(four) The Embassy

(part two) The Roller Skating Hall Putsch and the Rise of Fascism


“Beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of civilization. No one will maintain that they are ... essential to life ... and yet no one would willingly relegate them to the background as trivial matters. Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.”

- Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud


(four) The Embassy

Eddie was a player, all right. More than any of the suburban fascists with whom Jake had come in contact, Eddie had mastered a subtly nuanced yet iron clad control over his surroundings. He oozed the charm and confidence that was needed to sway the sweating puling underlings in his charge. Like a demented piper, he led the milkfat white-bread children around him into dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations their parents wouldn’t have dreamed they’d follow. They hung on his every word, his every opinion, aching for the morsels of advise like junkies in a rat-infested flophouse. This boy Stephens was the sole arbiter of taste. They dazed helplessly in the waft of his brio, turning on each other in turn as they jostled for position in his hierarchy. Daily, they made fools of themselves prostrating before the Manboy God, the Supreme Leader. Jake’s first gut reaction to this Dalai Lame-ass came home in spades, diamonds, hearts and clubs. Though he’d previously suffered humility at the hands of other ersatz fascists, those petty tyrants paled before their true master.

It was spring. The gutters in the street bled red with the fallen buds of maples, choking the drains and flooding the dead end of South Martin. The boys, they were younger then, would sometimes build paper boats, waterproofed with candlewax spread on along the keel, and float them in the makeshift pond at the end of the street. They graduated to models of the U.S.S. Arizona, and the U.S.S. Detroit equipped with motorized propellers. Occasionally, these would sink. One of the boys, likely a twin, would stand on the curb/bank whining over the loss. He wouldn’t dare wade in and right his boat. That would break the illusion of the high seas. And, besides, the pond was a good four inches deep.

Then, without warning, they started to sink them on purpose. They would gleefully stage elaborate pyrotechnic displays, building them into the models, blowing them up, each catastrophe bigger than the next. The twins were the best at it. Each handcrafted model would be destroyed exactly as it died in real life. Encyclopedias and history books were pored over, pictures were studied to achieve the utmost in historical accuracy. The smoke trailing from the blasted hull of the Arizona, her listing to the side, going down slowly, gracefully in the mid-morning sun. It would’ve brought tears to the eyes of Jake’s dad, who had the luck of being transferred from the mighty carrier to another ship 6 months before December 7, 1941.

Yes, it was spring, and with spring came thoughts of baseball, of tromping through the dank, musty woods down past the dead-end that separates Clayton from Royal Oak, of, more importantly, girls in shorts and halter tops, their swelling breastlets outlined under the polyester fabric. Of girls, clumped near the pretzel stand sucking down Cherry Coke slushes in a frigidly air-conditioned Mall.

Girls had lately taken precedence over other matters since the first time all the boys had, at the suggestion of Eddie no doubt, walked up to the Embassy Roller-skating Hall. Not rink, Hall.

See, it once was a dancehall where minor Big Bands would play. This part of the sleepy bedroom community would wake, grind the sleep from its eyes and dance the night away. The post-war crowd was desperate for fun and yearned to stuff every moment with it. This crowd was slowly phased out by bobbie sockers, their sweater-wearing lettermen Squares, and the Greasers who would come between them. Cops would trawl by in their heavy low-bottomed cruisers taunting the boys smoking outside. Fights broke out in the vacant lot next door, site of what eventually would be the new Burger King.

Soon the crowds thinned to the point of breaking the owners when they decided to change tactics. After a closure of only two weeks, a new sign was hung over the word “Dance” in Embassy Dance Hall. It read “Rollerskating” in a cramped script. It was awkward, but it got the idea across. When they eventually changed the sign to the bright Neon sign that exists today they kept the name the same; Embassy Rollerskating Hall.

The boys bilked skating money from their frazzled mothers-- except Richie, who actually went so far as to steal it from her purse when she asked him to fetch her cigarettes--and started their hike up to 14 Mile Rd. to stand in the line that ran along the white stucco facade of the Embassy.

Shortly after turning onto Custer Ave. and safely out of view of his house, Eddie had produced a pack of Marlboro Lights from his pocket, tapped one out of the pack, lit it and passed to Morris with the nonchalance of a career smoker. Morris took it out of reflex more than out of actually wanting to smoke and stared at it awkwardly before bringing it to his lips. Alex and Scott looked at each other and then to Jake. Jake’s eyes widened and he made a motion with his head that seemed to convey, 'I will if you will'.

Morris started to pass the cigarette back to Eddie.

“Pass it on”.

Morris turned to the others and passed it down the line.

Alex hit off the cigarette and immediately started to cough, his face glowing red from the effort. Scott tittered at the discomfort his sibling was experiencing. Alex reached up from his coughing fit and slapped his brother in the back of the head. His raspy hack thinned to a wheeze as whiteness returned to his mug. He accusingly thrust the cigarette at his twin.

Scott took it and took a small hit, like he was faking it.

“C’mon, Pussy”, Eddie snarled.

Scott took another deeper hit, like it was a joint. For a moment he looked like scene from a disturbing high school anti-smoking filmstrip with its copious shots of ruined, shriveled lungs. Or, an all child version of a Cheech and Chong film. He puffed out a great white-gray cloud of smoke, revealing that fact that he didn’t inhale, and passed the cancer stick to Jake.

Jake put his hand up to say “No”.

“Do it or walk home. Everyone else is in. Don’t be such a Fag.”, Eddie threatened.

Jake took the butt. This was nothing. He’d seen his brothers and sisters do this a thousand times. He’d watched intently as his brother went through the whole smoking ritual. The packing of the hard box. The shake to bring the cigarette up from its neat little row. The drawing it from the box with his mouth. The ‘tink’ the lid of the Zippo made as he opened it with a flick of his thumb. The ever-so-slight smell of lighter fluid before the strikewheel was spun. The gold flame touching, toasting the tobacco seconds before igniting. The orange glow blooming with the first hit. The smoke cascading from the nostrils and mouth in slow curling tendrils. It was all so sensual, so cool, so forbidden, so fucking bad.

Jake did it exactly like his brother. For the moment he was filled with all the fragile James Dean machismo that his plump pubescent frame could hold. He let the smoke drift from his nose and exhaled, passing the butt to Richie and bobbed his head up and down to a non-existent tune.

“Look at that. Yer a fuckin’ pro, Jake. A Fucking Pro”, Eddie laughed and took the cigarette from a retching Richie.

Jake nodded vaguely at the remark and bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling.

“You know what they call a cigarette in England?” Eddie questioned no one in particular.

“They don’t call ‘em cigarettes?”, Scott asked.

“Why would he ask the question if they did?”, Alex blurted at his twin. They loved getting the best of each other, loved every opportunity to show the other up to be an asshole or stupid or in any way diminish or dehumanize him. They reveled in it. To Jake this seemed to be a bit masochistic in a sense, them being nearly identical twins, and winced every time they set into each other.

“Fuck you”, Scott replied in a confrontational yet vulnerable tone, the awkwardness of the retort made sad by the crack in his high tenor voice.

“I’m tellin’”, was Alex’s pat response.

“A Fag”, Jake said.

“Yeah. And, it takes one to know one”, Eddie yelled and put his hand out for a slap five, his voice pumping out a rattling scattershot trill of laughter.

Jake was caught between getting it right and indirectly being called a fag. Reluctantly, he moved to slap Eddie’s hand, though he really didn’t know why, and Eddie pulled it away.

“Too Slow”. Eddie snickered a laugh and dragged on his dwindling cigarette.

And, so it went until they reached the Embassy. One after another belittling, infantilizing, feminizing, questioning their sexual preference, questioning their lineage, anything to hurt or offend each other. Eddie dished the sharp, stinging insults out fast and furious, sparing no one. The remaining kids hurled minor barbs riffing off of Eddie’s first one, rippling them out like rings on pond water; each less harmful than the previous.

This was typical behavior, no more harsh or gentle than any given day. Sure, occasionally, someone would go too far and there would be an odd, graceless groping and shoving match that caused some sweat and was broken up by someone in a passing car or someone mowing their lawn. Someone would get their favorite shirt torn. Another would have a slick green grass stain on the knee of their new grey cords. “Fuck, Mom’ll have a shit fit. That’s never coming out”. The two fighters would walk apart from each other, flushed and winded until they got to where they were going. Eddie said they needed to toughen up or the high school guys with their muscle cars and black belts in Tae Kwon Do would eat them alive. They loved to administer the dread “Swirly” to the weak or the outcast in the new pack of freshmen.

Ever since Jake had the near death experience at open swim at the Clayton pool when David Polks pushed him in the deep end, the boys feared drowning. But they feared drowning in a piss-filled toilet even more. Eddie would teach them what they needed to cultivate the hardass burnout don’t take no shit from no one demeanor they would need to survive in highschool, “You fucking wussies”. In Jake’s opinion, the highschool guys weren’t the ones they should’ve feared, but there was no way he could sway the others from Eddie the Great without first alienating himself. He was a member of the Stephens Youth whether he liked it or not; he would assimilate or perish.

* * *

They stood against the stucco wall huddling together in a clump, trying desperately to look older and far more sophisticated then they were. Only Eddie was succeeding in this. He looked 18, 17 at least and he had the swagger that comes only from having had sex, which, considering he hadn’t, added to the mastery of the performance. The girls passing by noticed him first and then the other pathetic specimens: Alex and Scott, the two bickering twins, Morris, the awkward geek with a buzz cut, Richie, the Latinate looking punk with a shifty demeanor and the marks of a professional thief and, poor Jake, a bulky boy who looked as if he’d never grown out of the last vestiges of his babyfat. When the girls saw them, their step quickened, their gaze would stiffen and turn. Eddie would bristle and become embarrassed, then rain down insults under his breath, chiding them for their clothes, their shoes, their whole demeanor, even their breeding. They were dragging him down. They’d better shape up or they were gonna get cut loose.

“And, I mean it, you sad fucks.”

The deeply tanned diminutive and grizzled owner of the Embassy unlocked the door, came out of the building and lit the stump of his Phillies Blunt. He spit a loose piece of tobacco to the ground and jerked his head toward the entrance. The boy first in line then entered the building and the crowd began to move. Jake visibly stiffened as he passed in the waft of the old man’s cigar stench. Deep, carved vertical lines ran across the man’s face like faultlines. His eyes were packed in behind the folds of loose skin created by years of hard toil. They flashed beneath the large greyed caterpillars that were his brows. He wore a hunter orange John Deere cap and a blue quilted vest with duct tape vainly trying to hold its fiberfill guts from bursting out. Strapped to his feet was a worn pair of rental skates with eraser-colored wheels. Hanging around his neck from a tattered shoelace was a gleaming silver whistle. If it weren’t for the skates, Jake would have surely dwarfed the man. If it weren’t for the whistle, the talisman in which he carried his strength, wielding the supreme power to eject Jake from the rink, or, hall, he would not be someone to be feared.

The boys got their skates, tied them on and bolted on to the skating floor. Weaving in and out of the taller slower skaters, most of them older boys skating backward in front of older girls, making their way toward the end of the rink where the mirror was. At this far end of the hall, mounted above the skating surface was the DJ booth. The short-- for he wore no skates-- mustached, long-haired man that spun records like, “Play That Funky Music White Boy”, “Sad Eyes”, “Free Bird” and the most of the songs by Journey, mounted the metal ladder attached to the wall and climbed into the box where he would stay until he needed to relieve himself. This was usually when the skaters would be treated the interminable “Inna Godda Davida” by Iron Butterfly or “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin, because the bathrooms were located on the complete opposite side of the hall.

When he played Disco, most of the boys sat down and let the girls skate, except Jimmy D’Monaco who either knew something the other boys didn’t or really really liked Leo Sayer. Occasionally, the DJ peppered the mix with new stuff from The Cars or Blondie and the young boys and girls, those Jake’s age, would flood the floor with awkward sexuality. Eddie would skate backwards--he was the only one of the boys who knew how--and talk with girls. The other boys skated next to him, jockeying for position in the girls’ field of view.

Most of the females they encountered were girls from their own school, Kernwood. A few were girls from other schools in Clayton. Girls from Schram, Bunter, Hacker and even as far as Strickland School flocked to the Embassy because it was an inexpensive way to spend four hours, both for them and for their parents. The parents looked at it as a way to ditch the kids and have some quiet emotionless sex before they went back to doing lawn work or laundry. The kids saw it as a way to test out their blooming sexuality while getting some aerobic exercise. In both cases, all parties came away sweaty and unsatisfied.

“Switch Directions”, came over the loudspeaker, temporarily drowning out “Whip It” by Devo.

“All Skaters. Switch Directions.”

A few of the younger skaters fell trying to maneuver the stop and the turn. This included Alex. Scott stood above his sibling laughing and pointing at him. He turned and looked toward Eddie for approval for his ridicule when Alex kicked him in the back of the knee buckling it and sending him to the parquet. The rest of the boys skated away from the twins as Scott crawled on top of Alex and started to wail away on him. Eddie, Morris, Jake and Richie had made it to the huge mirror that ran under the DJ booth, along the entire back wall of the rink before they heard the whistle blow. Jake looked into the mirror through the oncoming bodies and saw Alex and Scott on either side of the wizened troll in the blue quilted vest being escorted from the floor.

“I swear to fuck, you can’t take them fucking anywhere. They fuck everything up.” Eddie shouted over the beat. “Fucking Fuck-Ups.”

This was No Parents Land and Eddie made the most of it. He swore like an autoworker, testing new and interesting combinations of the word ‘fuck’. He’s use it as a gerund, a noun, an adjective and even a substitute syllable, as in his original phrase ‘Per-Fucked, Just Per-Fucked.’ Jake found this redundant. The word was repeated until it made absolutely no sense and held no weight whatsoever.

It was like the story that Jake’s mother told about his sister Denise reading the packages of make-up at the store. She repeated the word “Maybelline” over and over until the heavily lip glossed girl behind the makeup counter looked at her like a special needs child. His mother always ended the story with: “And I gave her a little pinch under the arm”--which she would always demonstrate on Jake-- “...and she hasn’t said it since.” Jake was saddened by the fact that his sister would only by off-brand makeup and she left the room every time a cosmetic commercial came on. Which, Jake thought, probably explained why she was never a big fan of Soap Operas.

Jake wanted nothing more than to administer one of his mother’s patented under-the-arm-makes-your-eyes-water-and-your-nerves-stand-on-end pinches. He would love to get just the barest quarter of an inch of skin between his thumb and forefinger, squeeze and twist until Eddie was down on his knees before him, crying Uncle with tears streaming down his peachfuzzed cheeks. He would then, in his daydream, knee him in the mouth and watch him fall limply to the wood floor, his tongue lolling out of his mouth like a fish. Then he’d turn and skate over to where Cheryl Tiegs was waiting in her pink bikini; they’d link arms and skate to his favorite new song, “Cars” by Gary Numan.

“Hey, Space Cadet. Over here, Fucko.” Jake broke from his revenge fantasy and rolled over to the rest of the boys lined up along the mirror.

Eddie had already extracted the black long handled comb from his crushed cords and proceeded to drag it through his intricately feathered locks. Richie pulled a blunt Ace comb from his pocket, probably one he pilfered from his dad while he was passed out on the couch, and mimed everything Eddie did. Morris didn’t have a comb, nor did he need one. His father didn’t believe in hair on boys. Every time his hair got long enough to grab, Mr. Shuler carted him off to the myopic town barber, Bob.

Invariably, every kid in Clayton got his first cut at Bob’s. The sign out front read: Bob’s the Barber. Jake didn’t know if this was a grammatical error or just a simple statement, seeing how Bob was the only barber in Clayton. Bob’s was a little three-chair shop on the main drag, where the barber pole spun not only red and white, but blue as well. Why one man would need three chairs was a puzzle to all the kids who went there. Jake’s dad had mentioned once Bob had had two partners, brothers, but one got sick with cancer and the other had to care for him. So, they sold their shares to Bob to pay the doctor bills and he ended up with two chairs he didn’t need and more scissors and combs than he’d ever use.

The fathers of the boys who polished the vinyl seat of Bob’s center chair with their butts every few weeks would sit in one of the other chairs, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee--Bob always had a fresh pot on--or reading the latest issue of Playboy. Oddly enough, it was here where their hair was shorn that most boys would see a woman naked for the first time.

Morris stood rubbing his scared stiff buzz cut, his back to the mirror, elbows resting on the bar that ran the length of the wall. Jake did the same, not because he had no hair, but because he had no comb.

Jake unbuttoned his light plaid shirt with the fake mother-of-pearl inlaid buttons. Despite the 45° weather outside, the rink was steamy and warm. Jake fanned himself with the front of his shirt, revealing his personalized T-shirt beneath. The shirt was blue with the word “BRAT” running across the chest in mirrored reflective iron-on letters. He turned toward the mirror and wiped away the beading sweat gathering in the peach fuzz on his upper lip.

“What’s this?”, Eddie asked, poking his sharp finger into the “A” in “BRAT”.

“It’s my shirt.”

“Where’d you get it?”, Eddie shot back.

“The Mall. At the shirt stand near Sander’s Ice Cream”.

“They spelled it wrong. It should be...”, he said, jabbing his finger hard into Jake’s chest with every letter. “F-A-T”.

Eddie looked over at Richie and Morris, rolled his eyes, and skated off.

Richie leaned into Jake’s face. “Brat.”

He followed Eddie, looking back and shaking his head. Jake wondered if he really knew why he was shaking his head, or if he was just aping the leader. Morris scooted over to Jake.

“Hey”, he said leaning into Jake’s ear to compensate for the music thundering down from above. “I think its pretty cool. It’s like ‘Fuck You, Take me as I am. Right?”

“That’s right.”

Morris patted Jake’s shoulder, shoved off the wall with his left foot, and skated into the circling crowd. Jake closed his eyes and wished with all his might to be thin; thin enough to fit into the average faceless crowd and not stand out, thin enough to slip through the cracks in the sweating cinderblock above his reflected face and lose himself in the tall grass in the abandoned lot next door.