I Get Punched in the Head

An inventory - reverse resume - of moments where I was not employed:

10/07/1970 - 10/08/1983: 13 years and a day: Because I'm a child and I shouldn't be thinking about work.
09/13/1993 - 09/15/1993: I was working at a temp agency, but had so much faith I would get hired on permanent at the now defunct Aldus. In my last week of hoping, I hear Aldus has been bought up by Adobe. I do not have a backup plan. Too lazy too look for a real job, I end up in a tanning salon.
02/21/2002 - 10/02/2005: I quit my professional job with indignation (though I hang around for about a month from my given notice). I spend a year finishing and starting house projects, I begin drinking (late bloomer), apply for about a thousand jobs in this time (who quits a job in the middle of a technology bust?), go to school to get a k-8 Education Degree, realize I love kids but most of my colleagues are christers - and I have difficulty resolving a teacher's salary with maintaining a house mortgage in heavenly West Seattle; I end up back where I was when I left. Gratefully.

In that time, I've worked at a roller-rink, been a restaurant dishwasher (for five hours), sold photo-sitting packages over the phone (for a week, tallying up a single sale), unimaginatively transitioned to telephone surveys (they rarely checked for the existence of respondents on the surveys, and they paid on commission - so I made over twenty bucks an hour), had steady work out on my own doing field maintenance for a local drug company, worked at a temp agency (everything from moving furniture to processing mail orders), the aforementioned tanning salon (the glory days of high-pressure, bait-and-catch sales of tanning packages: a racket that I couldn't ingest enough cocaine to perfect). And the rest is Information Technology, a vague term I hate validating. I tell people I work with computers; they tell me their internet keeps crashing, and I tell them I don't really do that kind of working with computers.

The coolest job? Roller-rink. Like there could be any doubt.

Child labor laws were pushed to their extreme so I could start work the day after I turned thirteen. In retrospect - I was paid under the table for several years - the laws may have been compromised a lot. The person who hired me based on my dancing skills (The March, The Fox-Trot, The Waltz, The Tango) is no longer living with us, and I'm guessing there is a statute of limitations that stops at the grave. I spent the first year as a floor guard - blowing a whistle to let you know you're going too fast, putting you on the bench if I have to blow my whistle twice. Little thirteen-old me, local rules enforcer and an early taste of my own pretend importance.

Southgate Roller Rink was a family owned business, and I felt a part of the extended family as much as the rink nurtured me as a second home. Dorothy was a gracious and kind employer. Her daughter was my dance instructor. Her son-in-law was second to my father as an authority figure, though in an employer role, he played at being impossible to impress. The older floorgaurd was like a hero to me: imagine Tom Cruise's charisma before it expired into crazy, and you'd have Steve. Working in the snack bar, there was Marge - who had been my Sunday School teacher, and Terry - my first gay pal. Terry would eventually leave and was replaced by my dance partner, Lisa. It was a tight little community.

And I was a bit of a red-headed stepchild. I was goofy, irresponsible, easily distracted: from day one, my focus was on the attention I received for being a floor guard and not necessarily the fulfillment of the responsibilities thereof. I would spend my time flirting with several girls - oblivious to a kid bleeding a bloody nose all over the skating surface. I didn't see playing the music as a responsibility, unless there was a responsibility to bring more Siouxsie or the Cure or the Dead Kennedys to the rink environment. I was an attention whore, and Les - the father figure & senior-senior floorgaurd, let it be known that he saw me as such. When I shaved my long hair down to my skull, my mother asked him what he thought of it. "We try not to give ben the attention he seems to crave" was all he said. A policy of containment.

It's a little weird in retrospect: I had this at such a young age, something that a lot of people want all their life: to be center stage, to hold people's attention, to be adored in spite of myself. To be an exception, to be able to get away with things you shouldn't, to be special. After only working at the rink for a couple years, I could feel it's lack of permanence as people I knew stopped coming to the rink...you know, growing up and into their own interests...finding myself feeling a little too old for my environment but not wanting to let go of it. It remained my full time job through high school. I was there long enough to mature into engaging the responsible aspects of what I was doing, and become increasingly conscious of the self-humoring & self-parody required to be an attention whore with staying power.

I may have stayed a little too long. Late on a Friday night in my final summer, when I was seventeen and knew I wouldn't be coming back in the fall, an excited child rolled and fumbled up to me - pointing to the emergency exit.

"I just saw someone go out the back door with a bunch of skates!"

Now who would want to steal a bunch of roller skates? I investigated the long hallway beyond the emergency exit that lets out onto 16th avenue behind the rink. I opened the door and looked northwards towards the bars, southwards towards the adult book stores. The hindside of the Roller Rink was a much more adult world, and it wasn't uncommon for young people to get dumped off at the rink so a parent could have themselves their own good time. But I don't see anyone with an armload of skates, and I ask the kid if that's really what he saw, and he insists on it.

I skate to the front door and I tell Dorothy; I'm equally insistent on checking it out. Of course I tell her that it's some kid that took the skates - there's no way she would let me go if she thought otherwise. White Center has gotten palpably more violent in the last several years - even the roller rink has a couple of police cars that show up as the sessions end on Friday and Saturday nights. But I love adventure when I sense it, and with her permission I motor down the ramp to street level.

I decide I'll just roll around the block and make a looksee. Chances are, they're long gone. But it is night and night is intoxicating to a seventeen year old adolescent...this is an excuse to roll into bars and ask 'have you seen anyone making off with a pair of our rentals?' I get to traverse a new territory to lay down my authority as a 120 lb. bounty hunter.

I cut through the parking lot of Bea's Pancake House, the last family-friendly post before hitting White Center's seedier boulevard of porn shops, bike shops and bars. There are a couple of made-up girls unlocking a dodge dart - typhoon and feathered hair, tight acid-wash jeans and suede stilettoed boots - and I ask them if they've seen anyone running around with a pair of rental skates - you know, black or white booted, orange wheels? And I'm sheepish about it; I can already feel the dismissiveness & condescension I've come to expect from girls a couple years older than me entitled by their own fake licenses.

"No, nobody with skates." And I thank them, and as I skate away I'm craning my head back at one of them, as she bends over to retrieve something from the back seat of the car. I'm not ready as I slowly turn to look where I'm going.

A man. A solid, balding man. He's juking to the left, to the right, like some spastic ape. I register this much when he's five feet and closing; I'm not ready for his roundhouse fist to the right side of my head.

And I'm looking up from off the ground. I think I remember seeing the sky, and one of my legs making a prohibitive sign across it as all my wheels turned against me. And the pain in the side of my head, and the pain in my back and another pain in the back of my head where it hit the concrete. The side of my head is the least of it. I am sore everywhere, and I'm feeling it as I get on my feet.

He's attacking the girls. No, he's pushing them aside. He shoves one of them away from the car, and she makes a dozen tiny skirting little steps in her heels to keep from falling down. She yells 'Asshole' after him as he is slamming the car door shut. The driver side window is down and I can see him now: probably in his forties, the broken face of a hard drinker, more fat than athletic. What you would expect to find in a White Center bar; and he yells out the window: "Bitch, trying to steal my car, bitch!" And he is still yelling out the window as he slams on the gas, tires screaming, and he winds out of the lot and into the street and away.

The girls take off running as fast as their jeans let them; I am on my feet now and I follow their rapid little clicking heels. They turn into the first bar right as I catch up to them, and I ask them what the hell was that? I have my palm to my head like it's the only thing holding it together. In my mind they are guilty. They are a couple of hot chicks that got a guy drunk and got his car keys, and their running off without checking on the guy that took the punch plays into my indictment. "That was my car! That was my car! That fucker stole our car!" and they forget about me quickly; one asks the other "God, what am I going to do?"

They are on the inside of the tavern's door; I'm on the outside; this seems to be a good time to give up. I tell them I'm at the roller rink if they hear anything. I tell them I was punched. Just in case they didn't notice. And she turns to her friend: "my mom is going to kill me". And my last words to them- "I'm pretty sure I'll be okay." evoke an angry eyeroll. I shut the door to them.

And I skate very slowly back to the rink. I'm not sure I like this new environment. I'm used to being the authority figure looking down, not looking up. I've stepped well far out of my jurisdiction tonight. In my contained world, I have all the information I need and in a small way, what I say, goes. Out here, telling who is right and who is wrong is a lot more complicated. And much less final. And what I think doesn't really amount to much in other people's drama. And so on. I am skating alone back to the rink, and there is no one to hear my complaint.

I am uninjured, and I get as much attention out of this as I can. I tell my story so Les will wish he got punched in the head himself. And I bask in it. At the end of the night, midnight, an inventory reveals that no skates were taken.