"False teeth," adds Ronald V. Toomer, revered architect of approximately eighty coasters worldwide. "They find lots of false teeth." In 1994 workers at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach amusement park in England drained the reflecting pool beneath two coasters and found twenty-five sets of false teeth.
At historic Kennywood amusement park in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, a passenger on SkyCoaster parted with his false teeth, and they pitched, in a hideous parabola, into the french fries of a passing pedestrian. "That person showed up at the lost and found," park spokesperson Mary Lou Rosemeyer reluctantly confirms, "with the teeth"—how shall she put this?—"still in the fries." While the disembodied dentures did not, alas, devour the fries, they remain a coffee-stained symbol of what man will sacrifice to stir, if but for a moment, his jaded viscera.
This is a story about roller coasters, so throw your arms in the air. Not literally, mind you. "I am told," Toomer says with neither pride nor embarrassment, "that someone's prosthetic arm was found under one of my rides."
Workers at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, last year collected more than $11,000 in loose coins and bills shaken free from riders of the park's twelve roller coasters (there are now thirteen). But the most valuable item ever found on a coaster belonged to Emilio Franco. In 1949 Franco, a West Virginia coal miner rendered mute by a nervous disorder, rode the terrifying Cyclone at Coney Island in Brooklyn and found, for the first time in six years, his voice. He screamed on the Cyclone's second descent and, upon disembarking at the platform, spoke his first words since World War II.
And while those words were "I feel sick," a larger point remains. "Riding a roller coaster," says Phil Hettema, who designs these diabolical devices for Universal Studios theme parks, "is a way of telling yourself, I'm alive."
"We are living in a roller-coaster Renaissance, a second golden age," says industry analyst Paul Ruben, North American editor of Park World magazine. The fifty most popular amusement parks in North America hosted a record 242.9 million visitors in 1998, vastly more than the attendance at all NBA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball games combined, and a number close to the country's population.
"There's an industry saying: A carousel is the soul of an amusement park, but a roller coaster is its heart," says Jim Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association (NAPHA). The roller coaster is the vital organ, the indispensable engine, the great american scream machine (or GASM), and it has never been more robust. There are about one thousand roller coasters operating in the world. While the United States alone had more than fifteen hundred in the late 1920s—the end of the first golden age—by the mid-seventies they had dwindled to 145. Think about that. Twenty years ago, the U.S. roller coaster was nearly extinct. You may now lift your jaw off the ground with both hands.
Mercifully, the late nineties have been a time of unprecedented construction, and Futrell says 520 coasters, more than half the world's total, are operating in the United States. About eighty coasters opened around the world last year, and at least ninety more have debuted in 1999, including one in the Micronesia Mall on Guam. All of them do unspeakable things. "The idea is to knock your socks off," says Hettema, whose newly opened Incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure in Orlando—with its catapult launch into an immediate 180-degree barrel roll—also tends to knock off bikini tops.
Swimsuits are recommended on the amphibious BuzzSaw Falls coaster, which opened last month at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. There are twenty-seven varieties of roller coaster, including stand-up coasters such as the Riddler's Revenge, at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. More preposterous contraptions are on the drawing board, such as the coaster set to open next March at Paramount's Great America in Santa Clara, California, on which passengers will lie back and be propelled into concentric circles of hell. In Utah there is one prototype for a coaster on which the car itself turns, and another for a ride on which the car races through the threads of a cylindrical track like an Archimedes' screw.
Already running is Superman The Escape, a "shuttle coaster" at Six Flags Magic Mountain. Though it's not everyone's idea of a roller coaster, it meets the technical definition: it uses gravity and rides on rails. Superman is not a continuous loop but an L-shaped track on which passengers are shot down a straightaway and then up a tower before pausing and falling backward to earth, all in thirty seconds. Its fifteen-passenger car travels from 0 to 100 in seven seconds, exerts 4.5 G's on the rider, and is roughly equivalent to taking off in an F-16 from the deck of an aircraft carrier. At the top of the tower, 415 feet above suburban L.A., riders experience six seconds of weightlessness before plunging back whence they came.
"You can let go of your sunglasses at the top of the ride," says Magic Mountain spokesperson Andy Gallardo, "and they will remain there, floating in front of you." Trouble is, you can "let go" of anything at the top of the ride, and it will remain there, floating in front of you.
If we are living in a roller-coaster Renaissance, the United States is its Florence. This nation's technophilia and leisure worship have joined in unholy matrimony to sire an astonishing subculture of coasterdinks and rollerwonks, men and women for whom roller coasters have become a lifestyle—or something more closely resembling life itself. This is not the case with Rich Rodriguez, a forty-year-old man who last summer spent twenty-two hours a day for forty-seven consecutive days on the Big Dipper at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, breaking his own Guinness world record for marathon coastering. "I do it in a Lindberghian spirit of adventure," says Rodriguez, an earnest Brooklyn native who is a teaching assistant in the communications department at Miami. "I'm not one of these roller-coaster obsessives who can tell you what kind of bolts are in the track."
Rodriguez is eager to distinguish himself from the likes of Dreadlock Jim, a multiply pierced, Rasta-haired coastermane from Saginaw, Michigan, who practically lives in his car. Dreadlock Jim reportedly drove eighty thousand miles and visited one hundred and one amusement parks in 1998. He has the elusive quality (and personal hygiene) of Bigfoot. "I saw him in Tampa yesterday, on Montu at Busch Gardens," a twenty-two-year-old rollerphile named Walt Breymier told me last January in Orlando as we stood in the construction site that would become Islands of Adventure.
The theme park wouldn't open for another four months, but the Incredible Hulk was up and running, and, as Breymier explained, "There's something called ERT: Exclusive Ride Time." It is a privilege extended to people like Breymier, of the Virginia-based Coaster Zombies club, whose members were given a no-expenses-paid trip to Orlando to test-ride the Hulk in exchange for the good word of mouth they were certain to spread.
For some Zombies it was the second trip to the construction site in as many months. "I came down at Christmas and watched Hulk run from the outside," said Sam Marks, forty-one, a customer service manager at Pitney-Bowes in Arlington, Virgina, which is "Twenty-four miles from Six Flags America," where Marks spent at least twenty-eight days last summer.
"I'm giving up a week's worth of work to be here," said Breymier, a night supervisor at the Target department store in Bel Air, Maryland, who lives within a five-hour drive of fifteen amusement parks. "I took a bus here to save money. I've been serious hardcore since '97."
American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE) has 5,800 members, not all of whom are serious hard core. "Our membership runs the gamut from casual to 'coasters are my life,'" says ACE public relations director David Escalante, whose surname suggests ascents and descents and whose signature ends with a line drawing of a roller coaster. (Such salutations are common among coastermanes: Park World's Ruben ends telephone conversations by saying, "Go with gravity.")
"I'm a gawker," a man in a sweatshirt bearing a likeness of the roller coaster called Raptor told me at Raptor's home, Cedar Point, on the banks of Lake Erie in Sandusky. The Raptor fan, it turns out, was not a gawker but a GOCCer, a member of the Greater Ohio Coaster Club. GOCCers and ACErs and Coaster Zombies gather in cyberspace to discuss first drops and chain lifts and lateral G's and brake runs and camelbacks, and to exchange intelligence about new coaster construction.
"You'll read, 'There are reports of a truck carrying blue track north on I-95: Where is it going?'" says the Zombies' Marks. "It's kind of pathetic. Some people have broken into parks just to look at the construction of a new coaster." He pauses, lost in thought beneath a beige Gilligan hat with a blinking red light and the souvenir pins of myriad coasters. "By the way," Marks says of such break-ins, "I didn't really do that once, when I was sixteen years old."
For eighteen-year-old Jeff Tolotti, coasters are not life itself. "I also enjoy free falls," he says of rides like the Cedar Point Power Tower, in which human cargo is hoisted in a harness up a twenty-four-story obelisk, then dropped to earth in 2.3 seconds.
"And I like really big, really fast spinning rides," says Breymier.
"These are known in the industry," says Kennywood's Rosemeyer, "as Spin-'n'-Barfs."
To barf, on the serious hard-core coaster circuit, is to "lose it," and nearly everyone loses it eventually. "It takes me a lot of rides," says Marks, "like twenty-seven consecutive at Six Flags St. Louis." When a Los Angeles helicopter pilot—a Vietnam combat pilot turned traffic reporter—loses it on Viper at Magic Mountain, as happened a couple of years ago on the world's tallest looping coaster, what chance do the rest of us have?
While marathon champion Rodriguez was living in the sixth car of the Big Dipper in Blackpool last summer, a press photographer joined him to take his portrait with the coaster in motion. As Rodriguez said "Cheese," the photographer lost it. Says Rodriguez, who has an almost courtly way of speaking, "I've also had regular passengers get ill near me."
"I lost it on Akbar yesterday," Breymier said in Orlando last January, referring to Akbar's Adventure Tours, a "simulator ride" at Busch Gardens in Tampa. "There's one scene where you're riding on a camel, up and down, up and down on a tour through Egypt, and I just lost it." He said this in the manner of a fullback facing the press after a fumble. Then Breymier boarded the Hulk for a tenth straight time, before his ERT expired.
What, exactly, is the appeal? Several enthusiasts told me that riding a coaster is better than sex. In some cases, this was clearly a matter of conjecture. In others, evidently, it is sex. "The back car is for your heavy-metal S&M crowd, people who like a lot of whip action," says Ruben, to which we can only say that, in addition to ERT, there is something called TMI: Too Much Information.
Gerald Menditto practices abstinence. He has operated the Coney Island Cyclone for twenty-five years but has, astonishingly, ridden the infernal thing only twice. Menditto is what is known in the trade as a chicken. Ask coaster architect Toomer, whose eighty rides include the superlative Magnum XL-200 at Cedar Point, to name his favorite machine, and he responds with a good, long chuckle. "You mean to ride?" says the sixty-nine-year-old former mechanical engineer. "Oh, I don't ride 'em. Oh, no. Haven't for years. I get motion sickness real bad. The bigger ones, I get sick as a dog on those."
These coasterphobes play a vital role in the amusement-park ecosystem. "They're a good thing," says Ruben, who has ridden more than four thousand miles on 525 coasters. "Someone has to hold our change."
"We don't laugh at people who are afraid of snakes," says Brian Newmark, a Harvard-trained psychologist in suburban Boston, "but we laugh at people who are afraid of roller coasters." We should not. Newmark, who has treated coasterphobia, cites the case of a fifty-five-year-old man married for several years to a rollerweenie whose passion he desperately wanted to share. "It was an obstacle in his life," says Newmark. "The question with a phobia is, Does it interfere with daily function? When parents are fearful, children sense that and become habitually fearful of the world around them."
Coasterphobia has not always been an irrational fear. When the infamous Crystal Beach (Ontario) Cyclone opened in 1927, a full-time nurse was employed at the unloading platform. The coaster had a ninety-seven-foot first drop into an eighty-five-degree right turn. "Hats, purses, combs, and false teeth all flew out on that turn," says Ruben, sixty-two, who grew up in nearby Niagara Falls, New York. "Riders were thrown into their seatmates and cracked their ribs." By the end of the Cyclone's run, in 1946, more people were watching this ghoulish spectacle than participating in it.
Such a coaster, alas, couldn't leave the station in today's litigious society. "When a new ride opens up, you get a lot of lawsuits," says Toomer. Retired from Utah's Arrow Dynamics, Inc., Toomer spends much of his time in trials, testifying about coaster safety. "We have two hundred million riders a year on coasters designed by our company," says Toomer. "When someone comes to me and says our ride hurt his back, I say, 'Would you believe that fifteen million people rode it before you did, without a problem?'"
In the past eleven years, there have been eleven nonoccupational roller-coaster-related fatalities in the United States, few of them involving mechanical malfunction. Last September at Paramount's Great America in Santa Clara, California, a Mexican tourist lost her hat on an "inverted coaster," the kind that speeds its suspended passengers, feet a-dangle, around a high-speed glorified dry-cleaning rack. The woman's twenty-four-year-old husband didn't speak English and thus didn't heed warning signs when, after finishing the ride, he entered a restricted area to retrieve the hat. He was struck in the head and killed by the dangling feet of another rider, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, who suffered a broken leg.
The point is, while you might have your face bloodied by the occasional dive-bombing goose (as happened to Fabio this spring in the front car of Apollo's Chariot at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia) or be stuck upside down for two hours awaiting rescue by the fire department (as happened to twenty-three passengers on Demon, at Six Flags Great America outside Chicago, in April 1998), riding a roller coaster is much safer than riding a bicycle. "We all look for things that push the boundaries of our daily existence," says Hulk designer Hettema. "Roller coasters are a safe way to do that. Riding a coaster is a more practical way to feel alive than jumping off a cliff."
More practical than a cliff dive, coastering better approximates mountaineering. Rodriguez had "surreal visions" during his forty-seven-day Blackpool marathon last summer. "You can experience a kind of natural high while riding," confirms Ruben.
Enthusiasts speak of rides the way climbers talk of the Seven Summits. On every coastermane's "lifetime list" are Dragon Khan (at Port Aventura, near Barcelona) and Monte Makaya (at Terra Encantada, in Rio de Janeiro). Both have eight inversions, the world record. Oblivion (at Alton Towers, in England) makes an 87.5-degree drop into a hundred-foot hole in the ground. "I've heard," one rollerphile told me lasciviously, "it's terrifying."
The names of the world's great modern coasters are conceived to heighten such terror: Megaphobia, Mind Eraser, Exterminator, Alpengeist and—at Parc Asterix outside of Paris—Tonnerre de Zeus, which means, sounds, and feels like the thunder of Zeus. None of these, however, have the exotic, elusive appeal of Fujiyama, King of Coasters, at Japan's Fujikyu Highlands fun park in the northern foothills of Mount Fuji. "Fujiyama is the one I want," Tolotti told me, as if it were a white whale. It might as well be.
Fujiyama is the world's tallest traditional complete-circuit coaster, 259 feet at its high point. The ride's toupee-ravaging first drop of 230 feet is also a complete-circuit record. And Fujiyama shares with the formidable Steel Phantom at Kennywood the Guinness mark for the fastest complete-circuit coaster, with a top speed of eighty-two miles per hour.
What's more, I resolved not merely to ride Fujiyama but also to do it immediately after speed-eating bowls of soba noodles with another Japanese phenomenon: Hirofumi Nakajima, the Black Hole of Kofu, the former world champion of competitive eating, a man who once consumed twenty-four and a half hot dogs in twelve minutes, as if feeding pencils into an electric sharpener.
In the days leading up to my trip, I thought many times of hurling. But I also thought of Kipling:
If you can meet with Gluttony and Gravity And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can ride with Kings—of coasters—and not lose it; Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!
There is no clown. That is the first panicked thought of every noodle-gorged gaijin in line at Fujiyama. There is no cutout clown bearing the traditional disclaimer, YOU MUST BE TALLER THAN ME TO RIDE. What if I am too tall, thinks an anxious American who is nine inches taller than the average Japanese male. All of the recorded warnings played in the serpentine line to board Fujiyama—and these warnings are manifold, believe me—are, unhelpfully, in Japanese. All the signs are in kanji.
That changes when you at last approach the loading platform after ninety angst-inducing minutes in line. Adjacent to the platform is a small door painted with the leering cartoon likeness of a barnyard fowl. This is your last chance to exit before you are swept, like a cork on a fast river, onto Fujiyama's malevolent rails. The sign on the door is in English. It reads: CHICKEN GATE
The Chicken Gate thumbs its beak at current coaster etiquette, according to which parks attempt to allay, not inflame, a rider's anxieties. Near the Hulk at Islands of Adventure, passengers can pick up a pamphlet titled Anxious about Riding. No such luck at Fujiyama, where the only sound on the platform is the metallic echo of the train's lap bars locking into place. It is the sound of finality, like lockdown at Leavenworth.
With a temperamental lurch, the train pulls away from the platform and begins its inexorable climb, 235 feet up the first hill. The angle of ascent leaves the rider in roughly the same position—and disposition—as a dental patient. The only sound now is the ratchratch-ratcheting of the chain lift. It recalls to me the rattling chains of Marley's ghost.
When at last you crest the first hill, there is a pause, long enough to let your knuckle hair stand at attention as you take in the view. Twenty-five stories above the Fujikyu Highlands, you are staring straight at Mount Fuji, and it is breathtaking—so perfect a mountain that it almost seems a theme-park contrivance, like the Matterhorn at Disneyland. You can only gape at it and whisper, "My God, what a lovely—"
Then the bottom falls out of your world.
The first drop at Fujiyama is, in essence, a plane crash. When you pull out of the near-vertical twenty-story plunge, your car is traveling about eighty miles per hour toward a course canopied with wooden beams, which appear to be no more than six feet above the track, offering sufficient clearance only to the average Japanese, whose culture promotes something called Tall Poppy syndrome, in which heads that jut above the crowd must be cut back down to size. Only later do you learn that Tall Poppy syndrome is a metaphor and that these low beams are a calculated optical illusion known in the coaster trade as Headchoppers. Indeed, a similarly terrifying specimen exists on Shivering Timbers in Muskegon, Michigan.
In the moment, as you hurtle toward presumed decapitation, your thoughts turn to many things: to the vindictiveness of Japanese engineers, to the criminally negligent absence of clowns, and to Hirofumi Nakajima, with whom you imprudently engaged in an eating contest scant hours earlier. But before you know what hasn't hit you, you are suddenly—to your profound relief—coasting on small camelbacks into the brake run leading back to the station. You have survived Fujiyama. You have not, moreover, lost it.
Or have you? The souvenir photograph offered at ride's end doesn't lie. Somewhere on the first drop I let fly a Tourette's-like torrent of involuntary profanity. To judge by the photo, in which ampersands and exclamation marks practically billow from my mouth in a cartoon balloon, these epic obscenities came as a revelation to the plaid-skirted Japanese schoolgirls seated in front of me. Each of their mouths is forever frozen in a rictus of disbelief.
For one brief shining moment of American ingenuity, in 1991, Kennywood's Steel Phantom was faster than Fujiyama is today. For its first seven days of operation, the Phantom was the fastest coaster of all time, doing ninety miles per hour, a speed quickly deemed too uncomfortable for humans to endure without lifelong twenty-four-hour chiropractic supervision. So this creature, another spawn of Toomer's evil genius, had to be retrofitted with additional brakes. The Phantom is now more spine-chilling than spine-killing, particularly when it passes beneath the tracks of the Thunderbolt coaster, with which it is entangled.
Such is the Phantom's menace that park officials made me ride it with a fifteen-year-old from Mars, Pennsylvania, named Ed Murphy. The kid, a veteran of twenty Phantom rides, could only stare grimly from our front seat as I babbled nervously. When I blurted that I had just eaten a chicken-salad sandwich, young Ed said, as we ascended the chain lift, "I wish you hadn't told me that."
The Phantom is frequently cited as the second-best steel coaster in existence, after Cedar Point's Magnum XL-200. Cedar Point has the highest concentration of coasters anywhere in the world. What's more, the park is on the beach where Knute Rockne invented the forward pass with Notre Dame teammate Gus Dorais while the two worked as lifeguards in the summer of 1913. The historic spot, marked with a plaque, is now part of the Soak City water park.
I rode Magnum with Cedar Point public relations director Robin Innes, who wore a shirt and tie and carried on, with consummate professionalism, a business conversation as we climbed the 205-foot first hill. "This was the first coaster to break the two-hundred-foot barrier," Innes said casually as we crested. "This first drop is a hundred ninety-five feet and aaiiieeeyeaaah! Hoohoohoo! Wahahaheee! celebrating its tenth anniversary this summer and oh man! Oh man! Woooooo! Yeaaahh! top speed of seventy-two miles an hour, which is approximately yes! Whoahoho! Woohooee! Hey hey! the tubular steel track eee-heee-hoo-ha-haaaa! be happy to if you have any questions." I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded frequently in response.
Toomer designed Magnum but never rode it. Still, he is aware that it remains the favorite of a great many coasterphiles, whose reasons are largely intangible and perhaps best articulated by Innes when he said, "Wahahoohaheeeeee!"
"Ten years after opening," says Escalante, the ACEr, "Magnum still hasn't been improved on." At the coaster's anniversary party in June, Toomer signed a thousand autographs.
"I never expected that I'd become some kind of nut-club cult leader," the designer says. But he has become just that, with eighty wildly popular coasters stretching from Indonesia to Spain to the interior of Buffalo Bill's Casino in Primm, Nevada. "These rides," he says, pondering a legacy, "will be around for a very long time." To say the least. Leap-the-Dips opened in 1902 and runs to this day at Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Not far from Leap-the-Dips is the Wildcat, at Hershey Park. It gives riders the most instances of air, or negative G's: eleven times passengers are lifted from their seats. "There's an arms race for everything now," says industry analyst Ruben. The list of superlatives is seemingly endless, much like the venerable Beast at Paramount's Kings Island, near Cincinnati. The Beast is by far the longest wooden roller coaster in the world, both in track feet and in ride time. It travels a tortuous 7,400 feet and covers an area more than twice that of Kennywood's Thunderbolt. The Beast lasts an unheard-of three minutes and forty seconds. And "No man," as Dr. Johnson said about Paradise Lost, "ever wished it longer."
Strike that. One man has ever wished every ride longer. A coaster jockey of exceedingly rare gifts, Richard Gregory Rodriguez now takes his place beside Ted Williams and Jascha Heifetz as a twentieth-century titan whose skills simply overwhelm our powers of analysis. Twelve times Rodriguez has set the world record for marathon coastering, but last summer was his Beamon leap, his Secretariat at Belmont moment. He rode the Big Dipper in Blackpool for 1,013½ hours over forty-seven days, from June 18 until August 3, nearly doubling his own record of 549 hours, set in Blackpool in 1994. "The three big questions I get," Rodriguez told me solemnly, while sitting for an interview in a sidewalk café near his home in Miami, "are, Why? Do you get paid? and How do you go to the bathroom?" We will try to answer each of these questions in due time, but for now you need understand only that Rodriguez's life is a cat's cradle of coaster history. In him all of the industry's threads intersect.
He was born to greatness, blessed genetically and geographically. For starters, young Rich grew to the minimal acceptable standard of forty-eight inches, then kept going, eventually leveling off at five-foot-eight" and 160 pounds—"The perfect size for riding," he says. "Like a Formula One driver's."
Even more propitious, Rodriguez was born in Brooklyn, the cradle of American amusement, home of the original Luna Park and Coney Island, where the first commercially successful roller coaster was built, in 1884. The Gravity Switchback Railway was the brainchild of LaMarcus Thompson, who had made a fortune inventing seamless hosiery. More than a century later, in unintentional homage to the stocking magnate, an astonishing number of women would toss their underwear from roller coasters, in the same spirit in which unmentionables are flung into trees from chairlifts on ski slopes. It is a dirty little secret—a Victoria's Secret—of the family entertainment industry. But we digress.
Rodriguez was raised in the shadow of the great coaster jocks of the seventies, men such as Jim Bruce, who made his reputation on the Swamp Fox in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Noel Aube, who tamed the Wildcat at Lake Compounce in Connecticut. But Rodriguez's true heroes were aviators: solo balloonists such as Ed Yost and Steve Fossett and, above all, Charles Lindbergh. Two years after crossing the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindy rode the Cyclone at Coney Island and said, "A ride on Cyclone is a greater thrill than flying an airplane at top speed."
So, in the summer of 1977, eighteen-year-old Rich Rodriguez set out to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Lindbergh's flight—and the fiftieth birthday of the Cyclone—with an audacious act of his own. "I don't want to overdramatize this," he would say years later, "but Lindbergh was a long shot in '27. He would have been twenty-to-one in a horse race. He wasn't well financed. And here I was, not wealthy, from Brooklyn, and I thought, What can I do in Lindbergh's spirit of adventure? Can I accomplish something?"
Carrying only a pillow, a blanket, and a note from his doctor—plus the blessing of management at Coney Island's Astroland—Rodriguez set out on August 18, 1977, to break Michael Boodley's world record of forty-five consecutive hours on a roller coaster. He selected the sixth car from the front. "It's the most stable ride," says Rodriguez, who would soon make the sixth car his signature. As he traveled fifty miles per hour in the frigid Coney Island nights, with the wind whipping off the Atlantic, his face swelled grotesquely. He resolved, then and there, that next time would be different. Next time he'd bring lotion.
There would be a next time, too, for Rodriguez shattered Boodley's record, set on the Cyclone, by staying on that angry mechanical bull for 103 hours and fifty-five minutes to enter The Guinness Book of World Records. Then, between 1977 and 1982, Rodriguez would break his world record nine times, the last two on corkscrewing coasters in Quebec and Germany.
Under Guinness guidelines, a rider can spend an average of five minutes of every hour off the coaster—or a total of two hours a day, to be divided as the jockey sees fit. Rodriguez used his time to eat and go to the bathroom, which is to say, he did all of his sleeping on the coasters, snoozing through every terrifying turn of the corkscrew. Soon the word went forth: There was an un-disputed King of Coasters, a man the British tabs called Queasy Rider, a misnomer if ever there was one. "I was blessed with a strong stomach," says Rodriguez. "I never get sick." He was, in short, the Natural, and the trade magazines all headlined his ONE TRACT MIND.
But his one-track mind was wandering. In 1982, after spending 328 hours on the Super Werbil at Holiday Park in Hassloch, Germany, to set his tenth world record, Rodriguez walked wobbily away from marathoning. There were, simply, no more Magic Mountains to climb. For the next twelve years, the Natural squandered his gift. He matriculated at Columbia, receiving a bachelor's degree in history and political science. In 1987 he joined the army, serving his country for two and a half years before his diabetes was diagnosed and, at his request, he was honorably discharged. He then moved to Chicago to educate America's youth as a substitute high school teacher. It was all very wasteful, this attention to duty, and Rodriguez watched his record fall to a younger jock, the Quebecois upstart Normand St. Pierre, master of Le Monstre at La Ronde Park in Montreal.
By 1991 Rodriguez was a thirty-two-year-old diabetic injecting himself with insulin four times a day, and it appeared that his train had long since left the platform. Or had it? "George Foreman had come back to boxing," recalls Rodriguez. "Mark Spitz was trying to return to the Olympics, and I began to wonder, Why not? At first it was hard to find a park to train in, but I'd buy some ride operators at Coney Island a couple of beers, and they'd let me ride all day."
He went to Blackpool in 1994 and rode for 549 hours to reclaim the record that St. Pierre had held, in his absence, for eleven years. Rodriguez returned to form on the Big Dipper, which was built in 1921. Today's brakes are almost all hydraulics, but at Blackpool, as at Coney Island, large men still pull enormous hand brakes. "If he misses the brakes, I could be dead," says Rodriguez. "If my hand falls out of the car when I'm asleep, I could lose a limb. I'm going around something like twelve thousand circuits, and any number of things can go wrong."
In 1979, at the Vancouver Pacific National Exhibition, Rodriguez was on a coaster that was "double training," or running two trains on one track. When his train pulled into the platform, the train behind it failed to brake. Rodriguez bailed out before impact. "Otherwise," he says, "I would've broken my neck."
Last summer, feeling stronger than ever, Rodriguez returned to the Big Dipper to go head-to-head against his nemesis, St. Pierre, who would be riding Le Monstre in Montreal in a kind of transatlantic staredown. In all fairness, the Francophone never stood a chance. Rodriguez forever lowered the lap bar on his own place in history. "The first couple of days are always a shakedown period," he says of the marathon. "It's almost impossible to sleep. By the fourth day, my body has a will to adapt. After two weeks, it feels more normal to be on the coaster than off." (When he is off, Rodriguez still feels the ride, like the phantom leg of an amputee.)
St. Pierre withered in the white-hot heat of such greatness and disembarked from Le Monstre after an otherwise astonishing 670 hours. Rodriguez, already in possession of the world record, refused to stop. He rode for gratuitous hours, then days, and finally weeks, until he passed the thousand-hour mark and put the record forever out of reach. On the final lap of his odyssey, he breasted a tape at the platform, a U.S. flag on his sweater, and then swigged from a champagne bottle. He was bussed by a pair of Blackpool belles. Then, spent, he called his mother from a cell phone.
His legs were badly bruised. His knees, though padded, were crosshatched with cuts from the violent jostling of the steel car as he slept. His face resembled a peeled tomato, rubbed raw by the wind off the Irish Sea. Imagine driving from Miami to Juneau and back at sixty-five miles per hour with your head out the window, and you only begin to comprehend the man's 11,362-mile ride to nowhere. Ensconced that night in an English hotel, Rodriguez couldn't sleep. "I kept waking up in bed," he says, "bracing myself for the first drop."
The next morning, England awoke to a bizarre and lengthy editorial in the Times of London denouncing Rodriguez. "If futility can be graded," the piece said, "surely this bizarre bid to turn entertainment into tedium might almost set a record."
The first time Rodriguez heard this was when I mentioned it to him recently. "I know I'm not Neil Armstrong," he said. "I keep this in perspective. I know there's a lot of humor here. I'm forty years old, and it will be easy for people to say, This guy is missing a few bricks. But you know, I don't get paid, I have slept in airports, I try to raise some money for diabetes research. I just want to keep my dignity, if that is possible. This is not a glamorous life."
So why live it? "I think it's the connection to people," Rodriguez says. "Most people don't understand what I'm doing, but they want to be a part of the fun. They ask, 'Can I bring you a blanket?' 'Will you come to dinner at the house when it's over?' At Blackpool, a family brings me candy. I rode with a little girl and a little boy when I set a record in Blackpool in 1979, and I wrote them a note. They came back in '94 and rode with me again."
The kids had, of course, grown up. One of them still had his yellowed note, and she showed it to Rodriguez fifteen years after he'd written it. It said, "Thanks so much for riding with me." His life had come full circle. But then it did so 505 times every day on the Dipper, 22,725 times in all last summer.
The traditional complete-circuit roller coaster always returns to its station, to where it began. So it is with all of roller-coasterdom. In the way that cities are building retro ballparks, neoclassical wooden coasters are now going up, and ancient amusement parks—such as 101-year-old Kennywood—are the envy of the industry. "The fifties saw urban decline and the flight to suburbia," says Futrell, the NAPHA historian, "and the sixties became a real struggle for the old-time traditional parks. The seventies brought theme-park development. Now we're getting back to the vintage parks. Kennywood is almost the Wrigley Field of amusement parks."
Kennywood's Thunderbolt was named the top roller coaster in the world in a highly publicized Discovery Channel special that aired over Memorial Day weekend. The wooden coaster opened in 1968. "There are a lot of people who don't even count steel as coasters," says Breymier, the Coaster Zombie.
"Ride operators like the older rides," says Futrell. "They're solid but simple pieces of machinery, with pulleys and gears and chains."
"You know how you remember the Top Forty songs from high school, what you heard when you were driving around in your car at night?" Rodriguez said out of the blue in one of our last conversations. "I remember the song that was playing at Coney Island the first time I rode the Cyclone, in 1976. It was 'Turn the Beat Around' by Vicki Sue Robinson. The summer of '77, 'Afternoon Delight' was the big one. The summer of '78 was all Bee Gees and Donna Summer. At most of these parks, a deejay plays the hit songs ten or fifteen times a day. I can still hear 'Fly, Robin, Fly' and 'Love to Love You Baby.' Remember a song called 'Magnet and Steel'? When I hear that, I think of riding the Rebel Yell in the summer of 1978, and it makes me happy and wistful."
Not long ago a woman called me from Premier Rides, a space-age design firm that builds roller coasters with linear induction motors, powered by magnets. I couldn't bring myself to call her back. Whatever lies in the future, I realized, the charm of roller coasters is in their evocation of the past. In addition to the Big Dipper, Blackpool Pleasure Beach has one of the world's last surviving Tunnels of Love. One of the last.
I finally understood Rodriguez and his white-knuckle attachment to roller coasters. It has nothing to do with magnets and steel and plenty to do with "Magnet and Steel."
(August 9, 1999)
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