“Really.” He seemed unfazed, but it was hard to get a read through the aviators.
“Yep,” I said. “She told me last night that she doesn’t like any of them.”
Still no reaction. “OK,” he said.
“So, you’re wasting your time with her.”
“Am I?”
“For sure. It’s just, you know, I don’t want to see you get hurt or anything.”
“Gotcha,” he said, nodding his head. “I appreciate that.”
Like a cool breeze, Terri rounded the corner to where Mike and I were standing. Most of the time I took her appearance for granted, but she really was quite beautiful. Tall and slim with curves in all the conventionally desirable places. Her shoulder-length black hair was feathered, quite similar to Mike’s, actually, and she had big green eyes that were heavily mascaraed in the style of the time. Her smile always looked the slightest bit mischievous, even when she was wasn’t. Tonight she wore dark jeans, a white blouse, and a black satin bomber jacket. As she kissed him hello on the cheek, they struck me as a very exotic couple, perfectly styled to go to a discotheque or knock over a liquor store.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” my mom said. “I see you’ve met Clint.”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “We were just having a little chat.”
“About what?” she asked, looking at me.
“Stuff,” I said.
“What kind of stuff?”
“I was just saying how I got detention this week for running to the school bus,” I said.
“Why’d you tell him that?” I couldn’t tell if Terri was horrified or amused. She explained to Mike that I was having a hard time in this new school district. “That’s his second detention this month. He used to be the perfect student, until recently.”
“He seems pretty perfect to me,” Mike said. If he was being sarcastic, I certainly didn’t know it at the time, because I believed I was indeed as perfect as a ten-year-old could be. And why my mother would choose to go out to dinner with this man rather than stay home with me was beyond my comprehension.
Mike and Terri left on their date, and three years later we were a family of four (plus one in utero) living in a much nicer, less-crowded house and eating a lot of chicken cutlets.
Maybe we could go to Action Park some time in July, they said.
“July? I can’t wait until July! It probably opens Memorial Day weekend! I need to go then!”
My begging and whining did little to convince them that donning a bathing suit in 60-degree temperatures would be a good idea. We would make the drive to Vernon, New Jersey, in July.
Oh, shit, I thought. They’re coming too. I hadn’t accounted for that possibility. I had figured they would drop me off at the front gate so I could make new and gorgeous friends who loved me for my God-given potential to be cool. But now, Mike and Terri were coming with me and we’d have to walk around a water park together. In bathing suits. With my little sister Jodi in tow. Aw man, my life sucked so much I could barely breathe.
For the next two months I kept Action Park at an emotional distance, the way a kid thinks about Christmas in September or an adult thinks about that STD test they should probably get after a long weekend in Miami. The commercials would play every day, and I had no choice but to regard those wet teenagers as long-lost cousins who didn’t know I existed but who would embrace me as one of their own upon first sight.
July arrived, eventually, and brought with it a heat wave, as is typical of Long Island summers, and—after some gentle reminding on my part—we loaded into the Chevy Blazer destined for New Jersey. Mike drove, as usual, and didn’t seem to mind at all that Jodi and I sang along loudly to Donna Summer’s greatest hits album as it played on the built-in 8-track. He wasn’t a singer, he said, when we tried to cajole him into joining us.
“Mike! ‘Bad Girls’ is next!” Jodi yelled. “You can do the toot toot beep beep part! It doesn’t matter what you sound like! You just say toot toot awwwww beep beep!” He smiled and politely declined. She sang it instead, rocking her head back and forth while she did so. She also squinted her eyes and pouted her lips, in what I assumed was a prepubescent attempt at sexiness. I silently wondered if I should care that my ten-year-old sister was really feeling this song about street-trolling hookers. I didn’t.
Much to my surprise and disappointment, Action Park wasn’t brimming with perfect specimens of American adolescence. Most of the people were either kind of fat, or droopy, or hairy. I mean, really disturbingly hairy. Men sprouted hair out of their lower backs and on their shoulders. Hair grew under their arms, across their bellies, up and down their legs into their groins, necks, knuckles, like mold spreading across a shower curtain. The women provided little respite from the assault on my senses. Some had giant, pendulous breasts and thighs the texture of chicken chow mein. Others looked broken or bowlegged, like life had really knocked the crap out of them.
Of course, I had been to the beaches of Long Island countless times, so I knew that human bodies came in all different shapes and sizes. But I had never seen so many half-naked people this close-up. They were practically touching me, making me anxious. I wanted to go home, back to our split-level ranch in the suburbs, where everyone was at least moderately attractive. Where skin clung tautly to our frames. Where hair grew in the appropriate places. And where there were no open wounds.
See, Action Park wasn’t comprised solely of water rides. It also featured an attraction called the Alpine Slide, a concrete half-pipe-shaped track that meandered down a mountain. People would sit on little nonmotorized sleds, controlling their speed with a joystick. You could pull the stick closer to you to apply the brake or push it forward and let gravity whisk you along the path.
The Alpine Slide had no seat belts or roll bars, just one built-in, state-of-the-art safety system: your epidermis. If you were to fall out of your sled or jump the track, the only structure that might slow your descent down the mountain was your skin.
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that one-quarter of the people mulling around Action Park did so with a moderate to severe case of road rash, which the first-aid team would cover liberally with Mercurochrome, a bright-red antiseptic that made bloody wounds appear even gorier. One might assume the management of Action Park would forbid, or at the very least discourage, people with fresh cuts and scrapes from entering a communal water ride. Nope. They might as well have posted signs reading, SKINNED HALF YOUR ARM? DON’T BE A PUSSY. JUMP RIGHT BACK IN THE POOL WHERE EVEN MORE OF YOUR BODILY FLUIDS CAN MIX FREELY WITH THOSE OF PERFECT STRANGERS. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER!
Another problem with this place was that to ride the Alpine Slide you had to get to the top of the mountain, and the only way to do that was to take a ski lift, which ran above the track itself. Pretty straightforward in its design, sure. Go up ski lift. Go down slide. Now add a few thousand teenage boys to the equation.