When I was the commander of the 508th Maintenance Detachment at Fort Lewis, Washington, my parents and my brother Craig and his wife came out to visit me during the last week of August 1986. I previously posted about the fact that my parents never had any intention of visiting me. They had taken one look at me and they had passed judgment. Caused by my previously mentioned dark brown tan gained during a recent deployment to Central America. Apparently I was too dark to be related to them. But I knew that time was on my side. Sooner or later, the dark tan would wear off and I would be my normal self again. Of course, that wouldn’t happen while my folks were here for their vacation. But that was their tough luck, not mine. Sooner or later, my aunt Pearl would also get sick and tired of my old man’s shit or my old man would get sick and tired of my aunt Pearl’s brand of hospitality. I don’t know what brand of hospitality that was. But believe me, it wasn’t worth a shit. If you tried to peddle her hospitality at a flea market, you wouldn’t be able to get five cents for any of it. Hell, you’d be lucky if it only cost you $10 or $15 to get somebody to take it off of your hands. Just a couple of days later, my phone rang like a sign from above. My old man was on the other end and he asked if I was ready to take that trip up to the world’s fair. Perhaps the love affair between him and my aunt Pearl had finally ended. I was wondering how long it would take. There is a finite limit to the absolute amount of “cheap” that one person will accept before he or she draws a line in the sand and says, “enough is enough.” For those of you that are not familiar with “cheap” as a measure of some character value or flaw, “cheap” is simply a measure of how miserly or stingy or pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge-like a person is or strives to be. Notice that the measure is taken against the pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge persona. There are no caveats when it comes to the pre-ghost Ebenezer Scrooge. That means you would have to go all the way back to before that bastard ever met the ghost of Christmas past. Cuz I believe that the ghost of Christmas past is the first chain clanging sonofabitch that old penny-pinching bastard ran into, or dreamed about or got haunted by, whatever you prefer to believe. The point is that “cheap” is measured against old Ebenezer in his prime. Now you know how to set the scale. Like I said, there is an absolute limit to the amount of “cheap” that any one person will accept before said person draws a line in the sand and says enough is enough. You can bet your biffy on that. So, if I were a betting man, I would have put every last dollar to my name down on a bet that a phone call from my old man would occur less than a week after my brother Craig and I had toured the Olympia brewery. And I was right. When the phone call came, I told my brother Craig that we probably wouldn’t make it to the Rainier brewery before going to the world’s fair. Again, I was right. We left just two days after that phone call. My parents, my brother Craig and his wife, and my family and I all left my house at 4:00 AM to drive to Vancouver, British Columbia. My brother Craig and I took turns driving. Once we got to the world’s fair, we spent the first few hours looking at exhibits from various countries. Some obvious ones to visit were the exhibit from the United States and Canada. But my folks also wanted to see the Korean exhibit because that was where my wife was from. We also looked at other countries’ exhibits of interest throughout the park. Then, we ate lunch and rested for a while. After that, my mom, Craig’s wife, and my wife took Wright Junior to ride on some infant rides and concessions. They told me and Craig to take my daughter and entertain her and to keep my old man busy. However, my old man had other ideas. He wanted to hang around with the women. What in the hell was up with that? The first ride, if you can call it that, that we came up to was a ride called the Minolta Space Tower. The Minolta Space Tower was modelled on parachute drop rides at other amusement parks, most notably the 1939 NYC World’s Fair. Now, this ride isn’t what you might be envisioning in your mind. You weren’t strapped to a parachute that was then lifted into the air similar to the parachute towers at the Airborne School at Fort Benning. Rather, there was a basket fastened to a cylindrical umbrella, which together comprised a “two-person” capsule. There were twelve of these “two-person” capsules suspended in a circle around a central observation deck. The central observation deck was an enclosed observation deck that slowly rotated as it rose up a central cylindrical pole. It gave its passengers a panoramic view of Expo 86, Downtown Vancouver, and the poor bastards riding in the satellite two-person capsules. Granted, the passengers in the observation deck caught only fleeting glimpses of the poor suckers riding in the two-person capsules on the way up and on the way down depending on where the observation deck was in its ascent or descent. My brother Craig and I were walking by the Minolta Space Tower and moving toward the roller coaster, aptly called The Scream Machine, when my daughter started shouting and screaming that she wanted to ride on the Minolta Space Tower. She was too short and too young to get on the ride, so we told her she couldn’t ride it. Then, she started to cry. We said what the hell and gave it a shot. When we got over to the entrance, my brother Craig held one arm, and I held the other arm of my daughter, and we begged the ride operator to let her go on the ride with us. He did. Big mistake. As soon as our two-person capsule got to the top of the ride and I lifted my daughter up so she could see out, she started screaming that she wanted to get off. Well, it’s kinda hard to get off of a ride when you’re a few hundred feet in the air. Cuz that first step is one helluva drop. Then, it felt like the bottom fell out of our basket. My daughter hit the floor and screamed the whole way down. She screamed over and over that she wanted to get off. And then we were off of the ride. And as soon as her feet touched the ground, she grabbed my hand and started running for the entrance line again. I asked her what in the hell she was doing. Just a few seconds ago, she had been screaming her head off to get off of the ride. Now, she wanted to get back on. So, we went again. After we went on the ride for the second time, we were all hooked. We must have ridden that damn ride at least 20 or 30 times. Then, we finally moved to The Scream Machine. After my daughter, my brother Craig and I finished riding the scream machine for a fifth time, we ran into my old man by sheer luck. We tried to talk him into going on the Minolta Space Tower with us. But he wasn’t having any of it. He said that he and my mom had ridden up to the top of the Minolta Space Tower in the observation deck, and he had seen the faces of the poor bastards standing in the baskets at the top when their baskets dropped, and the bottom fell out from underneath them. He said that there was no way in hell that we were getting him onto that ride. We did manage to talk him into a spin on The Scream Machine. But I don’t know what actually got to him about that ride. It might have been the corkscrew or the sidewinder or possibly even the 360-degree vertical loop. Perhaps it was the unbridled maximum speed of 55 miles an hour. Whatever it was, we couldn’t drag him on The Scream Machine more than once. What in the hell was wrong with him? My six-year-old daughter was way more willing to give the ride a go. We eased up on my old man for a while so that he could take my mom on the carousel. There was a ride called the Gyrosphere that neither my brother nor I were brave enough to try. That ride made about half the people that tried to ride it blow their lunch. Upchuck-a-wucca. The old heave-ho. Bottoms up. Inside out. Topsy-turvy. I think you have the idea. There was no way in hell I was giving that ride an opportunity. It seemed that my brother had the same sentiments. We loved the Cariboo Log Chute, however. The Cariboo Log Chute was basically a huge waterslide ride. The waterway was serpentine and ended with a rather large splash when your log dropped into a pool of water at the end of the ride. The person at the front of the Cariboo Log Chute would get soaked the worst when your log dropped into the pool of water at the end of the ride. So, my brother, my old man, and my daughter riding in my lap with me would take turns riding in the front of the log as we went down the Cariboo Log Chute. That ride was fun, and we got soaked. One other ride that we suckered my old man into riding was the Looping Starship. The Looping Starship doesn’t actually look that bad when you watch it. It looks just like a boat load of people rocking back and forth. Well, that’s what it looks like. But looks are deceiving. It isn’t until the Looping Starship gets fully cranked up and does a full loop that you truly experience the ride. That’s also when you lose all the shit that you had in your pockets, if you were dumb enough to have any shit in your pockets. Of course, my brother and I were seasoned carnival veterans, so we knew to take all the shit out of our pockets before we ever got on the ride. But we didn’t clue in the old man. Hell, all you had to do was watch other people ahead of you in line. There were always a few dumbasses who had shit in their pockets and hats on their heads. Naturally, when the ride hit the vertical loop, those idiots didn’t have the shit in their pockets anymore, nor the hats on their heads. The space between them and the ground (which was actually a wooden bridge and water in this case) was raining with the shit that used to be in their pockets and the hats that used to be on their heads. Fast-forward to my old man’s turn at the ride. As soon as we got to the vertical loop, his cowboy hat went sailing. At the same time, shit started raining out of his pockets. My brother and I started laughing hysterically. I think it was at that moment that he realized that he was the brunt of our joke. I don’t think he had very much fun on the wild rides, but my brother, my daughter and I sure as hell did. And we had a hell of a grand time talking about the wild rides on the way home. I think the only person who was mired in anguish was my old man thinking about the various exercises in futility that my brother and I had conned him into throughout the day.
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