PROLOGUE
My knees will not stop trembling.
I’m standing some sixty feet in the air at the mouth of an enclosed water slide, padded hockey equipment cinched tightly to my arms, legs, and torso. The artificial bulk is intended to protect my adolescent body against whatever trauma is waiting at the other end. Leaning precariously against a dirt-strewn hill in an empty parking lot, the blue tube resembles a giant drinking straw with a knot inexplicably tied at the bottom.
The hope is that, if I jump in, my momentum will push me through the improbable three-hundred-and-sixty degree vertical turn at the far end and out the other side. It feels like the kind of thing NASA would force astronauts to do to assess their fitness for space. I envision a doctor using a penlight to look at my unfocused pupils in the aftermath, offering a dismissive shake of his head at my poor judgment.
As he wraps my head in bandages, I will tell him it was not my idea. It was my father’s.
According to my older sister, Julie, I’m the first human to make the attempt. Prior to this, someone had tied off the ankles and sleeves of an old janitorial jumpsuit, stuffed it with sand, and fabricated a head out of a plastic grocery bag. The makeshift dummy cleared the loop but emerged decapitated.
“We haven’t told Mom you’re doing this,” she says, by way of encouragement.
Today, a mechanical engineer would use computer software to calculate the exact pitch of the chute required for riders to make it through successfully. An army of lawyers would pour over the injury statistics for comparable attractions and demand changes based on risk mitigation. A feasibility expert would evaluate plans and anticipate logistical issues.
This being 1980, none of that happened. Instead, my father drew the slide on a cocktail napkin and hired some local welders, who had just been laid off from a nearby car factory, to cobble it together. On windy days, it wobbles back and forth, perilously unanchored to its temporary location in the lot.
“Looks feasible,” he said.
I peer into the opening. The smell of the industrial glue that adheres the foam to the tubing stings my nostrils. (Later, the fumes from this same glue, combined with a lack of ventilation, will cause workers erecting other rides to pass out, angering my father with their reduced productivity.) It’s so completely and utterly dark inside that jumping in seems like attempting interdimensional travel. I’ve tested rides for my father’s amusement park before, and teenage bravado has always trumped common sense, but this thing—he calls it the Cannonball Loop—is giving me second thoughts.
I’m sixteen years old and about to become the Chuck Yeager of this monument to the total perversion of physics.
“Andy!”
I look down at my father. He’s tall, about six-two, with a booming voice that adds a few inches. His hair, neatly combed, gives him the immaculate appearance of a G.I. Joe doll. Bellowing is a standard method of communication for him. It’s strange to see him look so small.
“Come on!”
Today he is impatient. There’s just a month left before we open for the summer season. The Loop is supposed to be a flagship attraction. It looks like it promises total mayhem, an illusion of risk that is the backbone of any amusement park.
Except that here, in the place my father calls Action Park, risk has never been an illusion. If something looks dangerous, that’s because it is.
“Andy! We don’t have all day!”
Paranoia enters my thoughts. There are six of us kids. Maybe six is too many. Maybe he’s decided five is better.
My hands grip the edges of the Loop’s entrance. My father never twists my arm. He never has to. If I don’t test it, he’ll offer an employee a hundred bucks to do it. I know it’s my choice, the same one he gives anybody who passes through the turnstiles. Buy the ticket, take the ride. I think Hunter S. Thompson said that, but surely, even if he were on all the drugs in the world, Hunter S. Thompson would not go down the Cannonball Loop.
I blink sweat from my eyes. The words my father recently uttered to a visiting newspaper reporter ring in my head. “I’m going to be the Walt Disney of New Jersey,” he said, gesturing at the tangled and dysfunctional aberration he expected would launch him into amusement park history.
Being the son of the Walt Disney of New Jersey sounded pretty good, I had to admit.
I take a deep breath, tuck my arms into my chest, and do what I always do when my father calls me to action.
I jump in.
When Disneyland opened its gates for the first time on July 17, 1955, seventy million people were watching on television. In less than a year’s time, Walt Disney had turned 200 acres of orange groves in Anaheim, California, into a wonderland. Cinderella hugged little girls. Rides spun, and children laughed like they were on helium. A future president, Ronald Reagan, hosted the opening ceremony. Staring into the ABC cameras, Disney beamed. He had willed his $17 million dream into reality.
Watching him, you’d never realize the shit show people were walking into.
Traffic into the park backed up for more than seven miles. When families finally pulled in, kids nursing full bladders popped out of their cars and began urinating in the parking lot. A plumber’s strike meant that most of the drinking fountains weren’t working, a problem exacerbated by the one-hundred-degree heat. The temperature was melting the freshly poured asphalt and turning the pavement into quicksand. Counterfeiters had forged tickets, so almost 30,000 people, double the expected number, stuffed themselves into the park. Over capacity, the ferryboat ride nearly capsized. It was bedlam.
Despite these calamities, Disney had no choice but to open. He had agreed to the opening-day broadcast months in advance, and there was no rescheduling. Backed into a corner, he did the best he could. When a ride malfunctioned, he diverted the cameras to another part of the park. When he saw a huge pile of dirt left over from construction, he had someone stick a sign at the top: LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN.
Women snapped their shoes in half on the gooey paths. Children searched for water like they were stranded in the desert.
On television, though, there were only smiling faces. Walt knew where to point the camera.
Disney eventually smoothed out the rough edges, scrubbing any trace of imperfection from his fantasy. There was no chipping paint, no loose wiring, no surly Snow White. The reward for the steep admission price was total immersion into a fantasy; you could forget about real life.
Action Park made the same promise, but it never smoothed out its rough edges. Through the twenty summers it was open, every day was opening day.
My father’s name was Gene Mulvihill, and, before he opened Action Park, he had no experience of any kind running an amusement operation. In contrast to Disney’s carefully conceived fantasy lands, my father pieced together a series of ambitious and often ill-advised attractions on the side of a ski mountain in rural New Jersey that he had come to own virtually by accident.
He started slowly, installing go-karts, small-scale Formula One racers, and unusual contraptions developed in West Germany with no demonstrable history of safe operation. Then came the water slides, speedboats, and Broadway-style shows. The crowds grew from a handful of curious locals to more than a million people annually. We went from selling off-brand soda and taking out local newspaper ads to getting a Pepsi sponsorship and seeing our logo on McDonald’s tray liners. My father, who had simply wanted to find a way to make money off a ski resort in the summer, found himself an unlikely pioneer in the amusement industry.
Unlike most theme parks, Action Park did not strap in patrons and let them passively experience the rides. A roller coaster, thrilling as it may be, asks nothing of its occupants, and each ride is the same as the last. My father seized upon the idea that we were all tired of being coddled, of society dictating our behaviors and lecturing us on our vices. He vowed that visitors to Action Park would be the authors of their own adventures, prompting its best-known slogan: “Where you’re the center of the action!” Guests riding down an asbestos chute on a plastic cart could choose whether to adopt a leisurely pace or tear down at thirty miles per hour and risk hitting a sharp turn that would eject them into the woods. They decided when to dive off a cliff and whether to aim for open water or their friend’s head. They could listen when the attendants told them to stay in the speedboats, or they could tumble into the marsh water and risk getting bit by a snapping turtle.
It was not long before our visitors reworked our advertising to better reflect their experiences: “Action Park: Where you’re the center of the accident.”
The risk did not keep people away. The risk is what drew them to us.
Their cars emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, from Newark, New York, and New Haven, a chain of impatient day-trippers blaring their horns as traffic backed up on the tiny, two-lane roadway leading to the property. After screaming at the parking-lot attendants scrambling to keep up with the incoming masses, they burst out of their vehicles and flew past the ticket window, flashing their frequent-visitor discount cards.
In those searing New Jersey summers, they quickly stripped out of their Sasson jeans and down to their bathing suits, young men and women alike, gleefully crowding around rides while Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny blared through pole-mounted loudspeakers, the soundtrack for their contusions. They careened down towering water slides that spit them into shallow pools at such velocity that they sometimes overshot and landed in the dirt, laughing or bleeding—often both. They lost their grip on swinging ropes and plunged into freezing mountain water that made their bodies seize up in shock while their friends cheered on their encroaching hypothermia. They emerged from lakes stinking of spilled diesel fuel from overworked boat motors, too delirious with enthusiasm to realize that they were now flammable.
In their haste to get to the next attraction, people would stumble and skin their bare knees or elbows. Undaunted, they would straighten themselves up and continue, too caught up in the excitement of the place to worry about a few bruises. Repeat visitors stuffed their pockets with Band-Aids and sported scabs and scars along their arms and legs. The fourteen-dollar admission bought them an escape from the mundane, from the rules and regulations forced upon them by their bosses, teachers, or parents.
“People like not being restricted,” my father told reporters who inevitably asked why his customers were bleeding. “They want to be in control.”
His philosophy became the park’s identity. My dad didn’t have the budget to stand out from an increasingly crowded amusement industry. He set himself apart by promising guests that they were in charge of their own thrills.
That approach made us national news. The New York Times called my father’s creation “the area’s most distinctive expression of the amusement park in our age.” They also called it a “human zoo.” Both of these things were true.
The park yanked my siblings and me from idle adolescence and tasked us with corralling and protecting the guests who took its promises of risk to heart. Other kids worked at fast-food restaurants. We spent fourteen-hour days wrangling adults and saving lives. We bonded over the outsized responsibilities, the park morphing from a playground for paying customers to our second home. Two of my brothers met their wives there. I spent ten summers walking through a tangible manifestation of our father’s psyche, every ride and attraction a tribute to his impulses. I bled into the dirt as it erupted around me. I watched it grow from a small assembly of modest attractions to a sprawling adventure land that even the mighty Disney attempted to emulate. I pulled gasping swimmers from churning water. I patrolled the grounds on a dirt bike, becoming my father’s eyes and ears. I found my first love there. I forged lifelong relationships. I saw death. I grew up.
Action Park has become a campfire tale, an urban legend, a can-you-believe-this snapshot of our culture that seemed to predate liability laws and lawyers. The state of New Jersey had never seen anything like it and had little idea how to control it. My father loomed large in the small town of Vernon, keeping hundreds of people employed and using his political savvy—as well as his sometimes-questionable legal means—to make sure his passion project remained afloat. The state would fine other parks or threaten them with shutdowns when a guest stubbed a toe. Action Park remained open for twenty years despite injuries being a near-hourly occurrence.
The price for its success was sometimes paid by visitors, not all of whom came out alive, and sometimes by my father. The state once held a three-day hearing to discuss his outlandish approach to business and how best to deal with him. I’m pretty sure that never happened to Walt.
The park admitted anyone, misfits and clergymen, rich and poor, young and old, and told them it was theirs to do with as they pleased; never again would they have such freedom in their lives. The churn went on all day, people bouncing from the miniature race cars to the Colorado River Ride to the Kamikaze slide. Come closing time, at 10:00 p.m., they’d reluctantly head to their cars, making plans to return while showing off their scrapes and abrasions. Back home, exhausted and exhilarated, they would grab a pair of scissors and cut off the plastic wrist strap that acted as proof of admission.
It looked almost exactly like a hospital bracelet.
From the top of the Loop, I can see a church steeple, to which I quickly aim a fervent prayer before diving in. It is like jumping into a cement mixer. The blackness envelops me, the momentum pulling my body down the slide as though it were vacuum-pressured. There is a brief sensation of being upended by the circle, my back sliding along the foam surface before it levels out, and I’m returned to an upright position. There is no sense of up or down, only the g-forces tugging at my limbs the way one would torture a Stretch Armstrong doll. I’m unceremoniously spit out the other end, loose asphalt scraping my exposed skin. The experience is less a ride than a violent encounter with a supernatural force.
I stand up, dizzy. Later, we will tell visitors to lay motionless for a moment after coming out of the Loop, like divers who need to decompress.
My father waves his arms with excitement. I am the proof of concept, and my survival pleases him. It means profits.
“How was it?”
I want to tell him it felt like being flushed out of a toilet bowl, that there is nothing pleasant about it. The creases around his eyes and the smile taking over his face make me swallow my words.
“It’s great,” I tell him. “It’s awesome.”
He beams.
After my triumphant test ride, the next person to slide down the Loop without padding or a helmet smashes his face into the wall of the tube when he hits that first terrible corner, losing his two front teeth. The guy after him isn’t much luckier. He cuts his arm on the teeth, which are still stuck in the slide.
No one would hear of this for years. Like Walt, my father knew exactly where to point the camera.