PERSONAL WORST "THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH"
Summer, 1962
After getting kicked off the college baseball team and quitting school, I applied for a job at Disneyland, presenting myself as a serious, clean-cut, sunny-natured 19 year old student. I was hired immediately and reported to my custodial manager, Roy, who was around 30, with close-cropped hair, black slacks, white shirt and black tie, a string of keys on his belt and a row of pens in his breast pocket. He issued me a white ice cream-man uniform and black clip-on tie and informed me I was a “sweeper.”
My area was Fantasyland, where I was to sweep up butts and debris with a broom and dust pan. I was to start the next day at 1 o’clock and work until closing, at 10, and have an hour for lunch. “Welcome aboard,” Roy said, appraising me with sly amusement, almost as if he already knew I was a joke.
I attacked my new job with zeal and flair. Disneyland was awash in meticulous immaculateness and gushing wholesomeness and happiness. A smile-fest. There was a snack-bar in Fantasyland run by college girls—cream of the crop. I began spending a majority of my sweeping in this area, drifting off only when I spotted a butt or sprig of debris and jetted across the grounds, niftily skirting recoiling tourists, and, like a dog pouncing on a chased tennis ball, snapped up the filth contaminating Disneyland with a righteous vengeance.
The snack-bar girls began to take notice of my antics between cooking and serving burgers, so I increased my arsenal of entertaining tricks. When the coast was clear of company spies with cameras around necks and guidebook in hands, I swept in dreamy pirouettes, or behind my back, flitting back and forth-like a deranged polo player while they pointed and laughed. When I ordered my burger for lunch, I asked for extra onions and fries in a Marlon Brando southern accent that had them all cackling.
Laughing hardest and seeming to take a shine to me was a twig-thin redhead with snub nose and pert chin and bumps for boobs and a sassy twitch to her narrow hips. Erin. I began to pursue Erin, displaying a keen interest in her while divulging nothing of myself—a strategy I hoped would get me laid. She was a student at Cal State Fullerton, an Orange County girl, wishing to be a social worker.
Meanwhile, Roy had a talk with me. “Dell, we’ve noticed you like to show off. But YOU are not the entertainment, Disneyland is. However, we do like your work ethic and enthusiasm. You’re a valued employee, part of the Disneyland family. We want to work with you and make you a shining example of our company.”
A month into my employment, Roy and I had another man-to-man. “Dell, I realize our girls are attractive. We don’t hire them if they’re not. But you need to meet them at the designated lunch area, and not harass them at their work stations. It does not look good to have our male employees trying to make time when these girls are waiting on our customers, who are our most precious commodity. We’re very, very busy this summer, and you’re distracting them.”
“I understand, Roy.”
“Otherwise, you’re an excellent employee, always positive and upbeat. You know, the Disney company will grow and grow, and, if you continue to progress, you can find a future home with us here.”
To show his confidence, Roy gave me an extra shift and overtime, so that I was working 6 ten hour shifts a week. Every night I witnessed the closing constellation of sizzling, soaring fireworks filling the sky, the tourists oohing and ahhing and snapping photos. Meanwhile, I tried to schedule my lunch break so as to meet Erin, but since she came to work 2 hours later, I had to continue my furtive pursuit while sweeping near the snack-bar.
At the employee lunch area, which consisted of several elongated picnic tables, cliques formed among ride operators, supervisors, general flunkies, and 2 breathtakingly gorgeous girls—Alice In Wonderland and Snow White. Both these girls strolled Disneyland like pied pipers with their entourages and admirers and dwarfs. Alice was a tall lissome blond who’d reportedly modeled and won numerous local beauty contests, while Snow White was a porcelain-skinned, raven-haired knockout who’d also won beauty contests. They were nonstop smilers who waved at and coddled children who’d no doubt seen their likes in Disney animated movies and wanted their pictures taken with them by camera-toting parents. Every male employee at Disneyland knew both girls had handsome boyfriends who drove flashy sports cars, but that didn’t stop the peons from buzzing around them at lunch when they were not chaperoned, embarrassing themselves with nauseating flattery and the lamest of lines. I always ate by myself and hoped they’d notice me ignoring them, which they did not.
But I managed to get a date with Erin. I wanted to take her to the drive-in movie for a mindless horror flick, but she suggested miniature golf, which I found unendurable, so we settled for burgers at Carl’s Jr. followed by the Wax Museum in Buena Park. She lived in an Anaheim suburb and I was relieved I did not have to meet her parents as she came to the door when I pulled up in my dented, cluttered and filthy VW bug. Erin wore tight jeans and a sleeveless jersey as she twitchy-hipped her way to my car, where I held the door open in my best cords and polo shirt.
She changed her mind about Carl’s Jr. because she fried and ate burgers all week long, and, since she didn’t have much of an appetite anyway, I pulled a pint of Southern Comfort from my side panel and offered her a swig. She declined politely. I took a swig, imitating John Wayne. She laughed. At the wax museum we spent a long time gazing at Marilyn Monroe. We discussed her qualities, her appeal, what it was about her that once had, before her death, half the male race panting and almost every female jealous.
“I think it was her voice, the way she talked like this helpless, sexy little girl,” Erin said.
In my best Jimmy Stewart, I said, “I think it’s her walk. Kind of reminds me of you.”
She blushed. We browsed the place another half hour and I told her I had a place I wanted to show her, explaining Jimmy Stewart style how the orange groves were disappearing, the trees too, from housing tracts, but there was a little patch of sycamores and Eucalyptus trees in Garden Grove. We parked under a canopy of trees. I got her to take a nip of the sweet bourbon. I loosened her up with my Cary Grant imitation and got her to giggling. We cuddled. We began kissing. I was an accomplished kisser but so far unsuccessful seducer, but Erin was reacting after another swig of SC. She panted, dug her nails into my back during the second prolonged kiss and I blew in her ear. I realized she was not the kind of girl to fuck me in a filthy, smelly VW full of athletic gear on a first date, but I was so overcome I slithered my hand up under her sweater and wedged a finger and thumb under her loose bra and fondled her nipple. She shrieked and pushed me off with her skinny arms, still panting, mussed, frazzled; placing both hands together over her sparrow chest.
“I…I don’t even know you,” she murmured.
“Yes you do. We visit every day. You like me, don’t you?”
“Yes. You’re so..funny, but…I don’t know anything about you, you know, personally.”
“Well, whattaya wanna know?” I offered her another slug of SC. She shook her head. I took a slug. She made a prissy, disapproving face.
“Are you an....alcoholic?”
“Nah, I’m too young to be an alky—yet.”
“What do you want to…do with your life? Do you have ambition, a dream…do you want a career?”
“Well, right now I’m sort of in limbo. Erin. I’m feeling my way along, weighing my options, trying to find myself. This Disneyland thing, it’s just a stop-gap, until I pursue a more worthwhile profession.”
She sat back, looked at me. “Are you a religious person?”
“Are you?”
“Of course. I’m Catholic. What are you?”
I reached into the back seat and rummaged around until I withdrew 2 books not on my college reading list—“Why I’m not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell, and “Letters From Earth” by Mark Twain. “These are my bibles,” I explained. “They’re atheists. I’m currently an atheist. They started me out as a Jew, but to me Judaism’s like all religions, a bunch of brain-washing hogwash, a way to control people and keep them in the flock, a way of closing off their minds and avoid fun and wallow in guilt. I believe religions cause wars, and intolerance, and they breed a really colossal brand of boredom I can’t endure.”
As I made my speech, realizing there was no longer any hope of my getting laid, much less developing a love affair, I relished watching Erin recoil and shrink against the door, her tender young face filled with repulsion.
“Please take me home,” she said softly.
From this point on, I no longer bought burgers at the Fantasyland Snack bar, as Erin had turned every employee there against me. I ate silently by myself at the lunch tables. One evening I happened into a conversation with one of Snow White’s 7 dwarfs—Grumpy. Snow White and Alice in Wonderland were sitting at a table on the opposite side of the area with 2 exalted ride operators. Grumpy (John), had taken off his heavy rubber uniform and was a sweaty mess. He told me how these uniforms were cumbersome and heavy and the eye slots so narrow that under-sized employees like him were nearly blinded and therefore vulnerable to kids pummeling, pushing, goosing, and pulling at them as they followed Snow White around the park, sprinkling magic. Often they were tripped and laughed at—especially Grumpy, whom children took almost sadistic glee in torturing.
“It’s a 150 degrees under this goddam uniform,” he growled, a 5 footer, but muscular. “I get paid doodly squat to get beaten up by a bunch of obnoxious little beasties. I hate kids. All us dwarfs hate kids. They’re evil. Even that bitch over there, Snow White, she hates kids. Oh, she puts on this big act, smiling all the time, but believe me, she’s one cold-hearted cunt.”
“What about Alice in Wonderland?” I asked hungrily. “What’s the lowdown on that snooty witch?”
“Humpty Dumpty hates her guts. All these beauty queens’ve had their asses kissed all their lives, and that’s why they’ve become heartless bitches. Me, I’m practically a midget, so I’m not even in the game as far as fucking any of these bitches. What I am is a human punching bag. The parents, they think it’s funny, and cute, watching me get the hell beaten out of me every day for eight straight hours! They’re as bad as the kids. I mean, I’m a straight A student, pre med, on the wrestling team, working my way through college at a gig like this, sweating like a pig, dying of dehydration, getting mauled by kids, getting rejected by stuck-up bitches, and all this for coolie wages! People think this is a glamour job, because it’s DIS-NEY-LAND, but it’s the worst job in the park, I’d rather have your job, sweeping up butts.”
John bit into his burger savagely, chewed wildly, swilled some water. “Look at that cunt,” he seethed, as we stared at Snow White, animated as she conversed with a pretty boy operator of the Jungle Cruise. “She’s scheming to be an actress. Got no talent. Goes to Fullerton, like I do. If she wants to be in movies, she’s going to have to fuck every bigwig in the industry, and I’ll bet she’s a cold piece of ass and doesn’t suck dick. Alice is no better. Only way either of “em make it in the movies is getting twisted enough by the powers that be to make porno flicks.”
Though John and I weren’t necessarily friends, we looked forward to meet every evening at the lunch benches to sourly vent our frustrations and exchange toxic tirades that pretty much alienated us from fellow employees, who congregated together in a tight pack as far away from us as possible. Soon word was out of our blustery swinishness. Roy called me in and claimed I was no longer smiling and urged me to smile again. He expressed concern over my future at the park. “I’m not sure you have what it takes to be part of our Disneyland family,” he confessed.
After a while, the spotlessness, the earnestness, the wholesomeness, the forever smiling females with their perfectly sculptured bodies and cutesy-cutesy faces, the general overwhelming happiness of Disneyland and John’s mordant observations and my own gnawing discontent and failure to even fantasize fucking any of these bitches or doing jack-shit with my life, drove me into enlisting in the US Army.
After getting kicked off the college baseball team and quitting school, I applied for a job at Disneyland, presenting myself as a serious, clean-cut, sunny-natured 19 year old student. I was hired immediately and reported to my custodial manager, Roy, who was around 30, with close-cropped hair, black slacks, white shirt and black tie, a string of keys on his belt and a row of pens in his breast pocket. He issued me a white ice cream-man uniform and black clip-on tie and informed me I was a “sweeper.”
My area was Fantasyland, where I was to sweep up butts and debris with a broom and dust pan. I was to start the next day at 1 o’clock and work until closing, at 10, and have an hour for lunch. “Welcome aboard,” Roy said, appraising me with sly amusement, almost as if he already knew I was a joke.
I attacked my new job with zeal and flair. Disneyland was awash in meticulous immaculateness and gushing wholesomeness and happiness. A smile-fest. There was a snack-bar in Fantasyland run by college girls—cream of the crop. I began spending a majority of my sweeping in this area, drifting off only when I spotted a butt or sprig of debris and jetted across the grounds, niftily skirting recoiling tourists, and, like a dog pouncing on a chased tennis ball, snapped up the filth contaminating Disneyland with a righteous vengeance.
The snack-bar girls began to take notice of my antics between cooking and serving burgers, so I increased my arsenal of entertaining tricks. When the coast was clear of company spies with cameras around necks and guidebook in hands, I swept in dreamy pirouettes, or behind my back, flitting back and forth-like a deranged polo player while they pointed and laughed. When I ordered my burger for lunch, I asked for extra onions and fries in a Marlon Brando southern accent that had them all cackling.
Laughing hardest and seeming to take a shine to me was a twig-thin redhead with snub nose and pert chin and bumps for boobs and a sassy twitch to her narrow hips. Erin. I began to pursue Erin, displaying a keen interest in her while divulging nothing of myself—a strategy I hoped would get me laid. She was a student at Cal State Fullerton, an Orange County girl, wishing to be a social worker.
Meanwhile, Roy had a talk with me. “Dell, we’ve noticed you like to show off. But YOU are not the entertainment, Disneyland is. However, we do like your work ethic and enthusiasm. You’re a valued employee, part of the Disneyland family. We want to work with you and make you a shining example of our company.”
A month into my employment, Roy and I had another man-to-man. “Dell, I realize our girls are attractive. We don’t hire them if they’re not. But you need to meet them at the designated lunch area, and not harass them at their work stations. It does not look good to have our male employees trying to make time when these girls are waiting on our customers, who are our most precious commodity. We’re very, very busy this summer, and you’re distracting them.”
“I understand, Roy.”
“Otherwise, you’re an excellent employee, always positive and upbeat. You know, the Disney company will grow and grow, and, if you continue to progress, you can find a future home with us here.”
To show his confidence, Roy gave me an extra shift and overtime, so that I was working 6 ten hour shifts a week. Every night I witnessed the closing constellation of sizzling, soaring fireworks filling the sky, the tourists oohing and ahhing and snapping photos. Meanwhile, I tried to schedule my lunch break so as to meet Erin, but since she came to work 2 hours later, I had to continue my furtive pursuit while sweeping near the snack-bar.
At the employee lunch area, which consisted of several elongated picnic tables, cliques formed among ride operators, supervisors, general flunkies, and 2 breathtakingly gorgeous girls—Alice In Wonderland and Snow White. Both these girls strolled Disneyland like pied pipers with their entourages and admirers and dwarfs. Alice was a tall lissome blond who’d reportedly modeled and won numerous local beauty contests, while Snow White was a porcelain-skinned, raven-haired knockout who’d also won beauty contests. They were nonstop smilers who waved at and coddled children who’d no doubt seen their likes in Disney animated movies and wanted their pictures taken with them by camera-toting parents. Every male employee at Disneyland knew both girls had handsome boyfriends who drove flashy sports cars, but that didn’t stop the peons from buzzing around them at lunch when they were not chaperoned, embarrassing themselves with nauseating flattery and the lamest of lines. I always ate by myself and hoped they’d notice me ignoring them, which they did not.
But I managed to get a date with Erin. I wanted to take her to the drive-in movie for a mindless horror flick, but she suggested miniature golf, which I found unendurable, so we settled for burgers at Carl’s Jr. followed by the Wax Museum in Buena Park. She lived in an Anaheim suburb and I was relieved I did not have to meet her parents as she came to the door when I pulled up in my dented, cluttered and filthy VW bug. Erin wore tight jeans and a sleeveless jersey as she twitchy-hipped her way to my car, where I held the door open in my best cords and polo shirt.
She changed her mind about Carl’s Jr. because she fried and ate burgers all week long, and, since she didn’t have much of an appetite anyway, I pulled a pint of Southern Comfort from my side panel and offered her a swig. She declined politely. I took a swig, imitating John Wayne. She laughed. At the wax museum we spent a long time gazing at Marilyn Monroe. We discussed her qualities, her appeal, what it was about her that once had, before her death, half the male race panting and almost every female jealous.
“I think it was her voice, the way she talked like this helpless, sexy little girl,” Erin said.
In my best Jimmy Stewart, I said, “I think it’s her walk. Kind of reminds me of you.”
She blushed. We browsed the place another half hour and I told her I had a place I wanted to show her, explaining Jimmy Stewart style how the orange groves were disappearing, the trees too, from housing tracts, but there was a little patch of sycamores and Eucalyptus trees in Garden Grove. We parked under a canopy of trees. I got her to take a nip of the sweet bourbon. I loosened her up with my Cary Grant imitation and got her to giggling. We cuddled. We began kissing. I was an accomplished kisser but so far unsuccessful seducer, but Erin was reacting after another swig of SC. She panted, dug her nails into my back during the second prolonged kiss and I blew in her ear. I realized she was not the kind of girl to fuck me in a filthy, smelly VW full of athletic gear on a first date, but I was so overcome I slithered my hand up under her sweater and wedged a finger and thumb under her loose bra and fondled her nipple. She shrieked and pushed me off with her skinny arms, still panting, mussed, frazzled; placing both hands together over her sparrow chest.
“I…I don’t even know you,” she murmured.
“Yes you do. We visit every day. You like me, don’t you?”
“Yes. You’re so..funny, but…I don’t know anything about you, you know, personally.”
“Well, whattaya wanna know?” I offered her another slug of SC. She shook her head. I took a slug. She made a prissy, disapproving face.
“Are you an....alcoholic?”
“Nah, I’m too young to be an alky—yet.”
“What do you want to…do with your life? Do you have ambition, a dream…do you want a career?”
“Well, right now I’m sort of in limbo. Erin. I’m feeling my way along, weighing my options, trying to find myself. This Disneyland thing, it’s just a stop-gap, until I pursue a more worthwhile profession.”
She sat back, looked at me. “Are you a religious person?”
“Are you?”
“Of course. I’m Catholic. What are you?”
I reached into the back seat and rummaged around until I withdrew 2 books not on my college reading list—“Why I’m not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell, and “Letters From Earth” by Mark Twain. “These are my bibles,” I explained. “They’re atheists. I’m currently an atheist. They started me out as a Jew, but to me Judaism’s like all religions, a bunch of brain-washing hogwash, a way to control people and keep them in the flock, a way of closing off their minds and avoid fun and wallow in guilt. I believe religions cause wars, and intolerance, and they breed a really colossal brand of boredom I can’t endure.”
As I made my speech, realizing there was no longer any hope of my getting laid, much less developing a love affair, I relished watching Erin recoil and shrink against the door, her tender young face filled with repulsion.
“Please take me home,” she said softly.
From this point on, I no longer bought burgers at the Fantasyland Snack bar, as Erin had turned every employee there against me. I ate silently by myself at the lunch tables. One evening I happened into a conversation with one of Snow White’s 7 dwarfs—Grumpy. Snow White and Alice in Wonderland were sitting at a table on the opposite side of the area with 2 exalted ride operators. Grumpy (John), had taken off his heavy rubber uniform and was a sweaty mess. He told me how these uniforms were cumbersome and heavy and the eye slots so narrow that under-sized employees like him were nearly blinded and therefore vulnerable to kids pummeling, pushing, goosing, and pulling at them as they followed Snow White around the park, sprinkling magic. Often they were tripped and laughed at—especially Grumpy, whom children took almost sadistic glee in torturing.
“It’s a 150 degrees under this goddam uniform,” he growled, a 5 footer, but muscular. “I get paid doodly squat to get beaten up by a bunch of obnoxious little beasties. I hate kids. All us dwarfs hate kids. They’re evil. Even that bitch over there, Snow White, she hates kids. Oh, she puts on this big act, smiling all the time, but believe me, she’s one cold-hearted cunt.”
“What about Alice in Wonderland?” I asked hungrily. “What’s the lowdown on that snooty witch?”
“Humpty Dumpty hates her guts. All these beauty queens’ve had their asses kissed all their lives, and that’s why they’ve become heartless bitches. Me, I’m practically a midget, so I’m not even in the game as far as fucking any of these bitches. What I am is a human punching bag. The parents, they think it’s funny, and cute, watching me get the hell beaten out of me every day for eight straight hours! They’re as bad as the kids. I mean, I’m a straight A student, pre med, on the wrestling team, working my way through college at a gig like this, sweating like a pig, dying of dehydration, getting mauled by kids, getting rejected by stuck-up bitches, and all this for coolie wages! People think this is a glamour job, because it’s DIS-NEY-LAND, but it’s the worst job in the park, I’d rather have your job, sweeping up butts.”
John bit into his burger savagely, chewed wildly, swilled some water. “Look at that cunt,” he seethed, as we stared at Snow White, animated as she conversed with a pretty boy operator of the Jungle Cruise. “She’s scheming to be an actress. Got no talent. Goes to Fullerton, like I do. If she wants to be in movies, she’s going to have to fuck every bigwig in the industry, and I’ll bet she’s a cold piece of ass and doesn’t suck dick. Alice is no better. Only way either of “em make it in the movies is getting twisted enough by the powers that be to make porno flicks.”
Though John and I weren’t necessarily friends, we looked forward to meet every evening at the lunch benches to sourly vent our frustrations and exchange toxic tirades that pretty much alienated us from fellow employees, who congregated together in a tight pack as far away from us as possible. Soon word was out of our blustery swinishness. Roy called me in and claimed I was no longer smiling and urged me to smile again. He expressed concern over my future at the park. “I’m not sure you have what it takes to be part of our Disneyland family,” he confessed.
After a while, the spotlessness, the earnestness, the wholesomeness, the forever smiling females with their perfectly sculptured bodies and cutesy-cutesy faces, the general overwhelming happiness of Disneyland and John’s mordant observations and my own gnawing discontent and failure to even fantasize fucking any of these bitches or doing jack-shit with my life, drove me into enlisting in the US Army.
