REO Speedwagon carried us around the skating rink in perpetual left turns. Our own version of a flat NASCAR track in a dim, windowless building that once had been a service station situated along the highway south of town.
In the corner booth playing DJ was the old man who had rented us our skates, who would sell us our Twizzlers and Coke, and for whom the skate center was named: Don.
I now recognize “old man,” might have been misplaced. By math and hindsight, I now calculate his age to have only been in his late 30s at the time. Maybe cracking 40. Whichever, an age well enough younger than my own now counts. Perspective.
We used to go there on Friday and Saturday nights as kids too young to cruise the few downtown blocks of our town or race through the dark countryside to and from keggers in the woods.
We were eight, nine, 10 years of age. Maybe a touch older, before racier pastimes took hold. Left there by our parents with a few bucks for the wheels and some quarters for the snacks and foosball table. A building full of kids dropped off until pickup.
As a parent to two sons myself these many years later, it was an incredible freedom we had then, I now know. And it was a risk, I now also know.
My math and hindsight on figuring Don’s age are possible per news reports and court documents that many years later have come to light. To the quick, Don would serve 10 years in prison. Can you see where this is going? (psst … sex stuff)
He entered prison at age 68. That’s many years past my childhood, of course, evident by the math you yourself can now do. Story problems.
As with the questions I can’t help but half ask myself:
If a man goes to prison for sodomy with a 15-year-old boy when he is 68, and that man used to own a honeytrap for children left alone by their parents for hours at a time, for how many crimes against how many children for how many years might this man be guilty? Solve for all the Xs your stomach can take.
It also stirs a quandary not unlike that which is now associated with Bill Cosby. When the wholesome light of nostalgia turns putrid, what are we to make of those childhood memories? How do we disentangle? Raise the name or the memory, and it’s no longer a joy but a cringe that rises with it.
In the fouled light of the hindsight I now hold, maybe there was something deeper to Don’s REO Speedwagon obsession. At some point, it seems he in fact no longer could fight that feeling.
Addendum
The top 9 REO Speedwagon titles ranked by smoothradio.com, ffs:
9. Time for Me to Fly
8. Roll With the Changes
7. In My Dreams
6. Don’t Let Him Go
5. Take it on the Run
4. Keep the Fire Burnin’
3. One Lonely Night
2. Can’t Fight This Feeling
1. Keep on Loving You
[cringe]
The Skating Rink is #Sixteen in the weekly memoir series, Among Other Things. What’s it about? Read Introducing ‘Among Other Things,’ A Weekly Memoir Series.
