Where the Truth Lies (32 page)

We drove past many low buildings with small lawns around them, mostly warehouse-type structures but some two-story offices as well. Vince pulled up to a brick building with a broader front lawn and a sign markedADMINISTRATION AND GUEST SERVICES . Past it, I could easily see the turrets of Sleeping Beauty’s castle and the Matterhorn’s peak. I could also see the backs of the Victorian buildings that commenced the park; Walt Disney, with his admirable attention to detail, had insisted that the rear of the mock buildings be as complete as the front, even though no paying guests would ever see them.

We parked and were greeted by a charming Disney brunette, a stewardess-type whose bright smile evoked “coffee, tea” but no “me.” Her name, on the oval I.D. pin that all Disney staff wore, was Pam. She apologized to Vince, saying that unfortunately she’d been unable to obtain any seating on Royal Street (whatever that meant) because it was closed for the installation of a new ventilation system. However, if we wished, we could have a table held for us at the Blue Bayou on the semiprivate part of the patio. Vince smiled and said, “But the strongest thing in the mint juleps will be the mint, right?” Pam said yes, the only spirits permitted there were those that wandered over from the Haunted Mansion. I tried to picture the manual Pam had studied containing all these answers to oft-asked questions.

She walked us down a long, blue-carpeted corridor where lots of people were typing and filing as if they were in any office in the world. At the end of the short hall was a narrow door, and by it stood a guard who was dressed as a policeman in an O. Henry story. He had a short handlebar mustache that was clearly his own. “Hello, Ken,” said Pam. “Will you show our guests in, please?” I’d thought wewere in.

Ken rapped two short knocks on the door. After a pause, two knocks sounded from the other side. Ken said, “This way, please.” He opened the door just a crack and nodded at a man dressed in a straw hat, a shirt with blue vertical stripes, a white apron, and gray pinstriped pants. Getting a nod from this fellow, who looked like he had been plucked from a barbershop quartet, Ken opened the door wider and indicated that we should step through. We did and found ourselves outdoors. The door shut quickly behind us. The barbershop fellow beamed at us. He was standing behind a tall pushcart of plastic flowers that obscured our view of anything else. “Have a great day in the Magic Kingdom, Mr. Collins, ma’am,” he said. Vince led me around the flower stand, and I immediately saw that we were at the end of a narrow courtyard. I heard horse’s hooves clopping by, the bell of a trolley, and the oscillation of a thousand people. We stepped through the brick-paved area, past an artist in similar period costume seated at a small table. She was busy with black paper and scissors creating a silhouette cameo of a girl dressed in a Partridge Family T-shirt and Ditto jeans for kids. A double-decker bus puttered by and I realized that we were in Main Street USA, halfway along its length, equidistant from the train station by the entrance gates and the circular park out from which all the Disney “lands” radiated. Not since Blanche Sewell, who’d editedThe Wizard of Oz, had spliced from the last frame of Dorothy’s monochromatic house to the Technicolor door into Munchkinland had anyone experienced a more abrupt change of locales. Vince smiled at me and we headed up Main Street, past the Sunkist Citrus House on our left, whose tangy scent of a thousand freshly squeezed oranges seemed appropriate with the California sun high overhead. Vince had donned aviator sunglasses and a beat-up, broad-brimmed cowboy hat he’d brought with him. If you didn’t expect to see him (and who would expect this big swinger at Disneyland?), you’d never have known him.

We stopped in front of the Crystal Palace–styled Carnation Plaza Gardens. There you go. Lanny had taken me to the Szechuan Garden, where the flavors were strange and erotic and hot, so hot that they had at one point literally caused me pain. Vince had brought me somewhere safe, sunny, and soothing, as soothing as Carnation evaporated milk drawn from contented cows and poured over cornflakes. At that moment, I much preferred where I was to where I had been.

We stepped over to the Plaza Park, hub for all the Disney “lands.” Vince smiled at me. “So? Where first?”

“Ummm, Tomorrowland?”

Vince winced enough that I could see it even behind his sunglasses and hat brim. “No, we don’t like tomorrow,” he muttered. I had unintentionally reminded him of the topic we’d be covering the next day.

We decided to go straight to Adventureland, which was as appropriate a destination for me, I would grimly come to realize, as Tomorrowland was for him.

TWENTY-ONE

Our plastic passes got us onto the rides without requiring the pastel-colored A through E coupons, an A coupon at ten cents being good for nothing more than a one-way horse-drawn trolley, double-decker bus, fire wagon, or horseless-carriage ride up or down Main Street, an E coupon at eighty-five cents being required for the most expensive attractions: Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean. More important, we could even bypass the lines when we wanted to. In some cases this could be done subtly: for Pirates, we were walked by a cast member in a buccaneer outfit to where passengers disembarked, and were seated in a just vacated boat before it was floated around to the boarding area. We pulled up to the dock already perched in the prow, and the mere civilians who’d been queued up for an hour enviously wondered who we were to have achieved first-class status while they’d stood on line for economy.

Whatever mindless pleasure Vince was taking in his surroundings, I was taking every bit an equal share. As the day evolved, I realized we were having our own personal prom night. He was the high school quarterback who was also the school rebel. I was, well, I let myself imagine I’d been pinned by Vince. I hadn’t given myself to him yet, and he, being a sensitive rebel, had never pushed the issue. But I knew that someday, when the time was right, it would happen. And I knew it would be wonderful for the both of us.

Vince fired a rifle at the Frontierland shooting gallery and, thanks to the training he’d had for films likeReturn to the Alamo, won me a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. On the Matterhorn, my date put his arm around me just before we skidded hard into the hidden pool, shielding me from the plumes of water that shot into the air upon impact. On the Mad Tea Party ride, my beau spun the center wheel of our baby-blue teacup so that we rotated far more dizzily than I thought possible on such an innocuous-looking attraction. Our motion rivaled the twisted turns of Bel Air. I found myself laughing uncontrollably until after the ride had come to a full and complete stop.

In the Blue Bayou, the restaurant built within the “prologue” of the Pirates of the Caribbean, it is always a perfect, deep blue evening, even at high noon. One sits “outside” on the terrace of a handsome antebellum mansion designed in neo–Ashley Wilkes. Spanish moss clings both to the creamy-white trellises and an immense tree whose boughs reach to the water like drinking straws. The evening sky is full of uncountable stars and the odd comet. The moon fades away behind a cloud and then reappears, this with reassuring regularity. A bullfrog recites his low, sad poem. The placid surface of the Louisiana bayou sloshes as a gator slides sideways off the riverbank. “O Susanna” is picked out slowly on a banjo played by an old man in a shack across the water from our table, where we consume absolutely forgettable food in a memorable setting. We had been placed by the water’s edge, at the best and most private table in the house. Vince sat with his back to the rest of the patrons, and so was able to remove his sunglasses and hat. We watched the boatloads of passengers gliding by in silence, some of them deceived by the languid faux evening around them and the easy glide of their craft. If they had never been this way before, they might be blithely unaware that in a matter of seconds they would enter a dark tunnel and go toppling over the edge of a precipice, borne down by cascading waters. Vince placed his hand over mine at one point, and I turned my hand around so as to cup his hand back. Peggy Sue and Bobby Joe.

I was having a dreamy time with Vince, and I took comfort from its being so different from my day with Lanny. Lanny’s itinerary had been for me to witness him. Eat his food. Hear him sing. Fly his helicopter. Watch his film. Ride his thing. Vince, on the other hand, seemed so eager for things tonot be about him. Whenever we had gone out, we had hardly ever mentioned his career.

And sex was not an issue, because we were definitely not going to have sex until our work was done, and we definitelywere going to have sex upon its completion. What a brainstorm that had been. It gave me (and presumably Vince) an inviolable comfort zone.

As a child, I had savored Christmas Eve more than Christmas itself. I loved to stave off the opening of my presents for as long as possible, ecstatically sitting in their midst, wriggling within the thrill of expectation. I was wonderfully comfortable now with Vince, and every time I looked at him, I saw a continent of Christmas presents, gleaming and unopened in the first light of dawn on December 25.

And today Vince seemed the happiest he’d been since we’d met. The dark rides were particularly enjoyable for him because as we entered them, he could remove his sunglasses and become everybody else. For anywhere from three to seven minutes, he didn’t have to be Vince Collins.

The one time he publicly owned up to his identity that day was, significantly, a moment of openhearted generosity, as you’ll see.

We both liked the Alice in Wonderland ride. But it was very much an orphan in the park. Disney himself had never been totally comfortable with Alice’s story (though not so uncomfortable that he didn’t replace Lewis Carroll’s name with his own in the movie’s opening credits: Walt Disney’sAlice in Wonderland ). The feverish, surrealistic story, with its neurotic cast, centered on a young girl who took unknown medicines without a prescription, passed through mirrors unscathed, ate mushrooms that caused her to change shape, this—how can I put it?—this was not your quintessential Disney girl. A Disney girl did not unquestioningly eat food simply because it was labeledEAT ME or imbibe unidentified liquids just because their bottle advisedDRINK ME .

Perhaps because of this, the ride looked and felt very different from the Fantasyland dark rides that had preceded it: Snow White, Mr. Toad, Peter Pan. Its use of myriad muted pastels glowing under gobs of black light seemed to have anticipated the psychedelic sixties, even though it had been built in the late fifties. You moved more slowly and languorously than on the other rides. Appropriately, your vehicle on this journey was the Caterpillar, whom, we all smugly noted, smoked a water pipe. Not for nothing did we drift pleasantly through Alice’s world of wonderment as if sweetly stoned, gliding upside down across the ceiling and floating through fields of Day-Glo flowers, who hummed fitfully about the golden afternoon.

The ultimate sign that the ride was the troubled child of Disneyland was the value given her by the company. She was a B coupon. Twenty-five cents, two bits, just one notch better than a one-way bus ticket. No other dark ride was a B coupon.

After we got off the ride, we heard an amplified female voice singing. “Who’s that?” I asked Vince. The voice was one moment similar to Astrud Gilberto, then Ella Fitzgerald, then Marianne Faithfull.

“I don’t know,” said Vince. “She’s good, whoever she is.”

We walked a few steps over to an area of tables and chairs that had been cordoned off just outside the Salada Tea concession. Signs standing on the pavement identified this as being the Salada “High Tea” Party. At four o’clock each afternoon you could sit at a table (if you could find one vacant), drink iced tea, and hear live entertainment.

The singing voice we heard was that of Alice herself. Understand that in the world of the Disney theme parks, there are “atmosphere characters” (those who dress up as Mickey, Goofy, Captain Hook) and “face characters” (costumed but unmasked, such as Snow White, Peter Pan, and Alice). The search for a Snow White or Alice was always particularly challenging because the faces of the animated characters had such a very distinctive look. Replicating this in real life couldn’t be done simply by makeup because the face actors had to interact with the crowd from a foot or two away, in bright sunlight. In essence, they had to reallybe Snow White or Alice.

This exquisite, fairer-than-fair Alice was flanked by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who were there both to work the crowd and to dance behind her as she sang songs from the musical score that bore her character’s name.

She was singing my favorite song from that underappreciated score, “I Give Myself Very Good Advice,” in which Alice laments that, while she certainly knows the difference between right and wrong and is able to give herself wise counsel, she tends to ignore her own advice and instead await the moment when something “strange” will begin. And no, it wasnot my favorite in the score because I in any way identified with it. Perish the thought.

A backup band dressed like four playing-card Jacks accompanied this otherworldly Alice who sang in such haunting fashion. She sounded a bit like a folksinger, a Joni Mitchell or a Judy Collins, although her voice transcended any category with its clarity and lilt. I looked at Vince and the crowd that had gathered. They were all listening intently.

And looking. Alice was so breathtakingly lovely that I could not even be jealous; it would have been like being jealous of Bardot when she was discovered by Roger Vadim at seventeen, or of a cave painting on the isle of Minos representing the ideal of youth. Her hair was fine but luxuriant, golden yellow with a rich bounce that had been waved into it. Her face was truly Alice’s face (from the Disney version), unspeakably pretty with a small bow mouth and a dainty nose. As she sang, her lower lip would unknowingly pout a bit and her jaw tremble, not from fear but from her ethereal vibrato. Her eyes were full of white, and where they were watery blue, they were big and accepting. If you were close to her, you’d want to take that face in your hands and search it, trying to find what in its composition made it so exquisite.