I Pledge Allegiance to Roller Coasters

If I knew anything at thirteen, it was that I was going to love roller coasters forever, that any version of my future where I did not love roller coasters was no real life of mine but a fraud, a changeling, an act of sleight-of-hand. It was a matter of doctrinal importance that I did not simply love roller coasters now, in the present moment, but that I would retain the same love for them, in form and in function, for the rest of my life. Many, perhaps most, thirteen-year-olds are patriotic for roller coasters, in part because thirteen-year-olds are deeply concerned with matters of allegiance, loyalty, and affinity, like emerging city-states. If you had given me a potion, like Tristan and Isolde’s, that guaranteed a lifelong love of roller coasters, I could not have loved them more strongly, nor more gladly.

It was, I suspect, a matter of such importance at least in part because all around me were signs that a lifelong love of roller coasters was not inevitable, that the majority of enthusiastic theme-park goers around me (primarily Knott’s Berry Farm and Six Flags, with occasional Tuesday-night trips to Disneyland in the off-season when things weren’t so busy) were roughly my age, that the majority of bench-sitters waiting for the roller-coaster-riding companions were adults, and that one’s allegiance might be lost or misplaced somewhere in between the two cohorts.

I knew the following things to be true:

• Roller coasters were the distilled essence of life

• More than this — roller coasters were the life-force. To love roller coasters was to live, to not ride roller coasters was to fail to live

• To ride on a roller-coaster was to align oneself with the momentum of joy

• The test pilots in The Right Stuff and the astronauts in Apollo 13 very nearly understood what it felt like to be thirteen and on a roller coaster

• Theirs was the shadow-copy and mine the original, but still, Chuck Yeager and the boys deserved credit

• At some point in the near but not immediate future I was going to become extremely beautiful with no effort or intention on my part

• Say at some point in the next three to six months

• It would be as surprising and yet inevitable as the boy who woke up as a mermaid in the Disney Channel’s My Thirteenth Year

• His name was Chez Starbuck but everyone called him Cody and this was going to happen to me

• This sudden enfleshment of beauty would bestow upon me the kind of psychic power that previously only I had known in secret I possessed; now the world would know it, simply and intuitively, upon sight

• This power would not turn me into a tyrant but would in fact engender a previously-unheard-of force of great and undeniable kindness

• When I rode roller coasters after my great transformation my blue-black hair would whip behind me in a single matching sinusoidal curve

Have you noticed that amusement parks contain more people in love than any other place in the world? You must have, because it’s the truest thing there is. Almost everyone at an amusement park is an absolutely besotted couple, and almost all of those couples wait in line for roller coasters with their hands in one another’s pockets or wrapped tightly around one another’s waists, moving like Plato’s creatures from the Origins of Love in the Speech of Aristophanes. This is because roller coasters are the truest and finest expression of life, and true lovers want to be near roller coasters as befits their mutual excellence and worthiness. To be truly in love is to want to ride a roller coaster with the beloved. At thirteen I wanted to be in love, and I wanted to ride a roller coaster, and therefore I knew that I was good. I was going to love roller coasters forever, and I would never want to wait on a bench for someone else to finish their ride, and I would someday wait patiently in line for a roller coaster with my hands in a set of pockets not my own.

This was all true, even though the last time I rode a roller coaster was in college, and mostly it just made my head hurt, and I thought I probably wasn’t going to want to ride one again. I wasn’t wrong about roller coasters when I was thirteen even though I don’t like them very much now. I simply experienced a sea-change so profound and unexpected that I have now lived as two totally distinct creatures, both entirely alien and unforeseeable to the other, as if I had lived part of my life as a human boy named Cody and part of my life as a mermaid named Chez Starbuck.