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Chapter Two
FUEL
“If you’re in control, you’re not going fast enough.”
—Parnelli Jones, professional automobile racer
The summer of 1977 was a proof-of-concept season, with my father wanting to make sure the Alpine was no passing fad. He offered just one new attraction: grass skiing, a warm- weather activity where people wore boots fitted with what looked like tank treads and rolled down the slope on dirt, sometimes tumbling from an errant rock or pebble. Grass skiing did not prove popular, but the Alpine continued to draw crowds, and so he decided it was time to move forward. One ride was not enough. Expansion and growth were necessary.
He believed the best way of going about this was to legalize drunk driving.
He called it Motor World. It was in the same lower plot of land across the main roadway where Pete had busied himself getting the dune buggies ready. Because the Alpine’s opening had been delayed, those vehicles had largely sat dormant. At first, Pete explained, our father had merely wanted to allow guests to traverse a wooded area on the buggies, dodging trees as they hit the gas. Over the cold months, when he incubated ideas, he plotted something far more ambitious.
Now, in the late spring of 1978, there stood a prefabricated aluminum garage that housed a small fleet of three-quarter-scale Formula One racers, the first of their kind on the East Coast. Also called Lola cars after the British car company that made them, these were slightly shrunken versions of the arrow-shaped vehicles that tore through Monaco every year. They were not toys. The engine of the Lola T506 vibrated through your stomach and made your testicles rattle.
“Eight grand each,” Pete said. “They top out at fifty miles per hour, but that’s only because we put governors under the gas pedal. These things can go ninety.” Considering some of the questionable judgment already exhibited on the Alpine, I had a suspicion guests would approach these vehicles with a mixture of excitement and gross negligence. It didn’t matter. While my friends played with Hot Wheels, plastic lanes snaking around their bedrooms, I watched as an entire automotive world was laid out before me. Big Al and Char- lie supervised the paving of a huge track that wound through the field like a miniature Le Mans. In the middle were the ride attendants and a digital clock that displayed lap times. It was accurate to one hundredth of a second.
“Now we can time how long you’d last with a girl,” Jimmy said, snorting. At fourteen, Jimmy was beginning to approach the opposite sex with a little bit of a swagger. That didn’t quite match his experience, which, like mine, was precisely zero. I had already caught him bragging of his Alpine prowess to the occasional female visitor. Now, I suspected, he would likely drop whatever records he secured in Motor World into conversation with other objects of his affection.
Jimmy and I both snuck in laps, but we were too young to work at Motor World and technically shouldn’t have been allowed on the track at all. You had to be seventeen years old and present a valid driver’s license to operate a Lola car. (Kids with a learner’s permit could get on with a parent’s consent.) At the time, New Jersey printed licenses on paper with no picture. Kids successfully forged them all the time by punching out the birthday numbers with a hole puncher and switching them to buy alcohol. Attendants would eye one of these dubious licenses, then look at the prospective driver, who would often tug their hat brim down to cover acne or braces.
They encountered little resistance. Taking a cue from the obedient employees at the Disney parks, my father told us that we should never utter the word no to guests. Snow White, he said, would never reject anyone. He seemed oblivious to the fact that Snow White wasn’t charged with making sure people didn’t run each other over with gas-powered racing vehicles.
That mandate made attendants in Motor World largely powerless to stop both juvenile drivers and people who had been drinking. There was also the fact that the attendants were teenagers themselves and often cowed to the adults waiting in line, forgetting that the balance of power had shifted in their favor inside the park.
“Sir,” one would say. “I think you’ve been drinking. Have you been drinking?”
“Move, kid,” the guest would say, ignoring the question. Then they’d climb into the Lola and go swerving along the half-mile track, narrowly avoiding mowing down the crowd standing near the edge of the asphalt. We quickly developed a rule. If two wheels ran over on the grass, the driver would get a warning. Four wheels and they’d be kicked off the Lolas for the day. It was our improvised version of a sobriety test.
We were not as vigilant with the dune buggies. These were off- road vehicles made by Honda that guests could take on the rougher, wooded area adjacent to the track. Riders would follow a guide deep into the woods, where they could careen around freely. To offset the inevitable wipeouts, the buggies had a roll bar built behind the open driver’s seat, like you see in auto racing. Another set of bars was in front. While these were intended for safety, riders took them as license to drive like lunatics without fear of being trapped under the crumpled body of the vehicle. They whipped around the lot, taking off on small hills that briefly allowed all four wheels to leave the ground.
Balancing a dune buggy while taking sharp turns was difficult, and overzealous drivers sometimes found themselves losing control of the vehicles. The first weekend they were available, all ten dune buggies met cruel ends, their riders pulling themselves from the wreckage, a handful sobbing as they crawled away. Fortunately, my father had mandated helmets. It was one of the few times he decided safety equipment would be necessary. This measure likely saved many attendees from becoming vegetables.
The dune buggy apocalypse drove the mechanic insane. My father had recruited a guy named Mike Kramer because of Kramer’s reputation as a first-class engine jockey for a track in North Carolina. Kramer was short, bearded, and raced Volvo station wagons as a hobby. He was meticulous in maintaining the vehicles, treating them like col- lectors’ classics. It did not occur to him that they would be abused by people who considered auto accidents a recreational activity.
“The fuck. . . . the fuck is this?” he said, surveying the mangled dune buggies in his shop the following Monday. The garage had turned into a junkyard. “I just got all of these ready.”
Pete shrugged.
“SON OF A BITCH!” Kramer screamed, banging a mechanic’s wrench into a tray, glasses askew. Kramer developed a hostile working relationship with the ride attendants, insisting they didn’t do enough to protect the fleet. It was residual vitriol from my father, who hated seeing his investments mangled and yelled at Kramer to pull it together.
Kramer would often stay late, tinkering with a peculiar machine that looked like one of the evil Dalek robots from Doctor Who. Every time someone asked about it, he’d throw a tarp over it and shake his head, waving off further inquiry. Jimmy and I considered the possibility that he was building a bulletproof vehicle he would eventually take on a rampage.
Kramer was also responsible for maintaining the Super Go-Karts, twenty vehicles that each had an open-chassis seat, positioned low to the ground, and hummed with a high-decibel engine that made the area sound like an actual speedway. Because of their size, people underestimated their ability to take off in a matter of seconds, like a spooked horse. The drivers’ necks snapped backward upon acceleration and then forward upon braking. On some of the karts, a design flaw caused the gas cap to come off as people drove along the track. The fuel would splash out behind them, hitting drivers a few lengths behind.
“My eyes!” one guest cried, veering off course and smashing into the giant truck tires lining the track. Later, we replaced the tires with metal rails, because the go-karts could sail directly over the rubber barrier if the angle was right, crinkling the nose of the vehicle as it speared itself into the dirt.
With each collision or spinout, Kramer would become a forensic auto detective, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was al- most always the fault of the driver, and Kramer would mutter his diagnostic finding: “These people are fucking nuts.”
In fairness to patrons, it was unusual for them to get this level of control over such powerful machines in an amusement park. If a similar attraction existed somewhere else, as was the case with the Lolas and go-karts, my father would make sure his went a step further—faster, more daring, bigger, better. If the Lolas went forty miles per hour in California, his would go fifty. If someone had go- karts that ambled along a serene path, he would allow our guests to race them wheel-to-wheel.
It was a much-needed break from reality. The year prior, in New York City, David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, had been on a murder spree, later claiming he was under the control of a talking dog. That same summer, a blackout had sent the entire city into chaos. Stressed-out residents came to Vernon in groups, flooring the gas and forgetting their troubles. The Lolas became addictive, with people constantly repeating the track to try to beat their own best times, which were handed to them on a small ticket at the end. One man spent one hundred dollars in a single afternoon trying to outdo him- self. My father even organized a Lola Grand Prix later in the year, inviting fifty people with the best times to race. The winner got a portable color television. To avoid disaster, Kramer only allowed them on the track one at a time.
Amid the revving engines and drunken swerves of patrons, a romance flourished between Pete and one of the ride attendants, a tough, no-nonsense girl named Ellen. A black belt in karate, Ellen had the interpersonal skills to deal with braying guests. Her com- paratively soft-spoken sister, Erin, also worked at Motor World. Part of Erin’s job was to let people know when they had reached the final lap of the four allowed on the Lola track. To signal the drivers, she waved a checkered flag. Often, people completely ignored it.
“Sir,” Erin would say. “Please return the car to the starting line.” “Fuuuuuuuuuuck . . .” the drivers would say before disappearing around a curve and out of sight, then zooming back into view to add, “yoooooooooooou!”
The honor system was clearly not working.
Erin was patient and a valued employee, but Ellen’s other referral was not. A neighborhood kid she enlisted broke into the park in the middle of the night, made off with a Lola, and took it for a joyride down Route 94. He figured out how to deactivate the governor that limited the car’s speed and tore off like a Daytona 500 finalist. Police followed in pursuit for miles before they apprehended him.
Maybe it was then that I began to wonder whether the park was broadcasting on a frequency only a special kind of lunatic could hear.
