“Okay.”
We went in search of my wife and found her watching my son whiz around on the giant swing. After a mere half an hour at Funland, our clothes were soaked through with sweat and the children could barely keep their heads above their necks. But children will never readily acknowledge their own tiredness. Nothing pisses them off more than telling them, “Hey, you look tired!” They’ll claw your face off if you tell them that. It wounds their pride. You just have to let them run themselves ragged until they collapse from near-fatal levels of dehydration and exhaustion. My kids wanted to stay at Funland, so I cut them a deal.
“Listen,” I said. “One more ride, and then we go home for French fries and ice cream. I’m not even gonna pretend that you’ll eat the other things I put on your dinner plate. Just fries and then ice cream. Deal?”
Both nodded their heads vigorously. The girl took off to the arcade with my wife and I went with the boy to find his own last hurrah. Toward the back of the park, behind a small track where little trucks scooted around for the relatively high price of three tickets, there was the Jungle: a massive, Rube Goldberg–style obstacle course where kids entered through one cube and battled through a series of rope bridges and slides and ball pits and ladders until they emerged out of another cube six months later. It was cool as shit. I wanted to go into it myself. You weren’t allowed to wear shoes inside this toddler matrix. You had to place them in a little cubby and then let your parents watch in horror as your feet grew blacker and blacker with each progressive step.
I looked at my son. He was three years old. A robust three. A remarkably stubborn three. There wasn’t a trace of insincerity to him. I looked into his big Tweety Bird eyes and knew that he was going into this thing whether I liked it or not.
“I don’t think I have enough tickets for this one,” I told him.
“I wand to bo in dere.”
“You sure you can handle it?”
“Wes!”
“All right. Last ride.”
I plunked down the tickets, slipped off the boy’s shoes, and watched him burrow into the entrance. He climbed up through a plastic flap to the second level of the Jungle and jumped into a plastic ball pit. The balls were ancient. You could see the geologic buildup of dried snot that had accumulated on them over the course of time, layer after layer of petrified boogers. He struggled to wade through the pit, as if trapped in quicksand. I shouted encouragement to him: “You’re okay! You’re doing just great!”
But that was merely a taste of what the Jungle had in store for him. After the ball pit, he had to climb up another level. The cubes were just high enough for this to be a struggle for him. I watched as he reached through the plastic flap and tried to pull himself further up. It took him a while and I offered him a way out by shouting, “You can turn around! You don’t have to do the whole thing!” But he ignored me and pressed on, hoisting himself up and coming to a long rope bridge, with an opening between each step wide enough for his entire leg to fall through. The boy stepped cautiously as older kids swarmed around and past him, and he looked genuinely surprised that none of them stopped to help.
Ever cross a rope bridge with no shoes on? Don’t. The rope digs into your arches and you quickly find yourself in agonizing discomfort. I could see it in my son’s face as he walked gingerly across. He knew he had gotten in way over his head. Now he was beginning to cry because he hated the Jungle and there was no way out of it. It was his own private ’Nam. I kept waiting for a ten-year-old to grab him and scream, “You know where you are? You’re in the Jungle, baby! YOU’RE GONNA DIEEEEEE!”
There were only two ways out: down the way he came, or up several more levels to a tunnel slide that would bring him, conceivably, back down to the exit without much fuss (or pudding). But the climb up to that slide now appeared as daunting as summiting K2, and I begged my son to turn around.
“It’s not worth it!” I shouted.
The big kids were passing him and he hated the idea of looking like the one kid who couldn’t handle what the Jungle was throwing at him. He kept climbing upward. He slipped out of view for a moment and I couldn’t pinpoint his location. I was afraid the Jungle had swallowed him whole. I imagined a trapdoor hidden inside the maze that sent unwitting toddlers down to a special carny dungeon, where they would be set aside for meat. Then he emerged out of a tunnel and was nearly as high as the Sea Dragon at its peak swing. But he couldn’t see the tunnel slide. He didn’t know there was a way out. He grabbed the netting and began crying loud enough for everyone to hear.
“DEDDY!”
I went over to the Jungle’s operator, a sixteen-year-old who almost certainly took the job strictly for weed money.