I glanced at Kevin, who had raised his head from his magazine to make sure I was standing as instructed. I wondered what kind of family Kevin came from, whether his parents were proud that he had a job at Action Park. He looked a little dead in the eyes, so I concluded that he came from a home in which his father drank too much beer and his mother smoked cigarettes at the kitchen table while wearing a floral housecoat. Would Kevin cry if I died? Or would he brag to his dirt-bike-loving friends that he helped kill a skinny kid who was probably a fag? Most likely the latter.
Kevin pressed a button and the floor dropped from beneath me, sending the Human Xylophone plummeting to earth, clad in nothing but a white bathing suit at least two sizes too big. (Terri and I hadn’t been able to find the coveted white trunks in the boys’ department, so I convinced her to buy me a men’s small. Look, Mom, I can tie the drawstring really tight! They’re not too big! To give you a little perspective: My waist at the time was about 26 inches. A men’s small is 30. Those extra four inches will prove important in just a minute.)
I free-fell for less than a second before my body made contact with the slide, which came as sweet relief, and before I knew it I had begun the turn from vertical to horizontal. I cascaded over a few small humps and continued down the chute to where the deeper water slowed me to a complete stop.
Unfortunately, that deeper water, combined with my high speed of travel, spread my spindly legs apart and jerked my too-big bathing suit severely to the right and halfway up my torso. Upon realizing that my barely teenage privates were now on display for a small but significant fraction of New Jersey to see, I yanked the suit back down to cover myself before anyone could notice.
I stood up, a little shaky but in one piece. Stumbling back to my family, I was greeted like a soldier returning from war. Or a dog that ran away for a couple of hours.
“That was crazy,” Mike said with a laugh. “I’m really impressed.”
Terri added, “You were definitely the youngest guy to go on that thing.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Jodi said.
I mumbled some thanks to the three of them and assumed the funny feeling in my pelvis was because I had just cheated death.
“OK, let’s hit the road,” Mike said. “Does anyone need to use the bathroom? It’s a long ride home.”
Jodi said she didn’t, which was unusual because she had a strange affinity for public restrooms. Clearly, she had peed in the wave pool until her bladder was empty.
“I guess I’ll go,” I said.
The men’s room at Action Park was one of those places where you never want to find yourself. I mean, if some sort of sadistic genie ever forces you to choose between spending time in a Ugandan prison or a similar amount of time in the Action Park men’s room during a heat wave, choose the men’s room. Otherwise, avoid it at all cost. There are just too many wet, hairy guys in drippy suits and bare feet mingling with all the smells of humanity.
Back in 1982, there weren’t dividers between urinals. If you had to pee, you would do it shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger, in this case a shirtless stranger. I chose the far-right urinal, so there was a wall to my right and a man to my left. Men’s room etiquette dictates that you don’t look too closely at other men, but I could tell he was a big-boned, New Jersey dad type.
So, I get ready to pee, but before anything comes out, I realize I have to . . . well . . . fart. So, I fart.
Except this fart doesn’t make the usual pfft sound. It makes a splash on the concrete floor.
I stood frozen in pure terror. Holding my penis, looking straight ahead at the wall, I could see with my peripheral vision that the man next to me has glanced down at the floor and now he was staring at me. I turned my head slowly to the left and upward to meet his gaze.
We were two strangers looking into each other’s eyes in a hot, wet men’s room. This man, with the bulbous nose and a smattering of acne scars across his cheeks, has the power to make this the worst day of my life or to provide a glimmer of sympathy. I steeled myself for a laugh or a snide remark, but mostly I was hoping for a kind word or two. Say it, buddy. Whatever you’re going to say, say it now.
Without the slightest change in his facial expression—not even a raised eyebrow—he turned to face forward and continued his pee. He said nothing. Nothing.
I looked down to the small, thankfully clear, puddle between my feet. I felt like something needed to be said, if only to prove this was actually happening. To prove that I am in this men’s room right now, that I haven’t died on the waterslide and my soul isn’t floating aimlessly from urinal to urinal in search of The Light.
“Kamikaze,” I whispered.
Still expressionless, he shook his penis, flushed, and left. I would never see him again.
*
The ride back to Long Island was pretty quiet. None of us was in the mood for Kenny Rogers or Donna Summer. At some point, around Nassau County, Jodi fell asleep in the car.
“Something tells me that wasn’t the day you were expecting,” Mike said.
“Nah, not really.”
“You’re being really quiet. Is everything OK?” he asked.
“I guess.”
My mother knew I was lying. “What’s wrong?”
“Water came out of my butt,” I said.
Mike and Terri looked at each other, startled.
Terri craned her neck around to look at me in the backseat. “Did it come out of your butt right now?” she asked.
“No!” I barked. “In the bathroom. At Action Park.”
“In the toilet?”
“Standing up.”
Mike looked at me through the rearview mirror. I could tell he was wide-eyed, even through his dark aviators. “Was it just . . . water?” he asked.
“Yes, it was just water! Oh my God, I knew I shouldn’t have told you! Can we please not talk about this anymore? I wish I was dead.”
“Aw, don’t say that,” Terri said, then I wished I hadn’t.
“So, you got a little water up your ass. There are worse things in the world,” Mike offered. “You rode Kamikaze, man! You couldn’t pay me to do that.” He was smiling, which made my eyes well up, because my embarrassment was giving way to the realization that Mike was proud of me on some level, and that we were becoming a little family, with another member on the way.
BRILLIANT IDEAS
Jennifer’s new sofa had been delivered that morning, so she invited me to her apartment to see it, and presumably to sit on it.
A purchase of furniture neither disposable nor secondhand was company-worthy at this point in our lives. We were in our late twenties, living paycheck-to-paycheck, the vast majority of those paychecks going toward the rent for our Upper East Side apartments. I lived in a small rent-stabilized one-bedroom, located precisely a mop’s-length away from the uptown exit ramp of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Because the car exhaust would regularly cover the living room’s two windows with a semiopaque layer of grime, once a week I would stand on my fire escape and clean them with a sponge-head mop I had purchased specifically for this task.