We wait in line together, Clarity going through her purse like a bag lady, taking some kind of essential inventory that must be taken before entering a Six Flags. I try not to notice but she has multiple packs of cigarettes, not all Mistys, she has mini Kleenex, Narcotics Anonymous key tags that have been removed from her sprawling, active keychain waterfall. She has a bunch of other stuff in there but I guess it’s not polite of me to tell you what all’s in a girl’s purse.
As soon as we go through the gate somebody takes our picture, a short little Himalayas-looking girl with this huge camera/flash setup. Today she’d probably have an iPhone but this was way back, before iPhones were everywhere.
“You want your picture? You want your picture?”
Clarity just blows past her without saying anything.
I follow.
“I want to ride the people mover,” Clarity says. “After that, I’ll ride anything you want. You can choose. But I have to ride the people mover ‘cause it’s my favorite ride since I was a girl. Purity and I used to ride it up and down like a million times and our father hated it but I guess that’s part of the appeal, you know?”
“What’s the people mover?”
Clarity blinks at me like Bambi in slow motion.
“You don’t know what the people mover is?”
I shake my head.
“This way,” she says, and she starts walking.
I have no choice but to follow behind her. I wonder if we’re going to walk like this all day, with me or Clarity leading and the other one tagging along behind, like we hardly know each other, instead of walking side by side like civilized people.
We don’t walk long, though, ‘cause the people mover starts right at the front of the park. It’s still empty enough that there’s no line. A brown-skinned guy looks like he’s about 13 opens a rope for us and lets us on the waiting gondola. That’s what the people mover is: these big cars with benches all made up to look like gondolas, but they’re not suspended or anything. They run on a track on the ground up a steep hill. The whole purpose of the people mover is so that if you’re tired at the end of the day you don’t have to walk down a steep hill with your grandmother..or if you’re people in your late twenties who are just so lazy that first thing in the morning you don’t feel like walking up a steep hill just to get to the rest of the rides in the park.
I shouldn’t say late twenties. I was 27. Clarity was 26. Something like that.
Anyway we sat on opposite sides of this faux-gondola car and tried not to look at each other. The car jerked to a start and then proceeded up the hill at an absolutely glacial pace. Chug chug chug. You could have crawled up the hill faster than this.
Clarity and I look at each other and laugh.
“But this way it’s easier,” she says.
“A fucking chipmunk could walk up that hill faster than this,” I say.
“But it’s not about speed,” Clarity says. “It’s about good time family memories.”
“Do you have a lot of good time family memories from coming here as a kid?”
“Ask me that later. But the short answer is no.”
I look around. The park is about as full as I like it: just people here and there. Children yelling at their parents. Parents yelling at their children. Fathers shelling out the forty bucks it costs to get your entry into the park picture—a total rip off. What a memory. It perfectly captures the look on your face after you just paid a hundred bucks a head for your whole family to get into a park so you can risk your life on deadly rides and eat funnel cake. The funnel cake will cost twenty dollars but will be totally worth it. And if you’re lucky your five-year-old daughter will see Wonder Woman—and that really will be a memory of a lifetime..the smile on your little girl’s face as she meets WW or a real life princess of some sort and you get to take a picture with her with your own camera and just pay the girl playing the princess tips in cash.
I remember my first time on a rollercoaster. Some wooden one in Jersey called the Thunder Hawk, I think. My girlfriend who was three years older sat next to me and the ride was jerky as hell. Since then I became something of a rollercoaster junkie.
Clarity takes out a cigarette from her purse and she’s so into her own world she doesn’t think to offer me one. But it’s ok—I like her this way, not attending to my cigarette needs, instead being in her own world, no doubt remembering whatever hellish family memories she had when they came to this park as kids. Purity was Clarity’s older sister by one year. Purity was a pious Christian, this after some nebulous period of teenage wildness that was only ever referred to by Purity in shadow. It was hard to imagine what she did that was all that bad since she was still a virgin, but I believed her—she had taken some detour that, as usual, returns a person to their childhood values except even stronger and more rigorously and more literally than they ever followed them as a child. Purity was a straight arrow now. No sex before marriage. No marriage in sight. Clarity was a year younger, not married, with a five-year-old kid. Purity drank like a sparrow. Clarity drank like a sailor. But one sister is not so unlike the other—when Purity moved to LA not long after, she worked as a bartender at Improv Olympic, where Ash was going to see shows that day that Purity, her sister, and I went to Six Flags for Purity’s Wonder Woman audition? Purity kind of went crazy in LA (like I did). At the end of the night, Clarity’s big sis could often be found hugging the toilet at her place of employment. She drank so much on the job, LA people were telling her she had a drinking problem. And when LA people tell you that, it means you are a hardcore alcoholic and you need to put down the glass and run.
I looked at Clarity, up and down, while she rested her head in her hand and smoked. I had heard stories, but never seen it for myself: if Purity was the mild one of the two, I would love to see Clarity go wild at a bar.