Roller Derby Anarchy

"Most of you won't like this,

and I don't blame you at all."

- Lou Reed

I was supposed to be cleaning up one of my home's many rooms, getting it ready for paint, when I looked inside one of the boxes of crap I have accumulated over the years. Nothing sidetracks me faster than looking back on my life. I try not to look back, Satchel Paige taught me that, but sometimes you just cannot help it.

I have lots of old magazines - some from my heavy metal motherfucker days, some from my punk rock motherfucker days. I was looking at the pictures, recalling how much I wanted to be just like Ritchie Blackmore when a small rectangle of coloured paper fell from between the pages of a Lester Bangs interview with Lou Reed. The paper rectangle was about one inch wide by two inches long - a wee flap of drugs. I used to tuck drugs away for a rainy day and had forgotten about this one. It was not the first time I had discovered a forgotten package of fuck up dust amongst my belongings.

I opened it up, spilling the contents onto my desk. It was a brownish powder, unmistakably MDA. I smiled. This shit would put an extra sparkle on the roller derby show later that same day. I scooped the magic powder back into the flap and got back to my beer and my cleaning up.

I was just about finished cleaning up the room when Hunky Z poked his head in the door. A bottle of foul looking liquid was dangling from his crooked right hand. "What's that shit?" I asked.

"That shit," Hunky smiled, "is bhang. There's enough THC in this bottle to get over a dozen people as fucked up as Michael Jackson the night he died."

"But we're going to do it all before we go to the derby, right?"

"You know me too well Beer. You know me too well. Get us a couple glasses. We got ourselves some getting fucked up to do."

I took the bottle of bhang and got us a couple tall glasses. It was going to be another one of those nights. I poured us some bhang, added a half packet of the brown powder to each glass, gave them a good stir and topped up each glass with ice. "You ever drink this bhang shit before?" I asked Hunky. He told me he had not. "I bet this is going to be the best derby ever."

We poured the bhang into our bellies. It did not taste that bad so we each had two more glasses before we headed to the old hockey arena and the roller derby girls. The bhang and the venerable brown powder had not hit us until we were sucking on our second beer, ten minutes into the bout's first half. The Anarchy Angels and the Kiss Me Deadlies were showing everybody they could play the sexy, violent game just as well as the girls from Dope City.

Just as the buzz started to lift me out of my seat Hunky said, "Jesus Fuck Beer." Those were the last comprehensible words I heard out of him all night.

On the flat track it was becoming clear the bout was a match between the Angels' star jammer Snarly, who appeared to us to be about ten feet tall, and the Deadlies' Sugah Bomb, who looked like Alice in Wonderland. The Angels established a lead of about a dozen points which they did not relinquish until the bout's final jam when the Deadlies drew even with their Anarchist opponents - 132 - 132. The crowd of a few hundred or so, subdued at the beginning of the evening, had been getting progressively rowdier and were now fucking gonzo. The little hockey arena had never seen a crowd like this before. Everybody must have been on the dope.

The winner would be decided in sudden death overtime. The crowd leaned into the glass from the seats and onto the edges of the track itself from the mayhem of the beer garden. Snarly and Sugah Bomb assaulted one another from the starting line as they waited for the referee to blow the last jam into play.

Sugah Bomb, a little firecracker really, snuck through the Anarchist defence, and exploded past the pack. Snarly lay like a heap of broken bones far behind her. All that was left of Snarly, who looked to my eye to have all the star quality of Dope City's Roller Girl, was a whimper. The Anarchy Angels were not happy about their star taking a beating so before the final whistle Sugah Bomb too was lined up and taken out. She spun 720 degrees, deperately trying to keep her balance on the tip of one toe, before she too fell like a sacrificed animal onto the cement track.

We guzzled our last beer and headed out the door. There was not much of Hunky left besides a whimper either and I was surely in just as bad shape. "What do we do now?" Hunky asked, his eyes glazed over like never before. I checked my watch. It was only 8:30. "Looks like we are going to the bar!"

"You're a fucking animal!"

"Bhang on motherfucker! Bhang on!"