“‘We’re trying to expand the park’s image,’ said Julie Mulvihill. ‘We want to be able to attract senior citizens and make it a nice place for the family to come and visit for the entire day.’”
Daily Record, January 30, 1983
In the Vernon of the early 1980s, if you were under the age of eighteen and looking for a job, Action Park was not one of your options. It was your only option.
It wasn’t like that in the rest of the country. When a teenager was searching for part-time employment, they typically headed for a fast-food restaurant. Donning aprons and paper hats at chains like McDonald’s, they would dole out Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets, a new and addictive bite-sized menu item introduced in 1983. There’s a reason many of the kids in Fast Times at Ridgemont High slung fast food: Handing out sacks full of salty burgers was practically an American teen’s first job by birthright.
But in Vernon, the closest fast-food restaurant was a twenty-minute drive away. Many of the nearby communities rejected the encroaching franchises, wanting to preserve their small-town charm. Even my father rallied against them, once standing up at a town meeting and wailing, “Hasn’t anyone heard of mad cow disease!” He didn’t want anything siphoning away his workers—or his concession sales, for that matter.
The Golden Arches did not cast a shadow in Vernon. We had a complete monopoly on teen labor. Then, suddenly, parents caught wind of the negative publicity surrounding the park, put down their newspapers, looked over at their kids, and told them to quit.
It happened during the summer of the McNugget. While sitting in my office shack one day, a memo crossed my desk warning that we were in danger of being understaffed. The size of our workforce had not kept up with our growth, and our lousy press wasn’t helping. In the note, Julie said that the situation was dire enough that we might need to widen our pool of potential hires by interviewing senior citizens. I frowned. If you couldn’t sprint to someone’s rescue, or away from a raging forest fire, you were not park material.
Negative press was not our only problem. Like any summer operation, we offered seasonal jobs. Teenage enthusiasm was strongest in the busiest months from Memorial Day through late July but began to wane in August and into September. Kids heading off to college needed to leave their jobs early to prepare. Some wanted time off before high school got back in session. As a result, ride attendants simply stopped showing up, causing gaps at stations. This was unacceptable: an unattended ride could mean unprecedented idiocy. Guests could smell when there was a lack of supervision.
To resolve the shortage, I came up with an idea I knew my father would get behind.
“Let’s bribe the kids,” I said.
We began offering workers an additional twenty-five to fifty cents an hour if they stayed through Labor Day. It was retroactive, but you had to make it all the way to September to be eligible for the bonus. For sticking around, they got an automatic bump in pay that allowed them to strut around like senior staffers.
It worked well, but I wished we were able to sell the kids on the intangible benefits. At the park, they met students from other schools, widening their social opportunities and bonding over the shared experience of trying to corral unruly patrons. I saw more than a few listless workers, who probably hadn’t given a single thought to college, watch as their co-workers saved every dime and spoke about their admission essays. The park became a snapshot of a bigger world they didn’t know existed. That was a better reward than the quarter, though I doubt many of them realized that until much later.
Just because we found warm bodies didn’t mean we could trust them to be responsible. Some were the same level of delinquent that we sometimes had to chase off the property. Two employees who quickly became short-timers were in Water World doing absolutely nothing one day. Spotting this, Topher, who was by then a manager, approached them and told them that guests often enjoyed a refreshing spray of cold water while waiting in line on particularly hot days. Kids and teens liked it, anyway. Adults didn’t always seem to appreciate it.
“Grab the hose and wet them down,” Topher said. “It helps take their mind off the heat. Can you do that?”
They nodded. Topher went to get lunch at a concession stand nearby. Within a few minutes, he heard screaming. Turning around and jogging back to the line, Topher saw the two employees roaring with laughter. They had not grabbed the garden hose but a fire hose. The force of the water was knocking guests over like bowling pins.
“Stop!” Topher shouted. “Stop!”
Even a normal-pressure hose had its perils. A man once sued us because an attendant hit him with a jet of water near the mouth of a slide, knocking him down the track face-first and without a mat. The park settled for $18,000. I told Topher to cool it with the hoses.
When employees misbehaved, I chalked it up to restlessness. A ride that seemed so exciting in the first few days on the job could foster ennui as they watched thousands of people come and go in an endless churn. The extra money didn’t solve that problem completely, so I decided to go a step further and create a different kind of excitement, one that had roots in my father’s approach to management. I organized a series of intermural sporting events in Water World that I dramatically dubbed the Water World Wars.
I divided the area into two teams, tasking each with paddling small rafts across the Wave Pool, racing down all the rides in a relay, and running a foot race up the hill, navigating the park like an obstacle course. The workers liked it so much they came two hours early and on their own time to participate. Because no one had ever showed up two hours early for their shift at Burger King, I felt we had accomplished something. Next, I planned a major contest between the three main sections of the park: Motor World, Water World, and the Alpine Center. Motor World and Water World were hugely territorial, with each faction believing they had superior athletes. The Alpine Center was more like Switzerland. They participated, but not with any fervor. After hours, we raced cars, had sprint races from the bottom of the park in Motor World to the water slides in Water World, and held softball games. Jimmy and I were the team captains and likely more invested in the outcomes than the participants. If there was a close finish, the two of us would scream and berate each other. As manager of Motor World, Jimmy was particularly salty that his squad never won a single softball game. He argued that the diesel fumes affected their lungs and made them weaker. Fresh air was considered performance enhancing.
When I saw the response to the park-wide competitions, I plotted something even more ambitious. The mountaintop parties I threw for the Wave Pool lifeguards had helped keep our top employees coming back year after year. “What if,” I asked Julie, “we held a big Water World party for everyone at the end of the season?”
Julie was busy writing a note to paste over the employee time clock: DO NOT CLOCK IN IF YOU HAVE BEEN DRINKING. She looked at me like I had just suggested we expose everyone to the plague. “Absolutely not,” she said. “I know what goes on at those parties.”
Whatever Julie had heard, the reality was certainly far worse, but that wasn’t the point. “It won’t be like the mountaintop parties,” I said. “It will be great for morale. We’ll do it responsibly.”
“I think the liability risk is insane,” she said. “You cannot have kids running around the park in the middle of the night.”
“This is going to help employee retention,” I said, trying to appeal to her administrative side.
“Insane,” she said.
Julie’s management style was that of an authoritarian. Employees were on time and did their jobs because they dreaded her wrath and her ability to materialize out of thin air just in time to catch them arriving late or making out in the break room. I, on the other hand, felt you got more out of people if you gave them time to unwind and alleviate stress. We asked a lot of these kids for a few dollars an hour. We had to offer more than money, especially as they got older, obtained their driver’s licenses, and began looking for jobs elsewhere. When their parents told them to quit because they read a story about a ride mishap, they needed to insist they loved their low-paying and potentially injurious job.
I didn’t want to back down. More to the point, I didn’t want to acquiesce to my older sister. Finally, I told her I would just ask our father. I knew he would side with me. It was a cheap but effective tactic.
“Fine,” she said. “But you’re responsible.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, happy I didn’t have to ask him about it. Not because he’d say no—he wouldn’t—but because I felt he deserved plausible deniability.
There was another reason parents were sometimes hesitant to let their kids work here. We had developed a reputation for violence.
Scuffles were not an uncommon occurrence. Surly guests stewing in a mixture of beer and baking sun were often combustible. Hold a leering glance at someone else’s girlfriend for too long, and it might invite a shoving match. Couples with relationship troubles might get physically abusive with one another, prompting security to intervene. Once, a man pulled a knife on an employee. A young attendant had caught him smoking weed on the Alpine chair lift and confronted him. The man produced a steak knife with a kind of stoned indifference, then got back on the lift. Police had to wait for the chair to come back before making an arrest.
In a crowd that could exceed fifteen thousand people on some days, these were relative nonevents. Only on occasion would things escalate to the point at which tear gas would have proven useful.
At approximately 3:45 p.m. on a Saturday—I know this because I saw the police report—a teenager was holding a place in line for his friends. When he finally got to the front, he waved the rest of his buddies over. This was a common practice among some attendees at the park and referred to as “making the line.” Few guests dared protest, as a roaring band of aggressive teenagers could be intimidating.
On this day, a number of guests of Italian descent decided to voice their concern, alleging the offenders, who were Puerto Rican, were not “making” the line but cutting the line. Decked out in white muscle shirts and shouting enough to shake the gold jewelry around their necks, they accused the line-makers of selfish behavior. Words were exchanged. Ethnic slurs may have been uttered. The two groups moved closer to one another, trotting in unison like a troupe of stage performers. Some spread their shoulders out to appear wider, their heads tilting back so their necks grew thicker.
When they were nose-to-nose, the conflict ignited. It was like something out of The Outsiders. They began pummeling one another, grabbing fistfuls of shirts and putting their boots to downed opponents. Someone produced a bicycle chain and wrapped it around his hand, bludgeoning anyone who got close. The other guests gave them a wide berth, forming a circle of spectators. I grabbed my walkie-talkie and shouted for every security staff member we had, along with anyone else in the vicinity. Security guards and employees poured in, trying to restore order. Kevin Curley, who was fond of trading punches with belligerent guests, waded into the melee and began swinging his fists with a smile on his face.
We kicked out the brawlers from both sides, leaving only a few remaining to try to explain why they shouldn’t be permanently banned. Some of those ejected loitered in the parking lot, tensions still simmering.
This was not the worst of it.
Moments earlier, a young employee had come to Topher and announced she had to quit. Topher asked why she was leaving. The girl explained that her mother felt the park was too wild and that she was concerned for her daughter’s welfare.
“I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding,” he said. “Why don’t I talk to your mom when she comes to pick you up?” Topher did not want to lose an employee, but his motives were not entirely altruistic. He would later tell me he had been thinking of asking her out. At the park, a supervisor dating a subordinate was not the human resources nightmare it would be today. This was mainly because we didn’t have a human resources department.
The employee agreed and said her mother would be there around four o’clock in the afternoon. Her punctuality would prove unfortunate.
Soon after, the employee’s mother pulled into the parking lot to pick up her daughter, oblivious to the fact that she was driving into a war zone thick with the coppery smell of blood and Brut cologne. Topher had practiced a speech that emphasized how safe the park was and how she had nothing to worry about. The fight had blown over just in time, salvaging his hopes of keeping the daughter employed long enough to gather the guts to ask her out.
As he walked toward the mother’s vehicle, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. Suddenly, an Italian kid sprinted in between cars, a mob of Puerto Ricans carrying two-by-fours, retrieved from a nearby Dumpster, in hot pursuit.
Topher grabbed the girl and jumped into her mother’s car for safety. As they piled in, a massive body slammed into the driver’s side door, smearing blood on the window. A piece of wood snapped her side view mirror. The lone Italian jumped into her passenger seat, desperate to avoid being maimed.
“Drive, dammit!” the man screamed. “Drive!” The car veered out of the lot before the stranger jumped out, taking off on foot down Route 94.
The girl never even came back for her last paycheck.
Handling disruptive visitors was supposed to be the job of the park’s security team, but people figured out relatively quickly that it was ineffectual. For a long time, the head security guard was a former police officer named Arnold. Arnold was in his seventies and moved extremely slowly. He carried two guns, one on his waist and one on his ankle. Few if any situations at the park would ever require a firearm, so Arnold was more of a fixture than an asset. I suspected my father had hired him as a favor to someone.
The day did eventually arrive when we needed Arnold. Someone near Motor World spotted a rabid raccoon, frothing at the mouth and terrifying customers. The situation was tense, as we didn’t want the animal to disappear into the Human Maze, where he might cause a pandemic. A bunch of us jogged across the road and tried to back it into a corner without getting too close. When Arnold finally arrived, he drew his weapon and told us to stand clear.
Arnold and the raccoon were perhaps fifteen feet apart. He fired once, twice, and then four more times, emptying his revolver. Not a single bullet connected. The raccoon hissed in victory. It was then that we knew that Arnold would be almost entirely useless in a conflict. Someone finally put a cardboard box over the raccoon and probably drowned it in the speedboat lake.
I tried to communicate these problems to my father as best I could, but my ability to be his eyes and ears on the ground was limited to Water World. He needed a lieutenant, someone who could act as his sentry in the thick of the lunacy. For this role, he hired a park general manager named Adam Ringler. Adam had come from the ski operation and had impressed my father with his ability to keep tabs on the snow accumulation and make sure the hotline had the latest ski conditions. Adam segued into a role as my father’s emissary, motoring around on a scooter and keeping him updated on weather, attendance, accidents, and anything else Gene wanted to know, all in real time.
“Predicting three thousand tomorrow,” Adam would say. “High chance of rain.”
He wore a white shirt with white shorts and a safari hat with a built-in fan. He also wore a massive set of keys that made him look like an old-time prison guard. Like a cat with a bell, you could always hear him coming. Julie called him Ring-Ding.
The only real adult in our midst, Ring-Ding rarely took anyone’s shit, which became useful when we had issues with guests misbehaving. If we had to detain a patron until the police arrived, we kept them in a small holding area in the Hexagon Lounge. Usually, it was occupied by fence-jumpers. Our employees were notoriously oblivious to people lacking wristbands and one could spend hours in the park without paying or being confronted about it. I didn’t take a hard line with gate-crashers aside from asking for the admission fee. If they didn’t act like assholes, we’d cut them loose without any further hassle. But if Adam was around, he’d turn into Dirty Harry, playing bad cop to whomever was trying to let the offender off easy. It was a necessary injection of authority. Some of the guests became convinced we had the power to send them to Rikers Island.
The park had become a hub of activity for kids hopped up on adolescence and beer. Their money was as good as anyone’s, but my father felt the fights and rabid animals were alienating the family demographic that could add to our bottom line.
His solution was to emphasize attractions that catered to children and their parents. In the past, he had promoted classic car shows, antique fairs, and craft exhibits. He once hosted a park event in which we awarded a prize for the child who best resembled one of the little Hummel figurines. Hundreds of kids showed up in coveralls and wooden shoes, their cheeks reddened with makeup by their stage mothers. He hired street performers to entertain the kids and distract the older teens who might instigate conflict. One of these performers was a magician named Sebastiani, whom I once took to a Bruce Springsteen show in the hope that we might become friends. Instead, he used his sleight of hand expertise to pilfer a half dozen concert shirts from a souvenir booth. My father also enlisted Vernon high school students to march the grounds in military formation as the Action Park Marching Band. I found it hokey and told my father as much, but he just shook his head, as though I had a lot to learn.
“These kids aren’t interested in being ride attendants, but they’re still working here,” he said. “Think about it.” The band was a way of ingratiating himself with parents who still viewed the park with skepticism. It was always harder to voice opposition to the park and its development if it gainfully employed your children.
The band ignited his interest in live entertainment. Many parks had begun offering shows to keep parents occupied while their kids went on rides, with the themed spectacles of song and dance repeated multiple times daily. My father found out that the person responsible for most of the performances was a veteran stage choreographer named Allan Albert. My father contacted him and offered to build a soundstage above Motor World to host Allan’s Broadway Revue, a greatest-hits compilation of show tunes.
Always well dressed, Allan spoke in a brusque, clipped tone and seemed slightly ill at ease around the uncivilized park clientele. My father called him “artsy” and loved having him around, in part because his fastidiousness was in sharp contrast to the demeanor of the snowmakers and the belligerent New Yorkers who visited the park. Allan was also an insane taskmaster, barking orders at his young charges like the teachers in Fame and weighing the female dancers twice a week to make sure they didn’t succumb to the temptations of the concession-stand funnel cakes. It was less mentoring than psychological torture.
Full of hits from shows like Grease and West Side Story, the Broadway Revue was entertaining but was designed to be filler, something that anyone could drop in on at any time without feeling confused. We also added a country show and a rock-and-roll show so the performances could be spread around the park. You could hear the beat of the shows throughout the property. Families were enraptured. Delinquents were not. The latter largely avoided the Revue, repelled by its wholesomeness.
At one point, we brought in senior citizens, who ambled through the gates on walkers to take advantage of a package deal. For one price, they could have lunch at a nearby deli, take in one of our shows, and get a charter bus ride to and from their retirement home. Somehow, the highly underqualified food and beverage manager, Bud Kelley, wound up serving them bock beer, which was twice as potent as our usual beer. In the heat, the brew quickly went to their heads. By the end of the show, a dozen seniors were teetering over, the falls threatening to snap their brittle bones like saltines. Medics treated a few of them for bruises. Angry calls from the senior living facility followed.
While the Broadway shows were lively, they were passive, which was thematically out of place at Action Park. My father wanted to make visitors active participants in a spectacle, and he knew a competition was the way to do it. This was how we wound up with beauty pageants.
Everyone knew the template from the televised Miss America specials held in Atlantic City. These were battles of genetics, makeup, and charisma, and a thinly veiled excuse to have women in bathing suits parading around stage. Like any competition, they inspired viewers to root for their favorite contestant. Our entrants vied for a small cash prize and a sash that read “Miss Action Park.”
My father’s instinct was to get the crowd heavily invested in the outcome. To do that, he decided to introduce territorial tension. We might pit a contestant from the Bronx against a contestant from Brooklyn, with the emcee goading each faction on.
“Ohhh, the Polish are out in force today!” the announcer would say. “This poor Italian woman doesn’t have a chance!” This would cause a small army of Italians to begin screaming and circling the Polish side.
“Hey, man,” I told the emcee. “You really need to knock that shit off. We’re going to have a riot.” I knew this because we had literally just had a riot.
He didn’t listen. When we promoted a battle for aesthetic supremacy between women of Irish and Puerto Rican descent, the crowd resembled an Irish Republican Army assembly. We crowned only two or three women Miss Action Park before we agreed it was best to abandon the idea. It wasn’t fair to expect the winners to fight their way off stage.
Surprisingly, our biggest entertainment attraction wasn’t the pageants or even recognizable performers like Chuck Berry, who made periodic visits. It was Jimmy Sturr.
One year, my father invited Sturr and his polka band to come and perform at his Polish festivals on the Great Gorge grounds. Sturr, who lived just twenty miles up the road in the dirt flats of New York, was the Elvis Presley of polka. He had a great blond mane that looked like a wave you could surf and flashy jackets that were so sparkly he resembled a holiday ornament. Sturr has won as many Grammys (eighteen) as Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett, or Yo-Yo Ma, though, to be fair, the polka field is probably not as crowded as the other music genres.
Julie initially dismissed Sturr as corny. There was never an era in which polka was cool, but my father insisted New Jersey’s high concentration of Polish Americans was being underserved. He thought that community would flock to Sturr. He directed Julie to take out ads on polka radio stations and spread the word in polka newsletters. He hired a Motor World employee named Chris O’Keefe, who went by the nickname Puff for his wildly overgrown head of hair, to go to Polish neighborhoods and bars and stuff flyers under windshield wipers, earning Puff the modified name of Puffer the Stuffer. If there was a big turnout, my father promised to reward his dogged determination with several pairs of Gucci shoes, which Puffer desperately and inexplicably coveted.
The first time Sturr performed, five thousand people showed up, packing our parking lots with campers and Winnebagos full of Sturr devotees who followed him around the country the way the Deadheads followed Jerry Garcia. I attended the show, expecting to find the whole thing lame, but the crowd’s enthusiasm was infectious. Before long, Smoke, Vinnie Mancuso, Bob Krahulik, and I were doing the chicken dance, a famous polka step.
Every time Sturr appeared, we made a killing in beer and concession sales. I cannot recall a summer in which he didn’t play. He was our secret polka weapon. A proud Puffer the Stuffer would periodically strut around the park to show off his Guccis, carefully avoiding discarded ketchup packets like they were land mines.
Entertainment was only part of the plan to attract families. We also tried our version of Disney’s Main Street, USA, opening a collection of quaint shops and small-town storefronts that overlooked Water World. Dubbed Cobblestone Village, its purpose was to bridge the gap between the winter and summer months by remaining open year-round. It had twenty-four shops in all, including a candle store, a deli, a Bavarian pretzel outlet, a photo lab, and an ice cream shop, where Laurie now worked. She soon developed scooper’s wrist, a painful condition resulting from repeatedly digging into the cement-like concoction.
On a break one afternoon, the two of us walked over to Cinema 180, an expensive new theater my father added to the park with a giant 180-degree screen that exceeded your peripheral vision. It showed footage of Mount Saint Helens erupting and a first-person car crash, an immersive experience also available in Motor World.
Inside, there were no chairs. People had to stand for the ten-minute reels.
“It smells in here,” Laurie said, wrinkling her nose. “Like puke.”
Watching the disorienting car footage, we understood why. If people came into the theater shortly after gorging on pizza and pretzels from the nearby shops, they stood a decent chance of having their food come back up. Years later, I would see IMAX theaters and think that we had been ahead of our time in offering motion sickness as a form of entertainment.
Out in the fresh air, we dodged globs of melted ice cream on the pavement and discussed how we would navigate the next few years of college. Our time on separate coasts had gone extremely well. I had come back for holidays, and we had taken vacations together. We were determined not to be a park couple, a pair that thrived only in the intensity and intimacy of dealing with the teeming mobs and hysteria. Such relationships were commonplace here, like romances on movie sets. We agreed that we were more than that. I believed this even as I wrapped my Wave Patrol jacket around her shoulders.
We left Cinema 180 and discussed the recent expansion of Fantasy Isle, a child’s play area in Motor World where Laurie had considered taking a job. We already had a kids’ play park in Water World with a number of attractions, including a punching-bag forest. The objective was to run through the bags while your friends swung them, attempting to knock you stiff. We agreed this appealed to cruel children. Fantasy Isle had bumper boats and a less-imposing version of the Human Maze. My father planned to build a pirate ship featuring hidden treasure for kids to hunt. He also spoke of wanting a plank for pint-sized traitors to walk, plastic swords prodding them into a pool, but none of it ever came to fruition.
The jewel of the kids’ area in Water World was a massive ball pit. A wooden enclosure held thousands and thousands of plastic balls in which kids could swim. One day, a father idling near the pit began screaming at the attendant, taking some perceived slight at her attitude. Whatever she said in response only made him angrier. In retaliation, he reared back and kicked the wooden enclosure as hard as he could. Made of relatively flimsy plywood by harried snowmakers, it collapsed under the force of his strike. The balls began tumbling down the hill, spilling like a bag of marbles. Attendants spent hours walking around stuffing them into bags and bins. We found balls under benches and tucked near rides for months afterward.
Cobblestone Village and the kids’ areas endured for years, though they quickly became afterthoughts for most visitors. To a group of young adults, a candle store at an amusement park was just a speed bump in the way of their thrill-seeking. We had already cemented our identity as a wild place run by teenagers for teenagers. We were not, and never would be, known as a place for all ages.
I wished we had learned that lesson before the party.
The bash for the employees needed funding. There was no expense account, and even if there was, Julie never would have allotted a penny toward an after-hours affair.
Fortunately, the lifeguards had become very adept at canvassing the Wave Pool and the other water rides for money and possessions that guests had lost. The guards called it “scarfing,” and it could be extremely lucrative for anyone diving at the end of a shift. On a busy Saturday or Sunday, one could pull out hundreds of dollars, mostly in singles and fives that people had stuffed into their swim trunks to spend at the concession stands, as well as the occasional dime bag of weed. Jewelry was set aside in case the owner came back for it. We’d even send out search parties for wedding rings if someone returned in a panic. But not many people bothered to come back in pursuit of a few missing dollars. Added up, the money was sometimes more than an employee might make in an entire week on duty, another reason the lifeguard job was so coveted. I pointed this out when some of them complained about not getting the extra twenty-five cents an hour.
When he moved up to head lifeguard, Bob Krahulik asserted himself as the gatekeeper for scarfing. No guard could dive for money without his permission. He’d act as a spotter, remaining poolside and directing employees to swim toward wherever he detected waterlogged currency.
“Couple singles at six o’clock!” he’d yell. “Come on, man!”
In his benevolence, Bob divvied up the money with the diver. He set half aside for the mountaintop and Water World parties, and split the other half with the person who had fetched it. But Bob’s oppressive rule didn’t extend to the entirety of Water World, and other rides had different protocols. Some water-pump operators kept scuba suits in their cars. One guy in particular, whom I’ll call Joey Lion, developed an utterly diabolical method for scarfing that I didn’t discover until long after he had left the park.
Blond and muscular, Joey Lion was a big and intimidating guy who had a tattoo of a snarling lion on his bicep and the tense energy of someone who might break a bottle over your head at any moment. He was stationed at the Cannonball chutes. Not to be confused with the Cannonball Loop, these tubes were adjacent to the Tarzan Swing and spit people out of enclosed slides into a pool ten feet below. At the entrance, Joey Lion stopped people ready to jump inside and gave them a quick set of instructions.
“We can’t allow you to wear jewelry,” he said. “It’s sharp and cuts up the foam surface inside.” This part, at least, was true. The struggle to repair the foam cushioning the rides was unending.
Guests would ask what they should do with it, and Joey would set them up. “Make a fist and hold it really tight in your hands,” he said.
The riders would oblige, taking off their gold pendants or chains and clutching them tightly. After going down the Cannonball tube in total darkness, they would hit a bank turn and then get shot out into blinding daylight and freezing mountain water kept cold by the shade. This disorienting series of events caused them to open their hands on impact, at which point the jewelry would go flying. If someone came back looking for their trinket, Joey Lion would shake his head, mustering all the fraudulent sympathy he could.
“Probably got sucked into the filters, man,” he’d say. He portrayed the filters as black holes that devoured all matter. Retrieval, he said, was impossible.
At the end of the day, Joey would scour the pool and come out with a fistful of necklaces. His grift grew to enormous proportions. Once, at a house party, Smoke told me he stumbled into Joey’s bedroom and saw a jewelry chest that was the size of a refrigerator.
“It looked like something you’d see at the Saks jewelry counter,” Smoke said. “I think I saw diamonds.”
In addition to being conniving, Joey Lion was also selfish. He kept all his stolen goods for himself, which left the funding for the Water World party entirely to Bob and his crew. Still, by the end of the summer, we had collected over a thousand dollars. I posted a sign above the punch clock in the break room with a time and date. The whole of Water World would be open for any employee looking to blow off steam and celebrate the end of the season—but only if they were still on the job. I could hear the excited chatter begin almost immediately.
“See?” I boasted to Julie. “It’s all anyone is talking about.”
“Remember,” she said. “I have nothing to do with this.”
After weeks of anticipation, the night finally arrived. The party was for all the staff, including some of the maintenance workers who were as young as fourteen or fifteen, but that did not preclude us from making sure the older employees were well hydrated. I delegated beverage duties to Tommy Smith and Smoke, asking them to buy beer. The night of the party, I saw Tommy standing over two large plastic garbage cans, dumping bottle after bottle of liquid inside until the cans became immovable.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Party punch,” Tommy said. “Orange juice, pineapple juice, 7UP, and a little something extra.”
As Tommy finished pouring, a swell of workers began circulating near the Wave Pool. They dipped plastic cups into Tommy’s concoction, sipping it and making foul expressions. Behind him, Smoke had constructed a makeshift island in the pool, using the foam mats to support a fake palm tree and a beer keg. It had the charm of a high school stage set, only with much, much more alcohol.
I swam out to the “island” for one or two beers but avoided Tommy’s swill in the belief that I was acting as a chaperone for the evening. I was getting older, growing further away from the next generation of workers. Some looked young enough to be in junior high.
Laurie and I wandered around on foot for the first hour or two. We talked about how big the park was getting. She wondered if I saw myself in a long-term role there, finishing college and then going to work for my father, like Julie had.
“I think about it,” I said. “But I don’t know for sure.” In my mind, the park was a place for kids. When it stopped making me feel like one, I thought, it would be time to move on.
I asked her what she wanted to do.
“I think I’d like to be a teacher,” she said.
“You haven’t had enough of kids yet?”
She laughed. “Working here has been instructional.”
We spoke about my father’s determination to continue to expand the park. He liked Laurie a great deal, waving hello whenever he saw her and engaging her in conversation when she came over to the house for dinner. This meant she sometimes had park gossip that had not yet reached my ears.
“Your dad is thinking of starting a nursery,” she said.
I cocked my head, confused. “For plants?” I said.
“For kids,” she said. “Kids that are too young to roam around. Parents can come and drop them off. He’d like for me to run it.”
I knew my father was after the family demographic at all costs, but the idea of an Action Park nursery sounded no safer than leaving children at home alone near a pile of matches and a barrel of gasoline. I imagined a state subcommittee panel assembled just to evaluate the fallout, but I kept my opinion to myself. Whatever made Laurie happy made me happy. She was a calming presence, not prone to courting danger. Laurie projected a bubble of normalcy, reminding me that the park did not define me. Here was someone who considered it a job, not a life philosophy.
As we talked, Smoke waved to us from Beer Island. We waved back.
As the night wore on, the kids grew looser. They sang and ran around, orbiting Tommy’s garbage cans as cup after cup got dipped in and discarded. Couples splintered off and found dark corners for heavy-petting sessions. The park had a host of spots for this, like the pile of rafts near the Wave Pool, the rope climb in the kids’ park, or inside the Cannonball tubes. Enclosed rides provided the most privacy. Other kids sat by themselves and just stared, so intoxicated that they seemed to have only minimal brain activity. I began to reconsider the wisdom of not setting a minimum age for attendance.
As Laurie and I continued walking, Smoke came up to us. “Hey, man,” he said. “Cool party.”
“It’s going well,” I said.
“Just thought you should know, I think some of these kids are fucking.” He said this in the same tone you’d use to tell someone that they had a mustard stain on their shirt.
“What?” I said.
“Yeah, back behind the pump room,” he said. “Definitely fucking.”
I gasped, struck by terrifying visions of trying to explain to Julie—or worse, child protective services—how I had allowed an adolescent orgy in our amusement park. I ran to get one of the motorized Cushman carts and started making the rounds. Smoke had not been exaggerating. Heavy, borderline-pornographic make-out sessions were going on at the deck of the Wave Pool. Other kids were in the water. I exhaled, relieved they were just swimming. When they emerged, they were naked.
“Hey,” I said. “Hey! Take it easy!”
The scene became increasingly carnal and disturbing. Farther out from the Wave Pool, I saw motionless bodies splayed out on the grass. Approaching them, I winced. Some had lost their shirts, others their pants. A few were passed out, drunk.
“Kid,” I said, slapping one. “Kid, you okay?”
“Summunah,” he said. “Summunah party.”
I spotted Tommy. “What the fuck did you put in the punch?” I said.
“Orange juice, pineapple juice, 7UP,” Tommy said. He stopped, as though he needed a moment to remember. “And fifty percent grain alcohol.” Tommy had served them a recipe from his college fraternity.
I got back on the cart, breaking up fornicating teenagers wherever I spotted them. As it got closer to midnight, parents began pulling into the parking lot to pick up their kids. I swallowed my panic and waved, directing them to stay in their cars. Smoke and Tommy began dragging some of the bodies over near the lot, piling them up like sacks of animal feed.
Knowing some of the older kids would be too inebriated to drive, I told them to stay in the park overnight. On cue, they collapsed on the ground, dozing. I spent the rest of the night clearing the Wave Pool deck of couples and making sure Tommy didn’t refill the garbage bins. Older siblings who wouldn’t rat drove many of the kids home, but a handful of employees would certainly smell rancid enough to raise suspicions. I braced for disaster.
The next morning, I avoided Julie, who was rumored to be after my head. My father asked how the party went.
I had already received calls from some parents about their kids appearing tipsy. I played dumb, never hinting that we had gallons of moonshine on hand and let the parents believe they had gotten hold of the booze on their own. Fortunately, the truly hammered had remained there overnight.
“I think it was great for morale,” I said.
If he knew, he didn’t say a word.
The following summer, we had a sharp increase in the number of applicants, many of whom had heard about the Water World party. This drove Julie into spasms.
“Never again,” she said. But we brought it back every year, minus the bins full of rubbing alcohol. The employees loved it.
I couldn’t blame them. Under cover of night, the park took on a much different atmosphere. The crowds that piled in during the day were gone, leaving its walkways clear and the rides empty. The lights we used to illuminate Motor World at dusk bathed everything in an artificial glow. The din that rose from tens of thousands of people swarming toward one end and then the other was muted. There was no screaming over line-cutting, no fighting, no splashing, no hysterical reports of disaster on the radio. There was only silence. It made me feel like I did when my father first broke ground there, that he was building a park just for us kids.
Many times, I found myself pulling into the parking lot late into the night and piling out with Laurie or my friends, unlocking the fence in front of the admission window, and running inside. We divorced ourselves from being sentries. We wanted to be guests.
In Motor World, we turned off the governors that limited the speed of the cars and pushed the Lolas up to seventy or eighty miles an hour, taking sharp curves around the track and veering dangerously close to one another. Jimmy and Kevin Curley took the Lolas out on Route 94. Had anyone in an actual car plowed into them, the Lolas would have crumpled like aluminum cans. They were not street legal. But they were nimble, able to weave in and out of traffic, and there were never many cars on that stretch of road late at night. Still, I never climbed inside one. It was Jimmy who inherited my father’s reckless side.
Surf Hill was a different story. All of us sought out increasingly creative ways to take the jump. Smoke and Tommy built tiny rafts made of two-by-fours and mats and shot themselves off the lane and into the sky. We also rode inner tubes three people at a time, hoping some kind of inviolate law of physics would get us farther and higher up in the air according to how dangerous our makeshift vessel was.
During one of these midnight excursions, I watched as Smoke went down in a tube, soaring so high he seemed to be eclipsing the moon. The landing was less romantic. He plummeted down to the foam mat with such force that it dislocated his shoulder. As he writhed in pain, I ran over and helped him to his feet.
He was in agony but functional. I persuaded him to put off surgery until after the summer. He thought I was just worried about him, and I was. But we also couldn’t lose a lifeguard.
On a different night, I was contemplating going down the Kamikaze when I noticed a small band of strangers bouncing around near the bottom. Afraid it might be security, I slowly walked down the hill. As I got closer, I could make out faces. It was Nicole Molina, Ellen, her sister Erin, and Ginette in a pack and headed for Motor World. In the center, laughing louder than all of them, was Julie.
Startled, I stopped. It was like seeing the pope at a Megadeth concert. I wanted to yell and chastise her, playfully, but resisted. She looked over at me, then disappeared with the others into the night.
The park seduced everyone, kids and seniors, polka fans and daredevils. Julie never had a chance.