This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

COASTER DIARY

I saw a random coaster-Twitter account called @WOFGinger tweet: Your worst day at an amusement park is always better than your best day at work. Unless that park is Six Flags St. Louis. I’d rather work in a coal mine than go to Six Flags St. Louis.

20 people agreed with him in the replies beneath.

bring on the black lung, wrote one of them.

###

GHOSTRIDER

I’ve already lost at least one appreciable relationship to my roller coaster habit. It was with Kara¹.

Though we had mutual friends, I met Kara through an app on the phone during the ninth or tenth Covid wave. Her father was an agèd cult filmmaker who wrought out a family half on accident, two boys and a girl (Kara), and settled for a fruitful career in network television to support them, directing multiple episodes of your favorite procedurals, CSI Miami, Boston Legal, The Good Wife, plus many more primetime successes. Kara’s family lived well and so did Kara. She worked as an assistant to a fine artist whose name escapes me. On her left hand she had four fingers. Born without a pinkie. No one could explain why. Maybe she bit it off in utero. She called me sir when we slept together (as in, “Yes, sir” and “Please, sir”) and I didn’t stop her; in fact, I egged her on. She was three years older than me, which doesn’t matter much but certainly counts for something when you’re in your early 20’s and don’t know anything. Mostly we hung out in her parents’ regal/decaying backyard in Cheviot Hills.

Kara feigned an interest in coasters, bless her heart. I knew she didn’t care and was trying for me. I appreciated the effort at first.

After three months of dating, she organized a birthday party for me at Knott’s Berry Farm—for it was my birthday. I matriculated to quarter-life on the Calico Mine Ride and the Timber Mountain Log Ride, inside the John Birch Society bookshop. A dozen friends joined us. My friends, not hers. She was bored instantly, and to tears.

Ten boiling hours later—it was the end of June—and we settled in for a long wait at GhostRider, Knott’s “signature attraction” and undeniably one of the best wooden roller coasters in the entire world². It gets slammed during the day and, due to some baffling operational decisions, takes less than 500 riders an hour. (Some marquee rides elsewhere do triple that.) But if you get in line right before closing, they’ll still let you on the ride, regardless of the line’s length³.

We moved through the cowboy-themed queue at molasses-speed. One by one, my friends peeled off, they all bailed, they went home, citing long drives and tomorrow’s obligations and total apathy. But Kara continued to pretend to care—and what choice did she have? I was her ride. It was after midnight now and we were on our own, alone together in the exhausted crowd. We couldn’t fuck because we were in public—surrounded by families, to boot—and we couldn’t watch TV, either, and these were the two things we did together most. She showed me some TikTok’s, and I was too tired to fake an interest in them, and she didn’t like that. We slowly pushed our way through the indoor portion of the line, which was themed to appear as a barn. They the masters of this queue even lined the floor of it each week with fresh straw, for the smell, I think, and maybe to mop up the sick. Signs at the entrance warned off the allergic while assigning them liability. The straw made Kara sneeze, but I thought it was a nice touch, and it cut through the smell of stinking sweat well enough. We had 20 minutes to go still, at least.

“We’re almost there,” I said.

“Yeah.” She looked down at her phone. I couldn’t hear what she watched over the thundering of the ride and the crowd around us, and I didn’t care enough to look. I watched the ceiling to pass the time.

“We’ll be home soon,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I promise.”

She said nothing.

45 minutes later, we boarded GhostRider. As the teens checked our seatbelts, I explained to Kara how the ride had new trains now, sleek Millennium Flyers from Great Coasters International, replacing those unwieldy fiberglass jalopies from Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters. This ride used to be car-crash rough, likely from the heavy trains’ years of wear, but now it was smooth as a well-shaved leg, GCI having re-tracked the entire thing when they came in with their sexy new trains, re-profiling the most problematic portions, even.

The dispatchers flew upward thumbs into the air. A scratchy announcer wished us well. The train rolled out the station, directly into a small but whippy drop and then an unbanked 180-degree turn, providing some pretty juicy lateral forces before we’d even hit the lift hill. This ride had it all, and at night it had even more, as you raced through thick darkness barely illuminated by these evocative orange LED rope lights hemming the whole layout⁴. From off-ride, it looked like some glowing Pagan death machine. (The fun of the ride is, you realize you’re the “GhostRider.”)

On the brake run, the entire train applauded profusely, so moved were we all by such an exhilarating, intoxicating shared experience—except for Kara, bah humbug, who wouldn’t even look at me.

“Wasn’t it fun?” I asked her on the way home.

“Yeah.”

We careened through packs of slow-driving drunks on the mostly barren 5 freeway.

“I mean GhostRider, specifically.”

“I don’t know if the 80 seconds warranted the two-and-a-half hours of waiting. But yeah, it was pretty fun.”

“Thanks for the day, baby.” I squeezed her boobs with my right hand while keeping my left gripped to the wheel.

We wouldn’t come back from this. We each found the other insane. We could no longer tell ourselves otherwise.

I was grateful when she left me three weeks later; now I wouldn’t have to leave her. We got into a stupid fight about nothing and she called it quits. I told her I’d miss her a ton, but it wasn’t really true. We’ve only run into each other twice. We have nothing to say to each other when we do.

I bought a Platinum Cedar Fair Pass in monthly installments. It got me into Knott’s, plus the Soak City water park across the street and every other park in the chain, with free parking and zero blackout days across the country and at Canada’s Wonderland outside Toronto.

I had Tuesdays and Wednesdays off and I usually went down to Orange County every other week on one of those days to lap GhostRider. I’ve been on it at least 750 times by now.

###

NOTE

People keep throwing themselves off the top of the Mickey & Friends/Pixar Pals parking structure complex in Anaheim⁵. They do not survive the fall.

I imagine the families. Are they pissed their loved ones did it at Disney? Or do they understand?

My father could be considered a “Disney Adult.”He cannot help it. It is ingrained. And he hasn’t had to register with the state or anything.

He likes other rides, too, he loves a good ride, and he’s quite knowledgeable for a layman about the themed entertainment industry at every level, from downtrodden regional park to IP-laden mega-resort—he worked at Marine World⁶ up in Vallejo for a few years after college; his manager, a buddy, went on to work in, and eventually head up, comms at Premier Rides out in Baltimore. They kept in touch, they still do. But it’s Disney that’s my dad’s shit. I’ve been to Disneyland probably 500 times. At least. Mostly with him. Annual passes used to be relatively affordable, SoCal residents were eligible for deep discounts. (Now the concession for locals gets you in for only 3 days, one park at a time, for more money than a year with free movement between both gates⁷ used to cost.) This was a good way for a divorced dad to get his kids on his side.

I’ve only returned to the Resort twice since my 20^th birthday, plus one visit to Walt Disney World, all four parks on ten drinks, Christmas Day 2014.

The Mickey & Friends Parking Structure was the largest in America upon its completion in 2000. I was once told you could see it from space, though that’s certainly a lie. Months before the pandemic, a virtually identical garage, the Pixar Pals Parking Structure, opened right next to the original. The real tombs for the 500,000 real soldiers. Enough concrete poured to build a bridge to or into the sun, instead we’re lining up for Dumbo and Dole Whips. “The Jews built the Mickey and Friends Parking Structure,” I said to my father. He agreed with me: “We basically did.”

I can’t do any of it anymore. I enjoy the Matterhorn Bobsleds, in particular, but I can’t do it. Not just because I don’t have the money. It all sickens me. I want to ride the fucking rides, I don’t need it as a way of life.

Sometimes I picture another version of my father, my-father-as-jumper, like if he didn’t meet my stepmom:

Z.H.—I am sure you know of the urban legend: no one ever dies on Disney property, not officially, that they’ve paid off the Orange County Coroner to prevent anyone from being pronounced dead until corpse reaches hospital. Off-site. I don’t know if it’s true. I do know that there will be no doubts when it comes to me, when they see me, if you can call it ‘me.’ I hope I have given you a decent-enough life. Goodbye, Son. I love you. (And tell your Brother he’s OK, too.)

###

COASTER INDUSTRIES

Within the umbrella of my roller coaster sub-habits, the very most onerous has to be my coaster-YouTuber video-watching tendencies. I watch them constantly, every day, I guess, through the YouTube tvOS app on a 65-inch LG QLED television.

There’s only so much a coaster YouTube-auteur can do, so I’m watching endless variations of six video-phenotypes: ranked lists (the great, great majority of them), in-depth reviews of individual coasters, engineering/design deep dives (the hardest to pull off), travel vlogs, construction updates, and rundowns of speculation—rumor-mongering and wishful thinking regarding the next installation at every amusement park in America. That’s really pretty much it.

Among my 15+ active roller coaster subscriptions, Coaster Industries is the most popular channel, by subscriber count and Patreon take-home. I despise them. It’s a couple with a certain anti-charisma, a lapsed Mormon from Virginia and his perky, blonde, Tampa-born, undeniably attractive beard, who joined the channel three or four years after its inception. They’re Orlando-based these days, of course.

They’ve been caught in waves of niche outrage a few times now. People didn’t seem to like the language Coaster Industries-man used when he described the Black employees in the German theme park Phantasialand’s Africa-themed area. He said “dark-skinned” and “pygmy” and “swarthy” a lot in that vlog, unquestionably, while Coaster Industries-woman praised Phantasialand’s commitment to verisimilitude. Then there was this whole thing at IAAPA Expo in Orlando, something about them clandestinely photographing proprietary wheel carriages and then getting accused of corporate coaster-R&D espionage on Facebook and Twitter. It turned out to be a misunderstanding, apparently, but they were banned from the trade show floor in perpetuity, regardless.

I snort heroin given to me by a rich boy⁸ (so it probably won’t kill me) and watch Coaster Industry’s Coasting UAE series, 15 20+-minute coaster-vlogs hitting all the major Emirati rides (plus a couple in a Qatari mall), scored to the most offensive, orientalist stock music available. I find myself searching every frame of every vlog in the series for other parties of tourists, convincing myself that each one is more interesting than Coaster Industries-man and -woman. And it’s likely not true, I’m sure the vast majority are British idiots.

I nod off. Even in my haze, I still see Coaster Industries-man and -woman, I see them together traveling through China, I see the footage from their films, but I see beyond, too. The PRC is the final frontier for “the hobbyist”—even the most hardcore western enthusiasts rarely make it for a visit—but in my dumb-boy heroin-head, CI-man and -woman are there, frolicking through Happy Valley Chongqing and Happy Valley Xi’an and Chimelong Ocean Kingdom and Chimelong Paradise and Zhengzhou Fantawild Adventure and, what the hell, Shanghai Disneyland. CI-man ditches his blonde and stays in China. He settles in Chengdu. He is welcomed warmly by all. He makes a living as a freelance video editor. He is eventually invited to join the Party. He claims to be the first Mormon in the Party. He has re-embraced his Mormonism, too.

Now he and I are making love on a snow leopard-skin carpet beside a blue fire. He tells me in fevered whispers throughout our rollings how he’s the first American to shoot a coaster vlog in “mainland China,” the very first—a few Aussies beat him, yeah, sure, but that doesn’t diminish his accomplishments among the enthusiast-anglosphere, does it? He demands my reassurance, but I have nothing to say.

I wake up and they’re in Dubai again. My cat sleeps peacefully, rolled into a ball beside me on the loveseat. Two hours later, I’m at work, reeking of sweat and worry.

###

ELITE

Enthusiasts call world-class coasters “elite.” They call themselves thoosies. I don’t know where that started. Reddit, probably.

I’ve only been on a handful of “elite” rides, most of them at Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH (I went to school one county over, at Mathews College).

The rest, save for GhostRider, are all at Magic Mountain: X2, Twisted Colossus, Tatsu, some of the best rides in the world, supported by a solid lineup of 17 more coasters, the current world record—though Energylandia in Poland, armed with generous EU coaster-subsidies, is coming fast for the title.

I used to take random dates to Magic Mountain. Or meet them there. Or find them there on Grindr. I’ve had an annual pass—a Membership, they call it now—since I was nine years old. I’m grandfathered into it costing $6 a month. For a long while, I lived a straight shot away from Valencia down the 5. I’d always take the same freeway entrance to hit the same pothole the same way, at the same speed and angle, to reinvigorate my Prius’s catatonic AC.

Yes, there is a cruising spot at Magic Mountain. I’d frequent it back when I was gayer⁹, the summers I was home from school. It’s a men’s room, obviously, beneath a shuttered restaurant at the very top of the mountain, in the lightly/offensively themed area around the Ninja roller coaster called Samurai Summit.

I remember well enough Jedi-flipping there one day with a 43-year-old “heteroflexible” Grindr-otter. It was March. After he had his way with me against the shit-stained stall door, he asked me, “What’s that faggy tattoo on your arm?”

It’s a roller coaster, I explained to him, drawn by John Porcellino, the cartoonist behind King-Cat Comix; I sent Porcellino $150 and he sent me back the drawing three weeks later (“Do you want the passengers to be little animals?” is the only question he asked me; I said of course I do), and then a rockabilly woman at a tattoo shop in Venice carved it into my left forearm.

“$150? You could have done it yourself in 90 seconds.”

“I’m on drugs, man.”

“You’re such a little faggot,” he said. “I’m pretty into it.” I hated this guy.

We went on Superman¹⁰. The interior walls of the Fortress of Solitude-queue, ice-colored stucco lit up with cheap green LEDs, moved backwards and forwards. We went on Ninja¹¹. I bought a Powerade from a Powerade machine.

We headed halfway down the mountain to get in line for Tatsu, the gargantuan B&M flyer¹², the largest of its kind in the world. Finally, we were hitting an elite coaster. Arguably elite. I felt it was elite. Its pretzel loop is one of the craziest coaster elements in the world (so sayeth every coaster-YouTuber). The line would take us an hour, at least. As I picked at my Cookies ‘n Cream Dippin’ Dots, my companion asked if I held any desire in attending a few films at a Naruse retrospective with him in Hollywood next week. “My common-law wife pre-emptively bailed on me,” he said, “so I have these tickets.”

I told him I’d think about it. “I might have ketamine therapy that day,” I said. The crowd around us appeared sickly. They all talked of sunblock and TV.

We got on the coaster after another 75 minutes. The sun was setting now—glass and honey filled the air, which grew crisp.

Once you’re snugly fastened in, resting in the metal-and-foam skeleton of the Tatsu-train’s orange seats, you swing back: you take the entire ride face-forward, semi-prone, a supposed simulacrum of flight.

Most of Tatsu is graceful, bird-like in its maneuverers, but then you hit that pretzel loop—it’s 124 feet tall—and you feel like the ride is waterboarding you. I can’t get enough of it. My partner loved it, too. “Better than sex,” he said. “No offense.”

Next, after remembering to chug some Dasanis, we headed for X2¹³, widely considered California’s best coaster and among the most aggressive on Earth. Ride it wrong and it can hurt you. I was hoping it might kill my companion. The sun was gone now.

X2’s seats flip independently of its maneuvers. A “third rail,” snaked through the center of its thick, metallic-crimson track, wagging back and forth, triggers the motion. For instance, while you start the ride on your back—facing the steel roof of the prefab station and then the giant sky above the chainlift—you soon pull half a front-flip as you descend the nearly-90 degree, 215-foot drop, like you’re being thrown straight into the dirt beneath. Then the track pulls up and you complete the rotation.

When we slammed into the brake run, my companion caught his breath and said, “I don’t know what just happened.”

“It’s elite,” I said—was all I could say until the next Dasani.

###

RUINS

I’ve always dreamed of writing a book about a roller coaster archaeologist, a learned adventurer thousands of years in the future puzzling over the bits of metal—like a lone support lodged into steaming volcanic rock, let’s say—my favorites will one day become. I never manage to write any of it.

I tell my dad of these thoughts. He asks me if I’ve watched The Last of Us show on HBO.

“The game was enough for me,” I say.

“They show Worlds of Fun when they go to Kansas City. You see Mamba¹⁴ in the establishing shots. I guess it’s not so far in the future. You can still tell it’s Mamba.”

“That’s pretty cool,” I say. “I don’t remember them going to Kansas City in the game.”

“Maybe you should watch the show.”

“No thanks.”

I read a big book called Death at SeaWorld by an environmental reporter, for inspiration, maybe. I learn that killer whales born in captivity barely need to be trained for the Shamu show; they learn by watching their parents perform, picking up even the trainers’ hand signals. The SeaWorld staff goes out of their way only to impart husbandry skills, is what they call them: offering up the dorsal for blood collection, sliding onto the veterinarian’s whale-scale¹⁵, even pissing into sample jars.

As if I’ve psychically prompted them to do so, SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. announces a name change (that’s the parent company¹⁶, not the individual SeaWorlds themselves). United Parks & Resorts is the new moniker, which sounds old-timey, cartel-like, but it’s another sign of the present: the animal rights activists, the journalists, the documentarians, they’ve won. The three American SeaWorlds have been pivoting for the last decade, away from marine-mammalian enslavement—but to what? To coasters, of course. They already had a few. San Diego is under strict sanction from the Coastal Commission and cannot build 150 feet, but they’ve gotten creative, building rides into trenches, and in Florida, the local authorities don’t care about anything like that, it’salready become, more or less, a slightly fancier Six Flags-esque coaster park half-themed to cetacean concentration camp.

My girlfriend wants to see the pandas at the San Diego Zoo. The Chinese government took them back—their agreements with US zoos allow them to repatriate any of the animals at will, with zero notice, including those bred in the States—but then decided we were all right again, that they needed us as we needed them (it’s true), and so they’ve returned some specimens to Balboa Park. The San Diegans were elated: the panda economy, so vital is it down there, dried up with the panda diplomacy overnight, and had returned with it as suddenly, once again there were shirts and boba drinks to be sold.

I tell the ol’ GF I’ll only join her if we stop at SeaWorld.

The park is dead-empty. We might be the only people here who aren’t getting paid. We beeline for Emperor, the B&M dive machine¹⁷. Is it an elite dive machine? I’m thinking yes. The GF says it looks like they cheaped out with it and she’s right—the loading platform isn’t even covered. No landscaping in sight. The appealing blue track (all the coaster track here is painted blue, another Coastal Commission mandate) rides above a dirt patch best resembling a landfill. The ride is ostensibly themed to penguins, but you’d never know it. SeaWorld of yore would have placed a pool of the glorious birds beside the first drop in a nice-looking, faux-Antarctic enclosure. In a way, I’m relieved this is no longer the case, for the penguins’ sake.

In the Shipwreck Reef Cafe, we run into another guest for the first time today. He asks if he can join us for our lunch. He’s tall, maybe six-and-half feet tall, dressed in $3000 leather Celine pants and a Padres jersey (Manny Machado, Mr. Hustle). We’re starved for non-employee contact, so we agree. I kick out a seat for him. Then we’re all eating baby-back ribs and slurping down Sprites.

“I’m Karaoke,” he says.

That’s your name? we ask him.

“My legal, Christian name.”

“What’s your last name?” the GF asks.

“Purdue.” Then he tells us his life story. Enlisted in the Navy, spent years sailing around the world, plus a couple stationed at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti City. He got to know the local maritime fauna there, diving with the whale sharks in the Red Sea every weekend during whale shark season, “the kindest 30 feet of flesh you’ll ever meet.” And although they aren’t actually whales, they got this Karaoke Purdue thinking about the mammals with which they share their name’s former half. He considered all of Gaia’s riches. He did his own independent research. Now he’s looking into SeaWorld. “You maybe picked the wrong day to come,” he says.

“We know,” I say.

“We’re sorry,” the GF adds.

“I think I’ll give you ten minutes to get out of here. I’ll admit it: I felt totally apart from the human community when I woke up this morning and then I drove over here still feeling that way. But you two seem all right.”

“Thank you, Mr. Purdue,” I say, as I’m wondering if I can sprint from him fast enough to get on SeaWorld’s three remaining coasters before his bloodbath can reach those far-flung parts of the park.

“We’ll just head to Legoland now,” says the GF.

“Sounds good. You do that. Have a good one.” He starts drinking my Sprite.

We drive to the Zoo. “Thanks for not saying we were going to the Zoo,” I say to my GF in the car.

“I’m not stupid.”

We park in the Zoo parking lot—free for some reason (this is the first time I’ve felt God’s smile in months)—and head toward my consolation prize: a bunch of blasé pandas, three of them sitting around, picking at pre-cut bamboo, apples, and carrots, totally enraptured.

1. That’s what I’ll call her.
2. https://rcdb.com/526.htm
3. Unless it breaks down. Then they’ll kick you out. But this is still a pro strategy, getting in line for the most popular ride right before park closing. Most (but not all, so please check) amusement/theme parks in the US subscribe to this policy, including Disney properties.
4. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3lEtVPg4cA
5. Actually true: https://deadline.com/2023/11/disneyland-suicide-parking-structure-jump-1235616017/
6. Now known as Six Flags Discovery Kingdom.
7. Being a term for the entrance to a theme park, synonymous/fully interchangeable with the premises beyond. Used particularly often by the Disney-snobs and Universal-arrivistes, the two most fervent, Nazi-like fandoms in the space, which have attracted entire cottage industries of journalists, vloggers, and podcasters, many of whom make their entire living from such work. (Most of this lot lives in Orlando, mercifully far away from me.)
8. Later, he will attempt suicide, and succeed at it, with one of those off-the-shelf suicide kits highlighted in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/09/us/where-the-despairing-log-on.html
9. This better get me the Lambda Award for Bisexual Roller Coaster Autofiction.
10. https://rcdb.com/140.htm
11. https://rcdb.com/129.htm
12. https://rcdb.com/3305.htm
13. https://rcdb.com/750.htm
14. https://rcdb.com/469.htm
15. Taxonomically speaking, “killer whales” are the most massive species of dolphin.
16. Holdings include four SeaWorld Parks (Orlando, San Diego, San Antonio, and now Abu Dhabi), Busch Gardens Tampa and Williamsburg, Sesame Place in San Diego and Langhorn, PA, plus a handful of waterparks.
17. https://rcdb.com/17030.htm