Thrillville usa stories, p.1
Thrillville, USA: Stories, page 1
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I wrote these stories to impress my wife, Joselyn.
Thank God for her.
THRILLVILLE, USA
IN THE FIRST week of the last season at Thrillville, USA, a boy got all fucked-up in the Haunted Mine. The animatronics tore a wasp nest apart somehow, and the kid came out stung to hell. Poor kid was riding alone, too. I’d always thought you could slip from the lap bar if you really wanted to, but I guess not. The minecart lurched out to the loading zone with this kid shrieking his head off, all pink and lumpy, a face pinpricked with bruised dots of blood. Denny and I didn’t have any clue what to make of it at first. This deranged, swollen child shrieking like a cat set on fire. Then Glenn with his prosthetic leg came vaulting up on his forearm crutch, shouting for us to kill the ride and release the lap bar already.
It took us a while to figure out what had happened. The kid didn’t know those were wasps that attacked in the dark. He believed the Haunted Mine was really haunted, and with such conviction that I felt a bit skittish around the ride afterward. Glenn and I had to walk through the Haunted Mine with flashlights and find the shredded wasp nest buzzing to realize what had happened. I got stung on the hand. The kid was hospitalized, but he was okay. Glenn settled it out of court. He knew the kid’s mother. They’d been sleeping together. She used to hang around and he’d made a point of introducing her to everyone. She and Glenn strolled about, sometimes disappearing into his office trailer while the kid roamed the park off-leash. Glenn didn’t move too well and he carried some extra weight on him, but he was never without a girlfriend for the moment. We’d met a few of his short-stint lovers by then. He was a good guy, but we guessed it was the leg, the missing one.
“I mean, he looked bad,” I told Jen. “Really fucked. Probably he got stung in the eyes.”
“How bad though?” she asked. “Like medical-wise?”
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I told her. I was so hungover, the whole day felt like an anxiety hallucination. “It looked like a pissed-off witch doctor just went to town with a needle on like a little voodoo doll version of the kid.”
“Oh my God.”
Denny said if voodoo were real he’d carry a little doll version of himself around and jerk it off and lick its ass all day. He knew the kind of jokes I liked and told them, watching me from the corner of his eye. He was my very tallest friend. When he was drunk, he tossed me around like a little dog. It was great. Jen told Denny to grow up. The ambulance hadn’t even left yet, she reminded us. That was the boy’s mom in hysterics with the paramedics.
Jen glowered at Denny with an expression that seemed to say, you’re just the worst, babe. The two of them were having a secret affair that everyone knew about. My least favorite part of the affair was that I had to play clueless about it, although Denny had clued me in from the start. Denny, right after their first night together, told me all, too much—the noises she made, the color of her nipples—but Jen, he insisted, wasn’t to know that I knew. So they fiddled with each other’s genitals when they were at one side of the game counter and me at the other. I couldn’t see the action, but I knew what was happening down there. Their mouths were half-open and eyes half-closed. Denny and Jen thought they were doing the most interesting thing in the world together. When they touched, they seemed amazed that something hadn’t stopped them from touching. Nobody cared at all, but to them it was magic.
One time, Denny was on a bender and I was having trouble hunting him down, and I asked Jen where he was. It troubled her that I expected she’d know Denny’s whereabouts. “I’m not his keeper,” she said, indignant, as if I were the one who should be embarrassed, just for knowing the facts, just for being anyone other than the most ignorant person in the room.
Denny was seeing a high schooler then. Girl named Katie. She was pretty and freckled, but she was too young, legally speaking, so they just kissed cheeks, he said, and sent each other dirty texts. “Sow the seed,” he told me, “and pluck the tomato a little sour, little green, before anyone else takes it for their own caprese.” Then he kissed his pinched fingertips with a big “Muah.” He often used nonsense gardening metaphors to talk about Katie. Shucked corn and mushy peaches, et cetera. It was all geared toward the eventual eating of something. He was twenty-five and she was sixteen. One night, when Denny was super fucked, he told me they did hand stuff sometimes, but when he sobered up the next day, he said he was just joking.
Maybe Jen was not quite as pretty as Katie, Denny theorized, but that might have been a virtue of Katie’s leg up on her youth-wise. I was a poor audience on this subject because I believed Jen and Katie, between the two of them, had more prettiness than Denny warranted. Jen’s hair was so black that, right when I met her, I decided everyone I’d ever thought of as having black hair really had very dark brown hair. And she was mean, too. I loved that. Jen was technically married to a badass Mexican guy from Salem. He had a left shoulder full of cigarette burns. Dozens of mottled, ring-shaped scars overlaid like a gory octopus arm. He burned himself whenever he drank too much, even though no one had dared him to since middle school. He and Jen had a courthouse marriage in a spur-of-the-moment situation just before he shipped off on his first deployment. They didn’t talk anymore, but they were man and wife in the legal sense and in the eyes of the Lord.
What inconvenienced me though, about the affair, was that I’d had to move out of the one-bedroom apartment Denny and I shared. It made getting to work a hassle if I missed my ride with Glenn, since Denny and I’d gone in together on an old, two-hundred-dollar Ford Pinto. We loved it. We drove it around like a go-cart. The rear bumper was torn up like a busted lip and the front bumper just dropped off one night on its own. Technically Denny and I shared custody, but mostly he kept it. I was reasonable about parting with the Pinto and apartment both. The apartment lease was in Denny’s name, and it was his mom that helped with rent. It was her old raggedy sofa I slept on, too. Fair was fair. Denny’d told me his stepbrother was moving back to Turner, and needed help getting on his feet, but then his stepbrother never showed up and Jen was always over, her clothes on the bedroom floor, beauty stuff all over the sink rim, strands of her long black hair in the drain. I put it together. Glenn let me crash on his couch. It wasn’t like I was out on the street. He had a massive old tube TV and a bachelorly place in the mobile home park at the next exit down I-5.
The foot was the first thing I noticed about Glenn when we met a few years before. It didn’t move right. I was only twenty-one then. I asked if his foot was fake during my interview. He said that’s poor interview etiquette. Then he bent forward conspiratorially and hiked up the cuff of his jeans so I could get an eye on the metal prosthesis. He told me that in the nineties he was hand propping his ex-brother-in-law’s Cessna, but when he yanked the motor running, the brake block beneath the tire must have jimmied loose because the airplane budged forward just a hair and the prop caught him right above the ankle. He said it flipped him a rotation and a half onto his head and it shot his foot across the hangar bay with such force it dented the hangar wall. “The foot,” he said solemnly, “exploded.” He took painkillers for his phantom limb pains. Some days it felt like his foot was still there, he said, ghost toes wiggling on command, but it also felt like the foot was pinched in a vise. The pain flared up when he was stressed-out or lonesome or feeling ashamed, which accounted for all his time on earth. Denny and I figured he probably just had a pill problem like everyone else we knew, but we left him his story because, first off, we partied too and, secondly, because we liked Glenn, and also because Denny snuck us pills now and again from Glenn’s stash. Glenn kept his pills in his office desk. He didn’t like to keep his meds on him because he ended up relying on them too much, he said. I told him, sure, the desk was a fine stowing place.
* * *
GLENN HAD OWNED Thrillville, USA for four years then, and each year of business was a miracle. The wasp incident was terrible timing. It came on the heels of another bad one. The previous season a heavy drunk managed to launch himself from the Magic Carpet Slide, then plummeted a floor and a half down to a concrete walkway. We didn’t think that was even possible, but then the guy came soaring overhead with his shirt off. Cracked his pelvis clean through. Messed his pants on impact, instantaneously. He messed his pants so fast, we thought the mess in his pants might have been a preexisting condition. I’m making light of this now, but it was really a horrific thing to witness.
Insurance and maintenance would have been enough trouble, but park attendance was at an all-time low. We broke low attendance records every month. We shut down midday all the time. Stood attendant to the idling rides, humming and vibrating for no riders. Money vanished into the park as into a pocket with a hole in it. Glenn, though, even desperate as he must have been, seemed to grow more affectionate toward the place with the loss of every dollar.
Before Thrillville, Glenn ran a carpet cleaning business that did okay for a while before it went out. He opened a bait and tackle shop once by the reservoir, but that was practically DO A. He said he wished he knew how to work for someone else, but he was always the first guy fired. Glenn was left by two patient women in his life, though they remained on friendly terms. Some days they brought him meals wrapped in foil. They worried about him. It had always seemed obvious to me that Thrillville wasn’t built to last, and that Glenn had practiced his whole life to see it off. He was its perfect hospice worker. Or he was like the servant who buries himself alive with the pharaoh.
Thrillville, USA had been owned by a series of unlucky men over the years. Each built additions without any thought of continuity, a total thematic fiasco. The feeling it had was like some madman’s roadside collection of carnival antiques. At the southern side, nearest the interstate, there was a sort of fairy-tales thing going on—the Magic Carpet Ride, Enchanted Forest, and Haunted Mine. Up above that, the park phased into an indiscriminate mix of Greek and Roman mythology, starting with the Flight of Icarus, which flew not at all, but instead spun passengers around and around and was generally considered a terrible time. Neptune’s Wrath, our one water attraction, which you could see from the parking lot, spiraling five or six times above the fence. No one rode it. Wasn’t worth the toweling off and change of clothes. At the other end there was the Screamin’ Eagle, which might have been patriotic, except it sat opposite the Cuckoo Ka-Choo, so maybe it was just avian. Glenn hadn’t added any attractions in his tenure, except for a new photobooth and a penny press machine, which mashed pennies into ovals, thin as a toenail. The machine imprinted the pennies with THRILLVILLE, USA SINCE 1977. Denny loved to watch the penny press work. He thought it was like a magic trick. He said, “You gotta spend money to make money.” But he said that all the time. Buying a beer at the Golden Nugget, buying a pair of shiny orange bowling shoes at the Salvation Army: gotta spend money to make money.
Glenn decided to host a fireworks night every second Friday of the month for that summer season. We shut all the rides off, except for the Ferris wheel and the Rock-O-Plane cages so that visitors could be drawn in from the highway by the flashing passenger carriages. That was fanciful thinking, I said. The surrounding county was ready, had long been ready, made its demands of the city council already, for Thrillville to shut down. It was, by popular opinion, an eyesore, a noise pollutant, and a death trap. They would be glad to see it gone, and to see us gone with it.
* * *
THAT FIRST FIREWORKS Friday, I was turning down the Ripper, the oldest steel coaster in Oregon over such and such height—or so claimed Glenn anyway. By now it was fairly run-down, and you heard plenty of rumors about it. According to one rumor, the coaster cars beat so violently around the curves that a woman once lost her pregnancy at the first turn. In another version of the story, the unborn baby was a young boy who, while riding with his mother in the rearmost car, was flung from his seat at the turn and scattered dead into the parking lot. If any of that was remotely true, I think I’d have heard about it from Glenn. I removed the pocket trash from the footwells, then wetted a rag with disinfectant and rubbed down the seats, the asswells—shaped in such an impression as I have never met a living ass to match—then the shoulder bars, the buckles, so on, before I called it satisfactory and hit the lights out. I spent the next quarter hour wandering around beneath the coaster with a flashlight, looking for dropped wallets and cell phones. If any jewelry ever turned up, it was the faux, plastic stuff. I didn’t find anything this night except a flip-flop, which I left floating upturned in the small, leechy pond.
Denny was sneaking himself between the park, where Jen saved him a spot on the yellow lawn, and the untenanted gravel lot that lay adjacent to Thrillville. A dozen high schoolers assembled a bonfire there and ringed their parents’ cars around it and laid out on the hoods to watch the fireworks. Katie was there, hoping Denny would sneak off with her for the finale. I told Glenn those high schoolers were seeing the show for free. Glenn didn’t mind. He thought it was a step in the right direction.
We’d set floodlights up around the concessions pavilion, and with the lights placed down low and angled upward, they had strange shadows dancing around in the dusty evening. Glenn was messing around in the launch zone, which he’d stanchioned off and fixed with handwritten warning signs. Andy, a rail-thin seventeen-year-old who’d started at Thrillville partway through the previous season, was selling beer on the down-low out of a cooler for three dollars apiece. He was drunk early. When he was drunk, he winked a lot and drew a finger gun and clicked his tongue.
“That little alien dude does a shit human impression,” Denny said.
I went back through the park to stake my spot for the show and came across a low rustling in the dirt along the back side of the Scrambler. I pointed my flashlight at the noise and clicked it on, and in the sudden brightness two teenagers materialized, groping each other passionately. The guy rose up on an elbow and shielded his eyes. He called out, “Whoa whoa, man, get outta here!” I stood there blinking at them, shining my light in their eyes. The squinting girl giggled in a low tank top and held herself. I saw the bluish color of veins in her pale chest. That killed me for some reason. The guy gathered himself upright, huffing indignantly, and he told the girl to come on, and they darted off into the dark like a pair of deer.
I hung around fidgeting for a while, electrified with longing and shame in equal parts. Then it occurred to me: It was those two that were behaving badly, wasn’t it? That audacious horndog had scolded me as if I’d barged into his dorm room, but they were the ones fooling around in my place of business. I decided I’d find them, tell them the score, or maybe just keep an eye on them. I didn’t know what I meant to do, but I was already on the move. I had something to live for all of a sudden. Far off in the distance there were voices speaking in that tone they speak in when a show is about to begin.
I’d nearly given up the search when I heard one high, clear note of laughter ring out from the Magic Carpet Slide then vanish beneath the low hum of Thrillville, USA. I switched off my light. The slide was eight-lanes-wide yellow fiberglass and descended to the earth in a series of gentle waves. The underside was all cobwebbed rafters and beams like the space beneath a set of bleachers. Now and then Denny got lit and nodded off beneath the slide. He told me he’d once come upon shadowy figures humping each other under there. The trouble now was the lighting. I edged up around a corner of the slide and crouched by a buggy shrub and trained my eyes blindly at where the action sounded to be. I felt light-headed. It sounded like chewing. It sounded like they were eating each other alive.
Then the first mortar reported overhead, and the sky exploded with golden light and then green light, red light, blue. One flash at a time, I saw the teenagers pulling at each other’s vulnerables. The reports grew in frequency and choked the sky with light and the eggy smell of combustion. I felt the mortar concussions in my chest, like ka-kunk ka-kunk. And my heart doing something similar, ka-kunk, ka-kunk. The boy spread himself over the girl as if he meant to cover her entirely, the way a soldier jumps on a live grenade lobbed into the bunker, like in the movies. And then, in the fiery light, the girl adjusted herself, turned beneath her lover, and I saw her illuminated. She lay her head in the golden nest of her hair, and her face was the golden baby bird of a face, and it was perfect absolutely. She had one of her pale breasts out and her boyfriend held on to it for dear life. Of course, I lit up too. Like the lighted statue of a pervert. I saw her and then she saw me, unmade, each of us, into the dark every other second, made back again in the light. She patted her boyfriend in a panic. “He’s back,” she said.
“Where?” he said, spinning his head.
“There,” she said. “That’s him.”
They rose again and ducked out from beneath the slide. “Why won’t you fuck off?” the guy said as they passed, holding hands. The girl didn’t even glance up at me as they went, and before I could apologize, they were gone. I sat slumped beneath the booming sky and felt flat-out rotten about myself. Then the show ended, and everyone went home.
