When you enter Fillmore Auditorium, carneys surround you, hawking their wares. Bake sale girls walk the stands bearing cake pans filled with homemade goodies; vendors give henna tattoos, sell jewelry. Eight-dollar beers are bought. People are shouting and music reverberates from the crimson walls. You’re slightly stunned from being out in the sun, but it’s dark here in the big top. Multicolored lights flash around the track as the skaters warm up, sprinting and stretching, hitting and running plays. They chatter sporadically, working off their nerves. The crowd filters in.
It’s musty, smelling of dried booze and old sweat. The auditorium is a gymnasium, with soda-coated wood floors to keep the skaters from slipping. Bleachers circle the track. Sparkling chandeliers that put Phantom of the Opera to shame drip from the ceiling. Large photographs of rock acts line the walls.
You’re hoping for a spot near the bumpers—the “booty zone” or “suicide seats”—but take one in the bleachers, next to over-tattooed and under-dressed women, punk kids with Mohawk hairdos and nose rings, and a surprising number of average-looking folk. A Nebraska mom sports a “Team Bucklebunny” T-shirt because Bucklebunny is her daughter. Kids are running everywhere, scrambling to get sodas, cookies. Other kids wear shirts with their own derby names across their backs, often based on their mother’s—Toothless Fairy’s kid’s says “Toothless Two.” He sticks a finger in his ear and smiles.
Women are circling the stands in hotpants that sparkle under the soft yellow light like cubic zirconia engagement rings. Some are carrying placards—“Ask Me”—like they’re picketing the premises. The Ask-Me Girl tells you everything you ever wanted to know about roller derby and more. You chat with her, half-listening and half-trying not to stare at her ripped fishnets, the red ones. What is she wearing underneath?
The skaters take their benches, and a dance team clad in the black pants popular in the nineties does a routine to Young MC’s “Bust a Move,” also popular in the nineties. They’re a little off, especially the awkward-looking one in the back, but nobody cares. Everyone is having a good time.
Two announcers are on the mic. They’re slightly annoying, but you don’t know anything about derby so you listen. A woman from the visiting league in a miniskirt and neon legwarmers sings the National Anthem well enough. You hear a beat toward the end of the song and realize the players are stomping their skates. Your soul is hungry for something but you don’t know what. Something in the bottom of your ear canal itches. Everyone applauds.
The teams are introduced and each skater takes a lap as her name is called over the loudspeakers. One of them slows down to high-five the kids sitting closest to the track. One panders to the crowd for laughs, attention. One is wearing a bra, a normal bra, that peeks out as she rounds the closest corner, causing you to wonder about wardrobe malfunctions. You are in love with all of them.
Fortunately for derby virgins like you, starting lineups do a quick demo explaining the basics. Derby is a race. There are five players for each team on the track at once—three blockers, one pivot (also a blocker), and one jammer. The eight players from both teams who are not jammers form “the pack.”
The pack lines up at the Pivot Line at the beginning of each jam. The jammers—the only players allowed to score points—line up at the Jammer Line, 30 feet behind the pack. At the first whistle, the pack begins skating. When the last player in the pack crosses the pivot line, the jammers are released to try and catch the pack. The first jammer through the pack becomes “Lead Jammer” and is the only jammer allowed to call off the jam. Both jammers then try to lap the pack, and when they catch up again, they score a point for each player they pass from the opposite team. The team with the most points wins.
So far, so good, but there are blockers. Blockers play both offense and defense, helping their jammer through the pack while trying to prevent the other jammer from getting through.
You hope you can remember all this. An official blows the whistle and the pack is off, but only moves a few inches, which you don’t understand. Isn’t derby a race? It’s supposed to be fast, right? The jammer whistle blasts and the women with the stars on their helmets duke it out shoulder to shoulder until they reach the first curve, when the red star (your team) surpasses the pink star. The hometown girl is a locomotive approaching the pack. Their blockers see her coming and she does a marionette dance, jerking her arms and legs up and down, side to side as she successfully fakes them out, juking around.
A few sharks hang out at the front of the pack, big girls who know they can hit. One of them shifts all her weight into the jammer’s way, but the jammer sees it coming, easily avoiding the hit. Jammer is quick like a bunny. Another shark goes for a hip check, but her power is diminished by the jammer’s speed, so with just a bobble, the jammer continues on.
Now lead jammer, the hometown girl—Keeper Down—allows herself a quick breath. She glides around the pack with the speed and grace of Apollo Ohno, tucking one arm behind her back and lowering her outside shoulder. The benches are screaming because the other jammer has busted through the pack and is climbing up on Keeper’s ass. Like Stallone in Over the Top, Keeper turns a metaphorical baseball cap backwards, hunkers down, and kicks it into high gear.
Reaching the pack again, the home team’s blockers are doing such a good job that Keeper takes the inside, jumping and leaping through holes like some sort of frenetic Frogger video game ballet. Instead of riding a turtle back, she’s whipped to the front by a teammate and is through the pack. Satisfied with her four points, she pounds her hips in a vaguely obscene motion and whistles wail, calling off the jam. She’s avoided the pixeled semitrucks for now. The crowd relaxes back in their seats.
As the bout goes on, the heat in the Fillmore escalates, literally and figuratively. Do they even have air conditioning? You’ve had a couple of cold ones so you don’t care too much, get loud instead. You groan at a couple of bad spills—a girl takes an elbow to the chin by “accident,” a girl slides head-first into a bench—but there are no injuries. The other team is ragged and tired. It feels good to yell at them. Their outfits don’t look so hot anymore. You start to feel pretty sorry for them, actually.
Your good mood comes back the second the hometown girl calls off the last jam. They’ve won by over 50 points, and it’s time to start thinking about the afterparty at the bar next door. The crowd rushes the track to slap hands with the teams during a victory lap, a consolatory lap. Everyone is happy again. High-fives all around, including the woman to your left who kept asking what was happening. You grin and spill beer on each other. You feel like you’ve known each other your whole life. Maybe you have.
Brandi Homan is the author of the full-length poetry collections Bobcat Country (Shearsman, 2010) and Hard Reds (Shearsman, 2008). She is a cofounder of Switchback Books and plays roller derby with Rocky Mountain Rollergirls. Probably, she loves you.
