Whitehead Colson: Sag Harbor

The fact that Mr. Finkelstein's daughter had a bona-fide black friend mitigated the situation a bit. Hey, wasn't that why they'd marched on Washington in the first place? The pictures of that day in 1963 are majestic and holy — the black-and-white mosaic of faces and stone, the force of people such that it overwhelms the pool and the monument and wipes the sneer off the face of architectural arrogance. If you were actually there, what did you think when you saw the photographs? The mass of figures was the sheer expression of human potential, making it possible to kid yourself that you could spot yourself in that sea of people — that's me in this important event, right there, as I was, before all this. It must be possible to fool yourself that you were not lost in the crowd. I had no problem with Mr. Finkelstein.

A roller-disco party was surely an artifact of the post-piñata, pre-intercourse era. Whither all the piñatas of yesterday? In a succession of finely furnished living rooms we took sticks and expressed our lust through an eager fury, assailing the poor piñatas and sending their sad paper fur flapping, their empty bulk wobbling above us, such a grubby mob we were. We needed to get inside there, split the beasts open, see their pink guts burst to loose that clumsy rain of mongrel candies that exist only inside piñatas, the dingy Zimzis, Dolos, and Shrats, sweet shreds that we scrambled after like well-dressed vultures. We wanted different candy now. For some, this period of pre-sexual limbo would be short. Not for me. Which made my inflated sense of self after that time Emily Dorfman asked me to skate with her all the more pathetic.

Emily Dorfman was the tallest person in our class, had been for a while. We called her Spider. Her arms and legs were pale scaffolding propping up her shirts and skirts, and she hadn't yet realized that growing her hair out might cover up the extra vertebrae she seemed to have in her neck — if she were an animal, she'd be nibbling those high-up leaves. While I believed she was the owner of a certain bow-legged elegance, a gangly grace, I had never thought of her as a sex object. We'd shared co-ed bathrooms as youngsters, seen each other's bald parts back in the day, and maybe that had something to do with it. No mystery.

We were on our second or third sugar rush of Liza's birthday party when Emily came over. I hadn't hit the floor that much. The skates were too tight, and I winced through wide, oafish circuits around the rink. I didn't know what size my feet were anymore. My body was having an off year basically, and I was not the kind of person to ask for the right size after I had committed, preferring to stumble around in pain for a couple of hours rather than speak up for myself. And so. I was standing with the guys over by the Asteroids machine — all of us momentarily between quarters and speculating as to the training regimen of DMZ, the high scorer on the game — when Emily stepped into our circle and said, “Benji, let's go out there. I want to skate.” She slapped me on the back to emphasize the casualness of her proposal.

I looked over at Andy Stern, who was my buddy. We played D&D together, went way back, to Star Wars marathons. I remembered he passed notes to Emily for a while in the third grade. Was this okay? Would he take revenge as Dungeon Master? Those days we expressed aggression by siccing orcs, gryphons, and homunculi on each other. Andy Stern scratched beneath his bowl haircut, eyes vacant. What was the big deal? I didn't think of Spider in that way and why would anyone think of me in that way. I said, “Okay,” and we headed out.

It was all pretty innocent, just pals, as we dodged a flotilla of older kids skating together in a gossipy swarm and discovered a comfortable little slipstream on the inside of the track. Then she grabbed my hand and I almost jumped. Her hand was hot and moist. She was sweating a lot. I mention her sweatiness not to raise the specter of glandular aberration but to explain the sympathetic gushing of sweat it roused in my own hand. Guh. Our fingers slobbered over each other. I had been dragging a little behind her on account of my pained feet but I caught up and started matching her rhythm. We swooped past where our friends were hanging out but we didn't look at them. We kept them behind the aluminum rails and far from us. I did not witness any hypothetical thumbs-up Mr. Finkelstein threw my way. As my fingers slid in the grooves between her knuckles, I reckoned that her spidery fingers provided more points of contact than those of our classmates. If you were going to hold hands with someone, this was the hand to hold, volume-wise. My perception burrowed down into those places where our flesh rubbed together. I turned to her, she looked at me and I smiled and lifted my eyebrows, this suave tic. Then it was quickly eyes down again. Too much! I squeezed her hand twice in some kind of weird code and she squeezed back. And then my other hand occurred to me. It was empty. I wasn't pulling Reggie out of traffic or up out of bus seats so that we wouldn't miss our stop, he wasn't drifting behind me sloshing a cup of soda, he wasn't there at all. This was no threesome, I was alone with someone else. The awareness of my left hand faded and I returned to the little world of sweet contact in my right.

We were out there forever. How does one measure infinity in a roller rink? You can test the universe by asking questions — how many mirrored tiles on disco balls shooting how many pure white streaks across the walls and floors, how many ball bearings clacking into each other like agitated molecules in how many polyurethane wheels, how many inkblot colonies of bacteria blooming unchecked in the toe-ward gloom of how many rented skates. But let's say this notion of chintzy roller-rink infinity is best expressed by the number two. Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case “Big Shot” and “Bette Davis Eyes.” The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives. Spider and me slogged through the songs, hand in hand. Occasionally seeking each other's faces to trade brief, worried smiles.

Then “Xanadu” came on, murderer. We clomped off the track and rejoined our respective tribes, slouching male and female on opposite walls of the subterranean roller rink, never acknowledging this episode again. What made her step up? Next year we went to our separate high schools, and Emily might as well have been broken down into antimatter because we never saw each other again. Frankly, I took our moment of closeness for granted (this will be a running theme) and if I had known that that was the most girl contact I was going to have for many years, I would have taken a souvenir. Wiped her sweat off my hand with a handkerchief and cherished the hankie as an erotic aid during the long period of self-abuse that was to commence a few months later (initiated by a vision of a glistening Barbara Carrera in the minor James Bond vehicle Never Say Never Again , which featured many water-themed scenarios). Retrieved from its secret hiding place, the uncrumpled hankie, saturated with Emily's sweat, would have added an olfactory component to the visual artifacts I had in my mental files, mostly snippets of Cinemax movies and adolescent sex comedies of the Makin It — Doin' It — Losin' It ilk, plus the odd stray tit from National Lampoon as I was too afraid to buy Playboy . The surface area of her long fingers would have left more sweat than the average eighth-grade hand. I would have huffed that hankie for all it was worth.

The night of the roller-disco party I decided I was in big-boy territory. Other kids in our class were doing more than holding hands, and the fact of other people's greater pleasure was becoming a feature of my reality. Now even I was on my way, having received what I interpreted as an omen of glorious high school — style interaction into my fetid sandbox. Freshman year was going to be great. Reggie wouldn't even be in the same building. I was relieved the day he told me that he didn't want to go to my high school. “I'm tired of being everyone's little brother,” he said. (We have an older sister I haven't mentioned yet — we both bobbed in sibling wake all through elementary school.) Fair enough. I was tired of being everyone's older brother. By the summer of 1985, we were at a time when if someone asked, “Where's Reggie?” I didn't know. And it was good to say I didn't know.