“Most people spend their lives trying to dodge trouble. The best fun in the world is dodging trouble you’ve made for yourself.”
James Bailey, co-founder of the Barnum & Bailey circus
My father always had an interest in magic. When we were younger, he would perform card tricks at the kitchen table during breakfast, blowing our adolescent minds with disappearing aces and recovered kings. Later, when my brothers got older and started having children of their own, he would gather the grandkids during family getaways to his vacation home in Aspen. By then, his illusions had grown more elaborate.
“I’m going to turn into a rabbit,” he told them.
The kids were skeptical. They were old enough to know their grandfather could not turn into an animal but young enough to think, well, maybe. He ushered them into a spare bedroom and told them to examine every inch of the place for signs of a rabbit or anything else suspicious. He had them check that the window was too high up to accommodate his escape. There was nothing.
“Okay,” he said, ushering them out and shutting himself in. “Come back in five minutes.”
They milled about. After a few minutes, they opened the door. There, in the middle of the room, was a rabbit. My father was nowhere in sight. They were amazed. They looked everywhere for him. Soon, the rabbit consumed all their attention. My father would rejoin the family a short time later. He did this often. To this day, some of them don’t know how he managed it, or what became of the rabbits that had temporarily replaced him.
I could have guessed what happened to the bunnies—my father was a meat-eater—but didn’t learn the rest of his methodology until later. There was a trapdoor in the closet, a place for additional storage, that was obscured by clothing. That was where he hid the rabbit, and then himself.
My father’s sleight of hand was legendary in the family, but it was also well known across New Jersey, where his misdirection took on a different form.
When the injuries at the park began to pile up, I’d hear people make jokes about how he must be paying out the nose for liability insurance. Who would insure a park designed by an amateur with no previous water ride experience? That served beer? That was effectively run by area high school kids?
When anyone wanted a real answer to that, Gene would say he was covered by the prestigious firm of London and World Assurance, Limited, which never seemed to raise an eyebrow at anything he wanted to do. He gave the state proof of insurance whenever they asked.
London and World, I would come to find out, was surprisingly affordable. The cost of premiums was zero, and their office space had extremely low overhead.
That’s because London and World didn’t actually exist in any conventional sense. He had conjured it out of thin air.
Like his grandkids, the state was amazed by the illusion. But he didn’t see the trapdoor until it was too late.
I learned of the insurance fraud through my Stanford classmate Adam Tracy in March of my sophomore year. Adam was from Rye, New York, and kept up with the East Coast newspapers.
“Hey, Andy,” he said. “Your dad’s in some shit.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” I said. Adam handed me the newspaper. On page three was a headline:
RESORT HAD NO INSURER, STATE SAYS
“For fuck’s sake,” I said.
“This is the death park, right?” Adam said. “What do they mean, he has no insurance?”
“It’s not a ‘death park,’” I said. “There have been mishaps. It’s no different from swimming in the ocean.” Oh, my God. I am turning into him.
“They’re saying he made up his own insurance company.”
“It’s a mistake.”
I got on the phone with my mother, who explained that my father was “having some difficulty” with insurance regulators. “The state,” she said, “seems a little vindictive.”
“Put Dad on the phone,” I said.
“Heya,” he said, as if I had caught him on a lazy afternoon.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“It’s all a big misunderstanding,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. How’s school?”
My father’s stoicism made it impossible to gauge the seriousness of any given situation. It was always difficult to know what to be worried about because nothing appeared to worry him. It wasn’t that he didn’t consider the consequences of his potentially troublesome actions. It was that the consequences bothered him so little, their threat seemingly so remote, that he was never distracted by them. This was a man who once went on a trip to Las Vegas with his Mayflower men, hopped on a real live bull, and rode it until he was flung to the ground and into unconsciousness. Getting trampled was not something he feared because it was not an option he weighed.
With help from Julie, Topher, and the newspapers, I absorbed the details of his latest maneuver. For the past year, the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation (SCI) had been looking into allegations that London and World was not actually an independent insurer but one of Gene’s own companies. No one knew who urged the commission to conduct the inquiry, but a prime suspect was Tom Kean, the governor of New Jersey. Kean, a Republican, was apparently irritated after Gene threw his support behind an opposing candidate during the 1981 gubernatorial election and may have decided to retaliate by sending the SCI after him. (Kean would later come to the park for a photo op and go down the Alpine at an apparent speed of a few inches per hour. Maybe it was his version of a victory lap.) It was also no coincidence that the SCI became concerned about the park’s insurance status following the two deaths the previous summer. As I feared then, we had attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.
Asked to submit records of his various businesses, my father passive-aggressively sent over an entire moving truck full of documents. It took them three months to comb through it all. The SCI was looking for evidence of London and World’s existence, but could find no trace of it. There was only a post office box in the Cayman Islands.
My father was cryptic on the topic of London and World. “Just because they can’t find it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” he said, as though it were common for insurance companies not to have telephone numbers.
For those who knew him, there was little mystery as to why my father had done something so brazen. He hated insurance. Period. Premiums had skyrocketed in the late 1970s, jumping 400 percent after a number of people injured at ski resorts won the resulting lawsuits. My father considered insurance a substantial waste of money that served only to line the pockets of the insurers, with no apparent benefit to him. If an insurer did need to pay out a claim, his premiums, deductible, or both would go up. The state’s mandated amount of two million dollars in coverage for the park would have been incredibly expensive, even more so because of our spotty safety record. He theorized that it would be much cheaper to field claims himself and pay settlements out of his own pocket when needed, which wasn’t often with the tenacious lawyer David Chaffin in his corner.
So, after the first couple of years of the park’s existence, he opted out of conventional insurance. In this way, he avoided premiums, but it also meant that every time someone slid down the Alpine and stumbled off with weeping skin, the park was vulnerable to litigation. Every bump, broken bone, concussion, dented nose—he was liable for everything. It was now clear to me why he fought claims so aggressively, why David Chaffin was a bull terrier in court. A large settlement could have wiped out the park financially.
Tipped to London and World’s curiously ethereal quality, the state’s insurance department asked for proof that my father had paid insurance premiums. He could produce only one check. It was dated 1978 and did not appear to have been sent to London and World. Instead, it was cashed by New Jersey Financial and General, another one of his companies, which effectively meant he had paid himself. He did, however, give the Department of Labor certificates of insurance, which were required to obtain a permit to open a ride. They were signed by Joe Dasti, a former Mayflower employee. That was alarming because Joe Dasti did not work in the insurance industry. Someone at the SCI remarked that the certificates appeared to be homemade. Since Gene owned the company, that was a perceptive observation.
Not only were London and World’s existence and ownership shadowy, the company was not authorized to do business in the state of New Jersey. This was a clear violation of my father’s lease terms with the Department of Environmental Protection, which owned a large swath of the mountain. If an injured guest had received a large judgment that Gene could not pay out of pocket, the state could have been open to liability. London and World had no assets to back up any substantial claims, no reservoir of funds if someone wound up paralyzed. The exposure was enormous.
My father, once again, ignored the pleas of both Julie and his lawyers that he avoid speaking to the press and tried to explain, in a very rational tone, that he had done nothing wrong. It just made everything worse. He said he had paid all valid claims. He insisted any gaps in coverage were handled by Dover Insurance, which was licensed in the state. When contacted by newspaper reporters looking to corroborate my father’s assertions, a representative for Dover said they only agreed to handle claims exceeding London and World’s coverage. Dover seemed unaware that, since London and World offered no coverage, anything would have exceeded it. He had, in effect, taken out insurance for his quasi-fictional insurance company.
He refused to apologize. “There is basically no difference,” he said, “between self-insurance and having a high deductible.”
The self-insurance paper trail acted as a crowbar for the SCI, which proceeded to submerge itself in his escalating history of audacious behavior. The commission’s report included mention of the snowmaking systems being fed with the help of a dam at the top of the mountain, which no one at the DEP had authorized. (My father argued they only had jurisdiction for concrete dams; his was made out of dirt and, therefore, immune to oversight.) The state was also annoyed that he was slow to pay the share of the ski-lift revenue that he owed them under the lease agreement. My father’s explanation was that they had never sent him a bill. While this happened to be true, it was not what the state wanted to hear.
Things quickly began to unravel. A battalion of lawyers who had active lawsuits against the park modified their complaints to note that the rides on which their clients were injured were only approved because of an insurance certificate from a company that was owned by the person seeking the ride permit. The Larssons were among those who thought it made the park even more at fault.
In perpetuating this scheme, my father had somehow managed to embarrass and anger at least four major state agencies. The state held a three-day hearing to discuss its findings, which turned into a kangaroo court, with no one defending him. Someone from the DEP who examined the dam said it was “hazardous” with “the potential for loss of life” if the water escaped the barrier. (It held up for decades.) They said he created the illusion of insurance, and that he had cheated them out of resort revenue.
It was incredibly surreal to see state employees discuss my father like he was a career criminal. For my entire life, he had done things his way and redefined rules that didn’t suit him. Time and again, he emerged triumphant, no worse for wear and hardly in need of a defense attorney. His behavior in this case was all pretty typical of him, playing with semantics and outmaneuvering opponents who were not as crafty. Usually, people recognized they had been outplayed and moved on.
This was different. Now he had outsmarted the state government, and they were, as my mother said, a little vindictive. It’s never good news when a state holds a multi-day meeting to argue that you’re out of your mind.
The unmasking of London and World forced him to obtain actual insurance from an actual insurance company to remain in operation. He paid back most of what he owed to the state from the allegedly underreported ski-lift income. But the damage was already done. The opposition to development in Vernon now had the backing of the state. After years of my father forcing the town to submit to his whims, the pendulum was now swinging the other way. Officials grew quiet, withdrawing to consider their options. All my father could do was wait.
One day, Julie was driving to our house and passed a lawn sign with a drawing of my father. It was a cartoonish depiction of him trying to hoard more of Vernon’s real estate. Enraged, she pulled over and yanked the sign out of the grass. When she got back home, she told Gene about it. He just laughed.
“You can’t worry about what people think,” he said. “This whole thing is going to blow over. It’s not like we’re the mafia laundering money up here. It’s crazy. You’ll see.”
That is what some people would call misplaced optimism.
Under such scrutiny, it would have made sense to show contrition, lie low, and work to mollify the park’s reputation for mayhem. It was 1983, the year of the insurance scandal, and probably a time to embrace gentler rides.
It was categorically not the best time to reintroduce the Cannonball Loop.
Like a pharmaceutical drug with serious side effects, the Loop’s human trials had not been encouraging. Though it had been at the park for years, it had never been open to the public. Yet my father would always refuse to tear it down, believing he could crack the code of its deficiencies and turn it into a marquee attraction.
Merely by existing, it had become part of the park’s identity. The very top of the Loop loomed over the skyline and was the first thing people saw upon entering. They would congregate around it, as if summoned by its insanity, craning their necks up at its formidable height and looking awestruck in the same way people must have looked at mushroom clouds during early atomic testing. Because it was always shuttered, rumors spread that someone had died riding it or had been stuck in it for hours. It became an urban legend, like the rumor that a combination of Coke and Pop Rocks would explode in your stomach.
“I don’t think it should ever be open,” Julie said. “Ever.”
Julie did her best to temper some of my father’s most radical impulses. She rarely succeeded, but it was important to her that she make the attempt. Her role was to make him question his decisions. My role was to do what I was told. I knew trying to talk him out of anything was a waste of air.
Predictably, he waved off her concerns, telling us changes had been made. From a distance, it looked no less terrifying than before. Up close, I saw where he had instructed the snowmakers to make a major modification. Someone had finally alerted him to the concept of centrifugal force and the need to shore up the loop at the bottom so that riders would remain tight to the slide as they moved around the circle. He had the entire thing cut apart and reassembled to shorten the loop, reducing its height. That significantly reduced the chances of a guest smashing their face into the opposing wall. This was progress.
There was more. A hatch had been installed on the bottom of the loop that could be opened to rescue anyone who failed to clear the circle and got trapped in the chute. It seemed to me that this didn’t necessarily make the ride safer; it only meant that we could now fetch unconscious bodies more efficiently. To demonstrate, he dispatched Pee-Wee Lazier, a diminutive Lazier family member less than five feet tall. Pee-Wee was able to disappear into the exit easily, crawling in on all fours and coming out through the hatch to give a thumbs-up with an elfin hand.
My father gathered some of the employees around and began waving a one-hundred-dollar bill. He was in full carnival barker mode. “I need three people to clear the Cannonball Loop!” he announced.
Like impoverished urchins, ride attendants mobbed him, waving their arms in the air. A handful of greedy daredevils trudged up the steps and disappeared into the Lovecraftian structure. I braced for the familiar tonk sound of a passenger smashing their nose into the opposite wall of the Loop, but it did not come. Tightening the circle had worked. A state inspector signed off on the ride. We celebrated like bad students who had barely gotten a passing grade.
My father had Julie get the word out that the Loop was going to be one of the big attractions for the summer. Amid people calling for his head, we ran print notices declaring that the ride would soon open. It was therefore possible to read an article about the amusement park run by a maniac on one page of the newspaper and see an ad for that same park’s giant death circle on the next. I suspected some editors did this on purpose.
The optimism proved to be short-lived. A few days later, during another test, a ride attendant came tumbling out with a bloody mouth. A fall from the top of the loop wall to the bottom had knocked out his teeth. When two more attendants went down, they came out with bloody forearms. This seemed inexplicable. A snowmaker crawled inside the hatch and came back out nodding to himself.
“Here’s your problem,” he said. He held up two teeth. “These were stuck in the foam.”
My father paced back and forth, clearly feeling he was closer than ever to rendering the ride consistently survivable. He asked some of the engineers orbiting the park for their input. Postmortems of the fateful test runs were prepared, in much the same way that NASA spent months exhaustively analyzing a failed shuttle mission. It soon became clear what we had been missing.
The attendants who had traveled through the Loop safely were of average height and weight. The young man who had misplaced his teeth was not. The engineers determined that there was a sweet spot for the kinds of bodies that could be shot through successfully. Too heavy and they’d pick up too much speed, risking disfigurement. Too light and they might not have the momentum to make it all the way around the knot, also risking disfigurement. The solution was to place a scale at the bottom of the stairs leading to the mouth of the slide. Attendants would weigh prospective riders and assess them for an ideal physique. We had to body-shame patrons to keep them from getting hurt.
“I’m sorry,” an attendant might say. “But you are too skinny to have fun.”
Every time an engineer told him it would be best to simply disassemble the Loop and scatter its parts to the four corners of the globe, my father would redouble his efforts. Telling him he could not do something, or that there was no solution, had no bearing on his behavior. That intractability empowered him to open the park and turn it into a success. He would not be defeated by a guest-eating tube.
“We’re opening it,” he said. “And that’s that.”
Before introducing the Loop to the public, my father made one conciliatory gesture. He had Father Boland come by and bless it. Other rides would receive his benediction, but the Loop was most in need of divine supervision.
Thankfully, the Loop did not fall under the responsibility of Water World. It was operated by the employees of the Alpine Center, who dutifully weighed guests at the bottom and shooed away children deemed too small to ride safely. Back from my sophomore year at Stanford, I returned to my post as head of aquatic attractions. Though I was concerned about my father’s future, he had taught me never to let anything distract me from the task at hand. As if to reassure us, he acted as though nothing was troubling him.
He let this veneer of stoicism slip only once. He invited me to come watch a fireworks display from his office on the Fourth of July and told me to be there by nine o’clock. I got sidetracked by another brawl, this one involving a group of crazed bodybuilders tossing lifeguards into the water. Security and police brought the situation under control, but Laurie and I arrived at his office late, my work shirt half-torn from the conflict.
“I told you nine o’clock,” he said. My mother and grandmother were there. So was Julie.
“Yeah, right, but—”
“Nine means nine,” he said, irritated. “Your grandmother has been waiting an hour for you!”
He continued to dress me down like the marine captain he was, barking at a subordinate. Unable to articulate that the need to dampen a riot trumped the fireworks, I just slumped in a chair.
That holiday weekend marked the opening of something called the Aqua Skoot, another of Ken Bailey’s ideas. The Aqua Skoot was more pragmatic than the Bailey Ball in the sense that it had no potential to roll someone across a busy highway, but it still wasn’t entirely safe. On the Skoot, guests sat on a cart that was propelled down a thirty-two-foot-high tower made of metal rollers, like the kind found in airport security. They would pick up speed at a steep, downward angle, which then flattened out and shot them across the water like a skipping stone.
The problem with the ride was that it was dependent on the patron holding their torso upright. If they messed around and leaned back too far, their head would slam into the metal lip near the last roller, which would effectively scalp them. The Skoot lacked the foam encasement that made rides like Surf Hill, while not necessarily idiot-proof, at least idiot-resistant. The overhang at the bottom also attracted bees, which built nests there. It was therefore possible to tear off part of your head, then attract stinging insects with your panicked flailing. In our new, ambiguously insured world, I had reservations about the Aqua Skoot.
As with most of the rides, the attendants knew how to go down safely (and to swim away from the bees). Not satisfied with this absence of peril, however, they began riding the carts standing up. Then one of them struck upon the idea to take the backboards used by the EMTs and use them in place of the carts. They would strap new employees to the boards before sending them down headfirst in what amounted to a demented initiation. Their bodies secured to a flat surface, the employees could easily become trapped once they hit the water, sinking until they unhooked themselves from the straps. Drowning was a distinct possibility.
“Did that occur to you?” I asked them. “Do you know how dumb this is?”
I may have called them shitheads, which was uncharacteristic of my otherwise affable management style. I had always struggled with the tension between being a participant and being responsible. Another time, I might have gone down the Skoot on a board with them. The insurance debacle had changed my mind-set. I told the EMTs to begin taking inventory of the backboards and not to let them be checked out like library books.
The Aqua Skoot remained open that summer. The Loop did not. Only a small number of people were able to clear it successfully. Bloody noses persisted. Grit collecting on the slide scratched up people’s backs. Worse, the vinyl coating on the interior foam kept bubbling up from the force of bodies sliding across. It would absorb water, increasing friction and necessitating constant repairs. (Foam was our everlasting nightmare.) When people did make it through without incident, the ride had so disrupted their equilibrium that attendants would tell them to lie down for five seconds before attempting to get up. From a distance, it looked like the Loop was spitting people out unconscious.
We had also come to realize that body mass was not the only factor that made each trip different. A slick bathing suit could increase momentum. So could the addition of suntan lotion, as Smoke proved during his early runs. Each variable resulted in a different ride. As hard as we tried, there was simply no way to make skill a factor in success. Each rider was little more than dead weight subject to the laws of physics. Anything could happen to anyone at any time. Unlike the exploding Pop Rocks, the Loop was no myth. It was the closest any theme park ride had come to Russian roulette.
My father still refused to tear it down.
The insurance scandal grew more serious after that summer. The SCI had no authority to fine or penalize my father, but they were more than willing to hand their findings over to the state’s attorney general, who decided to pursue a criminal complaint. Since I was back at school for my junior year, I once again found out about this through Adam Tracy.
“Your dad’s being indicted, man,” he said. Adam was quickly becoming the Tom Brokaw of terrible shit happening to my family.
There were 122 counts in total. My father was the alleged “central figure” of a “complex and massive conspiracy to defraud various state agencies.” The state’s Division of Criminal Justice spent months putting their case together, ultimately listing more than two hundred acts of fraud, theft, and embezzlement, with some forgery thrown in. My father held a press conference denouncing all charges.
“I’m shocked,” he said. “Shocked and outraged.” He insisted none of what he was accused of doing could have hurt anyone but himself. He said he had taken a substantial risk in taking on the legal claims, painting a picture of significant responsibility rather than one of heedless neglect. Rather than express remorse, he called it a “brilliant insurance program.” He did not believe he had done anything wrong. In a sense, he hadn’t. Not exactly. Self-insurance grew to be an accepted form of coverage in the years to come, particularly for businesses seeking health benefits. But, in 1983, it was a bit too forward-thinking.
“Your dad is out there,” Adam said.
It would be a long time before I learned that many of my Stanford friends referred to my father as “Uncle Vito” behind my back, believing he had ties to organized crime. I found this ridiculous. Still, he was looking at a high-profile trial, with prosecutors saying there were more than one hundred thousand documents to review. There was talk it could be the longest criminal trial in the state’s history. If convicted, he was facing twelve years in prison. Admittedly, it was a little mobster-ish.
After Adam debriefed me, I called my mother. “Dad doing okay?” I asked.
“He works all the time,” she said. This was my father’s way. One of his attorneys later told me that some defendants facing trial and conviction roll themselves into a ball, essentially shutting down. My father never brooded, never got depressed. He also never risked an unoccupied moment, purchasing a limo and hiring a driver so he could work on the ride to and from his office at the park.
I knew he was downplaying the seriousness of the situation, but I decided to go along with it so I wouldn’t upset my mother. I couldn’t imagine my father going to prison. Then again, I couldn’t imagine him going on trial for crimes committed in the course of running an amusement park, either.
“We’re a law-abiding family,” I told her. “They’ll see that.”
Someone began banging on our door. I hung up the phone and opened it. It was Jimmy. “The cops are looking for me,” he said.
Jimmy had followed me to Stanford and was a year behind. By this time, I had moved out of the dorm and into temporary student housing on campus known as the Trailers, which were prefabricated homes with three bedrooms. My roommates were Adam, Fred Buckley, and Eric Weintz. Since we each wanted our own space, we decided to build an addition. We got some lumber and assembled the room, a rather patchwork job that probably wouldn’t have passed any kind of code inspection, but that somehow no school official noticed. The snowmakers would have been proud.
After a week or so of living together, I came to regret the arrangement. Adam, Fred, and Eric were all good guys, but as roommates, they were absolute pigs. Dirty dishes and a rancid bathroom were the least of it. Someone threw a bowling ball through a television, thinking it would be funny as a kind of avant-garde art piece. They tossed smelly clothes on the sofa and chairs. They left food to rot in the refrigerator. It was like living in the concession area of the park.
I tried berating and shaming them. I tried rotating weekly cleaning duty. I tried every trick I had learned managing the workers of my father’s uninsured utopia. Nothing worked.
When two of my friends from Newark Academy, Evan and Gary, came to visit as prospective students, one of them accidentally dropped a beer bottle on the floor.
“Shit, Andy, sorry,” Evan said, and started to pick up the shards.
The floor was already covered in empty pizza boxes. I had seen enough. “Leave it,” I said. I chugged the rest of my beer and threw the bottle against the wall, smashing it. By the end of the day, we had finished an entire case and broke each bottle into pieces. If they wanted to live in squalor, I wasn’t going to interfere.
My passive-aggressive stunt coincided with spring break. I went off to visit Laurie, leaving the trailer full of broken glass, hoping the brutes would get the message. When I got back three weeks later, all three of them were there. Not only had the broken glass been left untouched, but someone had nailed a giant ham to the wall. My mother had sent it to me as a gift.
“That’s my mother’s ham!” I yelled.
It had arrived in my absence and was left to rot for two weeks in the sweltering unit. Someone had stuck every eating utensil we owned in it. It was crawling with maggots.
“This is disgusting,” I told Adam. “We’re living like animals.”
He shrugged and continued to stare at a basketball game on the television that didn’t have a bowling ball in it, absently flicking maggots from the sofa cushions.
Knowing they would not lift a finger, and unwilling to become their chambermaid, I remembered my father’s fateful game of poker on the houseboat and decided to make an alternative proposal.
“We’ll play poker,” I said. “Whoever loses has to clean the fucking place up. Unconditionally and immediately.”
This intrigued them. They agreed. I had never played with such concentration or ambition. Fred Buckley lost. We celebrated, relishing Fred’s misfortune.
“I’m not cleaning anything,” he said. “I’ll hire a cleaning service.”
When the crew arrived and saw it for themselves, they demanded a higher fee. Fred forked it over without hesitation. No price was too great to avoid having to deal with a biohazard.
All of this meant I was not in the mood to have Jimmy come to the door looking for sanctuary from authorities. I spent my summers taking care of lunatics. I didn’t want to do it on my own time.
Jimmy sat down, popped open a beer, and explained. He had been riding my motorcycle with a friend of his named Ernie on the back. The two decided to take it off the slow-moving roadway and onto the pathway reserved for pedestrians and bicycles. He was going pretty fast when a campus cop pulled up behind him and signaled for him to pull over. These weren’t rent-a-cops or mall police. Stanford had actual law enforcement patrolling the grounds. Jimmy either didn’t know this or didn’t care. He tore away from the blaring siren and forced the officer to give chase. It ended with Jimmy abandoning the bike and leaving Ernie to be interrogated by the cops. Ernie made it sound like he had been beaten and starved before giving up Jimmy’s name. He later admitted they had just asked him politely.
I told Jimmy to live with me for a few weeks until they got tired of looking for him. We had one suspected criminal in the family, so why not two? My only condition for harboring a fugitive was that he pay me for the bike.
Jimmy’s presence and the ambiguity of our father’s fate caused me to regress into a park-oriented philosophy of life, one in which self-preservation was an afterthought. Without realizing it, I devolved into Aqua Skoot levels of recklessness.
One night, thunderclouds forming overhead, we brazenly swiped an entire half keg of beer from a fraternity house. We didn’t want to go back to the Trailers, in case someone had seen us, so we made our way to an area not far from campus known as the Dish. This was an undeveloped parcel of land with several hundred acres of rolling hills and meadows and a paved walkway for hikers and joggers. At the top was a large satellite-communications dish made of metal trusses and mesh.
Rain and wind cut through our clothes, soaking us. Adam and I charged up a hill, trying not to let our knees buckle under the weight of the keg we were both holding. Jimmy and the others followed, panting. When the hill leveled off, Adam dropped the keg. I kept going.
I made it to the dish long before anyone else. The bottom was low to the ground. I reached up and gripped the edge, then pulled myself up and into its concave surface. Hunched over on all fours, I crawled along, careful not to lose my footing on the slick mesh. Jimmy yelled something. My foot gave, and I felt the toe of my sneaker lose its grip. But I didn’t fall. I kept moving until I reached the upper edge of the dish. I balanced on the narrow lip as the rain came down and the wind blew my shirt collar against my chin.
Seeing I had made it, Jimmy and the others followed me up, keg in hand. We sat up there, letting the rain pelt us, balanced precariously between an amazing view and total disaster. I supposed I wanted to know, if only for a moment, what it felt like to be my father.