Hm, I don’t know,” she contemplated. A bit of logic forever lost in the intricacies of complete stupidity, I concluded.
“The Outlaw” looks like he’s recently escaped from a minimum security prison and is trying to hide in the folds of society as a rink attendant. I must admit I was at first afraid of this man, but he later grew on me as one of the few undisturbed people at the rink. (Which, if he really is trying to hide, would actually make him stick out like a guy in an orange jumpsuit here.) During the first few shifts, while everyone else was out fighting to skate, he and I sat behind the rentals counter poking fun at the customers, relacing skates, and talking hockey.
When Dropout returned from her surprisingly short shift on the ice, she sat down next to me to remove her skates. “It’s freezing out there,” she said. This, to me handing out rental skates, seemed like a pretty poor reason to cut an ice shift short. I asked her generally about the current skating conditions and the customers, to which she replied, “Well I’m afraid to skate like I normally do because I think I’ll run someone over.”
I sat back on the bench with some apprehension. I realized then that my ability to skate around proficiently and not fall on my ass while trying to do some simple thing was now a lot more critical than it had been when I was simply a rink visitor. I envisioned everyone I worked with as mad skaters.
The true “Mad Skater,” however, (who we’ll call “Mad” for short) is an alternately affectionate and annoyingly gang-like individual who skates like he has been doing it in at least three former lives, and who I saw last April running the ticket booth at Carnival after the rink closed. Last February he gave me skating pointers and saved me from some unruly children during a late night game of tag. Working alongside him has changed our relationship a bit, although I still find him quirky, unpredictable, cute, and offensive. Proud of his new job driving the zamboni, he wasn’t as adamant about skating as Rebel, and I didn’t actually see him on the ice until the final session I was scheduled to work that day.
We were well into the second session and I had yet to go out and skate. That’s when I saw Rebel lace up her skates a second time and go out on the ice without her guard vest on. She’s just going out to skate for fun, and ditching us behind the counter, I thought. I pulled on my skates, grabbed a vest and my gloves and went out.
I hadn’t skated outdoors since last winter, and it was invigorating to glide out into the cold, and this time without the hesitating instability I always felt the first five minutes after transitioning from rubber mats to unforgiving ice. I at first skated out with some zest, before becoming sweatily aware that many eyes were on me, as I whizzed around in a reflective yellow blur. I slowed down and skated cautiously, being careful not to put myself in any precarious positions such as maneuvering while skating backwards. A group of children, a.k.a. rink rats, started to accumulate behind me.
Rink rats are unloved children whose parents give them money for all four skating sessions a day and abandon them at the rink. The strange characteristic about rink rats is that most of them have been coming to the rink for years, skate every single day, and still are disappointingly poor skaters. Their priorities appear to be socializing, picking fights, and being generally annoying. Rink rats know all the current and former skateguards and other rink employees, and can smell fresh blood. They followed me erratically like a cloud of gnats before I had even completed a full lap.
“What’s your name?” one of them said, peering up at me while skating stiff-legged to catch up to my slow, deliberate stride.
For someone who isn’t overly fond of children, I deal with them extremely well, even to the point where people think I really like them. I told her my name. Then I asked for all her friends’ names. They skated up one by one beside me, offering their names and some bit of rink lore or gossip that I nodded appreciatively to in response. After giving them my express permission to harass everyone working behind the rentals counter, and telling them I would “work on getting them in for free,” they finally drifted away in the same nebulous mass in which they had arrived.
I turned the corner and Rebel was skating whimsically with no guard vest on. “You know,” I said to her, “no one ever asked me if I could skate before I took this job.” “You don’t have to skate much,” she said. “You only have to skate when you’re going to yell at someone.”
I thought about this and then said something else instead. “I don’t skate that well.” She looked at me, skating around with her arms cautiously out to the side, balancing her two-footed stride. “I can’t crossover,” she said. In fact, Rebel didn’t skate much better than the rink rats, sadly. “My dad used to drive the zamboni here.” I wanted to finish her sentence for her but I didn’t. I skated away with a humorous expression that I didn’t think anyone saw.
My first shift on the ice turned out to be uneventful, as there weren’t too many visitors and since I spent the majority of the time worried about whether or not the general public was evaluating my skating ability. It didn’t get bizarre until the sun started to go down, as is the rule with delinquency and youth.
After I got off the ice, I went back behind the rentals counter and had hardly removed my gloves when someone appeared with their very expensive hockey skates looking for a sharpening. I picked up the skates and the chip dumbly and turned around. Mad saw my helpless look. “I’ll show you how to sharpen them,” he said, “it’s easy.”
We took the poor sucker’s skates into the zamboni garage and Mad jammed the skate into the machine and clamped the blade down. He turned the sharpener on, grabbed the handle, and pulled the wheel down over the skate blade. A dramatic spray of orange sparks flew out from either end of the wheel, which Mad completely ignored. A small voice in the back of my mind said that perhaps we should be wearing goggles or some other sort of protective equipment instead of sticking our faces down by the skate blade and the sparks, but I immediately banned all thought of mentioning it for fear of getting razzed as much as I do for my wheelie hockey bag.
“For new skates,” Mad said, “you usually go over the blade like seven times.” He then proceeded to grind the guy’s skate fifteen times on one edge, then turned the skate around and ground it another fifteen times on the opposite edge. I cringed, thinking about the first time this guy would try to stop on his newly mutilated skates.
When I returned to the counter, Ms. Disney had just sat down on a bench with a divided plastic tool carrier full of ice cubes. She proceeded to put her feet, complete with socks, into the ice in each side of the carrier. Her neon green skates were strewn across the floor beside her, laces everywhere.
“I have this knee injury,” she said. I kept staring at her feet in the ice. “I have a bad knee also,” I replied. “You know how I got this?” she asked me, apparently disregarding my comment. I tried to look interested without speaking. “When that new Kaufmann’s department store opened up, they hired me to go out there and rollerblade around in this Victorian dress. Me and a bunch of other people. And it was this big hoop skirt and my wheel just got caught right in the dress and I did a header in front of four news stations.” I still kept looking at her feet. Eventually I was interrupted by customers at the counter asking for a size 10 instead of a 9. When I came out from the back, Ms. Disney was telling someone else what was wrong with her feet. I decided I had heard enough medical ailments for the day, and when Mad finished zamboniing the ice, I donned my styling vest and went out for my second ice shift.
It had started to sprinkle a bit and dusk had fallen when Outlaw joined me on the ice. Several new hoodlums had shown up, and things started to get rowdy. One kid, who appeared to be about nine years old, had taken off his sweatshirt to reveal a torn, sleeveless T-shirt underneath, 50s greasers style, and was skating around backwards hooting and twirling his sweatshirt in one hand. “All the girls wanna see this!” he screamed, weaving in and out of the crowds while occasionally glancing over his shoulder. He then leapt forwards onto the ice, sliding on his chest across the length of the rink. “I think he should do that without his shirt on,” I said to Outlaw. He laughed, I suppose thinking it would be a nice sight to see but that the kid wouldn’t do it.
I smiled crookedly and followed the kid around. He skated up to me and asked “Want me to take my shirt off?” “Sure,” I said. “Do you think the girls wanna see this?” “Of course,” I replied. As we glided down the long side of the rink I added, “I think you should slide without your shirt on.” “Really?” he said. “Yeah, but you might get ice rash.”
He looked a little concerned about this. “Ice rash? Are you sure?” “Yeah,” I said, “but don’t worry, it’ll go away after a while.” He seemed to ponder this for a bit and then apparently decided the benefits outweighed the consequences. He gathered up his harem of pint-sized girlfriends and made them all watch as he leapt onto the ice in all his nakedness. He slid for about half the rink before jumping to his feet screaming and twitching like a stuck pig, and skated immediately off the ice and disappeared. The girls giggled uncontrollably and I skated over to Outlaw who couldn’t respond except to shake his head.
By the end of the evening session and before the start of the night sessions, Ms. Disney appeared on the ice to join Outlaw and me, and Mad came out skating in a long hooded sweatshirt over his baseball cap. Ms. Disney gallivanted about, twirling and spinning and crossing over backwards without picking her feet up. Mad skated around — well, madly — disconnected from the ice yet never falling, jumping three feet into the air and twisting around and landing with one foot in front of the other, only to cut backwards, turn and stop. I couldn’t have maneuvered in my sneakers the way he did on skates.
With four guards out and not many visitors, I grew bolder, and started skating backwards and working on my crossovers. Mad came by to give me pointers on turning around both backwards and forwards. “Pivot off your inside foot, see,” he said, turning around and around again in succession as I watched his skates. I tried this, but my outside foot kept dragging like a dead appendage and catching my edge. Backwards and forwards and then some fourth dimension between the realm of backwards and forwards and I went flying onto my rear end in the middle of the rink.
Ms. Disney guffawed. “I think every guard has wiped out today!” Mad took offense. “I haven’t wiped out,” he insisted, reaching out a hand to help me up. I brushed off the snow and continued my backwards strategy. It was all I had.
Ms. Disney skated up to me after a half lap around. “Those kids want me to teach them how to do tricks, when they can barely skate forward!” I looked at her in a daze, with my mind still on my throbbing hip. She explained. “I’m one of the top figure skating teachers in the country, and I’m not giving out pointers for free! I charge $40 an hour for lessons.” I wanted to tell her that horseback riding lessons in California were $40 for a half hour, taught by people who were far from national caliber, and that she was getting ripped off, but my preference was to run away from her. It also occurred to me that I wasn’t going to get any tips, so I just skated away.
About half a lap later as she watched me crossing over backwards pitifully around a turn, she shouted from the center of the rink, “You aren’t leaning inwards enough! You have to lean in like this, see?” She skated in a small circle backwards, crossing over elegantly. I wondered if her recommendation would be deducted from my pay at the end of the week. One thing I’ve learned from both teaching and being a student is, that if you are pathetic enough, someone will eventually give in and try to help you just so they don’t have to continue watching the suffering.
By the time the session ended, I actually felt like my backwards skating, which had plateaued over the last two months, had improved, primarily from all the taunting and ridicule. And so ended my first day working at Schenley rink. I was off Sunday, but if you’re really interested, ask me about the country music frog on hockey skates.
