I Hate Everyone, Except You(4)

I knew what had to be done. I could save this day. By riding Kamikaze.

Kamikaze, suspiciously absent from the TV commercials, was a waterslide conceived by someone with little regard for human life. Shaped like a giant curved L, the slide required its rider to climb a one-hundred-foot tower and, once at the top, enter a cage and cross his arms. The ride operator would then press a button, releasing the floor of the cage and dropping the rider into a free fall. Because the slide is completely vertical at first, the rider’s body does not touch the slide until it bends to 90 degrees and enters a series of shallow hills and approximately six inches of water.

“I’m going to ride that,” I said.

“What?” said Terri. She wasn’t incredulous; she couldn’t hear me because I was whispering. The words had slipped out of my mouth before I could suck them back in. Even with what little life experience I had, I knew Kamikaze was designed for grown men with diminished mental capacity, sort of an experiment in natural selection.

“He said he wants to ride that!” Jodi yapped.

“Absolutely not,” Terri said. “You’ll kill yourself. Let’s go home. Remember, it’s rush hour.”

“C’mon, Ter,” Mike said. “Let him ride it if he wants.” Great. Now Mike was involved. I really couldn’t tell if he was defending my budding manhood or if he finally saw his opportunity to destroy me and get my mother to himself.

Mom asked, “Do you really think it’s safe?”

“Take a look,” he answered. “Nobody’s been carried off on a stretcher yet.”

It was true. Grown men were indeed walking away after riding Kamikaze, but most of them stumbled as though they were recovering from a frying pan to the frontal cortex.

“OK. Just be careful,” Terri said.

“Yes,” Mike said, “be careful.” He was smiling the same smile he had when dropping Jodi and me off at our grandparents’ house for the weekend, except this time it was bigger, like he expected me to be gone for more than two days.

I started off to the steps of Kamikaze and heard Jodi call after me: “Don’t die!” Sweet kid.

I climbed the metal stairs, occasionally pausing to see if my family was looking. They were. I could see my mother holding her round belly with one hand and shielding her eyes from the sun with the other. Jodi was holding Mike’s hand.

Because so few people wanted to ride Kamikaze, there was no wait when I reached the top. A kid barely older than me told me to step into the cage and cross my arms. His name tag read KEVIN. “You’ll probably want to keep your legs together,” Kevin said without looking at me. He was reading a magazine about dirt bikes.

Keep my legs together? Why the hell was I doing this? To prove something to myself? To Mike? To my mother? My heart was pounding through my emaciated chest. I wondered if Kevin could see it vibrating like a berserk squirrel trapped behind my sternum. I could die right now or become paralyzed, I knew, and yet to climb back down those steps, with half of New Jersey watching, would have been more humiliating than to live the rest of my life with a torn spinal cord and the mental capacity of a parsnip.

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.”