While wandering through the purgatory that is suburbia, I noticed a sign for a contracting company with the name: Actual Plumbing Ltd. I neither endorse nor disapprove of the contractor, and I assume they don’t mind free advertising on my blog. I think it’s an interesting name. What makes plumbing actual plumbing? Is there such a thing as non-actual plumbing? The kind of plumbing that uses fake pipes and invisible toilets? Or maybe the word is used in the same sense as it was used by sixties pop-psychologists when they talked about self-actualization. A thing is actual because it has emerged into an authentic state of being. (The pragmatist in me tends to think the owner chose the name because it’s close to the beginning of the alphabet.)
Dragon Fire
The sign piqued a memory from more than thirty years ago. The theme park, Canada’s Wonderland, had just opened and they were desperate for student workers to do grunt work for minimum wage. Me? I was just desperate. That’s the only reason I can think for working there. At that time, the park was owned by the Taft Broadcasting Corporation and run by a bunch of American cowboys who were gonna show us simple Canucks how to run a real theme park. An actual theme park. I was a cast member. The customers were Guests. We were putting on a show. Creating an illusion. An actual illusion! Smiling. Always smiling. A happy world where Guests could escape from their miserable lives for a day, or something to that effect. That was the pitch from the cowboys.
Early in my career as a happy cast member, I got stuck taking tickets at the Dragon Fire, an upside down double looping roller coaster. On the afternoon of the evening when Bette Midler was playing the Kingswood Music Theatre, a pompous English twit came to the front of the line with his entourage and demanded a ride. I swear it was Christopher Hitchens, but that’s probably my memory playing tricks on me. I told him he needed a ticket. He told me he didn’t; they’d already let him into the park for the Bette Midler concert; that was all he needed. I told him he needed to buy separate tickets for the rides.
“Look,” he said, “this is how it works. It’s called marketing. You let people into the park two hours before the show. You let them ride a couple rides. You give them a taste. You pique their interest. They come back for more.”
“Actually …” I wanted to point out that the marketing had worked—only not the way he wanted it to work. He wanted it to work so that he wouldn’t have to pay money for tickets, whereas the park was a business and therefore designed to take as much of his money as it could. But the Christopher Hitchens look-alike cut me off.
“What did you say?”
“I said: ‘Actually …’”
“Oh do stop! That horrid word! There is no such word as ‘actually’. Where do they teach you such things? Are you a student?”
“Yes.”
“What are you studying?”
“English.”
“Oh, go on.”
“But I haven’t actually started the program yet.”
“There it is again! Please. My ears!”
“Actually?”
“Doesn’t exist.”
“I thought it was an adverb.”
“If you insist on using it, people will take you for an ignoramus.”
And so it went until my supervisor ended things because we were holding up the line. My supervisor sent the man and his entourage back down to the ticket booth, but we never actually saw them again.
With over thirty years of reflection under my belt, I’ve concluded that there really is a word “actually”. However, it’s so abused and overworked, that, like most adverbs, it is essentially meaningless. Just like essentially. Really and truly.
That summer I didn’t learn much about adverbs. I learned a lot about people. Guests. That endless stream of inconsiderate assholes that insisted they were right no matter what.
Sometimes, the only way to change a person’s point of view is with shock tactics …
The Hotrock Raceway
I spent most of the summer working the rides in Bedrock of Hanna-Barbara fame. Fred and Barney lived there. I liked working with little kids. It was the parents who gave me nightmares. I’d look at a kid and think: Please, please, please don’t grow up to be a sociopath like your mommy.
The Hotrock Raceway was a track for Flintstone-style cars. The ride had a height restriction because the cars were small and it was hard to slip long legs in under the hood. Most of the time, when you told a kid they were too tall, it wasn’t a problem. They were getting too old for this stuff anyways and there were better rides in the park. When you told them they could ride the grown-up cars, that made them happy and they went away.
But there was one kid who went hysterical on me. He was a skinny boy about five feet tall. It turns out he was only seven or eight. When his dad came up the exit to complain, I understood why this seven or eight year old kid was five feet tall. His father was humongous. He stared down at me and lit into me about how all his life he had been too tall for everything and now it was happening all over again with his boy and he was damned if he’d let people treat his boy this way just because of his height.
I tried to explain that the height restriction was for safety reasons. The cars were small and if his son rode with his knees tucked beside his ears and if his car jerked to a sudden stop, it could injure him.
The man wasn’t interested in my reasons and insisted that I let his son ride in one of the cars.
I told him I couldn’t do that. Then I had a brilliant idea: I asked if he wanted to speak to my supervisor.
He liked that idea. He told me to go get my supervisor and we’d get this sorted out.
My supervisor was extremely short which is my understated way of saying she was a dwarf. She was all of about three foot six inches tall and, unlike the boy who wasn’t allowed to ride, she could fit quite neatly into a car on the Hotrock Raceway. I brought her to the ride and squared her off against the irate father. She tilted her head as far back as it would go and asked: “Now what seems to be the problem?”
The man threw up his hands and walked away.
Not all Guest concerns came with such a neat resolution. There was one that still leaves me scratching my head.
Flintstone Flyboys
The Flintstone Flyboys were these stupid pterodactyl eggs. You’d load kids into each of the eggs and they would spin around a centre pole. Each of the eggs came with a metal bar that went waist-high in front of the kids. If they pulled the bar into their guts, it activated a hydraulic thingy that raised the egg into the air. If they let the bar go, the egg would come back down. Whenever I loaded an egg, I’d buckle up the kids, put their hands on the bar, and tell them to pull it towards them once the ride started. When all the eggs were loaded, I’d go to the operator’s booth, give my spiel, and push the start button. The ride had only one button. It was a dead man’s switch. Push the button and the eggs would spin on a ninety-second timer. Let it go before the ninety seconds were done and the eggs would stop spinning.
It was a completely forgettable ride (for me) except on one occasion. I loaded all the eggs with little screaming kids. There were three little black girls who sat in one egg. As per my training, I strapped them in, handed them the metal bar, and told them to pull it into their guts if they wanted to make the egg go up in the air. I went back to my booth, gave my spiel, and pushed the only button on the control panel. I looked at the clouds. I looked at my fingernails. I looked at the eggs to make sure nobody was falling out or spitting on Guests. Ninety seconds went by. The ride stopped. I helped all the kids get out of their eggs. And that was that.
But before I could let the next batch of kids onto the ride, a black man approached me. When he spoke, I knew he wasn’t Afro-American. I couldn’t place the accent. Maybe from Nigeria? I couldn’t be sure. He said: “In my country, if a white man did what you just did, he’d be shot.”
I was stunned. I had no idea how I could have offended him. I asked: “What have I done?”
“You know exactly what you’ve done.” And he walked away.
I didn’t have time to think. There were more kids in line waiting their turn. The only thing that occurred to me was that if the man had shot me, it would be a pretty pointless murder. When break time came, I skipped my routine. In my spare time that summer, I had resolved to read everything Franz Kafka had ever written. I think I was on The Penal Colony. But instead of taking out my book, I chewed on a sandwich and thought about what had happened. I closed my eyes and revisited the scene, from loading the kids to pushing the button to unloading the kids to the ominous statement from the man (whom I presumed was their father).
Then it hit me. I knew what I’d done, or at least what he thought I’d done. The girls never pulled on the metal bar. They were too busy in fits of laughter. So while all the other pterodactyl eggs went up and down, their egg went round and round. It didn’t seem to matter to them. But it sure as shit mattered to their father. I think he thought I controlled the hydraulic thingy on each egg, that I had deliberately kept their hydraulic thingy from activating. I let all the white kids go up and down and left the black kids to go round and round. He didn’t realize that I had only one button to push—a dead man’s switch.
A few other things occurred to me, too:
1) The man had no idea how onerous (i.e. technically impossible) it would have been for me to discriminate against his children in precisely the way he imagined.
2) The man assumed the worst of me probably because others like me had given him their worst before.
3) In Canada, we (or at least we who are liberal Caucasians) tend to assume that discrimination is passive. It’s the result of thoughtlessness or a failure of imagination. We suppose it has something to do with the unintended consequences of otherwise benevolent systems. We don’t imagine that people are actively racist. (I don’t know if this is a true characterization of how we think, but it was my impression at the time.)
4) In my encounter with this man, we both experienced the opposite of communication.
I fantasized about a return to the scene: I would show the man the control panel and the single button I had pushed to start the ride. Then he would understand and I would understand and all would be right between us.
Actually
Earlier, I called Guests assholes. I take that back. Some Guests behaved like assholes, but I can think of only one reason for their behaviour. They came to the theme park from their actual world. The actual world held things for them that were unpleasant or challenging or dangerous—bad grammar, a world that doesn’t accommodate tall people, racial hatred—and they wanted to escape, if only for a few hours. They paid for the park and its cast members to perform an illusion—to hide the actual. But sometimes the actual made unwelcome incursions into the illusion. It was at precisely those moments that Guests acted out.
There may indeed be no such word as “actually”, but the actual is a certainty. Ironic that it was drawn to the foreground with greatest clarity when I was trudging around in a stupid outfit pretending to live in the stone ages with Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.