asteroid

chapter 6

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The Goodspeeds not only had a ski pass, but season tickets to Six Flags Lake George, an amusement park that was within an hour drive of Veddersburgh. Six Flags Lake George was not so foreign to me as skiing. It was, in my view, a more equitable activity between Tommy and me than skiing could ever be.

The first time I went with Tommy to Six Flags Lake George, we went with Tommy’s cousins, his dad’s brother’s two daughters, Madison and Margaret, otherwise known as Maddie and Maggie, one the same age and the other a year younger than Tommy and me. They might as well have been twins, both blonde and curly-haired with cute little noses. I was instantly in love with both, despite not being able to remember which was which.

Tommy, of course, loved the amusement park. He hated lines, but they were worth it for him because he loved the rides at the end of them, the higher and the more extreme the better, especially the roller coasters. I supposedly hated roller coasters, but the truth was that I was too scared to go on them.

“Come on, Jude,” Tommy implored me. “Tell me: what’s the worst that could possibly happen if you were to get on that ride?”

Maddie and Maggie were already in line. I couldn’t believe I had allowed myself to be embarrassed in front of them, but there I was, refusing to go on the Asteroid, a large wooden roller coaster that was an icon of the park. Tommy had, at the expense of his own enjoyment, stayed behind with me. But he wasn’t going to give up easily.

“The worst thing that could happen? Well, I’d say my chances of death go up dramatically if I get on that thing compared to standing here,” I said, looking up at the main drop of the big wooden coaster that rattled as though it were about to fall apart.

“I’m sure just being in a car on the Northway is more dangerous,” he countered.

The smell of hot dogs, the sticky ground, crying children. It wasn’t just the roller coaster. I really hated the amusement park in general. I sighed.

“I mean, think of it this way—that roller coaster has probably been there for years. Years. And I’ve never heard of it crashing or anyone dying once. Not once. Have you?” Tommy continued.

“No,” I conceded. “It just feels like me being on it, of course, it would be that one time…”

“You’re not special, not in that way, Jude. The odds aren’t going to suddenly change for you,” he pointed out.

“I know that,” I said.

“So then what’s the problem? Why not just go on it?”

“Because it’s the experience. Like, even if I know, in my head, that I won’t die, the experience is still scary, like physically scary, and is it really fun to just do something if it’s going to be stressful and scary?” I asked him.

He snapped his finger, pointed at me, and laughed.

“That’s just it! It’s the experience of it. You think I’m not afraid when I go on these things? I’m terrified! But that’s why I do it. The thrill of it!” He threw his hands up. “It’s the pounding of the heart, the burst of the adrenals, the screams! If you’re not afraid to die, then are you really living? If living is defined by the absence of death, then how can we know we’re alive if we don’t at least look at death, just a tiny bit, every once in a while?”

I would like to say that Tommy’s beyond-his-years, erudite reasoning was what swayed me, but I saw his cousins turn and look at us from their spot in line and giggle to themselves over—as I perceived it, anyway—my reticence.

“Fine,” I conceded, and we began the longest wait of my short life, seconded only by our wait in line for the ski lift. The rattle of the coaster grew louder as we slowly wove through rusted metal bars and the chipped paint of the queue. A kid spilled a slushy, narrowly missing my shoes.

I hated the amusement park.

The ride operator pulled the bar over our lap, and I watched him—a teen who couldn’t have been much older than us—stand at the controls, wondering if he had any sort of qualifications for such a job, whether there was a degree you could get in Amusement Park Ride Maintenance and Operation, and if there wasn’t and he didn’t have one, then why not? Why trust someone like him to do a job like this, to start the machine that would be my demise?

Tommy demanded we sit in the very front car for what he called ‘optimal vertical drop,’ which sounded like the worst thing you could hope to optimize. The chain pulled us up at a cadence I imagined a guillotine rises at. My strategy was to look at Tommy no matter what, which was not the best idea, but I didn’t want to look down at my shoes (how then to see impending danger?) and also not over the side or the front, which put me at risk of being privy to the great height to which we were ascending (which, in the world of roller coasters, was not actually that high).

He was looking over the side, laughing, bouncing with each click of the chain pulling us up the track. I can still remember how he looked to me then, nothing but the backdrop of blue sky complimenting his eyes, in which I saw a wild thirst, juxtaposed with the happiness in knowing that it would soon be quenched. We crested over the top, and there was a silence between the clicking and the roar created as we picked up speed, and in that silence, Tommy looked right into my eyes and whooped with laughter, no doubt because of the look of terror I returned to him.

And for some reason, after we locked eyes, we both looked forward at the same time, the spell of my self-imposed ignorance was broken, and I held on for dear life as my clenched jaw loosened into a smile and then a constant laugh as we were whisked away on the coaster’s mighty course.

“It wasn’t that great,” I said afterward as we got off, loud enough for his cousins to hear several cars away. We went to the booth where you could purchase a photo of yourself taken at the top of the ride, and I still have the one that shows Tommy and me looking at each other, eyes wide, just before the drop.

“Can we try and get a prize now?” Maddie asked us as we wandered around in the limbo of what ride to go on next.

Tommy sighed. He’d promised them we’d win one of those fairground games and get them each a stuffed animal. We made our way to one of those squirt gun games, where you try and point a water gun at a little target and the more directly you hit it, the more the little dolphin icon rises above it. Once it gets to the top, it resets and rises again, and the higher your score goes.

You paid five bucks or something, and the higher your score, the better a prize you’d receive. Maddie and Maggie were quite intent on the biggest prize, which was a sort of novelty stuffed bear that was almost as big as they were. They wanted one each.

“Let’s make this interesting,” Tommy said, cracking his knuckles as we sat on the stools. It always had to be interesting for Tommy; nothing could be a mundane task.

“Let me guess—competition?” I said as I sat down.

We paid the guy, aimed our guns, a bell rang, and we squirted away.

I was beating Tommy for once, probably due to some undiagnosed myopia in his young eyes (he’d go on to wear glasses and then contacts in high school), as I was able to quickly ascertain that the key to winning was to aim in the lower half of the bullseye.

I won and perhaps rubbed it in a little too intensely. “Boo-yah!” I shouted, and my score was high enough to garner the prize bear, which made me feel very valiant.

I didn’t understand why Maddie and Maggie needed us to do this for them. It seemed to me they would have been perfectly capable of aiming those water guns and achieving the performance required for the biggest prize, but they were the kind of girls who were raised to believe that coercing a male into achieving something for you was a greater endeavor than simply achieving it for yourself. Which might have been fair because I would have sat there for another ten rounds if I thought it would have made one of them like me more.

Instead, Maddie took the bear without even a thank you, and her sister seemed impatient for hers.

“Let’s go again,” Tommy said, realigning his sights and paying again from the cash his parents had shoved in his hand before they sent us on our way. “We still must get another bear.”

Again, I beat him. A rare happenstance.

“This thing is BROKEN!” Tommy yelled at the guy behind the counter. The attendant shrugged as he handed over the second bear. “No, seriously—it’s broken. This isn’t fair. It’s ABSURD! Mine doesn’t work the same way as his.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, kid,” the guy said. I reasoned that he could have told Tommy a few things, chiefly that all the water guns were the same and that the game was set up to be equally difficult with each one, but apparently, such an explanation was beyond his job description. “You can try again if you want.”

Tommy looked at his cash, surmising how much we’d have to buy some corn dogs and fries and that actually there wasn’t too much left.

“Scared to lose again, Tommy?” I said, handing Maggie the teddy bear with magnanimity.

“You won, but it wasn’t fair!” he yelled, drawing onlookers now.

“Chill out, dude,” I said, recoiling as I felt my brow wrinkle.

He spun off his stool and stormed off. I wanted to follow him, but we were under strict orders to always stay with the girls, who looked unbothered and a bit bored with Tommy’s outburst, staying where they were, chatting with one another.

“Should we follow him?” I asked as Tommy disappeared into the crowds of screaming kids, frustrated adults, and disaffected youths that were the constituents of Six Flags Lake George.

“He always does this,” Maddie said (or was it Maggie?).

“Let’s get something to eat,” Maggie (Maddie?) suggested. “I’m so hungry.”

If they weren’t concerned about Tommy, I took it that I shouldn’t be either, even though I was. We were still at an age where, although Tommy’s parents trusted us enough to drop us off at the park while they went to dinner, it was still perceived as dangerous to be alone in a place full of strangers.

“We can’t,” I said. “He has all the money.” Suddenly they cared.

We meandered around the park. I was looking for Tommy, but it seemed like the girls were content to follow me around and complain about being hungry. Although Tommy had a cell phone, it was before the time when they were ubiquitous, and I certainly didn’t have one, and neither did Maddie or Maggie.

“What the fuck, Tommy,” one of them finally said. I marveled at their bad language.

“I know what to do,” I said.

Tommy and I had this thing we did when we were in a crowded or dark place and needed to find each other, something we did when we got separated in the woods at night while playing manhunt, or at the county fair or in the hallways at school. It was like a sacred pact between us, a call that could never, ever go unanswered, no matter what.

It started when we found out the interval between the notes of “Hey” and “Jude” at the beginning of ‘Hey Jude’ by the Beatles was called a minor third. Both of us were proficient and loud whistlers, and just to be goofy we started whistling the minor third of ‘Hey Jude’ to each other in the Whispering Pines Park, getting farther and farther away from each other to see how far we could go and still hear it.

I whistled those two notes strong and clear between my teeth and tongue. Whenever I whistled it to Tommy, I imagined it to be “I’m Jude,” and only “Hey Jude” when he whistled it back to me.

We wandered a bit more as the girls laughed at the strangeness of my whistling. I whistled again, and after a few seconds, beyond the din of the rides and the passersby, I heard a “Hey Jude” return to me. We traded minor thirds a few more times before we finally triangulated each other, and we found Tommy on a bench with a giant stuffed giraffe under his arm.

“What the heck, dude,” I said. Maddie and Maggie seemed relieved. “What’s this for?” I asked, pointing to the giraffe.

“It’s for you, Jude-dude. I won it at another game that I would have surely beaten you at. My apologies for flipping out, though,” he said. He handed me the giraffe. I laughed; it was so ridiculous and uncool for a 12-year-old boy to hand another 12-year-old boy a stuffed giraffe in apology, but somehow so very Tommy to do so. What was I going to do with a stuffed giraffe? Tommy knew this but, more than anyone, he understood that thoughts were what counted.

“Can we eat now?” Maddie (or Maggie?) said.

“Well, much appreciated on the giraffe, but if you bought it with this, I’m not sure we have enough left for dinner,” I pointed out.

“Nah, we do,” Tommy said, counting the bills in his wallet. I saw he had the same amount of bills as before. “Don’t worry about it. Want to go on the Dust Devil?”

The Dust Devil was a steel coaster that went upside down, a sort of level-up from the Asteroid in the tiers of roller coasters. Was I ready for it? Probably not, but this time I allowed myself to be convinced by Tommy’s earlier words. Was maybe dying not as bad as maybe not living?

“Let’s do it,” I said.

I still have the stuffed giraffe.

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