Thrill-Bent (8 page)

“Look, I know you think I don’t get it, but I know why I’m here,” my father announced as he settled in to his spot on the couch. He sucked in a large breath, aware of the burning that was saturating his cheeks and forehead. “And it’s got nothing to do with peacocks or hamburgers.”

“That is true,” said the doctor. He looked pale, and his eyes seemed even more troubled than usual, the skin around them raw and pendulant, like turkey gizzards.

“I’m here because everyone thinks I’m a freak,” my father began, reciting the speech he had practiced while he pedaled through the neighborhood early that morning. “I’m a freak who should charge admission, shaking and strutting and hitting the walls all the time. And you think I’m doing it on purpose, and you think you can talk me out of it with clever stories about peacocks. Well, I’m here to tell you it couldn’t be massaged out of me, or punished out of me, or anything else. It probably couldn’t be cut out of me with a hari-kari knife. It’s sure as hell not going to be
conversationed
out of me!”

The doctor sat still, watching closely the effulgent, clear spume that had blown out of my father’s mouth during this tirade—an almost invisible thread that had flown all the way to the arm of the doctor’s old-fashioned swivel chair from the mouth of the boy on the worn leather sofa, like a line drawn between two similar objects.

“I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose,” the doctor said, his voice lower than usual, worn down to a candid shine, as though he were talking to a colleague. “I have always felt that the body’s complex systems are infinitely wise, they pull the strings that control the marionettes of what we call our ‘decisions’ and ‘preferences.’”

“All right,” said my father, who wasn’t used to being agreed with.

“Your body wants you to experience something that your will cannot induce. I have no intention of talking you out of it,” he said, shaking his head pensively. “In fact, in a certain way I envy you.” Dr. Berger rolled his chair slowly around the desk, a loud, steady rumble of wheels on wood that sounded like summer thunder. He pulled up next to the sofa where my father sat. “Do you understand that there are some mysteries that terrify most people?” he asked, in a low whisper. “Mysteries that cannot be solved by flipping to the last page of the book?”

My father nodded his head hard, up and down. He did undersand this, though he’d been raised to believe in rationality above all else. He knew, though this was not rationally acquired knowledge, that Dr. Berger would never be able to help him, no matter how many strange afternoons he spent watching the doctor’s sad, red-rimmed eyes and listening to the old swivel chair squeak. He knew, also, that there would be very few more sessions like this, and so he tried to enjoy the feel of the burnished leather and the quiet click of the wall clock behind him. The nods began to come rapid-fire now, each more exaggerated than the previous, his chin jackknifing off his chest with a dull, hollow thump. His hands were splayed, slapping the sofa cushions, eliciting a loud popping noise, double-time.

“Motherfucker!” my father fumed joyously. “Ass-biting, shit-loving son of a bitch!”

T
he only roller coaster in Houston is a tiny one in Koreatown, a teeming two-block-square neighborhood north of downtown. It is crowded. At least, it is on this Saturday early evening. I am several inches taller than almost everyone here, but my aerial view does not help me navigate the bustling sidewalks and plazas; I keep tripping over children in bright purple and green parkas and zigzagging old people and wheelie carts filled with bulbous vegetables and bottled tea in pink plastic sacks. Finally, in the midst of a ring of colorful shops and markets, there is a parking-lot sized clearing, and I look up to see something even taller than myself: the Kukwa-dan.

The Kukwa-dan, a roller coaster with gleaming, compressed humps and dives, is barely more than tot-sized, and is painted fire-engine red. But no tots, apparently, are allowed to board the Kukwa-dan. There is no
YOU MUST BE TALL
sign, but I notice that the orderly queue is filled with poker-faced adults. I appear to be the only non-Asian in the zip code.

I scan the crowd around the ticket booth for Buffy, the teenager that Betty arranged through Houston Craigslist to be my ersatz tour guide. Betty didn’t give me a more detailed description, and somehow I’d assumed Buffy would be easy to spot. How many Korean American teenage girls can there be in Houston, Texas? Ha! Betty liked the idea of my treating Texas as a foreign country, with a cultural interpreter in tow, but I’m starting to realize as I look down at the sea of shiny black heads that Koreatown is the real enigma. I check my watch, and notice that it’s not seven o’clock yet; I’m a couple of minutes early. To pass the time, I lean down to the elderly man in the ticket booth and ask him what “Kukwa-dan” means. He stares at me and holds up his hand, fingers spread like a starfish. “Fife,” he says, and nods to the sign above his head: $5 per ride. I re-form my question. “No,” I say, pointing to the roller coaster and shrugging dramatically. “Kukwa-daaaaan?”

“It means ‘Sidesplitter,’” says a cute girl with a blue fauxhawk and a Peggy Hill accent. She is almost as tall as I am, thanks to red patent-leather boots with towering platform heels. I thank her, but she shakes her head to show that her translation duties are far from over. “You’re Jan?” she says, and reels off a string of lilting syllables that makes the man in the booth open his lips, suck on his teeth, and chuckle asthmatically. Then, glacially, he pulls two red tickets from a giant roll on the side counter. Handing me a ticket as we turn away from the booth, the girl says, “I’m Buffy.”

“Nice to meet you,” I squeeze her daintily proferred hand. Her cupid’s mouth is lined with purple, an orchid laid against the white backdrop of her face, and her fine eyebrows streak across her forehead to her temples. Her eyes are long black fish, flipping their tails as they swim.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she says, “but, like, what the hell are you doing here?” Before I can answer, she goes on, “I mean, I answered that ad because my grandpa works in the ticket booth, and I hang around here anyways because, like, sometimes he needs a break or an iced coffee or something. Plus, my parents are afraid he’ll keel over and croak if no one is here to look after him on Saturdays, but he refuses to give up the job! He loves it. He’s a real people person. I’m kinda hoping they don’t tear the thing down for at least another year or so, for Crawdaddy’s sake.” She tilts her head toward her grandfather in the booth, then takes a moment to smooth down her ruffled pink-and-white checked crinolined mini-skirt. Her outfit is clownish but adorable: black-and-white striped over-the-knee socks, platform boots, a ruffly Victorianesque blouse. She doesn’t seem to notice that I haven’t answered her question.

“My real name isn’t Buffy, by the way, it’s Kyung-hwa, which no one in Texas can pronounce, big surprise, and I told my parents that on my eighteenth birthday I was going to the courthouse to legally change it. They laughed it off until I came home officially as Buffy last November, and then my mother cried and sulked for like a month, telling me over and over about how the Japanese made Crawdaddy change his name when Korea was a colony of Japan. Like, hello? We live in Texas. But I like it. I got it from Nick at Nite reruns, the girl in
Family Affair
with the freckles and the Mrs. Beasley doll? I know I don’t look like her, but still.”

We pass through the red gate, where Buffy nods to the white-gloved ticket taker, and take our places at the end of the line. Most of the adults in front of us are men, some of whom are wearing baseball caps with the words
Korean Pride
stitched on their fronts. There is no sign specifying penis ownership as a prerequisite for sidesplitting, but I entertain myself imagining the international icon that could be developed to communicate such an imperative—a vulva with a slash through it? An ink-drawn phallus with a thumbs-up symbol next to it? As I listen to Buffy explain her plans to start her own line of streetwear clothing when she graduates from fashion design school (“I’m gonna leave Juicy Couture in the dust, I’m gonna take goth Lolita to a whole new level! I’m gonna get one of those operations where they sew in a new eyelid crease!”), I am offered “neck candy” three times (I have developed a tedious, persistent cough, probably from the combination of quick climate changes and road food) by polite, smiling, lozenge-wielding older men. The Sidesplitter Jr. doesn’t look that daunting, especially not for a farm-fed Yankee raised on Six Flags and malted milks, but the thought of getting a hard plum-flavored nugget stuck in my esophagus as we peel down a fifty-degree curve is off-putting, so I decline. Buffy tells me that coughing isn’t really that rude, by Korean standards, although blowing your nose in public is probably the most disgustingly impolite thing you can do. But with every piece of neck candy I decline, I get the feeling that coughing into one’s own hand while waiting in line for the Sidesplitter might be right up there in the Top Ten Koreatown faux pas. I try to suppress the next few coughs, resulting in a series of Martha Graham-like full-body shudders that make Buffy giggle.

While she talks, Buffy hooks a chunk of her starch-sprayed blue hair from just behind her ear and twists it into a tight coil with her index finger and thumb. It is a gesture whose nimble, unthinking expertise calls to mind traditional handicrafts like crochet and piecrust-pinching. She winds a hunk of hair around her finger, the ends splaying out like a fan brush, and cranks it so tight I think it’ll fly her across the room when she lets go. I notice that she actually has an eggshell-white bald spot above her left ear, an artifact of this compulsive twisting, a spot whose oddball defenselessness makes me want to grab a blue magic marker and fill it in.

A train of square, white-sided cars that look like teeth pulls into the station. We are moving now, almost to the head of the line as pairs of unsmiling men board the back molars of the tooth train. Similar pairs of unsmiling men have exited the cars twenty yards to our right, while white-coated assistants 409 the seats for a hygenic sidesplitting experience. Being herded is familiar and comforting, a skill grasped by anyone who’s ever been to an amusement park: the tiny, shuffling steps forward in rhythm with the shuffling shoes ahead, that are following the esoteric arm-gestures of a crabby carnival monitor; the focused waiting while the hydraulic bar springs up to reveal the plastic butt-shaped seat that will soon be housing you; the controlled lurching into the center of anticipation; the buckling up. We have already secured our valuables in tiny lockers at the gate (Buffy took out her retainer and stashed it in a pitted case that looked like it had come from the bottom of the sea). We’re stripped down and lo-fi, streamlined as Olympic athletes. It is nearly our turn to dive headlong into the Kukwa-dan’s polished and symmetrical jaws, and Buffy is in swimmer’s start-stance, almost crouched and steadying herself against my left elbow. We are next.

I feel a shove at my back the force of which reminds me of a certain 1981 Black Flag concert, and when I spin around to see what manner of coaster enthusiast would be brazen enough to act like a post-punk teenage snapping turtle, I see instead a boy who looks sort of like a mole, let’s call him mole-boy, and he is
in motion.
He’s fallen against me, and I instinctively grab him around the waist to keep him from crashing to the sidewalk. He is vibrating at approximately the rate of the fastest setting on any vibrator I’ve ever owned. It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anyone in the throws of an epileptic seizure—but I’ve watched enough
ER
reruns to diagnose the problem. His face, two inches from mine, is both pinched and distended, like a mole during an earthquake, and his coke-bottle glasses are strapped to his head with an extra-huge rubber band. Good idea. I’m sort of cradling him now, pieta-style, mumbling
oh-my-gods
and trying to remember if there’s something specific I should be doing to keep him from swallowing his tongue. Buffy calls to the roller-host (you can tell he’s a host because of the white gloves) who’s just now moving toward our area. I cannot believe how long this seizure is lasting. I mean, rolling your eyes flutteringly back in your head for ten seconds
hurts.
It’s been at least two full minutes when at last our host whistles for assistance, and three monitors promptly arrive. They peel mole-boy off me and lay him down on the white concrete, pinning his limbs like he’s a criminal, or a butterfly. His rumbling starts to abate a little, finally, and his legs escape and kick at the air lazily like a baby’s. After a while he notices the crowd of faces around him, all focused on the spectacle of his affliction, and his expression takes on that foggy, Dorothy-at-the-end-of-
The-Wizard-of-Oz
quality. I half expect him to break into, “And you were there, and you were there ...” A couple of EMS medics, dressed in scrub-whites that look just like the Kukwa-dan staff uniforms, arrive bearing a stretcher, and they whisk mole-boy—well, he’s really more like mole-teen, I noticed when his faintly whiskered cheek was pressed to mine—away.

I’m still feeling a little shaky when the next train pulls up along the brake run. There is a moment of subtle and gracious shuffling before the train arrives, a moment in which, due mainly to white-gloved efforts, Buffy and I are mysteriously catapulted to the head of the line, in place for the front car. This may be my reward for supporting the vibrating body of a fellow leisure-classer for a couple of minutes, a thrill-ride equivalent to getting a ten-dollar bill for returning a wallet, or it may be that because Buffy does the staff iced-coffee runs, she always gets the front car. I don’t ask. The combination of post-seizure confusion and manipulations by recreation officials has left me wobbly. In any case, we are ushered into our front seats and locked down with gleaming horsecollar restraints. I sideswipe a glance at Buffy, who looks simultaneously haunting, cute, and like she’s ready to plough a field. She grabs my hand and squeezes it, giving me a shiny-eyed smile.

These seats are made for Korean-sized butts, I notice. I am crammed in and overflowing, and Buffy’s numerous petticoats are practically engulfing her. Between the micro-seats and the 409 ritual, the whistle-wielding staff and the piped-in K-pop music, it’s clear that the designers have implemented a few cultural modifications to the all-American Mousetrap coaster. (The idea of roller-coasting, by the way, is essentially a Yankee one. Sure, Siberians were sliding down ice floes in the 1400s, and kids in Wales used to hop mine trains for the thrill of the coal-black plunge, but the notion of flying down an undulating, gravity-fueled track was hatched in the early part of the last century on our very own Isle of Coney.) As we begin the initial lift hill ascent, it becomes apparent that there is a bait ’n’ switch going on here—the benign “cute” appearance of the Kukwa-dan (“Isn’t it kawaii?” Buffy asked) is betrayed by its now-obvious extra-steep incline and impending break-neck slammer drop. What is missing in height is made up for in the extreme angles of the ’dan’s sadistic design. I strain to hear the familiar chink of the ratchet-dogs, the rhythmic chain-lift clanking that I always associate with the safe wooden coasters of my youth, but there is only sugary dance music punctuated by the abbreviated breathing of fear.

While we’ve been in line, the sky has experienced its own convulsions, its own clouding of consciousness. What was blue has become bruise-mauve, and what was white has become marigold. There is a striping, like one of those layered pink-and-tan coconut caramels they sell in the bins at Rite-Aid. The flat edge of Houston harbor looks expertly torn from black construction paper. Night is not so much falling as rising up through the molecular structure of the sky, infecting inch by inch of toxic, yet comely urban dome. Pollution sure looks good around sunset.

“What’s wrong?” says Buffy, still white-knuckling my hand.

“I think we’re being pulled up by a linear induction motor,” I shrug.

“What?”

“Magnetic waves!” I yell.

I hear Buffy say, “Whatev,” as we crest the hill and peel down the first insipid-looking-but-actually-quite-stomach-jumping slope. We both scream. Our asses hit the meager seats with a resounding clap after being suspended by negative g-forces for what seemed like minutes but was truly only a second or two. I can hear Buffy’s giggle-breathing as if it’s my own. The second hill is somewhat less daunting, and I take a moment to notice the view afforded from its apex. The sun is not quite down, and the sky is still purpling in the aftermath of daylight. I can see the whole city from our stunted perch, so flat is this state, and I notice how the giant freighters on the bay look like miniature Houstons, silver-gray and filled with commercial enterprise. A plastics factory oozes steam out onto the sky like white paint being squeezed from a tube. Our coaster train hovers momentarily in the stillness at the summit of the hill, and just as my face is stung and flattened by wind, just before my eyes are forced shut, I glimpse the back of a man’s head at the edge of the parking lot where this tiny theme park resides. His is not the only head in the area, not by a longshot. There are groups of heads, schools of heads, bobbing near him, all with glossy blue-black hair, points clustered on a map. But the man’s head is separate from the other heads, in a category by itself. His hair is black, too, but it is not smooth-straight Korean hair. This inkspot head is detached from its constituents, and its hair is unmistakably wavy.