This past Sunday, Brenda was kind enough to invite me to the CURE celebration at Six Flags. It's basically a gathering of kids who either have or have had cancer; the group rents out a part of the park and I think the kids and their families all get free tickets. All of the kids get to go up on stage and tell everyone how long they've been off treatment, and it really does make you reflect on how lucky you are to be healthy when a 4 year old gets up there and proudly announces that she's been off chemo for a year. Tears were shed, free hot dogs were eaten, people dressed as anthropomorphic rabbits and bears were hugged,and it looked like everyone was having a really good time. Before long, my friends and I were ready to brave some rollercoasters.
Six Flags is cool; some of the coasters are really fun, and as you're whipping around at 76,000 G's or whatever, you can sort of safely theorize in your mind that you might die. It's a fleeting thought; you just catch yourself thinking "Wow, if this strap broke and the harness holding me in place came up, I'd be flung about 500 feet into the parking lot, hopefully landing on some hillbilly's Camaro." It's not realistic, and it's part of what makes these kinds of rides fun.
Unfortunately, this doesn't hold true for all of them. There's one called the American Scream Machine, and to describe why it's a totally fucked up experience, I have to start with what you see while waiting in line. As you can probably guess, this is a patriotically themed roller coaster, meaning they put the word "American" in the name and then painted the rotting wood of the track red, white and blue. I think the cars were also painted to look like a flag, but the enamel was so chipped it was kind of hard to tell. Anyway, while waiting, we noticed that intersperced at random intervals along the walkway were posters displaying people on the coaster having The Time of Their Lives. Seriously, one guy looked like he had smuggled a midget hooker into the car under the rollbar and was recieving mind-blowing midget head. Then, next to this disturbing image, was a picture of people in military fatigues jumping out of helicopters, also having The Time of Their Lives. The message was clear: "Join the Airforce, it's like riding a shitty rollercoaster that was built sometime before the Great Depression!" Although to be fair, the majority of the people that I saw standing in line with me looked like the kind of slack-jawed teenager that might go for that kind of jingoistic imagery. Maybe they should set up a recruiting booth right after you get off; you're still all pumped up with adrenaline from almost being killed, and then the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket starts screaming at you about how great the Air Force is, and you sign up without really realizing what you've done because you're just happy to be alive. And then you go get a funnel cake, maybe some cotton candy. It could work.
So after waiting in line, you come up to the part of the track where the control switchboard is. This is disturbing for a number of reasons. First of all, it's visible. I don't want to see what the controls of the machine I strapped myself into and am trusting my life with look like; I just want to assume that there's a team of men in white lab coats standing in front of a huge bank of computers somewhere, constantly adjusting things so that the car won't become derailed and send me hurtling into the ground. But no, the "control panel" is just a big table covered with large, plastic buttons. Some of them are red, some green, and some are kind of light pink because they've been exposed to the elements for the last 68 years. Sitting behind the table is an incredibly bored looking teenager, who was spending the majority of the time people were getting on and off the ride talking to her friends on the emergency phone that was built into the control panel. I doubt that it had call waiting because I'm pretty sure it was a rotary dial, so if the Mayor of Six Flags had to call to let her know that terrorists had blown up part of the track later down the line to help in their crusade against America, he probably wouldn't be able to get through. In between smacking her gum and talking about how her boyfriend was totally cheating on her, she'd press one of the buttons, seemingly at random, sending the cars lurching on their way.
The ride itself is terrifying, and not because it goes through a series of complicated loops or spins or anything cool like that. It's just because the entire thing is made from very old, decaying wood, and you can almost see the whole track sway when a particularly hard breeze hits it. When coming down a high hill, you can feel the car come off of the tracks a little bit, and then you're violently slammed back into your seat, maybe spitting blood because you've bitten through your tongue. All you can do is hold onto the flimsy harness and pray that you're still alive when it stops. I think it would be embarassing to die on a roller coaster like this one; it just wouldn't make for a good story in the afterlife. If you die on one of the new, high-tech ones, you could at least say "Yeah, I died on the Superman ride. Computers malfunctioned, and I was thrown off. I was doing about mach 3 when I landed; they found one of my shoes with a foot still in it in a tree two states over." That gives you some credibility. If you died on the American Scream Machine, you'd have to say "Some fucktard forgot to duct tape a piece of the track back together. We fell off and landed in the lake below us, and drowned because the seatbelt holding us in got stuck." And then all of the other people in heaven would laugh at you, and Jesus might call you a pussy.
At the end of the ride, the majority of which I spent with my eyes closed and screaming like a woman, the car grinds to a halt (I mean that in the literal sense; the car was shaking, while a horrible metallic screech was emanating from the undercarriage). We then proceed to sit there for about ten minutes, until one of the other surly teens ambled over to ask us if we had heard the garbled message that had just come out of the overheard speakers. As the voice was either that of a mentally retarded person or one of the teachers at Charlie Brown's school, I replied that I hadn't. The conversation was as follows:
Surly Teen: "So did y'all hear what they just said?"
Me: "No, actually. It was totally indecipherable."
Surly Teen: "They said the cars done been shut off."
Me: "What? Why?"
Surly Teen: "Sometimes the power goes off."
Me: "The powers been shut off? Why did that happen?"
Surly Teen: "Well, see, it's really old, and they waxed the track once, but that was a long time ago, and now sometimes when it gets hot out, the track...what's that word when things get too hot?"
Me: "Um...overheats?"
Surly Teen: "Yeah, that's it. It overheats and the power goes off."
Me: "That's fucking terrifying. So how long are we going to be here?"
Surly Teen: "Shit, wish I knew. I've gotta go to the bathroom."
Me: "Yeah, I hear you. I'd sure like to go to the bathroom too, but I can't because I'm still strapped into this fucking rollercoaster."
After what seemed like about 9 hours, we slowly crawled up to the loading platform, and after popping my shoulder back into place and trying to find the teeth that I'd spit out, we got off so that we could stand at the end of the track and laugh at our other friends.
One of them, Fil, had never been on a rollercoaster before. I attribute this to the fact that he's Russian, and it's a well known fact that Communists hate fun. He had braved the other three rides we had taken him on, despite all of us, at one point or another, pulling him aside and very seriously telling him that he was going to die. He was pretty funny on the Superman ride; whenever we were about to go into an especially gut-wrenching turn or drop, you could hear Fil screaming "WAIT! NO! NO! FUCK! AHHHHHHHHHH!!" He handled it well, though; his hands were only shaking a little bit when he got off. But watching him walk off the American Scream Machine was massively amusing. His hair was standing almost straight up, and his eyes were kind of bugged out. His first words were "WHAT..THE FUCK...WAS THAT?!" Heather, the girl he was riding with, was weeping softly. She later explained that she didn't really like rollercoasters that much either, but had handled them because the people she had been with would calmly explain to her that she was doing fine and was going to be all right. Fil, however, had just kept muttering "Holy fuck, we're going to die" over and over, and then had screamed continuously the entire ride.
Other highlights included making fun of the general redneck populace, especially the guy with the gloriously feathered mullet and his 400-pound girlfriend that he wouldn't stop making out with, finding a condom in the line for Superman, and seeing how racist Six Flags maps really are. Erin brought up the fact that on the map, about 90% of the little people drawn in are white nuclear families. There were a few minorities represented, but the black ones were almost all the same picture of a little man and woman wearing matching fez's, just with differently colored clothes, while the asians were depicted as (I swear to God) bright yellow with slanted eyes. Will said he saw an interracial couple, but I'm pretty sure he was either lying or it was a typo. Shame on you, Six Flags. We didn't get to ride on the new rollercoaster, Goliath, because the line was about 10 miles long, and by the time we got around to it my feet hurt and the general consensus of everybody present was that we needed a drink. All in all, it was a really fun day, and if you're going to go to Six Flags, I'd highly recommend going this time of year. Imagining some of the people I saw there stuffed into shorts and midriff-baring shirts is more than enough to give me nightmares.
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