SO BACK IN Metairie in the early eighties there was a low-rent waterslide park off Veterans Highway. It only had a few slides, but one of them was (in our eyes) enormous. You had to be at least forty-eight inches tall to ride it. I was maybe forty-four inches. On a good day. So when we reached the top of the stairs, Jay would engage the lifeguard in polite conversation as she tried to make sure I was of proper height. I placed my waterslide mat down in front of my feet to hide the fact that I was on my tippiest of toes. As Jay continued to noisily babble into the lifeguard’s ear, I fixed her with my best “Fuck you, you don’t scare me” face as my tiny head barely crested the forty-eight-inch mark.

“You’re good.”

And with that, Jay jumped onto the slide first and took off. He rounded the corner, out of sight, and the lifeguard gave me the cue to go ahead. What she didn’t know was that Jay had not only abandoned his safety mat, he was suspended just around the bend, arms planted firmly on the walls of the tube as the water rushed violently past him, waiting for me to come barreling down toward him.

The plan was simple: Before I crashed into Jay, I would jettison my own safety mat and lock arms and legs with him, effectively creating a Duplass Transformer. This new beast (now doubled in weight and sans safety mats) shot down the waterslide at a speed with which the insurance companies would not have been pleased. Without the mats, the small crevices where the tubes connected would scratch and scrape our backs, but we didn’t care. We had serious speed. Even the extra sunblock oil on our arms and legs gave us (at least in our minds) a few extra mph.

We flipped over each other, arms and legs intertwined, hurtling toward the pool below, where most of the time there was another lifeguard waiting for us (holding our forsaken mats, warning us that what we had done was not only against the rules but also dangerous). One more infraction and we would be kicked out of the park for good. But we didn’t care. We made our own rules. This was our way.

We climbed the stairs and went down the slide again.