Thrill-Bent (13 page)

The Magic Fingers have shot their wad, and I’m sitting up perfectly still hugging my knees. Everything happens fast now: the trial testimony of the flustered best friend, the interview with the pockmarked prosecuting attorney (“The innocent ingenue you see before you is effectively camouflaging a cold-blooded, heartless strategist!”), the denial-eyed mother still unbelieving, saying ridiculously untrue things like “My baby couldn’t possibly have done this,” and looking to her stone-faced husband, nodding pleadingly at Diane Sawyer, waiting in vain for someone to agree. Then there is the cheerleader in an orange jumpsuit, doing twenty-to-life at the state penitentiary, being led by a Janet Reno-ish jail-marm to the visitors’ room, where Diane sits flat-lipped on the other side of a glass partition.

“Do you feel like an adult, now that you’ve been sentenced as one?” Diane asks, clearly excited by her own phraseology.

The girl does not smile, but her for-the-camera expression falters for a moment. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she says, her mouth turning down at the corners like a freshly tucked bedsheet.

“Killing your baby wasn’t wrong?” an incredulous Diane asks.

“I didn’t kill him. He was already dead.” The ex-cheerleader/bikini-shopper seems oblivious to the testimony of several medical and forensic experts to the effect that the baby took at least several breaths after he was born, judging from the amount of air in his lungs.

She stares at Diane defensively. Her blond bangs hang like damp laundry across her furrowed forehead. She is pretty, still; her features are so symmetrical that they disconcert, her eyes set wide apart and blue, like Barbie’s. Clearly, she is beyond the stage of teenage untouchabil-ity where the voiceless, confounded sigh (whose caption might read, “Oh my God, I’m so
sure,
Diane!”) would be her only communique, and yet her face suggests childish defiance, a refusal to open her mind to even the next-up subset of possibilities. The images rush onward—Diane, mom, best friend, tears, Hugh Downs, Jerry Seinfeld for Amex—but my mind instinctively freeze-frames the picture of this girl’s blond-bordered face: the mesmeric eyes open but opaque, alive and yet static, unseeing—as death must be—here but not here, racked out, in-between.

I let my head fall back into the sturdy marshmallow logic of polyester fiberfill, whose stiff and lengthy tag curls around like a pig’s tail to poke me behind my ear. I barely flinch. From this position I can see the lighted Travelodge sign over the office: that fuzzy teddy bear still sleepwalks dumbly, his moccasin poised to step off of the cliff edge.

The urge to stick with your story—whether it is a not-guilty plea rife with incurable contradictions, or an imperious night dream that sends you out of bed and into the urban wilderness—is sometimes more compelling than the certainty of death, suffering, imprisonment, or plunging misstep. But I understand the urge. I’ve cradled my own fabrications like beloved toys, squeezed them until they squeaked endearments. I’ve been caught behind a vast suburban loneliness that looked cheerful from the front. I have felt secure in the Vaselined lens of fantasy, but now I want living color, even if that color is disturbingly blood-red. I don’t want to be daddy’s girl anymore. The look on that face behind the perspicuous prison glass makes me want to pray: Please don’t let me die clinging to my version of things; please give me the strength of character to unloose my grip on my side of the story.

Dear Chantelle,
I dream.
Where did you come from? Did you spring whole from an organic mix of minerals and air pollution, sludge and sunshine, milky semen and uterine gymnastics? If you can’t answer in five words or less, your leading man will take center stage and pilfer your soliloquy: “Behold my latest external organ!”

The next morning I wake to the melodic strains of my Kermit ringtone. The room is full of fat, golden light—everything looks swollen and encephalitic: the walls are convex, bloated out like glossy Buddha bellies; and the bed has taken on a giant tangerine bon-bon quality, puffy-sweet and glazed. I reach over to grab my phone, and at the same time give the curtain a good yank. I feel the heat even before I am blinded by sunlight, caught and held like a Star Trek crew member in the process of being beamed up.

“Hi, Half-Breed! Are you getting in touch with your Mormon side? Have you seen any of the Osmond brothers? What’s going on?” Betty’s voice is chipper and caffeinated, and I remember that she’s a couple of hours ahead of me in New York.

“No Donny or Marie yet,” I mumble. “No Tabernacle choir. I got in late last night.” My eyes are adjusting to the light, and I see through the haze of brilliant glow a bevy of chalk-white children very awake and splashing in the swimming pool. Poolside, right. Salt Lake City. “You woke me up, Bets. I stayed up watching this weird
20/20
about a cheerleader who suffocated her newborn baby and then went shopping for bikinis.” Squinting, I crawl out of bed and fire up the teeny Mister Coffee machine tucked in the cranny under the medicine cabinet (I guess even Mormons realize how caffeine-addicted is the tourist class). The foil-wrapped packet of courtesy coffee looks and smells just like sawdust.

“Oh my God, I saw that!” squeals Betty. “That girl was awesome! That tennis outfit? Genius.” I picture Betty’s perfectly wavy caramel-colored hair bouncing as she talks.

“Look, I’m glad you called. I need to talk to you about something. I think I’m starting to lose it. The night before last, in Houston, I had a sort of ... hallucination?” I hadn’t actually realized that I needed to talk about this until it is spilling out my mouth.

“Oh no, did Buffy dose you with weird Texas drugs?”

“No, nothing like that.” I remember the three bumblebees stuffed into my pants pocket and wonder if Betty has a sixth, drug-sniffing sense. “I guess I was a little drunk, and I stopped the car by the side of the road, just to have a smoke and chill out for a minute. And another car stopped right behind me. A man got out and came over to ask me for directions, but . and here’s the weird part . I had totally convinced myself that it was my dad.”

“Your dad? What would he be doing in Houston?”

“Right? I know. I guess I thought maybe he’d come looking for me. I don’t know! That’s my point here! I think I’m losing it!”

“Did he look like your dad?” She is trying to make sense of this.

“I guess so. He had curly hair. Shit, I barely remember what my dad looks like.” I sip my cup of gray coffee, and wonder whether they have Starbucks in Salt Lake City. A small girl in a skirted stars-and-stripes swimsuit is moonwalking her way around the circumference of the pool. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately,” I venture. “I’m wondering if I really want to go to the wedding.”

“Of course you do, Janimal. He’s your
dad,”
she doesn’t skip a beat. “I’ll be there with you, remember? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Betty has wanted to meet my dad for years, ever since she found out about his Tourette’s. She often asks me to do impressions of his seizures, a request with which I sometimes comply (and then invariably feel guilty about). Somewhere inside, I must want to be asked to imitate my father, because I can access the caricature at a moment’s notice, can launch into a burlesque complete with air stabs, crotch jabs, and a medley of expletives that feels both completely right and undeniably so, so wrong. It’s as though the grotesque send-up I used to perform for my bathroom mirror as a kid laid a groove in my brain that can be replayed at any time. Now Betty wants to see for herself how he writhes and swears and brings an electrical charge to the air around him.

“But you’ve got to get going! You’re supposed to meet Furry at 8:30, remember?”

The Lagoon opens at 10:00, and I am supposed to be at the back gates of the Tumbler at 8:30 sharp. A roller coaster named after a juice glass is less than threatening; a groundskeeper named Furry gives me more of a thrill. Furry is someone Betty tracked down through a MySpace pal who turned her on to a coasterphile website called Thrillbent.com, where someone with the screen name
furrybuck
was a frequent, and percipient, com-menter. He is a groundskeeper (or “facilities operations associate,” as he corrected me on the phone) for the Lagoon, and among his other preternatural and fascinating duties (trimming hedges into bunny shapes, polishing the rims of trash cans until they sparkle), he’s responsible for removing any lost-and-found items from the caged-off area underneath the Tumbler’s double-loop section of track. When we talked, Furry spoke of his job with a magisterial pride. “Yep,” he’d said, “No one gets in or out after hours without my pocketful of keys.” Hey Furry, is that a key ring in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? “Ever found anything really interesting?” I’d asked, and Furry whistled and said, “Oh, you gotta check out my collection.” This could be a line, of course, but if it is it’s a damn good one. I’ve heard men brag about the size of their dicks, the professions of their ex-girlfriends (model, stripper, Tantric sex instructor, Egyptologist), the number of digits in their first book advances, the hairless-ness of their balls, the 90-proof absinthe in their liquor cabinets, and the way they’ve trained their pet chihuahua to unfasten a women’s bra with its teeth. “Check out the crazy shit I found underneath a roller coaster” does not have a familiar ring. I decided to wait to ask about the nickname until I’d seen Furry in the flesh; maybe it would be self-explanatory.

I can’t find a Starbucks, and I don’t feel like slowing down to ask any of the well-groomed pedestrians I pass. It’s 8:20 a.m. on a Tuesday in early April, and my breasts are already sweating inside my bra, inside my Pep Girls T-shirt, inside the air-conditioned rental car. Apparently, there is something evil in coffee and alcohol that causes the pores to secrete, because all the natives I see are bone-dry and practically strutting down the wide, hot boulevards. The women have short, old-school lesbian haircuts and are wearing tan or teal suits and jogging shoes. The men represent about ten degrees at the end of the spectrum between balding and bald. I am slugged by a vivid visual memory of my great-aunt Vi standing outside her stucco Salt Lake City house waiting for my grandmother’s rental car to pull into the driveway, wearing a snug violet pantsuit, her gray hair permed tight into a Burt Convey afro. Her hands on her pillowy hips, she had that same expression I recognize now on the faces of the people on the street. I slow down as I approach a couple of women chatting as they walk, their white purses swinging. There it is, the look: all business, no nonsense, stern and stalemate as they turn their heads in unison and stare into the window of my rental car, not disapproving exactly, but far from Mayberry-friendly. If I were casing this town for victims, easy targets whose purses I could snatch with one hand still on the wheel, I’d pass up those two tough broads in a hot minute. You can tell from looking at them, they’d white-knuckle those pocketbook straps like they were hanging onto the last cliff edge over hell. I’d glide past each and every one of these salty pedestrians, in fact, and head right out of this area code entirely and try my luck in Sun Valley, Idaho, or some such blind spot filled with libertine nature lovers hoisting expensive vacation equipment.

After I choose one of the few shaded spaces in the expansive and empty Lagoon parking lot, I walk through the lot to the gates behind what’s got to be the Tumbler—the only giant loopy steel roller coaster in view. It’s 8:45 and all is stillness. The piped-in bubble-gum music has not yet been switched on, and the metal clank and roar of the rides is not yet bellowing. I feel a little bad about being late; I know Furry is a busy man. But he’ll probably expect this of me. Writer, from New York, truly excited about looking at his roller coaster crap: I definitely fit the neurotic flake profile. I’m probably the first person he’s talked to in years who has showed genuine interest in his obsessional amusement park stories. Sure, he toastmasters some AOL chat room where he regularly enthralls groups of teenage coasterphiles with his quirks and enigmas, but I somehow doubt if any live humans have “checked out his collection” in a very long time.

“Your coffee’s cold,” a voice says when I rap on the ten-foot-high Fort Knox security gate. It swings open and a small man wearing only an orange parachute jumpsuit, his gray hair braided into long skinny pigtails, hands me a plastic Mr. Potato Head mug. It’s full of coffee with cream in exactly the proportion I like, not too much, not too little, making it a perfect toasty tan, the color of Mr. Potatohead’s, uh, head.

“Hey, thanks!” I vaguely remember Furry asking me on the telephone how I liked my coffee. I’d thought he was just making conversation. “This is great. I was trying to find a Starbucks or something, which is why I’m late.”

I smile, but Furry is having none of it. Unfortunately, at this point in my day I haven’t had enough stimulants to even attempt to apologize further or to explain my convoluted thought process, so I just wrap my lips around the rim of Mr. Potato Head’s hat and take a sip of lukewarm-but-sacramental coffee and mumble another lame “Thanks,” and then “Sorry.”

Furry bats at his left earlobe and shrugs. “Okay,” he says, by way of absolving me. “Come on.”

He marches me up a paved pathway lined with empty garbage dumpsters. I follow, alternately staring at Furry’s back—even hidden under his overalls it’s a narrow, wiry river of movement, every muscle vibrating and swerving constantly, like amoebae under a microscope—and glancing up at the daunting charcoal exoskeleton of the Tumbler, so quiet and broad, the opposite of Furry.

The Tumbler is one of those massive, sprawling coasters they started building in the late 1970s before the design trend veered toward digitalized, compact structures, or models built on specialized gimmicks. It occurs to me that the late ’70s were also the last time when it was cool to have huge stereo speakers, the kind that took up half your dorm room. Furry bouces ahead, and I have to bend my knees and walk like Groucho Marx to keep up without spilling my coffee.

“Here’s the area where I usually find the good stuff, right underneath the loopscrew,” he says as he skids to a stop and unhooks his enormous key ring from his toolbelt. Ah, the legendary key ring; it really is impressive, fat and heavy with what looks like hundreds of keys. We’re standing on the other side of a chain-link fence from the no-man’s-land directly underneath the Tumbler’s imposing octopus arms. He unlocks the gate (without having to search for the proper key—he knows right where it is) and we scramble through, ducking down to avoid getting beaned by the low-swooping tracks.