One of my favorite places to go when I was a kid in Chicago was Riverview, the giant amusement park on the North Side. Riverview, which during the fifties was nicknamed Polio Park, after the reigning communicable disease of the decade, had dozens of rides, including some of the fastest, most terrifying roller coasters ever designed. Among them were the Silver Streak, the Comet, the Wild Mouse, the Flying Turns, and the Bobs. Of these, the Flying Turns, a seatless ride that lasted all of thirty seconds or so and required the passengers in each car to recline consecutively on one another, was my favorite. The Turns did not operate on tracks but rather on a steeply banked, bobsledlike series of tortuous sliding curves that never failed to engender in me the sensation of being about to catapult out of the car over the stand of trees to the west of the parking lot. To a fairly manic kid, which I was, this was a big thrill, and I must have ridden the Flying Turns hundreds of times between the ages of seven and sixteen.
The Bobs, however, was the most frightening roller coaster in the park. Each year several people were injured or killed on that ride; usually when a kid attempted to prove his bravery by standing up in the car at the apex of the first long, slow climb, and was then flipped out of the car as it jerked suddenly downward at about a hundred miles per hour. The kids liked to speculate about how many lives the Bobs had taken over the years. I knew only one kid, Earl Weyerholz, who claimed to have stood up in his car at the top of the first hill more than once and lived to tell about it. I never doubted Earl Weyerholz because I once saw him put his arm up to the biceps into an aquarium containing two piranhas just to recover a quarter Bobby DiMarco had thrown into it and dared Earl to go after. Earl was eleven then. He died in 1958, at the age of fourteen, from the more than two hundred bee stings he sustained that year at summer camp in Wisconsin. How or why he got stung so often was never explained to me. I just assumed somebody had dared him to stick his arms into a few hives for a dollar or something.
Shoot the Chutes was also a popular Riverview ride. Passengers rode on boats that slid at terrific speeds into a pool and everybody got soaking wet. The Chutes never really appealed very much to me, though; I never saw the point of getting wet for no good reason. The Parachute was another one that did not thrill me. Being dropped to the ground from a great height while seated on a thin wooden plank with only a narrow metal bar to hold on to was not my idea of a good time. In fact, just the thought of it scared the hell out of me; I didn’t even like to watch people do it. I don’t think my not wanting to go on the Parachute meant that I was acrophobic, however, because I was extremely adept at scaling garage roofs by the drainpipes in the alleys and jumping from one roof to the next. The Parachute just seemed like a crazy thing to submit oneself to as did the Rotor, a circular contraption that spun around so fast that when the floor was removed riders were plastered to the walls by centrifugal force. Both the Parachute and the Rotor always had long lines of people waiting to be exquisitely tortured.
What my friends and I were most fond of at Riverview was Dunk the Nigger. At least that’s what we called the concession where by throwing a baseball at a target on a handle and hitting it square you could cause the seat lever in the attached cage to release and plunge the man sitting on the perch into a tank of about five feet of water. All of the guys who worked in the cages were black, and they hated to see us coming. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen my friends and I terrorized these guys. They were supposed to taunt the thrower, make fun of him or her, and try to keep them spending quarters for three balls. Most people who played this game were lucky to hit the target hard enough to dunk the clown one in every six tries; but my buddies and I became experts. We’d buy about ten dollars worth of baseballs and keep those guys going down, time after time.
Of course they hated us with a passion. “Don’t you little motherfuckers have somewhere else to go?” they’d yell. “Goddamn motherfuckin’ whiteboy, I’m gon’ get yo’ ass when I gets my break!” We’d just laugh and keep pegging hardballs at the trip-lever targets. My pal Big Steve was great at Dunk the Nigger; he was our true ace because he threw the hardest and his arm never got tired. “You fat ofay sumbitch!” one of the black guys would shout at Big Steve as he dunked him for the fifth pitch in a row. “Stop complaining,” Steve would yell back at him. “You’re getting a free bath, aren’t ya?”
None of us thought too much about the fact that the job of taunt-and-dunk was about half a cut above being a carnival geek and a full cut below working at a car wash. It never occurred to us, more than a quarter of a century ago, why it was all of the guys on the perches were black, or that we were racists. Unwitting racists, perhaps; after all, we were kids, ignorant and foolish products of White Chicago during the fifties.
One summer afternoon in 1963, the year I turned sixteen, my friends and I arrived at Riverview and headed straight for Dunk the Nigger. We were shocked to see a white guy sitting on a perch in one of the cages. Nobody said anything but we all stared at him. Big Steve bought some balls and began hurling them at one of the black guys’ targets. “What’s the matter, gray?” the guy shouted at Steve. “Don’t want to pick on one of your own?”
I don’t remember whether or not I bought any balls that day, but I do know it was the last time I went to the concession. In fact, that was one of the last times I patronized Riverview, since I left Chicago early the following year and Riverview was torn down not long after. I don’t know what Big Steve or any of my other old friends who played Dunk the Nigger with me think about it now, or even if they’ve ever thought about it at all. That’s just the way things were.