Authors: Jan Richman
“Yeah,” she shrugs. “I’ll ride with you. You get more air back there.”
(“Getting air” does not refer to enjoying a breeze, but more specifically to your ass being literally lifted off the seat by negative g-forces. The Voyage, in Santa Claus, Indiana, holds the unofficial record for offering the most airtime on a wooden coaster, which is twenty-four seconds. There is some math secret, known only to a certain engineering cabal, that determines the precise parabolic shape of the first drop that leads to maximum negative Gs. Roller coaster devotees love to feel like they’re being spat out into the universe.)
“Oh, great. I’m Jan,” I say, and offer my hand before I realize how profoundly uncool a handshake probably is to a goth teenager. But she tentatively pets my hand with hers, as though she’s not quite sure how to execute the maneuver. Her spider webs are pink around the edges and her palms feel puffy and smooth, like satiny pincushions. I squeeze, but not too hard. “Are these new?” I ask, bringing her artwork closer to my face. “They’re really detailed.”
She pulls her hand back and tucks it into the pocket of her jeans. But I notice a tiny smile emerge, which she clamps down immediately by pressing her lips together. I wonder if this is the first time someone has complimented her hands.
“I know a spider web on your elbow supposedly means you’ve spent time in prison,” I venture. “But on the hand ... does that have some significance? Like, is it a warning that you might ensnare people if they come too close?”
She stares at me, skeptical. My articulation of her tattoos’ obvious symbolism has thrown her. This must be new work, or she would be used to answering questions by now, at least cursorily. Didn’t she expect people to be curious about her latticed wrists? You can’t spend your life with your hands in your pockets. Unless you want to live in Juneau and wear opossum-lined mittens year-round.
Hands shoved hard down into her jeans, she turns away from me and gazes into the middle distance. Her face is Delphic, deadpan, unadorned. She has perfected the Come Here/Go Away game, a more sophisticated version of peekaboo where she tests reality by hiding in plain sight.
It’s funny about teenagers. She must wonder what my deal is, why I’m alone in line for the Giant Dipper on a Monday at noon, trolling for a warm body to ride in the back car with, courting young girls with flattering remarks about their clothing and tattoos. Forty-year-old lesbian cruising Belmont Park for some mid-morning tail? But she would never just come out and ask me:
Lady, what’s your angle?
After a few years of dispiriting adulthood, it might dawn on her that she’s allowed to go ahead and say what’s on her mind, even to strangers. Even if it’s not particularly polite or pleasant. That’s what growing up means: you can be yourself, ask silly questions, flaunt your tattoos. It’s the way adults find each other in the darkness. But, sigh, for a few more years she will have to depend on sloganed T-shirts to send her message of ambivalence to the world.
I don’t remember much about riding the Giant Dipper with my dad. I don’t think we waited for the back car; he wouldn’t have had the patience for that. I like to imagine that we played word games while we waited in line, like Twenty Questions or One, Two, Three, but even caught up in the nucleus of my fantasy I know that never would have happened. We were probably silent, and I probably inched forward too close to the lady in front of me, and he probably grabbed my arm and yanked me back a foot or two. I know I felt excited to be riding with the Condor, to be seen with him. But when I try to picture his face—even in the middle of the steepest drop, with our butts lifted an inch off the seat and my hands gripping the lap bar for dear life—I can’t see any amazement or fear in his eyes. His eyebrows aren’t even raised and his breath isn’t sharp. His fists might be chopping the air decisively like a victorious athlete, his forehead creased with effort and joy. He might be yelling “Cocksucking shitfuck twatwaffle assbag!” but his expression is unsurprised and triumphant, as though he knew that of course this moment was coming, and he is congratulating himself for being right all along.
Morticia doesn’t tell me her name, and I don’t ask because really, what’s the point? Are we going to keep in touch? Will I see her in ten years across a crowded savannah and want to shout “Hey! Courtney!” to get her attention? Not bloody likely. Betty has counseled me to take people’s names and have them sign a libel waiver whenever possible (she herself procured these from Furry and Buffy), but the waiver forms are still in the zip pocket of my suitcase. Nothing kills a spontaneous interaction faster than the question, “Can I get you to sign on this line?” I prefer to change names and obfuscate details. Morticia is not the only goth teen in the world with spider web hand tattoos, that much I’m sure of. I’ll alter a few details; maybe make her a redhead.
The second run is considerably less painful and more fun than my first. Mort’s plush body buffers the harshest corners and yanks (though I try to keep from bouncing off her large and springy side boobage, for propriety’s sake), and the back car does provide the capricious thrills I remember. Not only is there more airtime, but the sharp turns are more terrifying because you have a second or two to anticipate them as you watch each car ahead hit the bend before you do.
The whole time we’re on the Dipper, I don’t think about my dad. It’s only when I step off the train onto the platform and make my way down the creaky metal ramp, pottering among the other dizzy riders as we all recover our walking skills, that I remember how the Condor would place his hand on my shoulder as we debarked. His hand was as heavy as a brick, reminding me that the force of gravity had never truly left us. Just as he didn’t seem fazed during the ride, my dad didn’t show any signs of having been physically affected by the Dipper. As everyone staggered drunkenly down the exit ramp onto the hot asphalt, he would saunter gracefully in a sober line, basking in his own particular volition.
Dear Chantelle, what were you thinking? Don’t you know that a bathtub, minus the bathwater, minus the baby, is nothing but an empty bodybag? You can’t feel the cold if there’s no heat. Or maybe you’re one of those people who doesn’t understand beauty; maybe you want to pluck the element of surprise from every molecule, pry the word paradox apart like a pomegranate. Me, I can’t help it. I miss him like fireworks.
Morticia declines my offer to buy her a psychic reading, and I can’t say I blame her. What could someone named “Miss Sybil” possibly tell you, when you’re eighteen, that you don’t already know? Your life will be tragic and wonderful and filled with incandescent lights glowing like beacons along paths that lead to bitter disappointment and indescribable joy? No shit. You will be lucky in love and then unlucky in love, and then unlucky in love some more? Today marks your fifth-to-last ride on the Big Dipper? The spider webs on your hands will attract and repel exotic, winged creatures all your life?
Miss Sybil does not have a crystal ball or a deck of tarot cards. In fact, she’s barely dressed. She appears to be napping when I duck my head inside the first aid tent. Wrapped in a threadbare terrycloth robe and splayed on a metal folding chair like it’s a divan, Miss Sybil (I know it’s Miss Sybil because she’s sitting behind a Comic Sans banner taped to a card table that reads, “Miss Sybil Knows—All You Have to Do Is Ask”) snores lightly; one of her skinny bare legs has kicked off its cover, revealing several rotting yellow bruises on her upper thigh.
“Miss Sybil?” I whisper. No response. I retrieve the crumpled flyer from my pocket and smooth it out on her card table. Then I wave it slowly, fanning her sullen, elderly face. Gradually she swims up from the deep, and I note the stages of her emergence: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, and, finally, Acceptance. That’s when she rights herself and covers her legs with her robe, snatches my flyer from midair, and clears her throat violently.
“Ten dollars,” she says flatly, after she has coughed some phlegm into an old tissue she found in her pocket. She has a slight Southern accent, which might explain the “Miss” part—more a rank than a marital status, antiquated as Miss Daisy. She gestures for me to sit down on the other metal folding chair.
On the opposite side of the tent, a white sheet with a red cross sewn onto it is strung between tent poles. Is a makeshift first aid clinic really necessary for such a small carnival? On the other hand, I’ve heard apocryphal accounts of a staffed medical facility outside the old el Serpiento de Fuego in Mexico City, where so many riders were injured that the proprietors decided, instead of softening the “spaghetti bowl” turns, to offer post-ride plaster casts and prescription painkillers free of charge.
From where I sit, I have an angled view into part of the clinic beyond, where a bright red young man hobbles in circles, groaning in agony. A nurse walks with him, impatiently hoisting a plastic pail between them, positioned just under his chin. It is a scene out of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
At first I am confused: has the Giant Dipper rattled this boy’s brains so thoroughly that he has been startled into schizophrenia? But then I realize: here is the essence of the old Belmont Park that I was looking for! Sunburned kids drinking twelve packs at noon and riding the Zipper! Only now there is a tent for them to report to, and a sterilized white bucket purchased especially to contain their foolhardy vomit.
Miss Sybil takes my hand and cranks it open on the table, palm up. I’m relieved that there is no fringed shawl draped over her junky card table, no candles or other gypsy-esque furnishings cluttering her bare-bones aesthetic. Perhaps Miss Sybil is the real thing; she feels no compunction to spruce up her little corner here—or to get dressed, even—because she knows that her talent is the star of the show. Is it a talent? Or a skill set? A gift for the grift?
“Ten dollars,” she repeats, in a lower voice this time, as she traces my palm with her dry middle finger and gives me a serious once-over. Her irises are light gray, like iron, and for some reason I feel taken by surprise by this feature. As though she has snuck up on me with her eyes.
“Right,” I say, pulling away from her grip and producing a ten-dollar bill from my pocket. She takes it and the money immediately vanishes, tucked away somewhere on her person.
Back to my hand, she frowns. “Your lifeline is broken in half.” She shakes her head. “Very unusual. Have you had a bad car accident? Or a murder attempt?”
“A murder attempt?” I have the nerve to laugh. This is what she’s opening with?
“Watch your back,” she advises, not amused. She takes another coughing/phlegm-spitting break, then presses the spongy part of my palm a few times, hard. “That can also mean that you live two lives.”
“Two lives? What do you mean?”
She looks up at me. “You are not always authentic,” she says. “A part of you, maybe from your past, has developed and is coexisting with you. So you are living two lives: yours, and hers.”
I can’t resist. “You mean, like
Sybil?”
I’m not sure if she’ll get my reference to the TV miniseries from the 1970s in which Sally Field played a woman with nineteen different personalities and as many corresponding poly-blend wardrobes. I waggle my eyebrows.
Miss Sybil doesn’t blink, and continues her tour of my hand. “I think you know exactly what I mean,” she says, almost to herself.
Before leaving Belmont Park, I buy some cotton candy for Betty. They still have one of those medieval torture machines that makes it fresh, staffed by an angry, aproned lunch-lady type who scowls at me for merely ordering. She dips the paper cone expertly into the spinning sugar, which flies onto it like it’s magnetic, and orbits the machine with a couple of slow turns of her wrist. Through an arch cut in the plexiglass booth, she reluctantly hands me the baby-pink cloud of floss. It is perfectly whorled, like she has created a new gas planet, wind-blown and carcinogenic, impossible to walk on. I don’t want to mar its fluffy surface, but when I get out to the car I realize I have nowhere to put the cotton candy where it won’t get ruined. It doesn’t fit in the cup holder, and I can’t even imagine the consequences of laying the thing down on the passenger seat. I try strapping the seatbelt around it like it’s a honey-baked ham, which works about as well as you’d expect. No, the eight-dollar pink ghost will need to be carefully held upright during the entire drive back to the hotel.
I back slowly and jerkily out of the parking space, spinning the steering wheel with one hand and with the other thrusting the cotton candy up high, like I’m toasting a bride or handling the Olympic torch. The same officious kid with the polo shirt guides me out of the lot and onto Mission Boulevard, and he salutes me good-bye as I turn. I salute back with the cotton candy, accidentally shredding a giant pink feather onto my bangs.
“Oh my God!” Betty screams when I kick open the motel room door. “Cotton candy!” I knew, with her love of kitsch, that she would appreciate the effort. But she gets bored after a couple of sticky finger-fs, and I end up eating $7.50 worth as we sit on the bed and clean out our purses.
“I always clean out my purse when I’m at a motel,” she says. “I think it’s because I can just leave all the shit that’s collected at the bottom on the bedspread, without feeling guilty.” Sure enough, she upturns her Longchamp tote bag and out spills shreds of tobacco and sand and wadded gum wrappers and old pennies and a few of those tiny packets of salt you get at movie theaters. “So, how was the dealio?”
I tell her about Morticia and the vomiting sunburned boy. I leave out the part about Miss Sybil. I know Betty will make fun of her, or at the very least her eyes will flare and she’ll demand more sordid details, and I feel strangely defensive about the whole experience. Though I immediately reacted with sarcasm to Miss Sybil’s pronouncement that I have been living two parallel lives, I now—thirty minutes later—feel compelled to protect the idea from the acerbic clutches of my clever benefactress and confidante. Those mustard-yellow bruises on Miss Sybil’s upper thighs hang in my vision like vitreous floaters or ragged, tufted clouds.