Only employees with vaguely Persian features work at Aladdin’s cafe, only pert white teenage girls work at Storybook Land. There is never a black Cinderella and never a blonde Princess Jasmine. The fact that small children who love these characters wouldn’t care if Cinderella was black isn’t important. Neither is the fact that the enduring characters like Mickey Mouse aren’t even human. These carefully drawn dividing lines are part of the precision, the vision, the idea—the ideal.
AS I HANG in an open car on a slim cable above the park, as the Matterhorn bobsled begins its clackety climb, as we shoot down into the dark humidity of the Pirates of the Caribbean, I imagine disaster. I see its possibility in every bolt and cotter pin. There is regular disaster planning, but rarely any kind of disaster here, and those are small, individual, human-sized ones. Occasional heart attacks whisked quickly away by ambulance, purse-snatchings, epileptic fits, sprained ankles. There have been only a few well-publicized deaths, like that of a woman who stood up on the Matterhorn and fell. In the mid-1980s an employee took a shortcut through the Carousel of Progress and, in a monumentally ironic moment, was crushed by the machinery like Charlie Chaplin in the assembly line. Murders, suicides, fires seem not to exist inside the walls. Even Los Angeles’s almost-yearly earthquakes have never damaged Disneyland. Now and then a ride stalls. When Splash Mountain first opened it broke down at least once a week, requiring the smiling, cheerful employees to walk passengers out through the emergency exits, hidden inside giant bumblebee hives and behind fat talking bears.
If Los Angeles is anarchy, then Disneyland is fascism. And like Los Angeles, Disneyland seems an impossible, post-apocalyptic place at times. Suddenly I see the enormous potential for political action here. But again, hardly any such thing ever happens. The most memorable event was in 1970, when a band of Yippies took over Tom Sawyer Island and raised the Communist flag over the fort. As we ride through the Small World (“It’s a small world, after all! It’s a small world, after all!”) I imagine Native Americans climbing out of the boats to stand in defiance inside the mechanical doll displays. (“It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears!”) I imagine drag queens lining up with the auctioned women in Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Panthers joining the headhunters on the Jungle Cruise. I have visions of sabotage, terrorism, the unspeakable heresies possible here. I imagine vandalizing Tinkerbell’s harness. Something truly big and daring. Yet the most dramatic thing I saw was a series of out of order signs taped to trees. Finally, I call the Disneyland publicity department and ask about terrorism. The P.R. man I talk to seems surprised at the idea. “That’s not why people come to Disneyland,” he says.
AND THEN I find myself sliding effortlessly, and in fact involuntarily, unwillingly, back into bliss, riding the steam train around the park. I am breathless at the elaborate fireworks. I get misty-eyed listening to a robot of Abe Lincoln talk about healing. We eat lunch at the Blue Bayou, a pseudo-Cajun restaurant perched inside the Pirates of the Caribbean, under a moonlit, starry New Orleans sky, cooled by light breezes, listening to the locusts. My daughter meets Mickey Mouse for the first time.
Outside the park is a messy, blurred world. Inside one finds only clear boundaries and distinct expectations. This vision, this hope, that such a world as this could be is promulgated so well and so deeply that for moments—sterling, distinct moments, Magic Moments—our very lives seem safe and free. A true generosity fills the heart, we are joined in a community without threat. We wait our turn. We smile at the child who waits restlessly beside us.
My brother remembers, with a surprising intensity, his first visit to Disneyland at the age of twelve. He had all the world in his hands that day, and he spent all its hours on Tom Sawyer Island, chasing other whooping, wild twelve-year-olds through a fantasy of pure girl- and boyhood. When he told me this, I thought about how different twelve-year-olds are these days. But perhaps, for a time on Tom Sawyer Island, even now they’re all the same.
Kids’ Stuff, Left Bank #6, 1993
Left Bank was a terrific small press in Portland. This was written for a collection called Kids’ Stuff. I took the opportunity to express my ambivalence about Disneyland. It’s a place I still find hard to resist, even knowing as much as I know now, which is far too much.
Meat
I WENT TO THE BUTCHER’S SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK AS a child. Meat was always in my life. The butcher shop was just down the street from our house, past the old, squat Carnegie Library, the Elks Club, the Groceteria, the bakery, and the big stucco fire department with its long driveway. I loved the Meat Market best; it was orderly, with the hushed front room encased in windows. The floor was golden oak, shiny and clean, facing a horseshoe of white metal display cases curving away like the fabric of space. The air held the scent of clean skin.
I would lay my hot cheeks against the cool glass and gaze at the meat inside: flaccid steaks, roasts, and sausages in neat rows like tile or shingles laid atop each other in patterns of soft red, pink, and maroon. I knew the textures—they were my textures. I liked to examine the down on my legs, the way the irises of my eyes opened and closed when I turned the light above the bathroom mirror off and on, the intricate maze of my belly button. I pulled scabs off and chewed them, and licked the ooze that followed. The rump roast in the glass case made a delicate curve, the curve of my own pliable buttocks. Me, but not me.
I was an inscrutable child, I think; a puzzle to my mother, who had had a girl’s youth of starch and oxfords. I threw off the nice things she wrapped around me. My feet are still hard and rough, jerkied from the dry days spent wandering my little town, dashing over the softened asphalt in summer, wrapped in hardy boots in the cold.
On panting summer days the basement beckoned, crowded and lifeless, the air cool, musty, and dim after the glazed sunlight. No one would find me there, if anyone cared to look. Most of the small basement was filled with a freezer, which my mother, one in a long line of carefully organized women, kept always filled as a hedge against catastrophe. (Distantly, my mother’s voice at the top of the stairs: “Shut the freezer!”—trailing off into words I didn’t bother to hear.) Its heavy white lid seemed to lift from the stiff latch with relief, and swing up so that a waft of the freezer’s queer fog blew in my face. My taut, tanned skin could breathe in the damp. There was often a whole side of beef in the freezer at a time, broken up among the TV dinners and the quarts of bean soup and the ice cream. Each cut was wrapped in white freezer paper and labeled with a red wax crayon in strange abbreviations: “FLK STK 4 #” and “P CHOPS – 6.” The irregular, heavy packets sat in the cold trough like a haphazard pile of white rocks littered with food.
The ancient grass skirt my father had brought home from the war hung on one wall, its clackety tendrils yellow with age. He kept a safe there, too, tucked inside a rough cavity torn by hammers from the cement foundation. Here were the dusty boxes of Christmas tree lights, the empty jam jars, a bike frame, a trunk, the lethal table saw I was never to touch. My silences were sometimes the silence of the lost, the wandering, but they could be deliberate and ungiving, too. I would lean on a post beside the freezer and fade half away from the world gazing at my father’s old toy train, wrecked against a tiny hillside.
THERE WAS NEVER a meal without meat; every afternoon the house filled with the scents of frying oil and roasting flesh. The long dining table leaned toward my father’s end, anticipating the heavy cuts on the platter beside him—the pot roast, the round roast beef, the piles of rust-colored chops dripping juice. He carved. At Thanksgiving he leaned over the enormous turkey to get a good purchase, the double blades of the electric carving knife slicing in a noisy blur. When he lost his temper at the table, voices suddenly raised, a hand out to swat, to knock aside a complaining child, he forgot the knife sometimes, holding it out in front like a Samurai as he bellowed at us three children. On quiet nights we squabbled for drumsticks, thick hamburger patties, the fatty end of the roast. I always had the chicken’s back with its fat, heart-shaped
tail that my grandmother called the pope’s nose, and when we were done our plates were littered with the rags of bones.
My father was a volunteer fireman; it was his one great victory. Like all the firemen, he had a closed-circuit radio with its own codes and shrill calls, so we could follow the progress and crises of each fire from a distance. The town had a siren for everyone else, and its long whooing call was as sweet as the coo of a dove to me. Every few weeks, the alarm would sound during dinner, and he would move so fast, so instinctively, that time seemed to stand still: the knife or fork or bite of food falls to the table, his chair scrapes back along the floor, we children scoot close to the table out of his way as he thunders past, “Goddammit!” trailing him out the back door, the door slams, and seconds later his pickup roars out of the driveway. My mother listens to the radio, we go get our books, because when my dad is gone my mother lets us read at the table. Afterward, she takes us to the Richmaid for ice cream.
Buying meat was like this every time: I am with my mother, an efficient, plain woman with the smell of academics around her. She much preferred reading to cooking, but she cooked every day. The butcher, Mr. Bryan, is my father’s best friend. He stands behind the counter, a tall jolly man with a hard round stomach covered in a white apron streaked with blood. He has saved his best meat for my mother, kept it apart for her inspection: a pot roast, a particular steak, perhaps giblets saved for her special dressing, the hard nubbins of chicken hearts and kidneys, the tiny livers purple-red like gems in his palm.
Now and then Mr. Bryan went to the back of the store and brought my mother something really special: a whole beef heart, balanced like a waxy pyramid on his hands, or a cow’s tongue, one of my favorite things. Sometimes I would come into the kitchen in the middle of the morning and find a tongue set out waiting for the pot, an enormous apostrophe of flesh covered in pale papillae. Tongue takes forever to cook, boiling for many hours on the stove, and it filled the kitchen with a tender mist and steamed the windows gray. When it was done, my mother sliced the tongue as soft as angel cake into thin, delicious strips unlike anything else, melting, perfumed. When all the rest of the world wouldn’t bend, flesh would bend. That was what flesh was.
Mr. Bryan spreads his hands full of meat on stiff wax paper out to my mother, as though making an offering, and at her nod lays the flesh upon the scale. Together, with hardly a word, they watch the red needle pass, the delicate cross-hatch of numbers, roll up, linger, stop; he murmurs the price, which goes into a monthly account book, and wraps the meat in careful white bundles, along with a pile of bones for our dog.
I wait, and smell the blood rising from the sawdust spread across the floor behind the counter.
“I’ve got something for you.” Mr. Bryan has a little bottle-brush mustache, a Hitler mustache, coarse and black. He leans over the counter and holds out his two huge hands in fists, his hairy hands and big round sausage fingers hiding a surprise. His arms are like my father’s arms, thick and powerful and tanned dark brown, his hands are my father’s hands, workmen’s hands, and he waggles them in front of me like a magician.
Abracadabra! I grab for the wiener he has hidden: “Which finger do you want?” he laughs with a big Santa Claus belly laugh, the sausage balanced in his knuckles. I laugh politely, too, and finally grab it and retire silently to a corner. The sphincter on each end is like my old aunt’s mouth I am sometimes forced to kiss, a dark center with radioles of pinched wrinkles. Inch by inch, beginning here, I peel the shiny pink skin off with my teeth. I eat the spongy mulch slowly, sucking its sweet and salty juices like a popsicle, transfixed by the window, watching the steady, slow passage of people outside in the glare.
SOMETIMES I WOULD do little errands with my father. He was a weary man, infinitely restless. He always went through back doors, never the front, and so I learned to walk in like I belonged everywhere: the hardware store where I could plunge my arms up to the elbow in bins of nails, letting the sharp edges bite a little, and the sporting goods store where I could study the rows of staring animal heads that circled the room, and the Elks Club, and the lumber yard. Then he’d have another snort, and get back in his old pickup and drive two blocks to the next brief chat, the next chore.
My father liked foods no one else in the family ate. He made his own rich soups, his own jerky. He liked the gifts of game my grandfather would bestow at times, the big cuts of purplish venison, the whole ducks with their peculiar, wild taste. He liked tripe, fresh jalapeno peppers, horseradish, Limburger and feta cheese, Rocky Mountain oysters: foods strong and biting, with a certain presence, foods unmistakably here. I was the only one who’d share his little treats with him, and this strange intimacy bound us across the table when nothing else held us near. The two of us sitting alone at the big dining table with a pot of steamed clams between us and little bowls of melted butter, shucking the sweet tidbits out with a clatter of forks. For him I ate what only he would eat, the far corners of flesh: pickled pigs feet, elk, brains, sweetmeats. I was proud to eat these things. It made me less a daughter, and more a son.
With my father it was this: he parks his truck in the alley and we enter the Meat Market through the unmarked alley door. The floor in the back of the market is gritty with fine yellow sawdust, streaked with blood; it grips my shoes like flypaper and piles up along the walls in little drifts. On the tables, the big block tables too heavy to move, knives and saws, pikes and hooks striped with blood. A slab of beef hangs in the hall, ready to be sliced into the day’s steaks, and while the men talk over my head I sidle up close beside it, sniffing its fragrance, stroking its soft, waxy fat. I don’t listen to the men because I know they won’t say anything important.
At the very back of the Meat Market is the walk-in freezer, behind a huge shiny door with a silver handle as big as a car jack. One of the assistant butchers steps past me and opens it, and a breath of moist air escapes like a faint snow, almost maternal. Inside in the dim light I can see the rows of beef sides, pierced by huge hooks, the ribs bumpy and the fat dangling. There are yellow chickens hung like underwear on a line, and whole gutted pigs with giant snouts.
I know what this means now, these dead by the hundreds and thousands that haunted my days. I saw the carcasses, the knives, I licked the blood off my fingertips. But then I was very young. The world was solid, the world was what it was, and nothing more. It had no ghosts, no God. No dead pigs and trussed chickens, just the meat my mother cooked for supper while my father ducked out back for a quick drink before we ate. I watch the man walk among these objects hanging in the frigid air, brushing them gently with his shoulder so they sway a little in the breeze of his passing, and I wait for the quiet conversation of the smiling men to end, and hope Mr. Bryan will give me a wiener.
MR. BRYAN, OF course, was a fireman, like all my father’s friends, and his kids were fire brats like me and sat beside me on the fussy rows of hose when we rode the trucks in the parades. The fire department turned a hundred years old the day before I was born, and by then my father had been fighting fires for years.
Now and then I was taken to the fire department on one of my father’s little errands, entered its high ceilings and its echoes and wandered among the stately, patient trucks. I could peek underneath them, and examine the long rows of turnout clothes, stiff rubberized overalls and Wellington boots smelling of oil and smoke. I loved fires and their pure destruction, I loved the prescribed movements of ritual and chaos that were the same every time. For years I wanted to be either a nun or a fireman, and the fact that I was neither a Catholic nor a man didn’t bother me. I just trailed after the firemen whenever I could. I often could—I was very free to come and go, and willing to walk miles if need be to find the circled trucks and milling men, to come in close beside the whirling lights and listen to the urgent, murmured voices and the dashing spray of foamy water, hissing down into the heat.
In late August, when the afternoons were close with heat, the fire department had a barbecue for the families
. Mr. Bryan provided the meat and the huge steaming barbecue grill with its electric spit. We all gathered in the farthest corner of the big city park near my home, where the shade was thick and cool, and you could hear the thwack of tennis balls from the nearby courts. The men stood around in small clumps, holding beers, laughing, basting the huge joint of beef. The spit turned heavily with a fluctuating whir, and the juice dribbled off the blackened flesh and landed spitting in the coals.
It was forbidden to drink in the park, but the firemen did it; even some of the firemen’s wives, like Mrs. Bryan, whom I always thought a little notorious and outspoken. My mother just smoked, one cigarette after the other, leaning forward over a picnic table to make a point to one of her friends, another fireman’s wife. I climbed a nearby pine tree and spread myself around the trunk, hidden in its needles, and practiced saying out loud the unsavory insults I learned from my peers. They were mostly flesh words, skin-and-bone words, animal words: Chicken shit. Wienie. Horse’s ass. And later, the rest of the flesh, all that was sliced off at the butcher’s when we weren’t looking: Prick. Pussy. Cunt.
When Mr. Bryan pronounced the beef ready, with his deep and hearty chortle, I quickly slid out of the tree and lined up to eat. I held out my plate for a gentle slab of rare meat cut very thin, the pink juices draining through the thin paper plate onto my hand. I added sweet baked beans, potato salad, garlicky French bread, and chocolate cake, and begged my mother for one more soda, just one more. The smoke swirled around and around my head.
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