Thrill-Bent (26 page)

“Is this an established treatment for Tourette’s, Dad?” I’ve never heard of deep brain stimulation, which appears to have taken away his Tourette’s symptoms and replaced his personality with that of a tortoise.

“It’s been used for Parkinson’s for years,” he says flatly, “but it’s still in the experimental stages for what I have.”

It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve ever heard my dad say the word
Tourette’s.
Neither of my parents ever referred to his disorder. It was always “what I have” or “your father’s condition.” Even when he was finally diagnosed, twenty years ago, I heard about it from my mother’s hairdresser. Apparently, he had read something about Tourette’s in a medical journal, clipped the article and sent it to my mom with a post-it that said, “Could this be what Seth has?”

The first neurologist my dad went to, clipping in hand, said, “Oh no, you can’t have
that,
that’s very rare.” Three specialists later, he got accurately tested and diagnosed. Maybe my father still prefers to think of his condition—his former condition?—as nothing more than bad behavior, the attention-getting class-clown routine that his parents always insisted it was. By getting rid of the symptoms (thanks to Vivian’s scalpel) he has finally let go of his look-at-me narcissism, finally become a man. But if that’s even moderately true, then why do I miss it?

“Fingers crossed,” I hear him saying, and I realize I’ve missed a few sentences, at least. Fingers crossed? You let somebody implant an electrode in your brain and your response is: Fingers crossed?

“Was this Chantelle’s idea?” I blurt out. I hadn’t intended to ask that, as it’s certainly none of my business. But the stench of money is all over this whole endeavor—the wedding, the operation, the haircut, the high-end liquor, the fancy patio furniture, the blandness where there used to be fire. I don’t think you buy all that on an insurance adjuster’s pension.

My father looks at me and I can see a familiar mood overtake him. His eyes flare with anger, and for a fleeting moment I think he might strike me. He takes my forearm in his hand and squeezes, pulling me to him on our little patch of coat. I can smell his breath now—a sharp spearmint spark cutting through the tequila—and as his large hand clamps down on my arm, time spins like a dial on a telephone. I am five and eight and twelve and twenty, trapped in a snare, afraid to struggle and somehow simultaneously turned on by the fear, by the secret knowledge of my father’s intentions. The heat from his palm travels through my whole body, flushing me with a low electric hum. For a long moment, we are locked in a blinkless stare, and then he rises to his feet in a swift bound.

“Of course not,” he says, brushing some invisible dirt off of his pants. “Please don’t make assumptions about things you know nothing about.” His featureless tone is back. “Listening to ladies’ room gossip isn’t your style, is it?” He smiles, but I can’t keep up with his transitions.

I am still sprawled on the ground rubbing my forearm when my father strides up the winding path back to his wedding party. In a daze, I gather my shoes and coat, covered in seaside topsoil and spilled champagne. Ducking under a low feathery branch, I glimpse the Condor at the top of the hill, stepping back onto the terraced patio. Chantelle trots over and tugs him up the last step with a flourish, like she’s pulling a rabbit out of a top hat.

I tell Betty that I don’t mind driving, but she jangles the rental car keys and slides behind the wheel. As she starts the car she unbuttons her pants and recants her food intake: herb salad, chicken Florentine, half my steak Diane, two buttered whole-grain rolls, two slices of the lemon curd raspberry cake with white chocolate ganache, and a breath mint.

“You just relax, little lady,” she tells me. “Maybe I’ll let you take over when we have to stop for gas.”

I don’t argue, because I really want to change out of my dress and into sweatpants for our drive down to Mission Beach (the site of my final roller coaster escapade tomorrow), which will be easier, though probably not terribly easy, to accomplish in the passenger seat. Betty is listing her caloric intake so I’ll think she’s sobered up, but I can tell she’s still tipsy—she gives off a certain odor, like metal and fresh dirt. I don’t care, though. I’m just glad she’s not pissed at me. Though I never explicitly said so, I know in her mind I’d promised her a freak show, and I hadn’t delivered. After all these years of subjecting her to my second-rate Tourettic dad imitations, I’d squelched on the real deal. She’d only gotten to see the new Omar Condor, which is a far cry from the Condor Classic. But just as I start to apologize, we hit a set of speed bumps on the way out of the parking lot, and my voice warbles unnaturally like a dying swan.

She looks at me and laughs, her head shaking ungrudgingly. “Don’t even,” she says. “You’ll have plenty of time to ’splain yourself after we hit San Clemente.”

And with that, she slips in a CD of Brenda Lee singing “Break it to Me Gently” and we turn south on the 101.

B
elmont Park opened in the 1920s, experienced a renaissance in the 1950s, and was already well past the apex of its parabolic popularity curve and sinking into a protracted downslide by the time I was tall enough to ride the Giant Dipper. When I was a child, plastic grocery bags and stray seagull feathers fluttered from the barbed wire fence that surrounded the midway, like dragonflies caught on a spider web, and the parking lot had become a kind of hobo camp, complete with bonfires and rats’ nests and crunchy mosaic bursts of broken glass. But Belmont Park was just a block from Mission Beach, and the view from atop the rides was the stuff of California legend—waves and sand, surfers and sunbathers, girls in string bikinis pedaling Schwinn beach cruisers down the boardwalk while drinking forty-ounce cans of PBR.

The Giant Dipper roller coaster was mighty and vicious, made even more intense by its palsied, geriatric state. It is possibly the last remaining wooden coaster designed by the famous duo of Frank Prior and Fred Church. These guys are exalted in the coasterphile world—church actually patented the train that most coasters use now, where the bobsled-type cars are set on flanged wheels and coupled with a ball and socket joint, so they can negotiate sharper turns. Of course, this was in the 1920s, the heyday of thrill rides, when there were almost two thousand roller coasters in the US and guys like Prior and Church catered to thrill-seekers everywhere, always trying to conjure ways to serve up bloody noses, bruised limbs, broken teeth, and plenty of excitation. (I say it is “possibly” the last P&C woodie because there is a debate among coaster enthusiasts whether Arthur Looff, who built the still-standing Santa Cruz Giant Dipper, also designed Belmont Park’s Giant Dipper, as he sometimes claimed. My tendency is to think not; it is too much like P&C’s previous designs, and too problem-free for a first-time coaster designer—but what do I know?)

The Plunge, as the Olympic-sized public pool was called, used to be next to the midway, and the sound of screaming kids plummeting from the high dive blended with the sound of screaming kids hurtling down the roller coaster track to create an unabating symphony of fortissimo squealage. The park was condemned in 1976, and then the homeless really took over, apparently making cozy sleeping nests out of the roller coaster cars and toilets out of the Tilt-A-Whirl buckets. I’m guessing local skaters and graffiti artists claimed the Plunge after it was emptied—what Southern California punk tween with a skateboard and a can of spray-paint could resist an empty Olympic-size pool right next to the beach, especially one where Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller supposedly learned to swim?

But during that magical window between reaching the required height of forty-two inches and hearing about Belmont Park’s impending demise on the evening news, I would insist that my dad take me to ride the Dipper at least twice a month (unsurprisingly, my mother wanted nothing to do with the place). Most times I was allowed to bring a friend, and my dad would wait in the Fiat listening to a game on the radio while we stood in line for the back car again and again. But sometimes, the Condor and I would drive down to the city alone on a Saturday, and after we rode the Dipper and played a few games of Down the Clown he would take me to the Starlight Room at the top of the El Cortez Hotel for a Shirley Temple.

The El Cortez was another San Diego landmark that had lost some luster since its glory days in the first half of the twentieth century. Bing Crosby and Ginger Rogers used to hang out there, and big bands played in the Don Room, the luxurious ballroom nightclub. In the 1950s, the famously brash hotelier Harry Handlery added the world’s first outside hydraulic glass elevator to the building’s facade (causing concern among architectural historians, who thought it made a mockery of the original Spanish Renaissance design) and a skyway fitted with a motorized moving sidewalk called the Travelator, which connected the hotel to its sister motel across the street. The Travelator was also taken over by homeless people after the motel’s demise. (Apparently, downtown San Diego was teeming with vagrants who were constantly scouting for the next possible demolition site onto which to steer their shopping carts—but I, child-tourist from the suburbs, never noticed, wandering through that urban core with stars in my eyes and the Condor on my arm, giddy from all the engineered velocity.) Both the glass elevator and the moving sidewalk were state-of-the-art technologies at the time, and I considered them to be thrillingly World’s Fair–worthy. The St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco soon copied Handlery’s glass elevator concept (actually, he later credited the idea to a daydreaming bellhop, which sounds to me like a plot for a Frank Capra movie), and London’s Heathrow Airport implemented moving walkways in the 1960s, but the pioneering El Cortez made my hometown seem very sophisticated, at least to me.

Belmont Park was reopened in 1996 after a massive infusion of public and private funds, but I haven’t been on the West Coast since then—until today. A polo-shirted teenager gestures me into a parking spot between a hulking Lincoln Navigator and a Ford Sierra with a “Freedom Ain’t Free” bumpersticker, and I find myself already pining for the old days. The clean-cut, wand-waving teen gives me the OK sign with his thumb and forefinger. He doesn’t even looked stoned, and no one vaguely homeless is on the premises, though you could comfortably house a family of four in most of the vehicles in this lot.

I told Betty I needed to come here alone today. I have to start getting used to the idea of a remarried, tic-free Condor, and I thought riding the Giant Dipper by myself might help me to exorcise some of the old twists and turns of fate that still rankle me. Out with the old dad and in with the new. Betty was pretty hungover anyway, happy to stay in the motel room and nurse her headache with the Diet Coke and trashy magazines I’d brought her from a convenience store. When I left, she was propped up on three pillows, sleep mask pushed back like a headband, smoking the second half of the cigarette she’d stubbed out in the soap dish last night. “Whoa, Rumer Willis was born with a third nipple?” I heard her ask herself as the door swung shut.

The Dipper doesn’t look the same, and I am instantly disappointed. I know its restoration was thorough and exacting—the wooden structure was braced and refitted, and each tie on the track was placed by hand—but the new cars are painted a plasticky, aggressively shiny yellow and blue, as though they’re trying to hide their classic wooden coaster status and fit in with the hipper Six Flags crowd. The phrase “A Hipper Dipper” jumps to mind before I can stop it, and I pray that the term wasn’t thrown around at PR planning meetings. The main scaffolding, despite the poor paint choices, looks pretty much the way I remember, with gorgeous swooping cross-hatch patterns, but the whole structure appears smaller to me now. Maybe because I was forty-two inches tall the last time I rode it, or maybe because I was on the massive Coney Island Cyclone only a month ago, the Giant Dipper seems more like a Medium Dipper, more like the Kukwa-dan or even an effete Santa Monica pier bauble than the grand dame I recall.

You have to buy a ticket now at a central booth (you used to just pay cash to a stoned teenager before boarding), which requires you to walk farther inside the midway than you might wish, if you’re over sixteen and not in search of chocolate-dipped bacon or temporary tattoos. Next to the ticket booth sits a small toothless man whom I initially—I admit, with a certain optimistic zeal—took to be a vagrant, but who is in fact distributing flyers that offer “Psychic Readings by Miss Sybil $10” in the First Aid tent by the parking lot. I like the idea of psychic appraisal being a form of first aid. I take a flyer and stuff it in my pocket.

“Do you think it’s in my future to get a psychic reading by Miss Sybil?” I ask the small hobo impersonator, who is sitting on an upended pail that once contained an industrial cleaning agent.

He stares at me intensely for a few seconds, as though he is contemplating my destiny. Then he shrugs. “I don’t really give a shit what you do,” he says, and looks away again.

My first ride is patently uncomfortable. I choose a seat in the middle of the train, but even there, I am battered so brutally on the turns that I worry about what spectacular bruises a skinny person might sustain. Was it this bad when I was a kid? Maybe I felt pain differently then. At some point after the first drop and subsequent banked turns, I just try to cover my head with my arms to ward off a concussion—a tactic that leaves my neck vulnerable to snapping back and forth like a crash test dummy, so I grab the side of the car and white-knuckle it, refusing to slide down the waxed bench seat at each fan curve. There is a lap-bar restraint, just like in the old days, but the violent shaking of the Dipper is like a career alcoholic with the DTs; there are too many terrifying monsters to be purged. It would be better if I could sit sideways with my feet flat against the other end of the bench to brace myself, but I can’t rotate that much. Imagine riding in the back of a fast pickup truck down a steep, rocky grade, with nothing to stabilize you. You’d be bouncing around like a nut in a blender.

When I say my dad took me to the Starlight Room for a Shirley Temple, I’m falling into the childhood habit of taking for granted that everything revolved around me (or not habit, but more like prolonged hallucination). I can’t say exactly when that beguiling dream ended, but for most of my early childhood I felt like the most favored concubine in a harem. I can picture us in the glass elevator (informally called the Starlight Express), me in my white go-go boots and a leather skirt, pressing my nose to the glass, and my dad in his sans-a-belt slacks and a red guayabera shirt, looking bored with the skyline. He’d usher me straight into the bar, which was on the opposite side from the restaurant when we exited the elevator, and for some reason no one ever said or even intimated that it was inappropriate to bring a child in there. My dad had a special dispensation somehow—all the cocktail waitresses knew me and would rush over to bring me trinkets or break out a deck of cards and play War with me on the bar between customers. I’d grab a few boxes of Starlight Room matches (blue with pink tips) on the way in, and I’d light each one before tossing it into an ashtray from a few feet away. The bar was always busy, though, even on Saturday afternoons, and often I found myself perched alone on a heavy barstool while my dad worked the room. I knew he didn’t like when I watched him too closely, so I would pretend to be absorbed in a game of Solitaire while taking frequent surreptitious glances in the bar mirror, those gold-veined wall tiles that made everything look like it was happening underwater. The Condor rarely sat down, just floated over the crowd and dipped down occasionally to laugh with a redhead or squeeze the bare shoulder of a blond.

For my second go-round on the renovated Dipper, I decide to wait in line for the back car, like I used to do when I knew better, when I craved its whip-tail velocity. But I have a plan: I will find another single rider and propose we ride together. There are many times in life when I prefer to be alone, many activities that improve considerably when they are managed in private—reading, ice skating, pitting olives with my teeth, driving over a bridge in a storm—but riding a rickety old wooden roller coaster is not one of them. Any notion I had that riding solo would help me cast out the unquiet spirit of the Condor was dispelled by the first body slam. This is the first time on my cross-country trip that I’ve ridden a roller coaster without a companion—and also the first time I’ve managed to procure ominous bruises and a whiplashy neck cramp. Now I see what all those other bodies were good for: they cushioned me from harm.

A teenage girl with long black hair stands in line in front of me. Even before she turns around, I know she must be a goth, because nobody has jet-black hair in San Diego. Even the Mexicans and Asians have highlights. She is as tall as I am and considerably rounder, wearing a tight black T-shirt that says Go Ahead, Fuck With Me. I wonder if goth is the only option now, if you’re a fat teenager. Kind of like being a drama geek was the only option when I was a chubby teenager. Wait, I bet you can still be a fat drama geek, so I guess there are two choices now. Progress!

“Hey,” I say, trying to catch her eye and at the same time act casual and non-threatening. “I like your shirt.”

Not raising her eyes from the ground, she nods. She pivots almost imperceptibly toward me, and I take that as a sign to continue the conversation. “I’m thinking about waiting for the back car,” I say, gesturing toward the left end of the platform. “Do you ever do that?” She shrugs. “Want to ride in the back car with me? I don’t know if they let you go alone.” This is a blatant fabrication, of course they allow single riders, and I give myself a start, glancing again at the message on her shirt. I’m not fucking with her, I reassure myself, I’m just trying to rustle up a little human companionship. I think about saying out loud
I’m not fucking with you, I promise.
“I mean, if you’re not riding with anyone ...” I mumble.

She looks up for the first time, and pulls her hair behind her ear. She is pale, with a few freckles (is that strawberry blond under that raven hair dye?) and a puffy, Angelina Jolie mouth. She’s got spider web tattoos on her hands, so she must be a little older than her teens—what parent would let their child tattoo their hands? Then again, she might have come down here to Mission Beach after school one day and convinced some hard-up scratcher in the back of a smoke shop to ink her up; maybe she is punk-rock enough to suffer the consequences from mom and dad. But where did she get the money? These tattoos look pretty intricate. Babysitting service? Told dad it was for textbooks? Maybe she was one of those diligent, sweet-looking neighborhood redheads who washed cars and sold lemonade and babysat and surprised the shit out of everyone when she turned eighteen and showed up at the block barbecue with blue-black hair and Morticia Addams mitts. I bet she perfected the spider web design with her sketchbook in her lap during the entire semester of Algebra II.