I Think This Time It's Going To Work

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I THINK THIS TIME IT’S GOING TO WORK

In 2005 I met the Devil at Universal Studios Orlando and I took him on his first roller coaster ride.

It was spring break, and I was on a trip with the high school band. It was our second day in Orlando. Two days ago we had all piled into one of two motor coaches and driven almost twenty hours, straight through the night, sleeping poorly, our lanky teen bodies crammed into the large, plush-looking but very awkward and uncomfortable coach seats. We had stopped at a Waffle House in Georgia for breakfast at about 5 in the morning and finally rolled into Orlando around 10.

We had rehearsed all afternoon. My elbow was janked up from sleeping with my arm propped up on the window frame as a pillow, and hurt whenever I extended my trombone slide past 3rd position, and on top of that my tired eyes could barely read the sheet music.

After that we had broken for dinner and enjoyed a free evening afterward, which I spent by the hotel pool, reading some Terry Pratchett book, hoping to run into my crush Leslie Minburn (bass clarinet), who had already been tanning in preparation to go to Florida, and whose medium-sized but extremely perky titties I imagined would look just heavenly in any kind of bathing suit she might choose to put on. But Leslie never appeared, and I had turned in early rather than continue wondering about what she might’ve been doing instead, and who with.

Our first concert wasn’t till tomorrow, and this was our Universal Studios day. My clique, made up of Cameron (trumpet), Rick (French horn), Michael (also trombone), and token girl Katie (percussion) ran into the Devil at a snack stand while waiting in line for some drinks. The sun was bearing down on us with vigor and there was nowhere to escape from it. The line eventually took us past a table pushed up close to the metal railing, and its umbrella was just slightly over the boundary line. We huddled up against the railing and leaned over to enjoy a slice of shade. The Devil was seated at the table, comfortably under the umbrella, eating mozzarella sticks.

How did we know he was the Devil? He chose to let us know. We looked at him and it was like recognizing a celebrity from a picture in a magazine. He wouldn’t look like the devil to you, if you saw him. But I saw him, and Cameron and Michael and Katie and Rick all did too.

He looked a little older than us – college aged, maybe, though it’s so hard to gauge degrees of adulthood when you’re barely there yourself. He was young and well-groomed, smooth skin with only one brownish pimple on his temple, but he had a confidently thick goatee and a tattoo on the back of one hand. He looked tanner than us, vaguely Hispanic. He was wearing black jeans and a bowling shirt and kind of looked like a ska fan. OK, a lot like a ska fan.

We all fawned over him, of course. I mean, Devil or not, how many times do you run across somebody this famous? Melanie Haynes had already claimed she saw J.Lo earlier. This would blow her out of the fuckin’ water.

We asked what he was doing at Universal Studios. He said he was taking human form, just running a little experiment. He’d done it a fair number of times before, but it was different every time. Everyone’s body has radically different feelings, sensory thresholds, involuntary reactions, and you can’t just drop in one and think you have the whole picture, “like a certain someone did,” he chuckled. (Cameron later admitted he didn’t know who the Devil was talking about.) “Even if everyone had the exact same life, just moving through it would be very different from one body to another ,” he said. “You guys really don’t get that at all. People, I mean. In my professional opinion, you all would be I think that’s a huge part of what’s causing so much misery around here. But I don’t wanna get off on a tangent…”

He said that he was here because he’d never been on a roller coaster before. That was what was on today’s checklist. It looked interesting, he said. The nature of the thrill-seeking impulse fascinated him. Not having a fragile animal body with a limbic system that squirted out behavior-altering chemicals to keep him from danger, he didn’t know what would drive someone to deliberately get those chemicals flowing for an addictive rush. So he was finding out. He’d repeat the experiment, of course, in several different bodies, for a good scientific analysis.

He revealed himself to us, he explained, because we’d already gone on most of the park’s roller coasters, and could help him make an informed choice. Also, we had a roller coaster expert in our midst. Rick and his dad were bona fide coasterheads who often took weekend trips to Cedar Point and Six Flags and whatnot, and often spent at least a week or two every summer going to parks further away. They’d easily been on hundreds of coasters. Rick’s license plate even said “RLRCSTR” which, for a long time, I thought spelled “REAL ROCK STAR” which tickled me since Rick was anything but.

Rick took this honor very seriously, as he did most things. He listed off all the coasters we’d been on so far that day, trying to narrow down what the most “typical” roller coaster experience would be for a newbie, ruling out The Mummy Returns for being underground, and Dueling Dragons for being both inverted and a dual-track, and the Woody Woodpecker ride for being too kiddie. The Devil reiterated that he’d never been on a roller coaster before, and would probably be bowled over by even the dinkiest, slowest roller coaster around, but he would defer to Rick’s judgment.

“I think we should do the Hulk coaster,” I said. That was my favorite of the ones we’d been on today.

“That’d probably be a good choice,” Rick said, grudgingly. “Although it’s a launched coaster, and it does accelerate really fast in the beginning, which most coasters don’t do – but other than that it’s really the closest thing to like, your archetypal roller coaster. A good starter.”

The Devil said that sounded good. By this time we’d lost our place in line, and people were streaming past us as we huddled around the railing. The Devil invited us to step right over and offered us seats around the table, then left to go back up to the counter and came back seconds later with drink cups – exactly what each of us were planning on ordering, too. He had a half-finished order of mozzarella sticks in front of him, and he shared the remainder with us as we gratefully sat in the shade and drank up our pops. Then we took off.

It was cool to have the Devil hanging out with us, waiting in line for the Incredible Hulk roller coaster, but also a little intimidating, even though no one around us knew he was the Devil. We all wanted to play it cool, make like we hung out with enemies of humanity every day, but our normal conversations just wouldn’t come, and there was a fizzy feeling of self-consciousness in the air. We tossed short sentences at each other, irruptions of nervous energy that didn’t go anywhere. I kind of wished the Devil would use his powers to make the line to the Incredible Hulk go faster, the way he had with our drinks at the snack bar, but I intuitively understood that he wanted to sit through the line to its full length to get the full experience.

I watched him, in line. He was watching all of us. He watched Rick upbraid Michael about something stupid. He watched Cameron poorly try to conceal his crush on Katie. He didn’t seem to get bored or restless. Everything was new to him – he gazed at everything like he was a very wise baby. I wondered what he saw when he looked at people. Were they just grist for him? Livestock? Future fuel for Hell’s engines? Couldn’t be. He had all sorts of insight into people. I found it hard to believe that he didn’t love humanity on some level.

I watched other people in line with us, the people streaming by in the walkway outside, and I wondered if the Devil could hear all their evil thoughts. I wondered what kind of evil thoughts people would be having in such a happy place. The Devil looked at me and smiled, and just looking at him I knew he was following the train of my wonderings, and assured me, with a particular crinkle of his eye and minute shift of the angle of his shoulders, that these people were indeed having evil thoughts the depth and blackness of which I could scarcely appreciate to hear it, but it was a mistake to believe that was all they were thinking, that it was the nature of those black impulses to twirl themselves around and inside all the lofty and even the banal parts of the mind, lurking in disguise within unexceptional feelings and memories, sunk in so deep you could barely separate one from the other, and maybe wouldn’t want to even if you could, for would you recognize what was left?

Thirty minutes passed. Forty-five. The sun was relentless. I felt the blush of sunburn crawling across my neck and shoulders where my overlarge T-shirt rode down. We finally got on. Every coaster we’d been on that afternoon, Rick said we should try for a car as far back as possible because it whipped and jostled around more – he tried to explain the physics but no one cared. The best we could do this time was the 4th and 5th row back, out of eight. I ended up sitting on the outside left of the 5th car back, with the Devil next to me in the middle-left seat. Cameron, Michael, Rick and Katie were all sitting in front of us.

Because I I’d already been on the ride before and knew what to expect, and because I was seated right next to the Devil, I was in a position to observe him and note what he was going through. I tried to keep it covert – he surely knew what I was doing, and I don’t think he minded, but it was important for my own dignity.

The lift hill was totally enclosed in a tunnel. Green lights flashed on all sides. Thundering sound effects and dialogue portended a gamma-ray experiment about to go wrong. “Everything looks good!” assured an unseen scientist. “I think…I think this time it’s going to work!” I wondered if the Devil knew about the Hulk’s origin story, and thought briefly about explaining it to him, but there was no talking to him over the loudspeakers, and not really any time either, for we were soon gunning forward, accelerating to almost 60 mph before we had even left the tunnel (according to Rick) and going immediately into an upside-down corkscrew upon leaving it, turning us completely around before we got to the bottom of the lift hill. The Devil had not known to tense up his body and it flopped into mine, but he soon steadied himself.

I kept my eyes on the Devil the whole ride, registering his expressions as we banked this way and that, as we corkscrewed, as we went through several loop-the-loops, as we dove into below-ground trenches, one of them built right into a pond or culvert beneath the coaster with water spraying on us from all sides. The Devil was completely stock-still, silent, but not like it wasn’t having an effect on him – on the contrary, it was just sensorially too much for him, he was overwhelmed, he was like a prey animal freezing up in fear, that virginal brainpan just too pink and raw to handle the what was pouring into it. I knew when we went upside down, that new animal body of his was telling him he really was going to fall, and he wasn’t experienced enough to disbelieve it. When we plunged into the water trench, and the Devil was still new enough at breathing that he inhaled some water, I could tell his body was really telling him he was going to drown. It was all the Devil could do to keep upright and conscious. But he did. He was a trooper.

I could tell he wanted to scream. I caught his hand and gave it an encouraging squeeze. I wanted to tell him that he should surrender himself to the feeling, to raise his hands and holler like everyone else was doing – that would help him get the full experience, which I knew was important to him. But I didn’t know how to communicate this to him over the jostling and shouting. It was enough that I started to feel really bad for the guy, and I don’t mind saying that was a weird feeling – but as strong as my empathy was the silent glow of superiority, because I was tougher than the Devil, I wasn’t turning pale or playing possum in my seat, this couldn’t affect me the way it was obviously affecting him. This was the guy I sat awake in bed fearing when I was a kid?

The Devil regained his color quickly after we pulled back into the tunnel. He was cool and collected when the seat guards came up. We asked him if he’d had fun. “I don’t really know what you mean,” he said. “Sure learned a lot, though.”

The Devil gave each of us a boon for helping him have this learning experience. I don’t know what the others got for their boons, and I didn’t really keep in touch with those guys after high school ended. I think Michael might’ve gotten a good season for one of the teams he likes, or some bullshit like that. For my boon, the Devil told me exactly what I needed to do to win Leslie Minburn’s heart forever. He Cyranoed some words into my ear, told me to say them in this order, on these occasions, and I’d clinch her.

And I did it. I had to wait another year, almost till graduation, to do it. That was when he told me it would work. After exchanging maybe ten or fifteen sentences with Leslie in my whole life up to that point, I sprung the Devil’s magic words on her and nabbed her good. We got married right after college, and we have two children together. She’s in the other room watching one of her streaming series as I’m writing this right now.

Nearly twenty years later, and we’re getting on OK. A lot better than a lot of couples at this point, I can tell you that right now. But I look at Leslie a lot, and I see something in her eyes, some sort of mute slow-burn panic. I don’t think she wants to leave me, but she’s not exactly certain why she wants to stay. When conversation turns to our first getting together, our getting married, she talks about those days with an incredulous slackness to her face, like she has no recollection of ever being the woman who made those decisions, and she’s just assuming it made sense at the time, and trying to convince herself that therefore, it still must, because what’s changed?

Not like she’s alone there. How many people in long relationships wonder if they’re just in it through inertia at this point? But what makes things different with Leslie is this nagging sense I pick up from her, that being with me wasn’t really her choice. She was hacked, commandeered, shanghaied into it somehow. The Devil had said, way back when, not to think of it that way. Somewhere in the multiverse there was a timeline where I said all that stuff to her without any prompting, and enjoyed the results. We were just making that timeline this one. It was like playing an RPG when you already knew what dialogue option to select. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t she seem more content? Or am I just imagining all these doubts of hers? Projecting, perhaps?

Well, who among us can say we’re really in control? That we really did make all the decisions we made? We’re all victims of circumstance to some degree. Of all people I know, I have the best claim to say otherwise. I was given a miraculous tool to change my destiny, and I used it. And yet, my getting that tool, my meeting the Devil at Universal Studios that day, was pure chance too. I sure didn’t have any hand in that. So where does the buck really stop?

Regardless of how it happened, I’m married to my literal high school sweetheart. How many people can say that these days? Why would I just give that up? I could say that I love Leslie, that I treat her well, that I’m as good a husband as she could have hoped to have, and we’re relatively happy, and that’s all true (I think so, anyway), but I no longer have the luxury of pretending I didn’t know exactly what I was at the moment I said those magic words. But like the Devil told me, we’re all like that, in some ways or others. We’re just animals in animal bodies, a thousand inborn drives at war in our heads, irreducible to any of them.

I haven’t been on a roller coaster since. They just don’t seem to interest me anymore.