No one ever dies at Disneyland, at least that's what she'd heard, so even though it was obvious the old dude's heart was history – when the ride ended he was sagging in his safety harness like he weighed a thousand pounds, his eyes rolled back to the milky whites – paramedics loaded his body onto a stretcher, clipped an oxygen mask to his face, and whisked him safely off park property. Where, she supposed, Disney authorities would finally release his soul and allow the emergency room attendant at Anaheim Memorial to check him out.
Snow White, who'd been strapped in with the dead man, clawed her way out of the bobsled, ripping one of her pleated, mutton-leg sleeves in the process. She stumbled to the nearest trash can. Even on the best of days? The swoops and dips of the Matterhorn always made her feel like pitching. And today was most definitely not the best of days. The old dude they'd paired her with for an in-action publicity shot was some high-roller insurance tycoon from Houston. Pot belly, pink piggy eyes, cigar smoke, and Old Spice. When she first gave him her hand to shake, he held it a little longer, got it a little moister, than was really necessary.
No way, she'd thought, am I getting on that bobsled with you.
But then she'd felt sad, like somebody had jabbed her heart with a fork. Here she was, only eighteen years and three months old, and always she looked at life as something about to sneak up on her and pounce. Maybe this old dude was a nice old man, a dad and granddad who gave the kids dollar bills and root beer barrels whenever they stopped by. Maybe?
Smiling at the insurance tycoon smiling back at her, Snow White (Suzanne Elizabeth Bailey when she was off the clock) had made up her mind, as she did periodically, to screw past experience and try thinking the best of people. To be less jaded in the hope that the world, somehow – she tried not to think too much about this logic – might therefore turn out nicer.
That, and she really really needed the extra money she'd get for the job, you betcha.
Hunched over a trash can trimmed with glitter-paint fairy dust, Suzanne wondered now if it was possible for a girl to die of chronic dumb judgment. Right before he kicked, right after the bobsled shot into the last fast curve, the insurance tycoon had hooked a fat pimply arm around her shoulder and – smack! – grabbed a handful of her boob.
She'd seen too many people dead or dying (her dad, her first stepmother, a grandmother, a boyfriend sheared from his Yamaha by the kingpin of a jack-knifed semi) to feel anything but sympathy for the man; she wasn't pissed off, only tired. And glad to be off the Matterhorn, somewhere she could puke in peace.
When she finished doing that, she felt better, though not by much. She had three hours left on her shift, and nights in August were almost as hot as the days; her scalp smoldered inside the black, bow-topped wig.
Her own hair was dirty blonde. Brown eyes, a gap between her two front teeth. Very embarrassing, those claw-hammer teeth of hers, but when she scored the T.V. series they'd been part of her so-called charm; the producers had even written a clause into her contract. After that, well – the fact of the matter was that stepfathers, and the boyfriends of ex-wives of former stepfathers, didn't invest hundreds of orthodonto-dollars in little girls to whom they were barely connected.
With the back of her hand she swiped at the black mascara sweating spider legs down her cheeks. Worse than the heat or the heaves was the thought that they'd never use 8x10s of a corpse. They'd probably still pay her, she considered, but then again what if they didn't?
She kicked the side of the trash can. That money she'd already promised to her stepsister, who'd been waiting two months for her May rent. The stepsister, really just the ex-wife of one of Suzanne's half-brothers, wouldn't believe what had happened on the Matterhorn. She'd conclude that Suzanne had snorted away the cash, even though Suzanne had been moderately clean for almost a year and absolutely so since the Fourth of July...since the day after the Fourth of July. A fight would erupt, Tita would call her an ungrateful coke-head tramp – this from a woman who considered crystal meth one of the four basic food groups – and then Suzanne would end up sleeping in her friend Robert's van, if she was lucky.
The thought of all that was too much to bear on an emptied stomach. She dodged a pair of eight-year-old autograph piranhas and slipped into the Skyway to Tomorrowland, a timber and cake-frosting facade that was supposed to look like a Swiss chalet. Taped yodeling. A skinny blonde kid in lederhosen passed her through and a heartbeat later she was in one of the buckets that coasted on cables, forty feet above the asphalt surface of the park.
It was cooler up there, and quieter. No shrieking kids, no hydraulic spitting of the rides, no dink-dink-tinkle of "It's a small world, after all," piped through speakers hidden in the bushes. From inside her bodice, from the elastic edge of her jog-bra, she plucked a match and a joint. She slouched in her seat so that, from the ground, the only thing you could see above the wall of the gondola was her polka-dot bow. Not that she gave a shit if she got fired. But if she was caught getting baked on the Skyway, the jar-heads from security might search her locker and find the rest of the Chocolate Tide pot she had stashed there. And that would mean another three months of court-ordered treatment, another ninety-day twelve-step recovery drill.
"God grant me the serenity to blah blah blah."
Please. But she was golden up here, as long as she slouched. No worries. Hakuna fucking matata.
She lit the joint and blew out the match with a smudge of gray breath. She took a good, deep rip, pulled the smoke up and over her heart like a goose-down quilt, pulled and pulled until her brain was tucked in as well.
Every time was like the first sweet time. She'd been nine. Her TV dad, now a born-again bass player for a Christian rock group, had turned her on to bong hits between takes of an episode about cheating. Should little Cathy (that was the character Suzanne had played, little Cathy raised in the station house by a band of kooky firemen), should she copy her best friend's test answers? She had, of course, and they'd been nabbed by the teacher, of course, and there'd been some important lessons, of course, to be learned right after the commercial break.
The lessons? Little Cathy learned the importance of personal integrity, etc.; little Suzanne learned that weed was good and good weed turned your lips to liquid rubber. They'd had to tape the last scene three times, because she'd sounded like she was speaking Chinese or something.
Suzanne closed her eyes, smiled her first sincere one of the day, and enjoyed the slosh of blood in her veins as the gondola rocked along above the canals of Storybook Land.
Her series hadn't set the world on fire, but for two seasons and a half, at least, she'd had a manager, a theatrical agent, a commercial agent, a tutor, an acting coach. She had a woman who was in charge, as far as she could tell, of nothing else but slathering her up with SPF-two millions every time she even thought about going outside.
After the show was cancelled, when she was eleven, Stephen Spielberg didn't exactly come knocking. So she did the school thing for a few years, then worked a delightful array of bad jobs and worse jobs – Starbuck's, Old Navy, a cocktail place on Hollywood. About a year ago she landed this part-time Disney gig, where the money wasn't much, but steady.
"I beg your pardon!" someone shouted, loud. "Pardon me!"
She sighed. Was that too much to ask, she wondered, four minutes of peace without some asshole father, down below, throwing a hissy fit because all the princesses hadn't signed his kid's book yet?
"I BEG YOUR PARDON!"
Something stung her on the arm and she swatted at it. Another something, hard and small, pinged off the metal wall of the gondola; she heard it fall to the floor.
Startled, she sat up, leaned forward, patted the floor with the palms of her hands. After a minute she found it, pinched it, sniffed it: a chocolate-covered raisinette.
A chocolate-covered raisinette?
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Behind the story
In 1999 or so, my wife and I were in L.A. and saw an announcement for the annual Disneyana Convention in Anaheim. Be cause I thought it would be a cool subculture to take a peek at, and because it's been a lifelong dream to own one of the pirate ship ride cars from Disneyland's Peter Pan attraction, we decided to check it out. It did turn out in fact to be a very cool subculture, and that's where the idea for this story got its start. Unfortunately, I did not find a pirate ship ride car.
In 1999 or so, my wife and I were in L.A. and saw an announcement for the annual Disneyana Convention in Anaheim. Be cause I thought it would be a cool subculture to take a peek at, and because it's been a lifelong dream to own one of the pirate ship ride cars from Disneyland's Peter Pan attraction, we decided to check it out. It did turn out in fact to be a very cool subculture, and that's where the idea for this story got its start. Unfortunately, I did not find a pirate ship ride car.