I Hate Everyone, Except You(3)
Much to my surprise and disappointment, Action Park wasn’t brimming with perfect specimens of American adolescence. Most of the people were either kind of fat, or droopy, or hairy. I mean, really disturbingly hairy. Men sprouted hair out of their lower backs and on their shoulders. Hair grew under their arms, across their bellies, up and down their legs into their groins, necks, knuckles, like mold spreading across a shower curtain. The women provided little respite from the assault on my senses. Some had giant, pendulous breasts and thighs the texture of chicken chow mein. Others looked broken or bowlegged, like life had really knocked the crap out of them.
Of course, I had been to the beaches of Long Island countless times, so I knew that human bodies came in all different shapes and sizes. But I had never seen so many half-naked people this close-up. They were practically touching me, making me anxious. I wanted to go home, back to our split-level ranch in the suburbs, where everyone was at least moderately attractive. Where skin clung tautly to our frames. Where hair grew in the appropriate places. And where there were no open wounds.
See, Action Park wasn’t comprised solely of water rides. It also featured an attraction called the Alpine Slide, a concrete half-pipe-shaped track that meandered down a mountain. People would sit on little nonmotorized sleds, controlling their speed with a joystick. You could pull the stick closer to you to apply the brake or push it forward and let gravity whisk you along the path.
The Alpine Slide had no seat belts or roll bars, just one built-in, state-of-the-art safety system: your epidermis. If you were to fall out of your sled or jump the track, the only structure that might slow your descent down the mountain was your skin.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that one-quarter of the people mulling around Action Park did so with a moderate to severe case of road rash, which the first-aid team would cover liberally with Mercurochrome, a bright-red antiseptic that made bloody wounds appear even gorier. One might assume the management of Action Park would forbid, or at the very least discourage, people with fresh cuts and scrapes from entering a communal water ride. Nope. They might as well have posted signs reading, SKINNED HALF YOUR ARM? DON’T BE A PUSSY. JUMP RIGHT BACK IN THE POOL WHERE EVEN MORE OF YOUR BODILY FLUIDS CAN MIX FREELY WITH THOSE OF PERFECT STRANGERS. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!
Another problem with this place was that to ride the Alpine Slide you had to get to the top of the mountain, and the only way to do that was to take a ski lift, which ran above the track itself. Pretty straightforward in its design, sure. Go up ski lift. Go down slide. Now add a few thousand teenage boys to the equation.
See any inherent problem with that?
No?
Well, let me help you out. What do teenage boys like to do from high places?
They spit.
So, as you’re zooming down the Alpine Slide, maneuvering around turns, adjusting your speed accordingly using the hand-held brake-joystick, you must also dodge innumerable loogies hocked by New Jersey’s future rocket scientists.
When I rode the slide, I was lucky enough to be hit with sputum on the back of my left hand. It could have been much worse, but I was still furious. If anyone was going to goober on me, it should be an attractive person, not some greasy-mulleted punk wearing cutoff jean shorts.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the teenage boys tended not to spit on the pretty girls. Instead of mucus, they would hurl compliments, maybe something as subtle as, “Nice tits, blondie!” Or a polite offer to “Sit on my face, bitch!”
On the ride ahead of me was a reasonably attractive redheaded girl of about sixteen. Some boys on the ski lift yelled, “Suck my dick!” and so she flipped them off with both hands. A dumb rookie move. She let go of the brake while taking a turn and flew off the track. There was really no winning when it came to the Alpine Slide, unless you held stock in Mercurochrome.
Between the hairy men, the loogie-spitting boys, and the open wounds, this day trip was turning into a disaster, and it was all my fault. Terri was eight months pregnant and waddling around uncomfortably in shorts and a maternity top. Mike wouldn’t go on any of the rides because he didn’t want to leave my mother alone in her condition. At least that’s what he said. That meant I had to supervise Jodi, who wanted to do things that prepubescent girls do, like splash around the shallow end of the wave pool and scream in a pitch that could shatter Austrian crystal.
Usually Mike was a big proponent of “getting our money’s worth.” That is, arriving at dawn and staying until forcibly removed. But by two in the afternoon everyone was ready to leave Action Park. Even Jodi casually remarked, “Let’s go now to avoid rush hour.” You know your whole family is having a crappy time when the ten-year-old feigns concern over the traffic patterns on the Long Island Expressway. But it was Saturday, and the rest of us knew that if we left at 2 p.m., traffic would actually be worse because of the beachgoers. Nevertheless, we all jumped right on Jodi’s bandwagon.
“Yes!”
“Rush hour!”
“Let’s get the hell out of here!”
As we started to leave, though, I was overcome by the feeling that the day was incomplete. I had been deceived by the ad executives who produced the commercials for this place. I had not made any new beautiful, good-natured friends, because there were none to be found. “There’s nothing in the world like Action Park,” the commercials said. Indeed. There was nothing in the world like this place—if you wanted a staph infection.