Eventually, we did find a ride I enjoyed.
Miriam and I sat in little steel gondolas that faced an IMAX screen, approximating what it felt like to hang glide. Soaring over a montage of river, mountain, and gorge, we clutched at each other with desire and wonder while the gondola swayed and surged in a warm, slyly generated current of synthetic Santa Anas. (At last, something worth the $47 park entrance fee.) She gasped and excitedly pointed — for a rapturous moment, our old friend Death Valley, and Badwater too, lay below.
Just when I thought everyone had had enough and we could hightail it back to lotusland for an expensive lunch, young Michelet caught sight of a heinous sidebar village called the Hollywood Pictures Backlot. In the last hour or so, I’d caught fans staring; once or twice a family approached to have their picture taken and Thad obliged, for which the three of us were skittishly grateful. (He actually seemed to enjoy the attention.) Strolling deeper into the Backlot, he thrust a theme-park brochure in my face, stabbing his finger at the captioned ride he was dead set on buying tickets for. According to the description, the miniature limousine (set on little railroad tracks) took starstruck groups on a Mr. Toad — like tour of “the Hollywood experience of casting offices and premieres.” It did sound amusing, very Nathanael West, and Thad was miserably deflated when we arrived to find it shut down. We made inquiries to a ubiquitous Cast Member but the pimply girl said the ride had been closed for “voluntary safety issues,” whatever that meant, and no one knew when it would “relaunch.”
Thad just stood there, staring at the moribund attraction, as if he could will it to life.
Clea headed toward the candy superstore — she was jonesing for double-chocolate truffles — when our disappointed friend, ever-vigilant, spotted the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Theater. I groaned. The line was a block long. “We have to go!” Thad shouted. “Don’t you see? I can pay off the IRS! I can finally pay off the fucking IRS!”
My mood plunged further, if that were possible. I hate to be dramatic but there was something so creepily apocalyptic about it — I wasn’t even sure Millionaire was on the air anymore. Not that it mattered. Disney evidently fucking owned it and was going to fucking milk it for all it was fucking worth. When I was a kid, there was Tomorrowland, Tom Sawyer, and the glorious, snowcapped Matterhorn; now, it was all about replicating whatever syndicated hits had metastasized under the corporate umbrella. I had one of those “If this be our culture, let it come down” moments, and muttered as much to Miriam, who said I sounded like an intern at the Voice. I thought it was more Fahrenheit 9/11, but what the hell, I liked being put in my place. That’s what wives were for.
It turned out the theater was full because everyone was eligible to win a three-day cruise and Americans really love winning shit. That probably isn’t fair. I should have said, Americans really love standing in line to win shit. The host came out. Someone must have tipped him because he pointed toward us and said “we have a VIP in the crowd today.” The audience applauded while our boy Thad-libbed; they laughed but something didn’t feel right. Miriam shushed me for being a curmudgeonly paranoid.
Questions flashed on huge screens and whoever gave the fastest, most accurate response was moved to a center-stage “hot seat.” (“Answer buttons” were on back of each chair.) Thad was nothing if not competitive; it suddenly occurred to me that he really wanted to win. Things went from bad to worse when he couldn’t make headway. The questions were easy but they made sure to lob the occasional high ball, leaving you clueless unless you happened to be conversant with the inventory of the entire merchandisable Disney universe. Thad began to curse. It was funny for about ten seconds then some triple-chinned cracker objected to his language. Thad told her to shove it and the hubby didn’t like that one bit. Clea and I began to tug at both sides, as both reprimand and cue to leave.
The master of ceremonies asked the hot-seater, “Where would you be most likely to find a denouement?” The answers flashed onscreen, with annoying musical trills:
1. In the bathroom
2. In a story
3. Under the hood
4. In a salad
The mispronounced word (“day-new-mint”) had the contestant totally stumped. He used his “lifeline” to phone a Cast Member standing by somewhere in the park. After the employee answered, we could hear him hand the receiver off to a pedestrian. The Q&A was repeated and each time “day-new-mint” was enunciated Thad laughed so hard I thought he’d have a heart attack — it was that violent. After much deliberation the hot-seater said, “I guess in the bathroom.”
Thad literally fell off his chair. “You fucking idiot!” he shouted. “Yes! Of course. That’s where you find a day-new-mint—in the shitter, with your elephant-legged wife and waterbrain daughter! Sucking each other’s pussies!”
Needless to say, we rushed him out at the very moment a squad of terrified Mouseketeers, poorly trained in militia-like maneuvers, gave dogged, unspirited chase.
While waiting for the tram to take us back to the car, Thad bought the tiniest cup of Coke I’d ever seen. It was like something from a dollhouse but still cost $4.50—setting off another rant, this one with anti-Semitic overtones that managed to include Michael Eisner, Mel Gibson, and shouts of “Allah Akbar!” Clea told him if he didn’t shut up, “we could very well be detained.”
We finally boarded for the two-minute trip to the parking garage. I remembered how exciting it was to listen to the recorded voice accompanying that ride in my youth; how it evoked the genteel mystery and endless promise of a clean, well-lit, preordained world — truly, the Magic Kingdom. Now everything was different. The kingdom was Orwellian, the world was rotten, and the singsong murderous monotone of the man alternating product promotion with safety reminders only filled me with premonitory dread.
~ ~ ~
WE DROPPED THEM AT THE Chateau and drove back to Venice.
Miriam and I had plans that night. She went to Shutters to bathe1 while I headed for the beach. After an hour and a half in the car, I felt like stretching my legs. I took along The Soft Sea Horse, intending to finish it on a boardwalk bench.
I was surprised at the unguardedness of the book’s narrative. (I knew the title had been cribbed from the yacht that launched Jeremy to his watery death but subsequently learned it was a line from a poem of Jack’s.) Sea Horse is the story of twin brothers, one of whom, an autistic “angel” favored by their glamorous film star father, drowns in the Aegean Sea during a visit to a film set. When the child vanishes and is presumed dead, the long-embittered wife flies in from Amagansett with the surviving twin. The “angel” reappears after the wounded family reunites, in the form of a seaweed-swaddled wraith. When the book was published, Miriam said Jack called it a “cruddy Creepshow of a novella, worthy of a trepanned Stephen King.” He did everything he could to humiliate Thad in print. I’m no critic but I disagreed. To me, the novel was a fantasia that attested to a courageous, tender nobility. The reviews, though, were unkind and it sunk like a stone — or a boy — providing trivia for future unauthorized bios of the patriarch.