The Dark Side of Disney (21 page)

Good luck explaining this to your kids!

Brain Eating Amoebas. Yes, it sounds like something out of a bad horror movie, that doesn’t make it any less real. Naegleria fowleri is an amoeba that lives in the bottom of lakes and enters your body through the nose, where it hauls ass into the brain and proceeds to feast on your gray matter. Warmer temperatures allow it to replicate more, and it thrives in stagnant, shallow areas of a lake. Which is one of the main reasons why Disney no longer lets you swim in the beaches along Bay Lake, and is also why some think River Country was shut down. In 2007 six people died from the bacteria, and three of those deaths were in Orlando! If a single amoeba is inhaled into the nasal passages it can first cause flu-like symptoms, followed by hallucinations, and finally coma and death in as little as one day. So when the signs on the beach at The Polynesian tell you “No Swimming”, they’re not kidding around!

Naegleria fowleri look pretty, until they’re eating your brain

Chapter 4

Off-Limits Exploration

SNEAKING INTO THE UTILIDORS

It’s your fourth or fifteenth trip to Walt Disney World. You love the place dearly, but by now you’ve gone on all of the rides many times over, explored all of the resorts, and eaten at all of the best restaurants. You’ve even traveled off-site to Universal and Sea World, and maybe even to The Orlando Love Loft. You’ve done it all, and the thought of going back and doing it all again seems a bit boring for an adventurous spirit such as yourself. But yet you’re still drawn to Walt Disney World…. What to do?

This is the spot my friends and I found ourselves in back in the summer of 1995. Three guys who were born and raised in Clearwater, and who had all been to Walt Disney World more times than we could count. Hell, we used to go there on school field trips! Being total geeks, EPCOT was our favorite park, but we loved them all, and combined we’d probably made over 100 trips to
each park
in our lifetimes. It was a second home, and Walt Disney was our cool Uncle. But we were becoming adults, and wanted to rebel against the boredom of safety and false security Uncle Walt had provided us. We were too old to think that “It’s a Small World” was fun, but not yet old enough to enjoy it on a nostalgic level. In short, if we were to keep going back to WDW, something had to give.

And it finally did give, for the better, the summer after our freshman year at college. I’d enrolled at a prestigious private university, purposefully getting out of driving distance from my family in Florida. Newmeyer, a pudgy nerd who’d never touched a girl (much to his dismay), had only reached Atlanta, where he was happily partaking in the social rewards of a veritable geekscapade at Georgia Tech. However, he’d started a disturbing shoplifting habit which at the time seemed harmless and funny, but which would eventually land him in jail. McGeorge, a lanky self-avowed anarchist and social outcast with bad skin, had stayed behind. He’d actually moved closer to The Mouse, going to school at UCF in Orlando. Out of the three of us, he’d changed the most, growing his hair out, drinking a lot, and nearly flunking out of school.

When we got back together in Tampa that summer, it was like no time had passed. We were still the best of friends, and were thrilled to have a few months to hang around each other again. But it seemed as if the outside world
had
changed: our parents were more annoying and demanding, our siblings were more childish, summer jobs were more tedious, and Walt Disney World was… boring. I went a few times that summer with my family, and other than Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, and the cheap thrill of seeing girls losing their bikini tops on the slides at Blizzard Beach, I was bored out of my skull. “RIP, Uncle Walt,” I thought to myself.

The summer went by quickly, though. I had a job as a cart-pusher and bagger at Publix, which I promptly quit after three weeks because the idiot manager insisted cart-pushers wear dark slacks. Any guy who has ever worn dark slacks outside in the humid Florida summer heat knows that you sweat like a pig, and the sweat drips down your back, onto your pants, and quickly forms white rings of dried salt below the band of the pants. Not to mention the soaked armpits on the knit polo shirts we had to wear. Judicious application of Right Guard stopped the stench but still couldn’t stop the actual sweat from soaking your entire body. Sweating like this and going back inside to bag groceries made me look and feel disgusting, and I felt awful touching people’s groceries and trying to be polite when I was desperately in need of an hour-long shower.

So much to my mother’s dismay I quit the grocery store job and started a band with Newmeyer and McGeorge. We played a nonsensical mix of Gershwin, The Beatles, Zappa, and death metal. I was on guitar and vocals, Newmeyer on bass, and McGeorge on drums and keyboards. We played the local coffee shop on the weekends and I made more money each weekend than I’d been making each week at Publix. “Fuck Publix, and fuck my mom for making me get such a bullshit job!” I proclaimed triumphantly. I was in full-on adolescent asshole mode. But things were going great with the band, and we’d each saved up enough money for an end-of-summer trip.

“I don’t want to go to Daytona!” yelled Newmeyer.

“Why not, you dick?” I shouted back.

“Will you two shut the fuck up?” screamed McGeorge, desperately concentrating on trying to download a single pornographic picture from a BBS over a state of the art 14.4K baud modem.

“I’m fat, and everyone will be walking around in bathing suits,” seethed Newmeyer, completely ignoring McGeorge. “I’m not taking my shirt off!”

I sighed. “Sweet Christ. Okay, fine. So no beaches? It’s Florida, dumbass! Where are we going to go where there’s not a beach?”

“Let’s go to Disney,” replied McGeorge, not looking up from his computer. “Fuck! The connection got reset! MOM!!!” He jumped up, opened his door, and started screaming into the hallway, beet red. “DID YOU JUST PICK UP THE PHONE?! I TOLD YOU TO ASK ME BEFORE USING THE PHONE!” He slammed the door. “We’re going to Disney! Now stop your bitching and whining and help me download this porn!”

Newmeyer and I looked at each other and shrugged.

“Really, Disney?” I asked, incredulously. “That sounds a bit boring, McGeorge.”

“No, wait…” started Newmeyer, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s perfect! We can stay at a fleabag motel, get our Florida discount on the tickets, and McGeorge can hook us up with a shit ton of booze through his UCF connections.”

“Yeah,” said McGeorge, not paying any attention to us. “I’m awesome. Porn.”

“I’ve already been there like eighty times this summer with my mom and my sister,” I said, getting a bit desperate. “It was boring! McGeorge!” I yelled, breaking him out his modem-noise induced stupor. “Can you seriously get us booze?”

“Yes, yes, fine,” he wearily replied. Suddenly he jolted back to reality. “Wait, I just remembered something. Check this shit out.”

He cancelled his porn download, and Newmeyer and I gasped. “This must be awesome,” I thought.

After ten minutes of BBS searches, McGeorge connected to a server and downloaded an ASCII map (i.e., a map drawn with text characters, thus taking up significantly less bandwidth than an actual line-based image) of The Utilidors, the secret network of tunnels underneath The Magic Kingdom, restricted to Cast Members only. And so it began….

ASCII map of The Utilidors

We memorized the map, borrowed a video camera from McGeorge’s uncle, and headed up to Kissimmee. McGeorge actually cut his hair and shaved in anticipation of the trip to The Utilidors, knowing that his faux-hippie appearance was totally contrary to “The Disney Look” and would immediately get us singled out from the rest of the Cast Members down there. Newmeyer and I also showed up that morning clean shaven and with our hair more closely cropped than usual.

When we got to the main gate we backtracked until we found the closest motel we could afford, dropped off our suitcases, loaded up our backpacks, and headed out to The Magic Kingdom.

Pulling up to the far right booth of the Main Parking Gate, McGeorge started in on a scam we’d cooked up. “Uh, we’re, uh, here to meet a friend at The Contemporary,” stuttered McGeorge.

The lady at the booth seemed unconvinced. “Name?” she demanded.

“Uh…” McGeorge looked at me. I shrugged. “Uh… Frank… Sinatra?”

“Seriously?” asked the wrinkled booth operator.

“Yeah,” piped up Newmeyer from the backseat. “Friend of the family! Didn’t you know he was staying at The Contemporary this weekend?”

She screamed across to the booth to her left. “Bill! Is Frank Sinatra staying at The Contemporary this weekend?”

“I dunno?” slurred Bill. “Maybe? Yeah, maybe.” He furtively swigged from a flask. “Sinatra!”

We all cheered. Wrinkly Booth Operator pushed a button and the gate lifted. “You boys better be telling the truth!” she exclaimed as we drove off, veering to the left, away from The Contemporary and heading directly for The Magic Kingdom’s parking lot.

“Fuck paying for parking!” I yelled, and we all cheered. This was going to be an awesome trip.

After taking the tram from the lot to the Ticket and Transportation Center, McGeorge and Newmeyer bought their tickets, bitching about the price, but still happy that they’d received a sizeable discount with their Florida IDs. I had a “Four Season Salute” pass, courtesy of my mom.

“Pretty cool that your mom got that for you,” said McGeorge as he shelled out his hard-earned band cash for a ticket.

“Yeah…. It was pretty cool, I guess.” I replied. For the first time that summer I actually had something nice to say about my mother.

We took the Resort Monorail from the Ticket and Transportation Center to the park. I liked seeing The Polynesian and Grand Floridian on the way in, and the line was always significantly shorter for the Resort Monorail than it was for either the ferry or the direct-to-gate monorail. That was the day we found the “hidden dick” on the monorail, a distinctly ball and cock shaped moulding attached to the door hinges. Many obscene pictures would be taken over the years next to these mouldings….