My first job was selling film at a kiosk inside the safari at Six Flags, the summer I turned 15. It was the easiest freakin’ job in the world.
At 8:45 AM every morning, I shuffled, half-asleep, into Wardrobe, where they handed me a pair of shorts and a polo shirt, size Female-Small, and pointed my tired, lazy ass toward the girls’ locker room. I got dressed, drenched myself in 45 SPF sunblock, picked up my cash bag from the office, and hopped into the zebra-striped pickup truck that would transport me inside the safari gates. Chaz, the driver, who wore an Indiana Jones fedora hat and aviator glasses, dropped me off inside the American Bison section, where my little Coca-Cola/Kodak cart awaited. I opened up the umbrella, put my money in the old-timey manual cash register, filled the ice cases with cans of Coke and boxes of Kool-Aid, hung out the sign that said “Please Stay in Your Car, Animals May Bite!” and settled into a folding chair with a romance novel.
Every weekday, I sat there for four solid hours, reading. Occasionally I’d be forced to get up to bring a cold drink or a box of film to the window of the cars that pulled off to the side of the road, tourists stocking up before moving on to African Mammals. Every now and then Chaz would race by in his truck, chasing runaway monkeys or delivering supplies; he’d wave his eternal cigarette at me through the bars on the windows, and I’d smile back, waving him on. We had a signal; if something was wrong or I needed a bathroom break, I’d wave the red flag I had made out of an old McDonald’s french-fry carton. Most times, though, I just smiled at him as he whizzed by.
At one o’clock every day, Chaz would return to shuttle me back out to the main Safari entrance for lunch. He’d pull up to my cart, sending gravel flying everywhere, and drop off my replacement — some displaced amusement park worker dressed exactly like me, grumbling about being exiled out to the boondocks. I’d jump into the front seat with Chaz, grab his fedora and place it on my own head, and laugh as we forsook the paved road and flew, instead, over sand and hills and grass. Sometimes he’d get an emergency call on the radio before he got me to the gate, and he’d have to take me with him to go chase monkeys away from some idiot who’d decided to leave his convertible top down, or use the megaphone perched on top of his truck to yell at a stubborn giraffe who wouldn’t get out of the road.
The employee dining room was inside the amusement park proper, too far to get to on my break, so each day I bought my lunch at the food stand just outside the safari entrance. I’d sit down at one of the picnic tables, eating and smoking and watching the endless parade of cars lined up at the ticket booths. I hated lunch hour. I had asked my boss, time and time again, if I could stay at the cart and eat there — I really didn’t need to come back, I told her, really, I didn’t mind — but I was fifteen, and apparently there were labor laws against that sort of thing. So, I went. And when it was finally time to return, I’d stock up on fresh cigarettes at the gift shop ($1.25 a pack back then, yo, and nobody checked your ID), and then there was Chaz, waiting to bring me back to my place.
Early that July, after the weather had turned and stayed hot, they added an ice cream trailer next to my cart. It was a big silver thing, enclosed, with four actual walls and a door. While my film and soda kiosk was run by the Merchandise department, the ice cream cart fell under the jurisdiction of Foods, so I wasn’t allowed to work both. Instead, they brought in a girl named Diane. Diane was a sullen, silent sixteen year old with greasy blond hair and bloodshot eyes. For the first week or so, I thought Diane might have serious mental health issues. Sure, I always had to be careful of my skin, but Diane seemed almost averse to the sun – she spent her entire days inside that trailer, appearing outside only when she had customers and then quickly scampering back in after the cars had pulled away.
It wasn’t until a week or so after she’d arrived that I realized Diane wasn’t antisocial at all — she was simply stoned. Perpetually, unrelentingly stoned. I discovered this by accident when I opened her trailer door without knocking and found her sitting on a three-foot-high stool, regulation-white sneakers abandoned on the floor, her bare feet propped up on the glass top of her Good Humour freezer case, smoking a joint.
If she was dismayed to see me, she didn’t show it at all. She just squinted through the smoke hovering around her face and wheezed: “Close the fucking door, wouldja? Hey, you want a hit?”
Diane didn’t last long. I don’t know if she quit or got fired, but one day a short, pimply kid named Richard showed up instead. Richard was no fun at all. Richard was that kid you couldn’t stand: the one in your math class who knew every answer, the one who bumped everyone in the hallway with his trombone case, the one who reminded your teacher when she almost forgot to assign homework to the class. Richard was the one who followed you around like a puppy, pushing up his glasses as he trotted behind you, who took every scornful word you said to him as some kind of loving compliment and who really believed, no matter how badly you treated him or how loudly you told him to please go fuck off, that you would break down and agree to go to the movies with him if he just ASKED ENOUGH TIMES.
Luckily for me, though, Richard was also a thief. And halfway through August, he got caught on camera bypassing the middleman, so to speak; taking film from my cart and selling it directly to the customers, pocketing the cash.
Buh-bye, Richard. Buh-bye.
The fun ended for me when I went back to school in September. The safari was only open until five and I was in school until three, so they bumped me into the amusement park proper for the remainder of the season. For a while I was jostled around as break-relief, which I enjoyed because it meant I never knew where I’d be working when I clocked in for the day, and frankly, I kind of liked being transient. That got old pretty fast, though, the first time they gave me roving-balloon detail. Balloons is a horrendous, torturous job that entails walking back and forth across the entire length of the park, carrying and attempting to sell a gigantic load of mylar balloons. God, I hated it. Hated. It. Not just the walking, which was bad enough for someone who’d spent her whole summer sitting in a folding chair; the walking was only the half of it. The balloons were like a fucking MENSA mind game. The strings got hopelessly twisted in the wind, so pulling out one balloon for the greedy, grasping tourist child who had to have the Bugs Bunny – no, not that one, the one in the middle! – was, invariably, far more complicated than it should have been. By the end of that day, I was exhausted, sore, and determined to never, ever have kids.
Finally, they settled me into a tiny gift kiosk on the far end of the park, just outside the old bumper cars. There, I had a chair, a roof, and very few customers, because few people still rode the old bumper cars ever since the shiny new bumper cars had come along, and the ride had basically been relegated to nothing more than a make-out spot for horny teenagers. And horny teenagers tended not to be interested in giant Six Flags pencils or plastic zipper purses with Tweety Bird on them.
After a few days with nothing to do, I began bringing in my novel again.
And god, I missed the safari. Sitting there in that tiny, immaculate store with the concrete floor, shaded from the sun by a giant blue awning, unable to go anywhere or see anything even remotely interesting, I missed the safari desperately. I missed Chaz and his fedora and zebra-striped truck; I missed feeding ice cubes to the Rhea birds and stroking the coarse, brown manes of the buffalo. I missed chasing monkeys and laughing at idiots with their convertible tops and I missed the lady who got her car sideswiped by a rhino’s horn after she chose, unwisely, to honk at it. I missed the tourists who taught me to quote film prices in Spanish (cinco cincuenta! Cinco cincuenta, por favor!) and I even missed crazy Diane. But most of all, I missed the freedom of it, the laziness of it, the perfectness of that first, perfect job in that first, perfect place. Somehow I knew, even then, at fifteen, that I’d probably never find anything like it again.
sprung from cages on highway 9 