The morning I left rehab, I asked one of the nurses, a woman younger than me but significantly less stupid, “What now?” And she said, “What do you mean?” I said, “What do I do now? How the fuck do I live a normal life without coke, smack, pot, ket, acid, benzos, valium, booze, shrooms, nos, bounce, glue?” She said I had to face up to the fact that I was an addict, and always would be, and that I’d have to find a hobby to satiate my sick brain.
So off I went into the world of the clean: cutting grass, sawing wood, moving chess pieces as if I were some geriatric Russian. I flipped the board and went hiking with my pal Adam. “People do this…” I asked, hunched over, a tingling, pink embarrassment, halfway up my first and last trail, “… for a laugh?” He had me holding a rod out at sea. I caught a few fish. I looked at their faces. Their mouths. I knew the feeling. The one Adam felt while posing for a picture with some giant, ugly fucker he caught, I didn’t know. Later that night, we ate the giant, ugly fucker and it tasted great, but I still hadn’t found a convincing replacement.
In an internet cafe with a group of war-torn nomads, I came across a job posting for a water slide tester at a park called HydroTopia. In my application, I said I had balls the weight of osmium and a passion for water. They got back to me that same day and brought me in for an interview. “Have you been to HydroTopia before?” the park manager asked me on their jungle-themed grounds. I said, “Does the water contain chlorine?” This, he loved. “You’re my type of guy!” he said. “I think you’ll fit right in.” It was the first time anyone had ever said that to me.
Nobody is just a water slide tester. Before you lose your virginity you have to learn first-aid and CPR and everything. You have to learn customer service. With kids, no less. The park manager told me there’s a big difference between dealing with kids and dealing with adults. I asked what that was and he paused, bit the corner of his bottom lip and said, “Get back to me.”
“It’s patience,” he said later. “Adults know the importance of patience. Kids don’t. When they’re staring down that tube, with their hands gripped on the metal, the temptation is often too much to cope with. That being said, we get a couple of idiots who aren’t kids. Sometimes even a dad or two.”
I said, “We’re all kids at heart.”
“That may be true!” the park manager said.
On week one, they had me running basic errands. I mopped floors, rearranged furniture, and put about a hundred towels into lost and found. On week two, they had me working in the park cafe with two smart teenagers called Tanvi and Matt. Tanvi asked me what I used to do before working here and I said drugs and she and Matt laughed. I laughed too, to stop it being awkward. Then I had a go at working the till. Matt assured me it was simple. You do this, you do that, and then this thing comes up; then you do that again but also this, and then you’re there. I tried it once, hated it, and asked if the cafe had any decaffeinated coffee.
Finally, on week three, they had me on the slides. HydroTopia was a big old place with a rainbow skyline of interlocking tubes. To the west of the site, they’d just put up a bunch of new ones and it was my job to see if they were not only safe, but “fun”. As the park manager showed me around the new development, I wondered what would happen if I said they weren’t fun, or that they were fun but not enough to justify their existence. I wondered whether my gut feeling could oversee the demolition of a concept, its execution, and a child’s abstract ecstasy.
The park manager escorted me to the top of the stairs of my first slide, the Aqua Tube. He said, “See here? See that current? It can be deceiving. It sometimes looks sufficient but isn’t. We need to know whether it can force a person all the way down.” I looked hard at the entrance. I remember it feeling weird not to hear encouraging screams of excitement echo away from me. The faint splash of arrival somewhere below signaling their fun was over and mine was about to begin.
“Spread some of that water over yourself,” the park manager said. “No-one will be at the top of these stairs bone dry after all.”
I squatted by the entrance and cupped half a dozen bowls of water, bathing each limb, my face and hair. The park manager then escaped down the stairs like he’d conned me. He had his head tucked into his body as if anticipating a barrage and was taking the light leaps of someone walking on hot coal.
I gripped the metal rail above the entrance and placed both feet at the mouth of the current. I gawped at the entirety of HydroTopia. It was sunny and empty. We hadn’t picked up where we’d left off, the water slide and I, having spent too much time apart – arguably twenty-five years. Last time we’d met we were in Spain. I had to be pulled away, like I would from a lot of things, in tears and rage. I prayed I wasn’t naive throwing myself down; that somewhere along the line I hadn’t lost the ability to enjoy something as primitive as speed and discombobulation.
Those fears were laid to rest as I turned the first of many corners. Swaying left to right in the claustrophobic dark, my arms raised themselves. A twisted smile pushed my cheeks as far out as they could go, and I could only think: yes. Yes, yes, fucking yes.
At the bottom, I slunk under the water, experiencing a second or two of deaf isolation before spluttering my way back to life with inflated swimming shorts.
The park manager appeared a few seconds later with his clipboard, panting for air. “Well?” he asked.
“Yeah, she’s good.”
He made me go down it again to make sure I hadn’t gotten lucky. This time, I really did away with form and embraced the chaos. She was good. At the bottom, my legs went like Elvis. I asked the park manager what slide he wanted me on next and he chuckled at me like I was a naughty boy. “Oh, that’s enough for now!” he said. I played it cool, but I could feel it coming on again – the cravings, the desperation.
I did a few shifts in the cafe with Tanvi and Matt. They said I looked better. I had another go at the till like some hacker on a movie and managed to make it open and they gave me an ovation. But that was only the dress rehearsal. When I had to operate it in front of customers, it played hard to get again.
Later, we all tested out the Big Drop, a slide in which up to four people sit in a raft and shimmy around a giant funnel before falling down a black hole. Tanvi said she hated those kinda slides. Matt said he loved them. I had no strong opinion until we teetered close to and then sunk into the black hole. Then it felt like a sick joke.
“Oh my God!” Tanvi screamed. “Oh my God!”
Her screams turned to laughter. Matt’s laughter turned to screams.
I gulped and gripped. I shut my eyes tight. The arrival splash was bigger than the Aqua Tube. I remember mouthing, “Wow.” As the others dug water from their eye sockets, I leaned over and said: “Let’s tell him we’re not sure.”
“What?” Matt asked.
“Let’s tell him we’re not sure about the slide and that we need to go down it a few more times.”
“But it was fine?” Tanvi said.
So, I had to wait again. I had to walk the grounds of HydroTopia and merely perv on the slides, old and new. I hadn’t experienced their precise physics firsthand but I could gauge them. And it made me tingle all over. Only two more days, I’d whisper, just two days. Maybe one. Maybe today. See, the park manager had no schedule. He’d just kidnap me from the cafe, or from some branch of maintenance, whenever he pleased.
My third slide, the Slip N’ Fly, had a simple premise. You go down, you curve up a ramp and fall into a pool. “The question is,” the park manager said. “Is the curve too hard?”
No. It wasn’t. Not one bit. I tested it twice, for measure. Of course I did.
Through bleary eyes, I could make out the park manager nodding slowly at his clipboard. Swimming over to the curb, I bobbed underwater.
“Fuck,” I said. “It’s deep?”
“It has to be!” the park manager replied.
“Might be hard to save someone down there if they pass out.”
“Why would they pass out? The Slip N’ Fly is safe as they come!”
And that bothered me.
The next slides were equally drab. I eagerly awaited each one and welcomed that wind on my face like an old friend, but something was missing. I asked the park manager if it was okay for me to try out the Aqua Tube again under the pretense of clarification when I really needed to see if I felt better on there than I did the Slip N’ Fly and its elementary siblings Disco Slide, Olympic Run and the Gully Washer.
I was right. Something was missing. The Aqua Tube proved great fun but at the bottom, the weight of my shorts leaking down the back of my knees didn’t come with the previous jitters and endorphins.
After that, the park manager stopped asking me to test out slides. Fuck knows why. The drought lasted so long, I wasn’t sure I could call myself a water slide tester anymore. I just became some bog-standard barista spoiled with water slide intermissions.
Tanvi and Matt stopped saying I looked better, too. They were right. I had withdrawal. I pondered why it had come to this. Needing to feel the predictable high of the Gully Washer to sleep at night. Could I not cram the dash between my birth and death year without a crude buzz to define myself by?
I called in sick to work and watched a thousand water slide POVs on YouTube. I turned out all the lights to immerse myself. I stripped down to my boxers and had a bottle of water to squeeze over my face on climax. I couldn’t leave. And then I did. The park manager called me into his office. He said I couldn’t make a habit of this, meaning sick days. Here at HydroTopia, he said, we only hire team players. Did he know I was jaded by him cutting me off at the source? Could he, like Tanvi and Matt, see in my pallor the nasty reality of addiction? I wasn’t sure. A week later, he kidnapped me with a big smile and said the final slide was ready for me to try.
“Where is it?” I asked at the base of a red-coloured staircase the size of Big Ben.
“It’s in the stairs,” he said. “Ain’t that great?”
I got the back story on our clangy, nauseating ascension. It sounded crazy. They called it The Drop of Doom. Punters would stand upright in a glass capsule and wait for a trap door to open beneath them, through which they would then plummet some 120 metres at an estimated speed of 49 miles an hour. “Like the Slip N’ Fly,” the park manager said, “this one has a curve at the last minute. It actually comes out of the ground. Three quarters of the ride is unseen. The exit can only be seen from the landing area.”
“Like a sewage pipe?” I asked.
“We’re dreaming bigger than a sewage pipe but yes, I suppose that’s a good analogy.”
The Drop of Doom had a robotic voice that would count you down from ten. The park manager played it for me. I watched the trap door open from outside the capsule.
“Has no-one else tried this?” I asked.
“No-one!”
“Not even Tanvi or Matt?”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
“You ready?”
I removed my shirt and sandals and stepped into the capsule. The current running down my back made me squirm. The park manager advised me to cross my arms over my chest like I was dead.
“The water’s gonna come at you thick and fast,” he warned. “Make sure to close your eyes and mouth.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the slide if I can’t see it?”
He laughed. “The Drop of Doom is to be lived, not surveyed.”
Arms and legs in place, I looked out at the horizon. I pictured the men and women and children who would follow me – the Drop of Doom’s own George Washington – playfully screaming, holding GoPros, grateful to see the sopping queue around them cut to black. I tried to put myself in their heads but couldn’t. I was me. And me wasn’t so well. Did I realize that as I dropped? No. Did I realize that while being virtually waterboarded along the way? No. I realized it when I shot out of the exit and up into the clouds and figured that if I was to miss the pool and land on the sun loungers beyond them – a strong possibility – this was as good as it ever got. Feeling the rush of speed and discombobulation wasn’t enough if the threat of death didn’t rear its bruised head. That was what I’d missed. All my best highs had in common the promise of a final release, whether it was me puking myself blue on Charlie’s bathroom floor, flat lining in the back of that Uber, or leaping over the counter in Bar Burrito bollock naked. There was joy in knowing I’d gone too far, and would either die, or be saved by someone, and all of this would end. The sun loungers growing larger by the second, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I landed on the right plane of my head, a spasm would occur in my prefrontal cortex and fix me like nobody or nothing before ever could.
