Brace for Impact Read online

  Brace for Impact is a work of memoir. It is a true story faithfully based on the author’s best recollections of various events in her life. In some instances, events and time periods have been compressed or reordered in service of the narrative and dialogue approximated to match the author’s best recollections of those exchanges. Some names and identifying details of certain people mentioned in the book have been changed. Pronouns used are each individual’s confirmed pronouns at the time of writing and otherwise default to they/them/theirs.

  Copyright © 2022 by Gabrielle Montesanti

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  The Dial Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Portions of this work, sometimes in different form, were published in Boulevard Magazine, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, Hobart, and Just Femme & Dandy.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Montesanti, Gabe, author.

  Title: Brace for impact: a memoir / Gabe Montesanti.

  Description: First edition. | New York: The Dial Press, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021016592 (print) | LCCN 2021016593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593241370 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593241387 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Montesanti, Gabe. | Women roller skaters—United States—Biography. | Lesbians—United States—Biography. | Psychologically abused children—United States—Biography. | Sports injuries—Patients—United States—Biography. | Roller derby—Social aspects—United States.

  Classification: LCC GV858.22.M66 A3 2022 (print) | LCC GV858.22.M66 (ebook) | DDC 796.21092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2021016592

  LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2021016593

  Ebook ISBN 9780593241387

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Cassie Gonzales

  Cover image (skate): jumpingsack/Shutterstock

  ep_prh_6.0_140076052_c0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  1 / Recruit Night

  2 / Ritual

  3 / Attention

  4 / Pelvis Breastly

  5 / Fresh Meat

  6 / Derby Mom

  7 / Hitting Zone

  8 / The Rookie Rumble

  9 / Bad Blood

  10 / The Happiest Season

  11 / Old Habits

  Part II

  12 / About a Million Joans

  13 / Draft Night

  14 / Dedicated as Fuck

  15 / The Enemy

  16 / Break

  Part III

  17 / Little Movements

  18 / Baggage

  19 / One of Us

  20 / Test of Toughness

  21 / Departures

  22 / Splitting

  23 / Red Tent

  24 / Baby Steps

  25 / The Worldwide Roller Derby Convention

  26 / Joan of Spark

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1/

  RECRUIT NIGHT

  From the outside, the St. Louis Skatium seemed just as abandoned as the surrounding buildings. The strip looked like a stage set, all peeling paint and muted colors. There was a FOR LEASE sign hanging crookedly in the window of Kleb Clothing and Shoe Company; both the neighboring storefronts were boarded up. The BUSCH BEER sign hanging from an empty bar was coated in rust and cobwebs. Beside Tucker’s Bar & Grill, two old men wearing overalls and yellow gloves were rooting through a dumpster.

  Kelly and I surveyed the roller rink from our old Corolla. We had never been to South City before and had no idea what to expect. The building’s exterior, a flat, white façade with dull red accents, held no indication we had come to the right place. I’m not sure what I was expecting: something that looked more like the roller rinks of my childhood, perhaps. Kid-friendly graphics painted in bright colors on the walls. A tall roller skate with wings displayed on the roof. A sign would’ve helped me feel less intimidated—ROLLER DERBY RECRUIT NIGHT OR FUTURE SKATERS ENTER HERE. Even HOME OF ARCH RIVAL ROLLER DERBY would have put me at ease; instead, there was only HAP Y BIR HD Y JULIA 7, the missing letters all resting upside down at the bottom of the plastic showcase.

  “Are you nervous?” Kelly asked. “Because I’m not even interested in derby and I’m nervous for you.”

  “Nah,” I lied. Then I said, “We should probably go in.” But neither of us made a move.

  When I was fifteen, my dad took me and my sister, Cam, on a tour of all the places he and my mother used to frequent in the early days of their relationship. We were in Denver visiting my dad’s parents; perhaps the absence of my mother, who had stayed home in Michigan, allowed us to experience a rare collective feeling of missing, even romanticizing, her presence. First, we drove past the Grease Monkey, where my parents had first met. Mom came in for an oil change and Dad was her mechanic; we don’t know exactly what happened after that, but my sister and I loved to speculate about the initial attraction. Was it her dark eyes? His crooked smile? It was hard to imagine a time when they might have been passionate with each other. Although they stayed married, the sole affection we saw between them was a quick kiss in church before Communion. The only detail I know for certain about that time is that my dad couldn’t drive my mom on dates because his license had been revoked for drag racing. This was a particularly juicy piece of intel: his youthful recklessness, his passion. I was proud of him, in a twisted kind of way, for getting in trouble, since it was so uncharacteristic of the quiet, pious man I knew him to be.

  When we pulled up to the house they lived in when I was born, we didn’t get out of the car. I wondered if I’d have an emotional connection to the house, but when I looked at it, I felt nothing at all. The roof was flat as a ballroom; it was essentially a small box on a shady corner of two unremarkable streets.

  “That’s it?” Cam asked. Even at ten, she was hard to impress.

  Dad tapped on the steering wheel absentmindedly. I could tell he was toying with the idea of knocking on the door and asking the current occupants if we could take a look around.

  “It’d be nice to show you your old room,” he said. There was a pause; the car was still running.

  I understood my dad’s apprehension. If we knocked, we might be able to go in—but we’d also face the possibility of rejection; whoever opened the door would have all the power. My dad pushed open the glove compartment, removed a yellow cloth, and began wiping down the dashboard, which he always did when he was nervous. Maybe the thought of being inside our old home was frightening to him, I remember thinking. What if it looked completely different? What if it looked the same, and flooded him with memories of a time when our family hadn’t yet done so much damage to each other?

  “Are we going in or what?” Cam asked. I cringed, wishing she had let my dad linger in the possibility a bit longer. Her question seemed to snap him out of his reverie. We sat for a moment longer, then drove off. We never spoke about it again.

  * * *

  —

  “LET’S GO,” I told Kelly, and got out of the car.

  The walk up to the Skatium
was flanked by a black chain-link fence blocking off a neighboring bus station. In places, the chain had broken away from the poles anchoring it to the ground, and it had twisted up toward the sky. Several men in navy blue jumpsuits on the other side of the fence were smoking cigarettes and laughing.

  The air was thick and wet inside the Skatium. We had to push through a cloud of pot smoke to fully enter; the stink of weed tangled with that of body odor. On the track were purple benches arranged campfire-style around a cooler of beer. About a dozen people, who I presumed to be other recruits, were already perched there chatting. They ran the gamut in terms of age and appearance; I felt curious about what had brought everyone here.

  Stepping onto the track to join them was daunting; the surface was white, and for a brief instant I mistook it for ice. In some places, the wood had been stripped. In others, the track was warped and uneven. Small beams of light were shining onto the Skatium floor, reminding me of mornings in my childhood parish when the crucifix was perfectly illuminated. But unlike at church, where big windows were the source of light, the light flooding the Skatium was the result of holes in the roof. The ceiling was skeletal—barnlike, with crisscrossing wooden beams. Buckets, half-filled with rainwater, dangled from the rafters, and a disco ball hung in the center.

  On the sidelines, an elderly woman was vacuuming. Her hair was long and stringy, her body shaped like a question mark. After a few seconds of observation, I realized she was running the vacuum over the same strip of carpet again and again. She must have been gripping tightly, because her knuckles were white; the hand not occupied with vacuuming was clenching a fistful of her baggy T-shirt as if to wring it dry.

  “That’s slightly eerie,” I whispered to Kelly. She nodded emphatically.

  We took our seat on the purple benches beside another recruit, a butch woman who introduced herself as Alice. She noticed us staring at the vacuuming lady and said, “This place is fucking crazy, isn’t it?” Encouraged by our nodding, Alice leaned closer so the other recruits couldn’t hear. “I used to come skate here as a kid. Been here a lot over the years. I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s a drug den. My guess is meth.”

  “Are you fucking serious?” I said.

  “How do you know?” Kelly asked. As usual, she wanted facts.

  Alice simply gestured to the woman, who was done vacuuming her swatch of carpet and had moved on to wiping down the Coke machine and old arcade games. She wiped the surface of the pinball machine but didn’t touch the handles. The sea of stuffed animals and rubber balls underneath the dangling metal claw was covered with a fine layer of dust, but the woman either didn’t notice or didn’t care. She had a way of walking that looked more like hovering; she disappeared and reappeared with such regularity I became convinced she could float through the walls.

  We continued watching the woman for a few minutes as the other recruits trickled in. Alice stuck her arm into the cooler of beer and offered one to Kelly and me.

  “You all need to drink more shitty beer!” an approaching woman shouted. “And I’m the one in charge so you have to do what I say!”

  The woman was breathtaking. She had a tuft of blue hair and was wearing an exorbitant amount of makeup. Her eyelids were coated in gold glitter, and each eye was framed by a perfect wing. Her lips matched her hair and the blush of her cheeks. On her left arm was a large, unfinished tattoo of a wolf woman. Her right leg bore a hand-sized heart pierced by a dagger and the words KEEP ROLLIN. Though I loved all her ink, what I admired most about the woman was her clothing: she had hacked her jersey into a crop top and wore cheetah-print hot pants that more closely resembled underwear than shorts. My mother, who surely would have tried to recruit this woman to her Weight Watchers class, always emphasized that women bigger than a size six should cover up, hide themselves, and work hard to get thin, but clearly this woman didn’t subscribe to that philosophy.

  I recognized the name on the back of the woman’s jersey: Soup Beans. We had traded emails; I had asked questions about Recruit Night and offered more information than was probably necessary about my background. Seeing Soup Beans in person made me feel embarrassed and shy about everything I had disclosed. (“I was a competitive swimmer from fourth grade through college, and I really just miss being part of a team.”) She had responded that roller derby could probably fill that hole.

  “Listen up, sweet baby angels,” Soup Beans said, clapping her hands. “Tonight we’ll low-key get to know each other and casually ask some questions while we watch derby. The main purpose is for you to experience the action! Who here has seen roller derby live before?”

  A smattering of hands went up, including mine. I had gone with a friend in college to see the Killamazoo Derby Darlins. We had no idea what we were watching; to us, it just looked like a street brawl. Still, I was captivated. I couldn’t imagine coming to a Recruit Night if I had never seen a live bout before. Kelly’s was one of the hands that stayed down, but I made an exception for her since she didn’t want to play and was only here to support me. It was surprising, though, that I had experienced something she hadn’t. Kelly was four years older than me and had witnessed a lot in her twenty-six years: drag shows at LaCage in downtown Milwaukee, the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, bullfighting in Madrid. I felt proud that I had seen one small part of the world she hadn’t.

  Soup Beans reached into the rainbow tote bag draped over her shoulder. It said BE A SLUT. DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. Grinning, I poked Kelly in the ribs to draw her attention to the bag. From the tote, Soup Beans removed a stack of bumper stickers and fanned them out before all the new recruits.

  “Here,” she said. “Take one. We need to get rid of these.”

  Kelly and I examined our stickers. It was just the Arch Rival logo I had seen online: the Gateway Arch with Harley-Davidson-like wings and a single wheel underneath.

  “We’re rebranding,” Soup Beans said. “We’re not Arch Rival Roller Girls anymore. We’re Arch Rival Roller Derby. More inclusive. You know, for the skaters who aren’t boys or girls.” Several people on the bench next to me started clapping, and Soup Beans took a bow. Kelly whispered into my ear, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” And she was right. I had never been part of an organization that acknowledged or prioritized LGBTQ rights. It made me want to plaster my car with Arch Rival bumper stickers.

  Soup Beans directed our attention to the track, where a horde of skaters were just starting warm-ups. “As I mentioned, we’ll be watching some scrimmages tonight!” Soup Beans said. “Love me some scrim scram. Pay attention to what they’re doing out there while I go get some more benches.”

  There were close to fifty skaters on the track. Some swung their arms in circles. Others balanced on one skate and shook out their other leg. One was wearing anatomical leggings that made her look like a cadaver from the waist down. All of the wheels made the floor vibrate, and their stopping caused long, screeching noises like hawks. To Kelly’s delight, lots of skaters had their names on the side of their helmets. Every time she found one particularly amusing, she would nudge me discreetly and point. “Her name is Snotface,” she whispered. “Oh my god—Jamheiser Bush.”

  Although I felt incredibly awkward about meeting all these new people and unsure if I should make small talk with the other recruits during warm-up, I was glad Kelly seemed to be having such a good time. Her stack of crosswords—a permanent artifact in her purse—sat untouched in her lap. On the way to the Skatium, she told me she had filled out ten new job applications that day and this was her reward. Even though we both identified as introverts, I could tell the social isolation of job searching was getting to Kelly. Her only interaction with people besides me was her Saturday night volunteer ushering gig at the Fox Theater, which she had found soon after we’d moved to St. Louis four months earlier, at the end of May. She didn’t even care that she was the youngest usher by nearly forty years.

  Occasionally,
someone would break away from the track and barrel over to where we were sitting. The skaters we met this way kept their introductions brief. “Ginger Assassin. I play for the M80s,” one said, extending her knuckles for a fist bump. A woman with a long blue braid dropped to her knees, plastic pads clapping like hooves on the wood, and slid to a stop in front of me. “Rock Slobster. Smashinistas’ captain. Happy you’re here.” There was something military in the way she spoke—clipped, not in full sentences, anything nonessential boiled away—but there was an unmistakable warmth in her eyes and the way she smiled, a mouth guard blocking all her teeth like an orange slice.

  Soup Beans eventually shooed the skaters away and asked for our attention. “While they’re warming up, I want to hear from you,” she said. “Just your name, pronouns, and how you found out about roller derby.”

  The first woman to introduce herself, Birdsong, was a transfer. She was blond and tattooed and looked to be in her mid-twenties. “I just moved back home from South America and I’m looking forward to learning the rules in English,” she explained. “My league in Chile was pretty lax; we just kind of hit however we wanted.”

  I began to worry that I would be the only true beginner, but the woman who went next said she hadn’t skated in thirty years. She’d seen a van on the highway with information about Recruit Night painted on the windows. Soup Beans clapped and began jumping up and down. She turned and called to one of the skaters warming up. “Dad Bod! Dad Bod! Our windows worked!” She pointed a perfectly manicured nail back at the recruit. “This dreamboat is here ’cause she saw our windows!”