There’s nothing like the smell of roller derby. The “derby funk” we call it. It permeates your skin at the knees, elbows, and wrists and swirls around the air until inevitably at every practice, you feel like some overheated amphibian in some dank and musky watering hole.
That smell was in the air on the morning of March 7, 2020. The “funk” along with the continuous clacking of wheels, smiles, and high fives proves it - we’re at a derby tournament.
The Third Annual Bluebonnet Brawl. A tournament for juniors teams from across Texas all joined in Denton to compete and celebrate this fantastic sport of ours. Their anticipation and excitement was almost as pronounced as the funk. Almost.
It was hot in the back corner of Lone Star Sports Arena. Not just because of the funky locker rooms, but because that’s the nature of screen printing. The flash dryer gets to about 400 degrees so it can dry the ink on the shirts. The heat press, at around 350 degrees, presses and cures the ink into them so that the print doesn’t wash out.
It was in that back corner where I set up every year, live printing the tournament shirts for spectators and skaters to take home as a souvenir of their triumphs or defeats.
We had heard about some new virus that was going around, but still weren't sure of what it meant. There was plenty of hand sanitizer around the arena, there usually is at derby tournaments due to again, the fact that all our hands smell like old salty meat.
I say ‘our’ because I had been playing roller derby for almost nine years. I had played for North Texas Roller Derby, then for Arch Rival in St. Louis, now Austin Anarchy, an all-gendered team in Austin, Texas.
I love the sport. It’s in my blood, my bones, my skin, my brain, my soul. Which is weird for me as I had never been a person that liked people. In fact, I hated them. They were everywhere and for the love of God and everything holy, please don’t ever touch me.
That changed with derby though, or at least around derby people. You see, in the sport you are constantly touching one another. You’re in close, physically, mentally, emotionally. Not just with your team, but with the other team as well. You become one pulsing but opposing unit, like an atom with protons and electrons. You are working together in a brilliant ballet, but with opposite charges pulsing toward opposing goals, together.
When I started practicing almost a decade ago, it was incredibly difficult for me to be so close to people I barely knew. Of course, I didn’t know their real names. I knew Ruby Soho, Sweet Little Agony, and Galactic Scoundrel.
So, I didn’t even know these people and I had to grab their waists, their arms, their hands and hold on for dear life. I had to trust them to help me and I had to help them by literally throwing my body at another human while on roller skates.
It’s intimidating at first. But you get used to it. Slowly. Eventually you become a family with the other skaters. You again and again thrust yourselves into glorious battle together.
Derby becomes a shared experience of pain and delight and fear and defeat. When you can jump in front of a human twice your size barreling up the track, on skates, and sacrifice your body to save your friend and teammate, you know you are close.
So I knew what the Texas juniors were feeling that day during the tournament. How exciting it is to share these experiences with your brethren and “enemies” who are really just your friends in a different color. You all belong to the derby family.
I sat in the back corner watching it all play out in front of me, diligently and happily printing and laughing at the juniors’ stories of the games they played that day as they waited for their shirts.
Screen printing is my profession. It’s my company and I have been printing for roller derby teams around the country for almost as long as I had been playing. I, of course, love doing live printing the most. You get to feel the atmosphere and the happiness of the teams. It’s much more exciting than the storage unit I usually print in.
That morning the juniors seemed to be shaking with excitement. Team members shouting calls, coaches shouting corrections, the near constant cheering of the parents for their kids as they hurled themselves through the melee! It was a wonderful cacophony amid the skaters and people and cheers.
But it’s quiet now.
There are no more cheers, no more calls, no more excitement.
I sit alone and wonder about the void in my life from where all the noise once was.
I’m used to being alone. I like being alone. But there’s a limit. There’s only so much space a person can have before they feel incomplete.
Like I said before, I didn’t like people, but once your heart grows around a group of friends that become more than a family, more like a part of you, there becomes a deep stillness when it’s gone.
I feel that stillness now.
I haven’t been to a bout since that day. I haven’t even skated since.
The coronavirus took the derby away, but it didn’t take the love away. I think maybe that’s the most painful thing, that the love is still there. In my heart. But everything that caused and bred and created and nurtured that love is gone.
It sounds weird to say this, believe me it sounds weird to say, but I haven’t been able to touch my friends in a year and it’s killing me.
Is it too much that I want to touch my friends again?
That I too, want to be touched?
I think the pain of COVID-19 is not just what it has done to us, but what it has taken away. Not what it has presented, but what it has removed. The voids that are left in its wake.
The things we didn’t know we needed so much until they were gone.
I was on the verge of quitting roller derby that day in March. I was thinking I was going to retire soon. I was thinking I could live without it in my life.
I was wrong.
I miss it so much. The camaraderie that before derby I would have shouted from the rooftops was overrated and irrational, but now my heart cringes and wretches deeply by its removal.
I miss my friends, I miss my life with them. And while, as a team, we still technically keep up with our Facebook messenger group, and maybe once a week someone talks about something or other happening in their life, it’s not the same. It was the physicality and closeness of the sport that brought us together and held our rapt attention for each other. I miss the funk. I miss hitting them.
I know this won’t be forever, but the void that the coronavirus created has hit me hard. In the midst of this though, I can’t help but wonder if this experience has taught me something about myself and about the relationships I make.
I clearly didn’t know how much these people meant to me before, but now I do. And now all I want is to be with my friends again steeped in the knowledge that I care this deeply for them.
To be frank, this experience has sucked, royally. But in its wake, the least we can do as a culture and as a people is try to learn a bit more about ourselves and our friends. To hopefully become better and more caring people for the ones we love, happy in the knowledge that they indeed hold such a huge space within our hearts.
I won’t take them for granted again, and I don’t think I will take my own feelings for granted again either.
