To Hellholes and Back Page 24

  Joyce turns the Disney trip down flat, even after I offer to pay for her ticket and throw in a week of doing the dishes with a “no complaining” clause to sweeten the deal. Central Florida is too much to ask, even for a veteran of rodent-infested, long-haul Indian trains and torture museums in medieval European cities (ask her sometime about anal pears). In the end, I’m left to confront Disney in a way I hadn’t had the nerve to approach any of my other presumed Waterloos—alone.

  Walt Disney World is comprised of four primary theme parks: Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The enormous grounds also include shopping and restaurant complexes such as Downtown Disney, a sports park, and more than twenty hotels anchored by the de trop Grand Floridian. Over the course of an autumn week—with more than seventeen million visitors a year there’s really no slow period at WDW, but the Zagat guide assures me this is “the ideal time to visit”—I’ll check out most of these areas, giving wide berth only to Disney’s two water parks. I enjoy a good pool slide as much as the next perspiring northerner but I already feel creepy enough prowling around the premises as an unaccompanied adult male without getting half-naked next to a strange nine-year-old on the Slush Gusher or exchanging notes with peeing preschoolers on the Downhill Double Dipper while pulling a clingy swimsuit away from my crotch.

  Though nothing close to exhaustive—whole books can and have been written exclusively about WDW—the more or less chronological observations that follow represent the eleven defining points in my face-off with the behemoth that’s referred to locally as “The Mouse” or, by the less enamored, “The Rat.”

  Epcot

  An acronym for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, Walt Disney intended Epcot as the crowning gem in his everlasting legacy. Although the days are long gone when American concerns like GE and Monsanto blazed the scientific trail to the future—thanks to the canny American business practice of outsourcing most of its workforce overseas and government regulations that discourage college enrollment and private innovation, that sort of thing most often happens in other countries now—the Epcot aspect of the Disney experience is supposed to remind children that the future will be crafted in corporate R & D labs and that science is good for them.

  The predictable response to this quaint idea is visible on the faces of the miserable minors whose parents insist on hauling them through Every Pouting Child’s Obligatory Trial. “Attractions” like The Kodak ‘What If’ Labs do not answer the question, “What if Kodak management had foreseen the digital camera revolution and also not moved a ton of production jobs to China and Mexico?” Behind the Seeds at Epcot offers scintillating views of such wonders as oversized pumpkins grown in hydroponic trays, which children are required to appreciate before they can get to the rides.

  Epcot’s primary appeal for adults turns out not to be a glimpse of a glorious future, but a portal in time to America’s glorious past. Once inside the timeship, it takes only a moment to deduce the staggering differences between Disney’s back-to-the-future chutzpah and the reality of contemporary America. At Epcot, as in the rest of WDW, everything works. Everything is clean. Every employee is cheerful, competent, adequately trained, and intelligent enough to answer spontaneous questions from customers. No wonder the Japanese like Disney so much—it’s just like home, except without quite so many Japanese.

  Moreover, this reassuring sense of a properly functioning society puts everyone in a civic mood. It’s not just the employees—in the sway of the park’s old-timey, here-to-please ambience, visitors drop their don’t-fuck-with-me Darwinian veneers and become supernaturally affable with one another. I haven’t come to be convinced of anything, but my irresistible initial impression of WDW is how agreeable the whole place is. Life is well ordered here. Or, at the very least, well signed.

  Contrast this with my arrival at Orlando International Airport the previous night. Following a cross-country flight in a seat that wouldn’t recline, with a cabin crew that patrolled the aisles like North Korean border guards, ramming their haunches into the shoulders of aisle passengers without pause or apology, I’d gamely followed a disorienting array of signs that obliquely suggested a route to my car rental company’s premier-customer lot. These led me on a circuitous path from the concourse to a parking structure to a locked door to an elevator and back to the concourse.

  At twelve thirty in the morning, defeated as a navigator, I staggered to the car company desk inside the terminal to ask directions. I knew before the morose counter agent opened her mouth that she wasn’t going to be any help.

  “I can’t find the express check-in lot,” I said.

  “Sign’s behind you,” the agent grunted, barely looking at me.

  “Yes, uh, well, I’ve followed that sign twice and haven’t had any luck. It leads to a locked door.”

  “Take the elevator up to the second floor,” she said, reciting the instruction on the sign behind me.

  “I’ve done that. Twice. But you exit the elevator to find a locked door. There’s nowhere to go once you’re up there except back down here.”

  Finally, a fellow customer broke the gridlock by stepping forward and explaining, “You have to take the elevator down to B1.”

  “But the sign…”

  “I know, the sign says go to the second floor. But after midnight they lock the doors and the only access to the car level is through B1. Take the elevator down and you’ll find a long concourse that runs beneath the parking structure. At the end you come to a stairwell. Walk up two flights and you’ll see the rental cars.”

  The adventure wasn’t over. After a long walk and a short wait at the “valued-customer” desk, I received the keys to a car with garbage left in the back seat and an odor that strongly suggested the lot boys had been blazing up inside twenty minutes earlier. I can’t say for certain this actually happened, but having worked after high school as an airport reservation agent for a well-known national car rental company in Juneau, Alaska, I speak to this last accusation with some authority.

  I can handle a little adversity on the road, and I understand that people working at the Orlando airport at 12:30 on a Saturday night probably don’t have a lot of options in the workplace. We have a failing public education system, and these are the consequences. The reason I didn’t blow up or lose my head while being assaulted with a beverage cart or given bovine stares of incomprehension at the rental counter is that I’ve been through these battles before and, like the marines at Chosin, I know the temperature keeps dropping in this war and the enemy never stops coming. All this to say, in contrast to the world outside its gates, Disney World is already feeling like some kind of dreamscape.

  Soarin’

  One of the most popular WDW attractions, Soarin’ is a motion simulator in which riders are strapped into seats suspended in front of an IMAX screen, then tickled with wind and scent machines to create the illusion of a four-minute “hang glider” tour over California—Yosemite, Napa Valley, Mojave Desert, and so on. The advertisements of Soarin’s superrealism are the first things that get me genuinely excited about something at WDW.

  The helpful signs outside the Soarin’ auditorium report a mere thirty-minute wait—guidebooks warn of ninety-minute torments—so I drop into line as soon as I finish a ho-hum “brave new world” tour of the industrial exhibitions inside Innoventions East and West. Despite the slow shuffle inside, I’m kept distracted by the apparel badinage of fellow visitors. The words “You Wish” are splayed across the ass of the cheek-lifting short shorts on the thirteen-year-old (maybe) girl in front of me. For twenty minutes I follow “You Wish” as we snake through the cattle chutes, passing a pair of women in their twenties whose identical T-shirts bear the message:

  In Loving Memory of Jonathan Daniel Davis

  4/17/72 07/03/08

  The front of the shirts display the stately legend: CANCER BLOWS!

  When I eventually reach the ride itself, even the four sets of dangli
ng shoes in front of me and the chatty kids from Georgia in my glider who can’t stop arguing about the next ride they want to go on don’t dim my assessment of the highly impressive Soarin’, which is as close an approximation of the universal dream of independent flight as I’ve ever encountered. I don’t exactly succumb to the belief that I am indeed a carefree golden eagle on holiday while swooping at treetop level over kayakers barreling through redwood forest white water, but of all the attractions at WDW, Soarin’ is the one I wish I’d waited in line to do a second or third time.

  World Showcase

  In Epcot’s signature World Showcase, architectural landmarks from countries around the world are re-created in “pavilions” for the extant purpose of housing restaurants and gift shops. The country choices are safe and obvious. Nothing against Mexico, Italy, and China, but who doesn’t already have an idea of what they’ll find in those pavilions? What about Suriname or Uzbekistan or Burkina Faso? I’d have more of an interest in finding out about those places than chowing on a $7 crepe in fake France. Though it was a damn good crepe.

  In the Disney tradition, there are some improvements over the real thing. I can’t complain about the lack of fiduciary authenticity in Norwayland, where you can get a beer for $6.50 as opposed to about $92 in the real country (which, incidentally, is why I hightailed it out of Trondheim after three of the most expensive days of my life). Little Morocco might have the world’s only Arab market not plagued by thieving Arab shopkeepers, which explains how I escaped the place without being dragooned into a single purchase.

  Ten foreign countries are represented in the Showcase, eleven if you count the United States, which is foreign to a fair number of visitors. Thinking about the United States in this context offers some useful insight into one of Disney’s most important markets: foreigners. Imagine traveling to a country—Denmark, New Zealand, Malaysia, wherever—and stumbling upon a cultural expression as colossal as WDW. You wouldn’t approach it simply as a place to take the kids on rides and interact with show-offs in animal costumes. You’d experience the whole conglomeration as a grand, summarizing statement on the national character. Wouldn’t you?

  I start looking at all the Mexicans and Venezuelans and Taiwanese and Russians wandering around the park and wondering what assumptions they’re making about the United States based on WDW’s unreal sprawl of swampland acreage. The boorish patriotism that pervades so many attractions. The infantile politics. The outrageous markup on Nemo plush toys stitched together by villagers in Indochina.

  As a side note, foreigners—whether paying customers or employees—are referred to as “internationals” in company lingo. Walking by a place called the Candy Cauldron at the Downtown Disney Marketplace, an employee tells me offhandedly, “That’s where we put all the internationals. They’re miserable slaving over candy all day.” Indeed, a young Asian woman with an exploited Cinderella look on her face is stirring fudge in front of a picture window. “Internationals” are also widely disliked by WDW waiters for being notoriously lousy tippers.

  I try to get a flavor of limey life at the UK Pavilion with a pint of ale. Across the street, four guys dressed like John, Paul, George, and Ringo breeze through Nehru jacket–era versions of “We Can Work It Out” and “Drive My Car.” Incredibly, the two crew-cut guys in their early twenties drinking Bass next to me aren’t just actual Brits; they’re Brits who look like extras in a Guy Ritchie movie about Manchester bookies. I try to raise a discussion of the implications of the World Pavilion and this peculiar representation of both of our countries, but they’ve seen crude facsimile before—most notably, at home.

  “They have this shit for tourists in London,” Ronnie tells me, gesturing at pub surroundings that don’t look like anything seen by real British drinkers since Flo was giving Andy Capp what for down at the local after-hours.

  Ronnie and Joe are thoughtful enough guys but their interest in geopolitical analysis pretty much starts and stops with “George Bush was a right twat, but he wasn’t much worse than the lot we’re stuck with.” The boys have more immediate concerns. Ronnie and Joe love the Florida weather but mostly they’re here for the rides. They give Space Mountain a five out of ten, telling me that for genuine fright you don’t come to Disney.

  “With all the kids and grandparents around, the thrill rides aren’t all that thrilling,” Ronnie says, observing that nearby competing amusement parks such as Universal Studios are more inclined toward the idea that petrifying the audience is the prime objective.

  “Although the Aerosmith roller coaster [at Disney’s Hollywood Studios] gives you a pretty good blastoff to start,” Joe adds helpfully.

  O Canada!

  Anyone who’s read my stuff before knows that I love our mighty neighbor to the east (assuming you have an Alaska-centric view of the world). If you haven’t been to the Maritime provinces or Montreal or Quebec or Toronto or the Canadian Rockies or British Columbia or the Yukon, you really need to revise your travel wish list. This does not alter the fact that O Canada!—part of the Canada Pavilion, which also includes totem poles and a mini-Butchart Gardens—is the biggest bust in the entire wonderful world of Disney.

  Lured by the complete absence of a line—a bigger tell here than an empty dining room on a Friday night in Mexico City, as it turns out—I file in for what turns out to be an eighteen-minute film hosted by Martin Short, the least funny person in Canadian or Saturday Night Live history, including Tracy Morgan. O Canada! is a deadly morass of classic Shortian unfunniness meandering through a script torn from the pages of an in-flight magazine “special advertising section” and set to images lifted from a 1970s Great White North filmstrip primer on polar bears and industrial harvesting. The only dream this tired sled dog inspires in me is an intense desire to bail out of the theater early.

  I don’t forgive Canada for all its sins—poutine, those passive-aggressive “We’re not American” flags on the backpacks, and the Oh What a Feeling: A Vital Collection of Canadian Music four-disc set commemorating the 25th Juno Awards, featuring the vital Anne Murray, Glass Tiger, Céline Dion, Loverboy, April Wine, Corey Hart, and Dan “Sometimes When We Touch” Hill. But the largest country in North America deserves better than this sad excuse for an attraction. On the subject of shoddy representations of Canada, I get the tip of the hat to the pineapple, but shouldn’t the name of the “Hawaiian” pizza reflect the contribution of both toppings? Like a “salty dog” or “Cleveland steamer,” why isn’t this immortal après-softball combo dubbed the “Snowy Luau” or the “Hockey Brah”? There’s no end of issues to take up on behalf of Canada.

  The American Adventure

  Hosted by an amiable pair of animatronic robots representing Ben Franklin and Mark Twain, who banter and rib each other like Trapper John and Hawkeye, this half-hour review of U.S. history is embarrassing for its sixth-grade-textbook exclusion of Indian genocide, atomic bombs, Vietnam, and the naked perfidy of the BCS college bowl system. I’m no liberal scold—I hate that revisionist lefty wingdings have made pinko philosophy a pillar of our once grand education system by systematically shitting on the founding giants who built this country—but, c’mon, facts is facts and propaganda is propaganda. Then again, I suppose cultural mythmaking is a duty of the modern state, and presenting the American story as a bowl of cherries for kids has a certain logic. Patriotic legends might as well be commuted to the young and impressionable. What else is college good for if not to learn that everything your parents believe is a lie?

  The problem really isn’t the truckloads of crap the American Adventure delivers. When you’re pushing Exxon, you don’t show pictures of dead seals on the beach covered in oil, and when you’re trying to keep the family together, you don’t talk about mommy and daddy’s counseling-session blowup at the dinner table. What gets me is using Mark Twain to shovel it out (who himself wryly noted in The Innocents Abroad that “they picture no French defeats in the battle-galleries of Versailles”), a soul as subversive and discontented and a
ngry about blind patriotism as anyone who didn’t live through Watergate, Iran-Contra, Florida 2000, and Ohio 2004 could be. You want to pull one over on the kids, fine. But don’t mangle the legacy of the greatest malcontent of letters we’ve ever had by posthumously getting him to do your dirty work.

  The Hall of Presidents

  In the Magic Kingdom—for fellow Disney-phobes, this is the park with the castle and perpetual fireworks at the entrance—the Hall of Presidents show is, like the American Adventure, both rousing and awkward. The lineup of forty-three animatronic presidents is impressive, though slightly undermined by the front and center position still maintained by George W. Bush—Barack wasn’t ready yet at my viewing. Derisive snickers ripple through the theater when the smirking chimp starts talking about peace and liberty, then makes an allusion to the shockingly bogus “No Child Left Behind” tragedy, reminding all in attendance of his administration’s twin calling cards of duplicity and incompetence. For a second, I think the Mexican guy to my right is going to leap from his chair shouting, “Death to Zhorjboosh!” But the cynics maintain a respectful silence—perhaps, like me, impressed that the robotic Bush comes off as a more fluid and natural public speaker than the original.

  As with a number of presentations at WDW, the Hall of Presidents begs a question that, months later, still bothers me: Why do people applaud at the end of shows featuring animatronic actors?

  Pirates of the Caribbean

  Though the popular ride long predates the recent movie franchise, it’s impossible not to notice that this undisputed classic has been transformed into a live-action game of “Where’s Johnny Depp?” As the snug “Pirates” toboggans float through a faux Carib waterway, the delightfully eccentric actor’s likeness in the role of Captain Jack Sparrow pops up around every third bend. Judging from the number of pictures taken in flagrant violation of the “no flash photography” rule, these fleeting cameos represent the high points of the ride for more than a few enthusiastic passengers.