Does this girl even play roller derby? some of you may be asking. Does she even know how it can destroy your life? How it can bring out the worst in people?
I do. I've seen a lot of those things firsthand. In myself. In others - opponents, yes, but also teammates, derby wives. Vixen once said that she was selling her soul for roller derby. The remark was intended to be funny, but sometimes, it's not. Or maybe it's funny in the way things are funny because they're true. Maybe I don't write about it that often, but the truth is that for much of last year, I didn't just see the dark side of derby, I lived it.
On August 28 of last year, I played my last bout with BnB. We walked into the Jackson Convention Center right on time. I had played in a mixed scrimmage there last April, so I knew all about the hard hitters, the fast, teeny jammers, and the slick concrete floor.
Unequivocally, I also knew we were screwed.
Tuesday, five days before the bout, three skaters had pulled Ember aside to "talk to her." Predictably, it turned into a screaming match. I always get chosen to moderate bullshit like that. People tell me I'm even-tempered. But even I lost my cool when one of the skaters started shrieking at me because I asked her not to interrupt Ember's explanation. While I tried to listen to their grievances, they accused my derby wife of being a racist, of plagiarizing our logo, of shorting the team on money for the Jackson trip, of attempting to deliberately injure them on the track.
They made their stance very clear: either Ember didn't skate Saturday, or they didn't skate Saturday. Ember had a history of making questionable decisions. I guess I should have see it coming. She refused to back down. Zelda, Fiend Club and Delirium refused to skate, even after I spent the entire week trying to convince them to just finish out the season and not screw over the rest of us because they were pissed at Ember.
It had been a bloody terrible week.
But we couldn't back out. Booking a convention center doesn't come cheap, and we would have owed Magnolia a LOT of money for canceling. We had paid four subs from other teams to fill our roster. We were ten skaters at our strongest, seven when those three quit. BnB had never skated a single bout without the extensive use of subs.
MRV's contract had specified that we were to bring no sub jammers to the bout. Ember chose our subs selectively. Only BIG blockers. If they wouldn't let us have sub jammers when we were woefully short on jammers, then we would stack the deck with huge subs who could lay a jammer out by looking at her. We must have turned down three people or more just because they didn't fit Ember's size requirement for the subs.
Midnight was a nervous wreck. On the drive down, I had joked with Midnight that we had decided to go to New Orleans instead of come to the bout. She believed me. I knew she was nervous, and I knew I was being one of those mean girls to mess with her. Maybe part of me was taking out my frustration on someone who didn't deserve it. That was, after all, a grand BnB tradition.
Some of the others seemed unaffected, mostly because they had no idea what had happened at practice Tuesday. They had no idea why three skaters were mad enough to leave the team. They were here to play derby. I wished fervently that I could trade places and climb in their heads and erase the last week of wasted effort. A cartoonish black thunderstorm surged over my brow, soaking me with very stereotypical misery.
When the first whistle blew, we fell apart. It was a long, long five minutes before we managed to score. Maybe it was longer. It's hard to tell time in moments like this, when seconds of failure stretch into forever. Everyone watched us flounder, dying fish on the sand.
A little more than halfway into the first half, I was playing pivot, at the front of the pack as usual. Our back blockers let Reeta slip through like water through a sieve, and I was the last person who could do a damn thing about it. I knew what I had to do. I dug in and sprinted as she came for the front of the pack. I was on a collision course, going to chase her down and block her to the ground, make the save.
I turned my ankle on that ice-like concrete floor. Hard. As the pain shot through my shin, all I could think about was that I'd let Reeta get away.
I suck at being a hero.
I sat down. I took my skate off. I quietly asked for my derby wife to get me an ice pack for my ankle. Nobody even knew that I was injured until halftime.
I was captain for that bout, as I always was. Ember was co-captain, as she always was. In the locker room, one of the subs was talking over how to redo the lineups with Ember. Ember was ignoring me, not even consulting me on the subject. The sub turned to me and emphasized how terribly she thought I'd played in the first half and what a useless pivot I was. She turned to my derby wife and said that I didn't need to play pivot anymore, and Ember agreed with her. The sub turned back to me and emphasized in her snottiest voice that I was only to concentrate on blocking in the second half.
My stomach twisted harder than my ankle ever could have. My eyes stung. Anger flooded me first and, hands shaking, I skated off to the bathroom. I found Midnight and Vixen in there and I sobbed most of my facepaint off.
It wasn't the first time Ember had made me cry. She was extremely competitive and hated it any time I did something better than her. She was always emphasizing petty things. 'Your kneepads are too tight' meant 'don't you think you're too fat to wear a Size L?' 'I predicted everything you planned to do during the scrimmage tonight' meant 'you're a terrible player without me to back you up.'
Tiny things, raindrops in the ocean, little drops of venom that gradually ate away at my self esteem as a skater.
But nothing Ember said had ever hurt more than what she said during halftime.
I skated only two jams in the second half. I'd love to say it was because of my ankle. But it wasn't. The sub took over running the bench - MY bench - and she refused to put me in. In fact, she refused to put any of us in.
We were losing, so she only put in herself and the other subs. Three jams or more we skated with not a single BnB player in that pack. More than once, I saw Midnight forced to continue skating when she was obviously breathing too hard to function in a pack, much less as a jammer.
I wish I could say I noticed what else happened in the second half. My teammates proved things to themselves while I sat on that bench. I felt like I'd had my head wrapped in cotton, insulated from everything that was going on around me. Numb. Of course we lost. I faked smiles in the after-bout picture, threw all my things in a bag, and shoved everything into the trunk. Many of my teammates were proud of their performances. I wanted to go home.
On the way to the after-party, I broke down in front of my long-suffering husband, my unmoved derby wife, and her smug jackass husband. I couldn't stop my voice from shaking or tears from streaming down my face. Ember told me it was my fault someone else took over the bench. That I wasn't assertive enough. That I should have said something. She told me the only reason she didn't want me to play the second half of the bout was because I was hurt.
I knew a lie when I heard one.
The hell with all the work I'd done to help her set up lineups (which I was not allowed to do on my own in spite of being team captain). The hell with how much work I had put into begging girls not to leave us skating short.
My feelings didn't matter to her then. They mattered to her now for one reason only: she couldn't afford to lose the only person who had supported her the past few months.
If nothing else, Ember had read the writing on the wall. Three skaters had quit the team. That weekend, they went to Atlanta with one of our former fresh meat and decided they were going to start their own derby team. By the time we got back from Jackson, they had a concept for their team, if not a name. In the ensuing weeks, they started recruiting our skaters. If Ember didn't have me, who would she have?
I pulled it together at the after-party. Maybe I just didn't think anyone else needed to see the stress I was under. I was, as many people told me, the glue that held the team together. If it had looked like the glue was failing, everyone would have panicked.
We were staying in a really nice hotel. When we got back, Ember broke out a bottle of rum she'd brought with her. It was the one time I'd ever really seen her get rowdy when she was drunk.
The guys decided they wanted to get some beer. While they were gone, Ember got into a wrestling match with her derby little sister. I'm not that kind of partier. While the two of them shrieked and slapped each other, rolling around on the floor, I sat in one of the hotel chairs and watched.
"Helley, help me!" her little sister shrieked, eyes wide as she tried to escape from Ember's grasp.
That was when Ember crossed the line. I don't remember the words she used, but they meant that I was too attracted to her to stop her from wrestling around on the floor with another woman.
Even after sharing that rum, I couldn't suppress the anger. White, ugly, hard anger that welled up after how she'd treated me at the bout. It was insulting, the way she said it. Helley will let me do anything. She's blindly devoted. She thinks I'm hot.
For the record, I find it hard to be attracted to people who are that mean-spirited. People who prey on the vulnerabilities of others to hide their own.
They broke the bed after that. Her little sister was hanging on to the headboard and Ember jerked her away from it. They pulled it off the wall.
"Oh, don't worry about that," Ember said blithely, "BD will pay for it."
It really didn't matter to me why she thought that was the case. For one of the first times, I was able to let my anger come through clearly. I wanted to hit her for saying it. I wanted to yell at her until my voice was raw.
All night, I listened to her whine and vomit. She was hungover and bitchy in the morning, just like she was always hungover and bitchy whenever she drank. I never understood why she drank like she did when she knew she got bad hangovers. But you can't always protect people from themselves. Sometimes people need to be allowed to self-destruct until they learn something.
And me? I wrapped myself around that core of anger, closing down on it like an oyster. It lay there like an irritant, a constant voice murmuring 'too much, too much, too much.' Until one day not long afterwards, it turned into a roar.
Ember would discover too late that, in the words of one of my favorite poets, "there is some shit I will not eat."
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*This post is written in its literary style with apologies to 9 Lb. Hammer, who has pretty much cornered the market on BCR writing.
