Dear WWDD,
I hate my job. It’s not the work I do. It’s my boss. She’s passive aggressive, a micromanager, a social fail. Yep, a great combination. She treats me like a fucking child. We get paid shit, but we do something decent. She just doesn’t get the “decent” part when it comes to her staff. My boyfriend says I need to stick it out a year. We’re broke. But I dread the walk to the office from the parking lot. I’ve started showing up late to avoid her. And when I do run into her, I feel like throwing up. It’s just a stupid ordinary job, and she’s just a stupid ordinary bitch. Why does she make me feel like crap?
Jobba the Hunt
Clearly, you can ditch it, tough it out, or hit the bitch where it hurts. That’s the obvious advice. That’s how I would have responded a year ago, but I got the wind knocked out of me. I feel trapped in a noisy washing machine with my kneepads and wrist guards in the soak, agitate, spin, and repeat cycle.
My WWDD advice blog came to me like the big bang, a self-made extension of my derby career and a vehicle for moving from retail to publishing. I figured it could go viral, help pay some bills, keep me relevant in the badass community. That was two years ago, and the blog blew up by year one—the likes, shares, invites, comments, and nudges by social media hounds went off the chain. Even now, the blog’s reach keeps hitting all-time highs despite my bout of writer’s block. I feel less like a witty advice columnist and more like an imposter every day. You know, the old friend who gets called every six months by the ever-heart-broken slosh who thinks it’s cool to vent until 2:00 a.m. because they used to share a dorm room and get hammered twice a week.
I’ve come to a complete stop and derby can’t abide a standstill. Wheels must roll, any direction, any speed—fast, slow, imperceptible, backwards, lateral, powerful, graceful, on toe-stops, in the air, over a roller girl pile-up, through a blockade of hips and limbs. If you get stuck, get used to it; do anything to get out of it; try anything to keep the forward motion. Do not let it get in your head.
It’s playing offense and defense simultaneously. If a blocker opens a hole for a jammer, the other team’s star might slide on through. It’s all timing and intention, awareness and response, communication and contact. Let your girl through and then slam the door on the other chick.
Roca knew this as well as I did. She wasn’t loud, she didn’t curse, she never tagged people on Facebook and Tumblr after a game, because watching derby wasn’t a social event for her. She paced. She twitched. She anticipated how the blockers should pivot and brace, when the jammer should accelerate, how the lead jammer could fake and cut to the inside lane for a clean pass. She would identify the flaws in each team, the limitations of each skater, the untapped strengths of the under-recognized. She never tied a skate in her life or asked me not to, but Roca understood the game. She absorbed it tactically, strategically, metaphorically.
Offense and defense: The day she left, she dropped a love letter into my skate bag. I wasn’t surprised, I just wasn’t paying attention; she didn’t have to drive through my wall because I left the lane open.
Strangely, I don’t recall the timbre of her voice anymore, though we talked day and night the first year, but when I close my eyes I can see the curve of her fingers around a pen, the slope of her hand poised on the keyboard, and her first hesitant, frustrated moments before a flurry of loops and lines, key strokes, and returns. She studied anthropology, dabbled in poetry, stayed connected with people around the world. She called them, wrote notes in her hand and scanned them into emails, drew her own happy faces on round bodies with many arms.
I unfold her last letter, Verdana with addendums and tangents in her own script, English and Spanish. I carry it in a hideaway pocket of my sling bag with the coffee-stained napkin carrying our first collaborative poem. The creases of both parchments fall back into place when I fold them. Enormous messages made tidy and small.
The afternoon we wrote our first poem, we headed out as partners rather than women on a date. I grabbed her writing hand in mine, “You know, we should chat, hang out, fall in love, even argue, because it works, because it’s fun, because it’s real, even seamless, but let’s avoid having a ‘conversation,’ okay? ‘The talk’ never sits well with me. The ‘sit-down’ always comes off as another request for me to give in to what I don’t want and give up what I do.”
Roca clutched my two stunted hands in her one long one, holding a coffee mug in the other, and leaned from her chair to kiss my neck. I loved her for that—the way she could hold her tongue even as her mind raced.
My father used to say, “Let’s have a talk,” so we would sit, and I would never speak and he would never confess.
“Maybe we need to sit down and talk this out,” my mother would beg, and we would sit, she and I, in our trusted silence.
“Can we just sit down and have a conversation?” my latest lover would suggest when lust gave way to my needing some space, and we would sit, hearts in transit, until I left.
People in control don’t ask or hear or reflect, they tell, presume, and justify; the one-way communication they call an agreement. I learned this before I could read. There are things communicated in flesh that can find no voice, things said, accused, and demanded without dialogue, without any acknowledgment but the civilized skirting of what needs erasure, restitution, or at least a, “can I get a witness?”
I survived by standing in the shadows and saying nothing. When the shit hit the fan and splayed across the haunted walls of our family dollhouse, my shame held my tongue hostage and saved me. Even then, as that child still formed by imagination, I convinced myself that I would grow up and declare in dramatic courtroom fashion the truth of the wrongdoer, the strength of my character, the proof of my worth. But the loss of innocence is less about what you lose, and more about you can’t repossess.
Even if you put the thief away for life, you’ll never get back what they stole.
Dear WWDD,
I think I did something bad. I was drunk. I can’t remember.
Anon
I keep my Roca memorabilia tucked away in a travel trunk. The poems, love letters, stories, even shopping lists and vacation plans, little reminders of films we want to see. I dust them off sometimes and try to extract from memory and evidence what really happened. It’s easy to remember only the bits of conversation we care to, but the letters, notes, tombs, diaries, Craigslist ads, cryptic lines in the “I saw you” personals outlive those interpretations. They force you to reposition and reconsider. They make you relive the past by reinterpreting it.
As a kid, I used to leave scraps of paper under my brother’s door as warnings, but he took them as threats. “Do not go downstairs,” I would write. I wanted to warn him about the hell breaking loose, but he later told me he assumed I wanted to keep him from something good, maybe ice cream or a good TV show. No matter how often he walked into the maelstrom, he still doubted my motives.
He never heeded those notes, but he tucked them away. We shake our heads and laugh sardonically at the misunderstanding, and the intended camaraderie we only now know. Perspective of a thing deepens when you experience more angles of it.
I guess those warnings were my first attempt at giving advice. Later in grade school, I kept a poker face as I passed notes and delighted at how I could incite a drama by knowing what observation to make, how to make it, who to keep in the loop, and how to redirect backlash before the brunt of my words come falling back on me. My middle school savvy led to a college prep advice column, “Ivy League,” with encoded messages for the “in” crowd about where to get the best weed and how to get free pop from the vending machine. I concocted a system for my target audience to find the information they needed by scanning the bullshit of the day with headlines like, “The Top Five Study Habits for Getting into College,” “What to Wear at an Interview,” “How to Start a Club,” and “The Pros and Cons of Study Groups.” When you offer the advice, you control the questions by controlling the answers, and my fallback inquiries were always, “Who are the influencers?” and “How can I protect myself by making them need me?”
In college applications a few years later, I described my column as “visionary.” It makes sense that I’m back at the keyboard twenty-five years later where I can pose (or impose) a view of my chosen sport, the derby life, the spectacle of the game.
On the track, you might get laid out and knocked on your ass, belittled and dismissed, made heroic and mighty. You might get blindsided. You might not be good enough, strong enough, experienced enough, young enough, fit enough. You might discover your calling. You might stink. You might look fat in your uniform. You might get your confidence back. You might end up in the “in” crowd and regret what it turns you into. You might find your soul mate.
Ah, the ways the derby love bubble can pop.
Dear WWDD,
My marriage is a pile-up right now. We went from occasional sex to no sex. We went from kissing each other hello every morning to barely saying goodbye and even that’s a chore. He says I spend more time with derby than I do with him. He thinks I care more about my derby schedule than our family. It’s not that I don’t see his point, but you know: Derby. Because it’s where I can fuck up or jam like a rock star, and either way I still have my skates and my wives and my thing.
I love him, I really do. His family’s fucked up and he got the ass end of the deal, but I thought we worked that out ages ago. I thought we were managing it. I thought that with the kids close to moving out and our debt finally paid down, I could finally do something for myself, that I can do something that makes me a little fucking special for a change. Now he’s basically saying, “Derby or our marriage, you pick.” If I back off the oval to save my marriage, can I still save myself?
Love Un-Handled
A year ago I would have answered with a rapid-fire “play or get off the track” meme with a hardcore Sigourney Weaver Alien shot bolstered with some faux metaphysics: “The oval is the metaphor for life, the wall a symbol of cohesion, and teamwork the gel that holds it together. Why keep your man in the line-up if he won’t even put on skates?”
Just like that, I’d get a few hundred “likes,” dozens of shares, retweets with snide one-liners, and comments bemoaning my lack of compassion, recounting another rash of pity parties, hating on my choice of words or themes. No shit, if you read them out loud, the feeds would sound like an epidemic of AM radio personalities bouncing off the hermetic studio walls. Roca used to roll her eyes when I dropped a blog post because she could see the mediocrity round the bend.
“You can think harder than this,” she would say, scrolling down my posts and viewer responses.
“It’s just a thing,” I’d shrug. “I’ve got too many letters to overthink it.”
“Well, you can write better than this, too,” she’d say and get up to get on with her own business.
Every blog (over 100,000 fans and climbing!) made a new beginning for me, though. I learned how to twist a tweet into a one-sided manifesto sound byte every bit as shearing as an ass cheek across cement. To every “She’s got kids, debt, and a heap of ex baggage, but she slays me when she skates. Should I ask her out?” or “Sure, size doesn’t matter, until you’re upended at the knees and gasping for air at the bottom of the pile,” I would construct a WWDD blog easily broken down into 140 characters: Jam’s on, baby, if you can’t put on the #star when told to throw down for the team, then take your #FishnetDerbyEntitlement to the stands.
Once the blog blew, I spent more hours posting, updating, blogging, tracking analytics, responding to letters than I did dreaming, romancing, even skating. Roca encouraged me early on, helping lift it off the ground and give it traction. She got me doing something I cared about again. She convinced me that taking the basic tenets of roller derby—the attitudes, rules, tactics, strategies, legacy, sports scene, and sideshow—to build metaphors and meaning would matter. She said once, “What better way to help people deal with a sucky love life or lousy job than advise them to ‘dump the douche and put on your skates.’” (Crude words rarely fell from her lips, but she meant them when she said them.)
Pimping out the “get on with your life, we’ve got your back” message helped me subvert the wearisome song and dance of query, submission, rejection and replace it with instant gratification: Followers, likes, retweets, comments, favorites, shares, you name it. The blog made the 100 best blogs in Daily Tekk and I got invites to tournaments, boot camps, and conferences. I went from being a bookstore assistant manager with a dead-end job in Anchorage to a minor celebrity on tracks and in roller rinks all over the world, from Oklahoma, Florida, and Kodiak, Alaska, to Germany and Taiwan. I drank sake with trilingual military wives and smoked dope with rednecks in the back of 1970s American trucks.
I stopped hiking, reading books, or planning escapes. I stopped joining the give-and-take dialogues we used to spend all night unraveling. Everything came out in short, biting sentences, truncated and rambling, one after another.
“Stop talking to me in blog rants,” Roca said weeks before she vanished in the virtual fog.
“JFC,” I said.
“What, you’ll be sending me emoticons tonight and calling it making love tomorrow?”
Roca began walking the lower slopes of the Chugach Range alone; we began to snip at each other about who should have picked up the box at the post office or changed the oil in the car. Where Roca once called me on my horseshit and played poet to my documentarian, she turned inward to an interior hum. We stopped talking, yes, but I stopped listening first. We both forgot to care.
She soon tired of my workaholic, derby-holic all-nighters and my way of taking whatever we talked about and circling back to my latest blog post, engagement analytics, and what we needed to do to push its visibility. I knew things were messed up, but I kept putting it off, dropping it to the bottom of my chore list, conspiring instead to write a blog post about how derby can take over your life.
By then, though, Roca had stayed long enough. She didn’t look broken up or weepy. She didn’t leave in sobs. She just looked done. She packed her bags in front of me, quietly gave me instructions for keeping the garden and fish alive. She may as well have been talking to a smart phone, though, because I only gave her directions to the easiest route out.
I always unravel the letter and expect more: “I’ll miss you. I’m excited for you. I’ll always love you. Roca.”
Maybe that’s why after the first read I managed only an impulsive Tumblr video montage of epic derby fails with a flippant side note: Uh oh, my mother o’ rants means the single life for me, bitches. More track time, more me time, more WWDD.”
Hey WWDD?!
Totally miss you. Can’t believe the stuff you say, LMFAO! Shit girl. I think you’re my all-time MVP derby crush!!!!
So. How do I tell my derby wife that she stinks? I mean, a LOT. I mean, how do I tell her, “You stink and it’s not in the everyone-smells-in-derby kind of way?” Because, damn, she needs to take care of that shit.
Derby love. Xoxo
P.S. Text!
Hanna Satana
With derby, you can couch surf. You can find a sounding board for dangerous plans. You can ask for a loan and stay for dinner. Where there’s a derby, there’s an array of women and men who skate, run line-ups, referee, keep track of the score, do the color commentary, raise the funds, and pepper the sport with verve, grit, and community. You can reach out to a league in any state and most countries, small towns and large: Spokane, Baton Rouge, Austin (of course), and Fairbanks, Melbourne, Germany, and Taiwan. You can build vacations around derby. You can plot a worldwide tour as long as you can afford the time and expense, and as long as you show up ready to play. You’ll get hit, flail, and lay it out on the track, but that’s part of the payoff, the bruises and chafes and dislocations.
Pain isn’t the issue. It’s whether and for how long you have the patience for it.
We all toy with our own tolerances eventually. I started early by jabbing myself with an upholstery needle to watch the thick, red pearls rise and slide down my arm. I can still find the scars if I stretch my skin. But I graduated to another kind of hurt quickly when I met my first crush, a boy. I was sixteen, but I told him nineteen.
We went out for a few months, I don’t remember how long, but I recall the way his roughness coaxed out of me a monstrous, hungry, brutally free thing and how I loved how it lashed out and seethed. In that place, as that being, I could own my hurt and hate and longing; and it seemed right and fair that it could spit and unleash what I could never do on my own but that had been done to me.
We didn’t last, of course. He came over one night with friends to party.
“Fuck you,” I said casually.
He had fucked me plenty of times without my wanting it by then, and I felt my ribs tightening even as I held my whatever stare. They hung out for a while and talked about what I could handle and still keep the same cold stare. Awkward minutes passed until they shrugged and left. The next day I gave the kid his walking papers, his empty wallet, and the lighter he left on the step.
I kept the cigarettes.
Roca used to orchestrate romantic gestures out of the ordinary. She’d send a text, “Tonight, cheese and bread in bed while streaming the nationals,” and I’d get home and find the latest game on the laptop and a platter of bread, cheese, and spices in oil.
She grew up a strict Catholic girl with a come-and-go father who whipped her at every unsavory thought—his, not hers. She made it north in her twenties via Mexico City and Brownsville, Texas, because she wanted to touch the past by walking through it and study the collision of nature and culture.
I’m an Alaska-grown child who never left except here and there, but I spent most of my days outside in the wilderness, the neighborhood, the parks, and trails. Inside felt like a trap to me, so I stayed out for as long and as often as I could, summer and winter.
Roca and I figured our differences would help us align, but parallel paths never entwine.
The last night I spent with her, I came home after practice and found her watching Koyaanisqatsi again on the laptop. Uninterested in the film and too tired to sleep, I curled up against her and ran my hand over the curve of her ribcage, the dip at the base of her back, and then I put her hand on me and touched myself. We had slept together for nearly two years, but this time she pushed my hand sharply and snapped.
“What the hell? I’m watching a movie. Can’t you just watch a movie?”
I could care less about the film. I felt exhausted, but ramped up; worn out, but turned on. I wanted to fuck or go to sleep, because sometimes that’s how it goes with a body driven by untended and unknown sorrows. The sting of her rejection did not sit well with me.
“Don’t think I’m going to conform to your idea of how and when and where to make myself feel good,” I said. “This is my bed, too. You think things are fine, but I’m not getting what I want or need. You say we just have to work some shit out, so work them out. You’re the one who drank the Kool-Aid and can’t see your way out of self-loathing—not even now that you’re Out and estranged—and it doesn’t mean I have to go along for the ride.”
I stood and pulled on my robe, pulling clothes off the floor and folding them, putting them in drawers. “It’s the plotline of all time, right? First they tell you how precious you are, how precious love is, and then they feed you their shame about who you are, about your body, about what you look like, about what you do with it, about who you touch and share it with. All those words on a page, words from the pulpit, words from your so-called family carefully crafted to make you feel like shit.
“If they can make you stop giving yourself pleasure, let alone have sex with your partner, on your own time, for your own pleasure, without fucking hating yourself for it, well they can make you do anything. They own your ass. And that’s what this is about, right here. The big mind fuck that owns your ass and makes you feel crappy about yourself and shitty about me and shitty about sex, so you put out desire like a bowl of dry cereal, and you know what? It tastes like a big fat fuck you to me and every other queer who didn’t get brain washed . . .”
I spoke bitingly, as if driven by the subterrain of my heart and the need to claim the yes and no, the wrong and right, the will and won’t for myself in the safety of her heartbreak. I spoke as if sharing it with my followers, as if performing for my “friends,” as if trying to keep up appearances to the people who kept me silent because they could.
Roca sat in bed as the light from the computer screen swept across her pupils. She did not look angry. She did not look afraid. She did not look hurt. She looked ready to go. Our final jam, and we didn’t even get on the track.
Dear WWDD,
I’m just not feeling it these days. My game is off. I can’t stand the drama. I think I’ve just burnt out or done what I need to, but I worry. It’s easy to become irrelevant. What does the post-derby life have in store?
Ender’s Pain
It’s not that I decry faith and love; it’s just that I put a lot of currency in bliss. I figure there’s sorrow and pain enough in the world that you may as well engage what feels good while you can. I know what my body betrays. I see the scars every day.
WWDD used to get me high as a kite with a welcome ego-boost. Now it’s a way to offset my long, boring workday with furtive posts on my smart phone. I sure as hell won’t make the World Cup derby team. I joined the sport late. I’m in my late thirties and already worn out—inflamed hips, headaches, TMJ, lackluster sleep—the stuff born decades ago and churned into heavy cream. It’s the miles and the way I traveled them.
I hear about people all the time, people who have dreams, plans, plots unfolding like storybooks, their long-awaited retirements with retirement pay, their long road trips with long-lived lovers letting go of all they built to quest the last of their designs: the Hawaii bungalow, a cabin in the woods, cruises and grandchildren and temp jobs to boost the vacation fund. The thirty-odd years of saving and scraping and scrambling for opportunity and reserves, and it didn’t come easy, and they’re stiff in the joints now, but they still get around nicely, they’re still loved and in love.
Roca used to say, “Do people know the chances, the odds, their blessings? Do they know how much we watch them in awe?”
Those people who grab onto life’s arc and ride it out of the tangled forest floor to a place where they can see through and beyond the roots and weeds and trees—yes, the people who muddle through and around me and all that I’ve hoisted up on my shoulders or crunched underfoot, who have a clear sight line of all I want and long to see—the view from the clearing, the 360-degree sigh of belief.
Dear Olena,
Just want to touch base. I miss home, but I am well. I miss our laughing, our hikes.
I wasn’t sure if I could make this move without you, but I made it and I feel connected to myself again. I’m in Turkey now, a village called Ayder near the border, but I guess everywhere is near a border here. I work at a teashop and teach English. This is a place of history, and you know how I adore history.
Here, the mountains look lush like home and it smells like the spring when we took the ferry from Skagway to Sitka. It’s not the same, but there are waterfalls, meadows, peaks, and travelers. I am one of them.
I can speak a little Turkish now, enough to order pastries and make small talk. I met someone, too. She is Turkish. It is more dangerous here for us, but to everyone we know, we are close, close friends, and that is where it sits for now. She has decided to call me Raki because it “is close enough,” and our conversations are “intoxicating.” She is always playing with language. We are always messing it up and laughing, all the ridiculous translations.
It’s funny, we don’t speak each other’s languages well, and she doesn’t speak Spanish at all, but we fumble through and somehow learn through the fumbling and misunderstanding to communicate, even when the words scramble into something other than what we mean.
You and I fumbled a lot, too. Words can be such untethered things. Communication is like history that way—we hate memorizing the details, but if we don’t hold onto it, we repeat the same mistakes.
I do not know many people here, so I feel lucky to have found someone eager to repeat, repeat, and repeat again the same words and phrases until one of us gets it right or until it doesn’t matter, usually the latter. By then, we are drunk on our giddy misinterpretations and on to the next lesson.
I want you to know how much I miss our walks, how much I miss you. Write back if you can.
Ser la roca está, mi amiga íntima.
Roca
It’s been a week since I sat at the keyboard, and days since I dared hold a pen.
I go to the track, put on my skates, breathe. I feel that old dread mounting again, the buzz of anxiety, the wash of sensory anguish, old traumas mired in new. I cannot discern the difference. I join the wall of blockers and shift as it moves. Or I take the jammer cap and wait at the line. The whistle blows, my visible field narrows, my muscles angle toward the gaps between blockers, my speed gains at turn one, my thighs drive toward the inside lane, body hitting, evading oncoming hips and shoulders, anticipating the force of what’s sure to come, the past compressed with the future here in this moment on a track where the damage is witnessed, tallied, and shared, and the hardship heralded in hematomas and sheared skin.
This is what derby would do. This is all it can do.