“When do you ever see grown men holding each other’s hands like that?”
This question was posed to me on Friday night at Xanadu Roller Arts, a brand-new roller rink–nightclub–concert venue that opens in Bushwick at the end of the month. In the meantime, the club has been throwing parties to introduce itself to the neighborhood, and the local hobbyists are already making good use of what will soon become New York’s only year-round indoor roller rink. By nine o’clock, it was filled with not-so-amateurish skaters showing off their tricks — skating backward, skating on one leg, skating while doing elaborate, choreographed group line dances — and they were orbiting so fast around the wooden rink that it was creating its own windstorm for spectators on the sidelines. As was pointed out to me, there was in fact a great deal of adult men making loops while somewhat homoerotically holding one another’s hands or locking arms. Others were twirling in circles like ballerinas while a DJ played Janet Jackson and R. Kelly.
Xanadu, which, at 16,000 square feet, will be able to host 1,200 people at a time, harkens back to the era of grand roller discos like Roxy in the West Village and Brooklyn’s Empire Rollerdrome, both of which closed in 2007. Last month, Staten Island’s RollerJam USA also shuttered, even as more people seemed to be lacing up as a pandemic hobby. Earlier this year, if you’ll remember, Usher skated during the Super Bowl halftime show.
Although it will be open for all ages during the day, Xanadu is definitively a nightclub, and walking inside feels like taking a tab of acid. Retro neon carpeting glows under the black lights, and in the restroom there’s a DJ stand — they’re calling it Club Flush. The whole place smells like popcorn. Rinkside, you can order cocktails with names like “Skaterade” and “Purple Rain” (though you’re not allowed more than two drinks if you’re wearing skates, and, of course, you must sign a liability waiver). A snack stand in the back slings arcade fare such as Frito pie and six kinds of hot dogs.
Xanadu was founded by Varun Kataria, who runs the Turk’s Inn and the Sultan Room just one block away, also on Starr Street. In the 1980 musical-fantasy flick Xanadu, for which the venue is named, the protagonist gets the idea to open a roller disco after he’s visited by an ancient-Greek muse played by Olivia Newton-John. Kataria, meanwhile, got the idea at Burning Man, and he talks about his new project in appropriately Burner-y, woo-woo terms. Going from “life on shoes” to “life on wheels” is like “shifting physics,” he effuses. “You start to push past fear and enter this sort of flowy, confident embodied space. We have a room of people that are going through that psychic motion. There’s a harmony of joy and resonance that happens — this is not just hippie talk.”
On Friday night, during one of the club’s soft-launch parties, the skaters were talking with similarly cultish enthusiasm. “Skating is like therapy for me. Nonskaters wouldn’t understand,” an 18-year-old who had come into the city from Philadelphia told me, echoing a sentiment I’d heard several times. She was one of the younger attendees in the room; the rink was filled with gray heads under a disco ball. Some of them found out about the opening from their Facebook skating groups.
“There’s no competition here,” a woman in her 50s, who had come in from Long Island, said. “We get together, do this, and just exist. There’s no judgment.” A 69-year-old wearing a “BORN TO SKATE” T-shirt who had traveled three hours from Pennsylvania added, “You don’t think about your problems here,” before giving me some advice: “The drinking can sometimes make this sloppy. If you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and have a couple of drinks, you’re going to kill yourself.”
Which didn’t stop me from eating shit after three seconds on the floor. “Squat down like you’re taking a shit, and stay there,” a man who offered to be my instructor told me, also making a subtle dig at my “Bambi legs.” His name is Mike, and he looks sort of like a young “Weird Al” Yankovic. As a teenager, he told me, he skated every day but quit once the ’90s were over: “I wanted to interact with women, so I had to put the Rollerblades down.” With Xanadu opening, he’s back at it. “I get high on the perpetual motion,” he said.
Writing about nightlife, I’ve gotten used to people talking in extraordinary terms about “community” even though they’re usually just talking about, well, actually getting high. In a neighborhood whose nightlife in recent years has revolved more around dark, gatekept, underground techno spots, or messy megaclubs where straight boys go to overdo themselves, Xanadu is hoping to offer a family-friendly, unpretentious alternative. The “happiness quotient” in the room, Kataria told me on Friday night, “is really high.” He thinks his venue is a “cure for loneliness.” I believed him. Or maybe I drank too much Skaterade.
All night, I found myself hypnotized by an older couple on the rink who spun each other around for hours without taking a break. I later learned that he was from New Jersey and she from Long Island, and though she is married and quit skating for years to raise her three children, they’re now “skate partners” and do this every week. “We have our own style,” he told me before they hit the rink again, holding hands, dancing in sync the entire time.
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