THE AIRPORT
10/3/07, 6:30 AM
We're all pretty tired. We manage to make it to Newark Airport with plenty of time to spare, which is nice when you still have all of those wonderful security hoops to jump through before you can board your flight. The first one of these hoops (Actually, a large archway) is a device that blows synchronized puffs of air on passengers to detect any explosive devices they might be carrying. I make a mental note to blow on people all week to determine whether or not they are terrorists.
Cortney's pretty excited when she notices a little white dog passing through the security line. He's being carried through the checkpoint by his owner, a portly woman who looks like an extra from Class of Nuke 'Em High. I guess he's boarding the flight, as there's no pet carrier anywhere in sight. First class all the way, baby.
We finally get to our gate, and we take our seats. Cortney asks Jimmy to explain the plot of the Sex and the City episode he watched last night involuntarily (I turned it on and then left the room with the remote) while I pass the time by making fart noises with my hands. Cortney tells me there are children in the airport that are better behaved than I am, and that includes those that are crying.
I say something obnoxious to Jimmy. Cortney asks him why he even talks to me, which is when we notice that he hasn't actually responded to what I said, so he technically isn't talking to me. Jimmy then tells her, "You don't even know if I was listening to him."
7:45 AM
We board our flight. The stewardess gets on the intercom and tells everyone that there's a passenger on board with a nut allergy, and that we should all refrain from eating any nut products. In the ensuing silence, Jimmy leans over and loudly asks me to pass him that Nutrageous bar in my pocket. A moment later, he turns to Cortney and tells her, "You see, it's a candy bar that's so nutty it's outrageous. That's why the joke works."
I am seated in an emergency exit row, or as I am going to refer to it from now on, a "responsibility trap". While the stewardess explains procedure to me, my eyes glaze over as I (barely) contain myself from saying something like, "Yo, only white people are getting out of this plane alive."
I ask Cortney and Jimmy if they want to join the Mile Long club. They tell me that I have that wrong, but I'm still pretty sure I'm right. I mean, I've never measured it exactly, but let's just say I've definitely got nothing to be ashamed of.
8:45 AM
Someone on this plane totally farted.
10:30 AM
We touch down in Orlando. We're taxiing for a while, and the little kid in front of me starts to get a little punchy. His father, in the seat next to him, tells him he'd better calm down, or he'll turn the plane around to go back home. Jimmy looks at me and says, "That little fucker's going to ruin it for all of us."
11:15 AM
We arrive at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car. We stupidly tell the woman preparing our invoice that neither of us has any car insurance coverage, which instantly doubles the amount of money we're going to have to pay (I'm not going to mention the exact price, but let's just say we would have been better off if we stopped at a Lexus dealership when we got off the plane). She upgrades us to a Nissan Maxima because she "feels bad" about the extra expense, so I guess there's that. I'm pissed about the price, but this is a pretty sweet car.
UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
12:00 PM
We park in the Jaws Lot, where they pump in the familiar ominous theme music. I've never felt like I was going to be attacked by a shark in a parking garage before. Before we even get to CityWalk, the procession of stores and restaurants that connects Universal Studios and the Islands of Adventure, the three of us are drenched in sweat. And we were standing still on moving walkways. The humidity here is not so fun.
As we approach the entrance, we see the Universal globe/fountain. This trip didn't seem real to me until now. I can also see the decorations for Halloween Horror Nights all over the place, which for me is a little like seeing wrapped Christmas presents on the top shelf of the closet on December 24th. Exciting.
We get inside and immediately go to the Terminator 3-D movie. As we wait in line, I wonder if Cortney will be as impressed with this as I've been telling her she would, or if she's going to look at me five minutes in and tell me I'm retarded. When the Cyberdyne PR Director unveils the Terminator robots to do the machine gun demonstration, and I feel her fingers squeeze into my arm from the seat next to mine, I know she's into it. I realize I'm a nerd for believing that there's something really romantic about this, but I don't care.
After the Terminator, I beeline for Jaws. I'm worried about lines, and I want to at least be sure we're terrorized by a giant robot shark, even if we have to wait over an hour for it. I find out later that these fears are pretty unfounded, considering that the park is a ghost town today. Apparently, early October isn't a busy season. We wait for about twenty minutes in the Jaws line before boarding the Amity boat tour. Our tour guide is nasal and bored. The ride is okay. Rides that feature sharks that attack your boat shouldn't be just "okay." Oh, well.When we ate lunch (A surprisingly affordable and edible trio of cheeseburgers), Jimmy and I got enormous souvenir cups for our Cokes. The Portuguese woman at the cash register told Jimmy they were free, since he was using a MasterCard, and that we could get 50-cent refills throughout the park if we reused them. I looked at the cups after she said "refills" and thought that if I drank the whole thing, I would look like Senator Kelly in X-Men, after Magneto turns him into that hydro-mutant-thing, but they're actually very much coming in handy. Jimmy and I stop at a snack stand after Jaws and refill. And then we both have to pee. For like twenty minutes.
We go on the Men In Black ride, which is set up like a game, with point scores and a little ray gun for each passenger in the car. My own personal game on this ride is to see how many times I can say "Aw, hell naw," and have it still be amusing (It's actually less than you'd think). I end up winning the game, but Cortney and Jimmy insist it's only because I pressed the red button in the car at just the right moment (Side note: It's only now, weeks after the fact, as I write down these memories, that I realize the function of the red button was never actually explained. As we entered the car, we were told by the disembodied voices of Will Smith and Rip Torn not to touch it, under any circumstance, which pretty much ensured it was going to come in handy later. And then, sure enough, when the big bug thing is going to eat you, the Fresh Prince comes back and tells you to press it. But nobody told me what it does. Very strange. Stranger that I'm only noticing it now. Hmm.).
We pass Earthquake, and though we weren't planning on riding it, there's literally no line. We walk inside, where it's air conditioned (plus) and there's a park employee with a microphone trying to warm up the crowd (minus). He's singling people out, asking them questions, and then trying to insult them, doing about as well as you'd expect a sixteen-year-old theme park employee to do a Don Rickles comedy act. All of the other rides have a themed pre-show (The Amity TV station before Jaws, the Cyberdyne PR presentation before the Terminator movie), and I'm trying to find the tenuous connection between a Charlton Heston 70s disaster movie and a Dean Martin comedy roast, when the guy asks if anyone rode Men in Black today. We raise our hands.
"What was your score?" he asks.
"Three-nineteen," I say, raising my hand, for some reason thinking that a park employee would understand the abbreviation I was using.
"That's it?" he asks.
"Three hundred nineteen thousand," I correct myself, raising my hand again.
"That's it?" he scoffs. I guess this is the part where everyone laughs and he's supposed to have taken me down a peg, but it's just awkward silence on the Earthquake line. He started to mumble something to someone else, moving his comedy act to a new target, but I raised my hand again.
"Three hundred nineteen thousand...billion."
I've caused a lot of awkward silences in my life, and this was definitely one of them. He stared at me for a moment, and then said "Okay." I'm not sure if I disturbed him or if he just couldn't think of a snappy answer. Jimmy and Cortney think it's the latter, and as we board the San Francisco railway system, we imagine me as his White Whale, the one tourist that narrowly evaded the sociopolitical microscope of his trenchant wit.
Oh yeah, and the ride was fun. I get the feeling you enjoy a subway-themed ride more if you don't actually ride a subway every single day of your life.
As we walk through "New York", Jimmy spots a park employee with maps. When he goes to ask for one, we realize that this man is wearing a non-ironic, 100% functional eyepatch. He implores Cortney to come to a test screening of a new television show "for ladies." He tells Jimmy and I that we can wander the park and meet her later, after she's watched this new show "for ladies." Jimmy asks him if there's really a TV show, or if he's just tricking a bunch of women into entering a locked garage. He calls Jimmy a smartass. We walk away.
We find an Irish gift shop. We walk through the doorway, and I count the seconds that pass until I see Guinness merchandise (It's eight, for those of you playing at home. Eight seconds.).
We get to the Revenge of the Mummy. And based on the quivering, dry-mouthed anxiety I have over tomorrow's 80-foot drop on the Jurassic Park River Adventure, it was definitely a good idea not to read anything about this one beforehand. I'm just going to get on, and whatever happens, happens. Jimmy and I aren't allowed in with our enormous souvenir cups, so we have to put them in hi-tech thumbprint key lockers to the side of the entrance (You press your thumb onto a touch-screen to open the locker, and the locker recognizes your thumb when you come back to retrieve your belongings. I'd be more impressed by this if I hadn't just sat through a 3-D movie about the horrors of allowing technology to run rampant, destroying human civilization as we know it).
The line on this one is nonexistent, but it must get pretty busy during the summer, because it feels like we walk three miles through an abandoned museum before we get to the loading platform. We get into the cart (Front row, no less), and the park employees remind us for the thirtieth time to keep all of our limbs inside the car at all times. Okay, now I'm starting to get nervous.We take off. This thing moves pretty slowly at first, but after the computer-generated scarabs start crawling out of the walls, we're doing pretty much everything I dreaded we would do. We're plunging I don't know how deep into complete darkness, insanely fast and sometimes backwards. It takes me a couple of minutes to realize why my brother is laughing so hard: I am screaming my fucking head off. The sadist is getting a lot of enjoyment out of how terrified I am. Yeah, we're related.
We get off the ride, and I wait for the tremors in my limbs to subside before Jimmy and I retrieve our cups from the SkyNet lockers. We make our way to the Universal Horror Make-Up Show, which is basically pornography for sick people like me. We take our seats in the blessedly air-conditioned theater, and a couple of jovial FX dudes explain how they use prosthetic limbs and trick knives and the like. A foreign family sits directly behind us, and their patriarch (Presumably the only bilingual member of their party) translates everything anyone on stage says into whatever dipshit language these people speak. This is not distracting at all, and at no point do I fantasize about using the myriad implements of torture on the stage in front of me on these people, making red liquid joy flow from all of the holes I punch into their inconsiderate asshole bodies. I'm on vacation, and I'm going to maintain a positive outlook.
We go to Animal Actors on Location next, which offers the rare opportunity to watch small children being terrorized by live animals (A particularly frisky bird got this one little sniveling shit to start bawling in front of hundreds of people. There was definite catharsis in watching that, though I'm not completely sure why). At one point, the trainers trotted out Frank the Pug from the Men in Black movies, and Cortney reacted like all those teenage girls in the Ed Sullivan Theater the first time the Beatles played there. I'd make fun of her, but I'm probably going to do the same thing when I see Freddy Krueger tomorrow night.
We head to E.T. just as the park is about to close. You have to give a park employee your name as you enter the ride, which they enter into a computer as you pass through the turnstiles. When the old lady corralling us asks for Jimmy's name, he looks at her and says, "Eliot."
THE RESTAURANT
7:00 PM
We meet my Mom, Luke, and Brendan, and head to a restaurant called Key W. Kool's. It's pretty huge, and the whole place has a fairly pleasant Cedar smell. Of course, whatever ambiance the place offers is destroyed as soon as our waiter walks up. His name is Jay, he has far less than 32 teeth, and he has obviously done hard time. Recently. We spend the rest of the meal trying to deduce the crime with which he was charged.
At one point, my Mom orders a French wine, and Jay corrects her pronunciation. She tries to hide how irritated she is with this, and when he walks away to retrieve a glass for her, I tell her that she shouldn't feel too bad, that he's probably had a lot of experience with that particular label, brewing it after lights out in a garbage bag in a state prison toilet.
BACK AT THE HOUSE
9:00 PM
We basically just trudge up the stairs, take lethargic showers, and pass out on the bed. It's going to be an early day tomorrow.
