443: Amusement Park

From WBEZ, Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Robert Glass. Okay, so we're going through the gate here into the park?

Yeah, we're going. This is our morning walk into the park. Everybody will split up into their different sections and get the park open and we'll start putting out prizes.

We're at an amusement park in Kansas City, Missouri, called Worlds of Fun. We're going to be spending the entire hour today at amusement parks. It's five minutes before opening and I'm walking with Cole Lindberg, who's 25, with permanently must-have and the cheerful vibe of the Bosom Buddies era Tom Hanks. He's been coming to this park since he was a little kid, started working here as a summer job at 14, and then basically just never left. It became his real job.

I love amusement parks. Anytime my family would go on vacation, we'd schedule it around an amusement park. because I love roller coasters. I love amusement parks. I mean, I've walked this pathway that we're taking right now.

When he was little, his family had season passes here and they would come a lot. He'd travel to any new roller coaster to try it out, daydreamed about a job where he would design parks and build roller coasters, and when his dad drove him here at the age of 14 for a job interview, he wore a suit to that interview. Just sitting inside the park's offices, which are utilitarian, picture, the principal's office at a public high school. Even that was exciting.

I remember being like, kind of like, oh wow, this is the inner sanctum, you know, this is the inner workings, this is where all the cool stuff happens. And then, you know, then, first time, actually getting in the uniform, actually working in the park. I mean, I remember, to me, it was like, wow, this is kind of surreal, you know, I'm actually working in an amusement park now. And to me, that was kind of like, awesome, you know, awesome, I'm so excited about this.

You might think that enthusiasm would diminish over time, but what's incredible about Cole is that even after a decade here, even after becoming an adult and working 60, 70 hour weeks every week, all summer, even with the pressure in his current job of running a whole department and hitting financial targets and buying all the supplies and hiring and supervising over 100 young people, he is still pretty psyched about working in an amusement park. And it is not a glamour job. The department Cole runs is the games department at Worlds of Fun. This is 32 games, the kind that you would see at any carnival or Midway, where you get, you know, three softballs to try to throw them into a milk can, or you throw bean bags at targets, or you shoot darts to knock over a stack of cups. Nobody comes to an amusement park for the games.

Yeah, Mallory loves talking on the mic. Mallory does a good job.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Let's hear it. Go. Go for it. Try to get people to play. All righty.

You come on over here. You have 40 seconds on the clock, 12 shots up, and you can be walking away with some awesome prizes.

This is exactly how Cole trains the kids to talk on the mic. Don't stop. Get a flow. Have fun. If you have fun, that's what's going to sell the game.

Let's get around, guys.

It's the first shift meeting of the day. About 30 teenagers and college kids mill around a big tree before the shifts start.

All right, guys. Listen up. Get around. Let's do this. Here we go.

One of the guys, Sam, holds up a poster board with tournament brackets on it, like for any sports tournament. The Sweet 16 Tournament pits the kids in all 32 games in the park against each other in pairs in a four-week competition to make the most money. Last week, half the games were eliminated. Cole is here, letting the remaining games know who they're competing with today.

We have Pigs of Fury Bullpen versus Goblet Toss LimeStick.

Now.

Wait.

Hold on.

Before we go any further, could this possibly be a precursor for today? Yesterday, the number one game in the park was Scale Africa.

Okay, Scale Africa is a scale, a game where they guess your weight or age, and it's in the Africa part of the park, hence Scale Africa, and it's no surprise that it's number one. It always makes tons of money. All the games in the park are grouped together into four different teams, which they call Games 1, Games 2, Games 3, and Games 4, and these four teams, Games 1 through 4, compete against each other all summer long, like teams at summer camp in a three-month-long color war. Most other amusement parks don't go this far to make things interesting for the workers. This park, Worlds of Fun, is owned by a company called Cedar Fair, that owns 11 amusement parks and six water parks, and Cole knows the guys who run the games departments at the other parks, and some of them do competitions like this between the employees.

But I don't think they do it to the extent of what we do. I mean, we, every year, I talk about, you know, we had the Deathmatch tournament. We had the Sweet 16 tournament. A couple years ago, we did a thing called Toss the Boss, and basically what happened was is that every single day, I'd pull a game out of the hat, and if that game was the number one game in the park for that day, then that section would get to throw me in the pond. The pond is not a good-looking pond.

So finally, one day, the game that he picked from the hat that day tried their hardest and actually became the number one game in the park for the day, and.

Ready? One!

Two!

Three!

Of course, they made a video about this, because, you know, it's present-day America. And Cole went and told his peers, his colleagues, the guys who run the games departments at the other parks, all about what happened.

I go and I tell the other parks about this, and I showed a picture, you know, like, oh, there's me all soaking wet, and I mean, I kind of got laughed at. You know, like, why would you ever do that? And to me, in my mind, I was just like, why would you not do that? You know, why would you not want to get people excited about working in the game that they're in? At least they may try.

Also, it's more fun for the kids. Exactly. Exactly.

It's all about more fun. All right, so there's a lot of people in the park today. Now, I have composed a song about today, which I now want to sing for you, and you can all sing along. Okay.

Saturday.

Saturday. Wait, what day is that? I forgot. It's Saturday. Oh, okay.

Saturday.

Today, I don't feel like riding any rides.

Whistle, whistle.

I just want to play all the games. Did I really like playing Mamba Ball with a giant top frog or a big basketball? Yes, today, I don't feel like riding any rides.

Just playing games.

One, two, three. Games. All right, let's have a good day. Well, today, on our radio show, we go to amusement parks all over the country. We see stuff backstage that we had no idea was going on, like that song.

You kind of just go, it is what it is. Oh, I got to show you the lemur. You want to see what a lemur is? Yeah. People love these.

Really?

Yeah.

Who would have thought? It's a fluorescent colored monkey the size of a teddy bear with huge eyes and a super long tail. When they put it into the dart game, the dart game became one of the most popular games in the park. Doubled its business. I also learned that Cole invents games.

You like Angry Birds, right?

We round a corner and I see why he asked.

What we're looking at right now is a giant slingshot with a launcher that you launch basically beanbags at pigs. And we built this.

So you got permission from the Angry Birds people?

Well.

This turns out to be kind of an awkward question. Cole points out that this slingshot game is not actually called Angry Birds.

It's called Pigs of Fury. Pigs of Fury. So now this is one of our number one games. People love shooting a giant slingshot.

Before I flew out to Kansas City to meet Cole, I watched his YouTube videos online. Yes, he has YouTube videos and I heartily recommend them. They are shot, directed, and starring Cole. They are low tech. They're low budget.

Hello! How are you? I was just reading. Greetings!

When he says wonderful journey, he mugs at the camera with this gesture that communicates the idea, I know, this is completely ridiculous. In fact, the entire video seems to be making fun of the idea of training videos, while at the same time it is a training video, explaining how to sign in, how to use the till card, how to stock prizes. I saw these videos and all I could think of was, these people really love their jobs. And I thought about Michael Scott, the fictional boss on The Office.

I'd say that there's a lot of Michael Scott in this job. I'd say there's a lot of Michael Scott in me, probably. I do silly things that everybody looks at me later and goes, why did he do that? Why was it deemed necessary for Cole to dress up wearing a big beard and a raincoat and tell everyone he lived downtown, under the bridge and he was there to motivational speaker them today? Hi everybody, I'm Phil Bridges.

So, does that work in practice? After all, if you think about it, amusement park jobs are not, on their face, very fun. You know, taking tickets, strapping people into rides, convincing passersby to throw three balls into a can. Well, the Saturday that I visited turned out to be one of the busiest, hottest days of the summer. There was a concert at the park, which brought in thousands of extra people.

So this is, you have a secret weapon that is going, they're going to show you the secret weapon and what, and don't let anybody see it. Guaranteed victory.

It's a banana costume.

Did you just go buy fabric?

No, I've had this fabric. So this is the head hole, the arms hole, and it's going to look like the bananas in Lions did.

I like it.

We're pumped.

I like it. That is more than exciting.

People are going to be stopping, taking pictures, oh, maybe I'll win one too. Meanwhile, the guys in Games 4 were doing great in Sweet 16.. All their games had survived the first round. Games 1, was eliminated completely in the first round of Sweet 16.. As for Games 2, Max and Oksan are pulling a double shift, hoping to break the record for how much has ever been made, ever, in their two games.

All right, so strobe light, strobe light. You want two black lights out there.

Max and his team leader, Dominic, are setting up at a game called Roll-A-Ball, which is one of the older games in the park. Basically, it's just a ski ball, but as you get points, it moves a little wooden pig, which is in a race with all the other riders. This doesn't make any sense. It actually doesn't matter. Here's what you need to know.

We're going to put a light on that toy chest. We're going to put a light on that box. They're shining at the disco ball. The disco ball is going to be moving. It's all dark in here.

Half an hour before the park opened, Haley and Claire had gotten to work early, and were down in Games 3 by Scale Africa. We wanted to set out the most prizes that we could, make. the piles extravagant, do a lot of flash, and that takes a lot of time, so we came out here early. So just describe what we're looking at. There's a pyramid here of?

We really want to win.

We lost a death match, a very painful battle.

Years ago, I was lead of Games 3.

Cole gets just as excited as the kids do when you get him talking about all the fun things that he did back when he was Hayley and Claire's age, working here, running Games 3.

And they'd be out at the scale, and they'd do guessing pirates. Gar, your age B. Gar, you know, stuff like that. 2004 came around, we dominated. We beat everyone.

It is still so alive for him. They dominated in 2004 by tricking out one of the games with music and all kinds of commotion and turning it into a party, doubling its take for the day.

We brought my fog machine in from home because at the time, I was in high school, and I had a band. And people flocked to it. And we destroyed Games 2.. We destroyed them that year. It was the happiest I've been, because in 2003, we had gotten so close to winning.

Late morning, when I checked back at Games 3, the pyramids of plush toys looked pretty much exactly as big as they had earlier that morning. Things were slow. And, to goose the business, one of the supervisors, Sarah, was standing on the roof of this little hut.

88 more guesses until I'm coming off the roof.

She's staying on the roof until she gets 100 guesses. I'm here until I get 88 more guesses,

and then I'm going to allow myself to take a bathroom break. So any of you guys walking by, if you guys want to come play my game, help me out, get me off this roof.

If it's only $5 to play, I can guess your age, weight, or birthday month. This is a technique that I recognized from 1,000 public radio pledge drives, and it was working about as slowly for her as it works for us. Strangers. just don't care if some girl on the roof gets to take a bathroom break.

I'm stuck here until I can get 88 more people to play.

I mean, seriously? All you people don't want to help me out. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for the luck.

It sounds like a weird thing, but we really have the softest turtles in town.

You should feel one. They're really soft.

After a while, Sarah switched technique and finally managed to wrestle up a crowd through the simple tactic of making a series of insanely terrible guesses. First, there is a dad who looks like he's 42 and, in fact, is 42.. Sarah guessed as 25.. Then a grandmother who is standing there with kids and grandkids. Sarah writes her guess for this woman's age on a whiteboard.

This could be really wrong.

I get the feeling it's really wrong, but that's okay.

We'll see. You guys like this. guess? Maybe? All right.

Later, Sarah privately confirmed for me that she did intentionally take a dive, which is fine with Cole, because it turns out it doesn't matter if the kids guess right. The game costs $5 to play. The prizes cost less than $5.. Sarah can be wrong with every single guess, and they'd still make a nice profit. In fact, it's good to lose, because people carrying prizes around the park are a walking advertisement for all the games.

I couldn't wait till the summer, because when it was summertime, I get to come to World Fund and work with people that are just like me and enjoy our whole summer together.

So, after years of that, in his senior year at the University of Kansas at Lawrence, he got a phone call offering him the job of games manager, and he dropped out of school to take it.

It's probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make. But I said, okay, this opportunity's probably only going to come along once in a lifetime.

As you'd imagine, it hasn't been such a popular decision with the family.

So I mean, I have a full year left. I'm like one full year of college left. It comes up when you least expect it. It comes up when they're like, oh, I know you're working real hard,

but when are you getting back to school?

Or my grandmother, now, before I pass on, you need to make sure that you've completed college. My grandma all the time.

This girlfriend and Cole were pretty serious. They just moved in together. They met in games back in 2006,, though she moved on from games.

I get that all the time. She's like, we're not going to be together forever. if you don't finish college. I get it a lot.

How often will it come up?

Once a week.

Lots of very accomplished people don't have college degrees.

I know.

Steve Jobs?

Yeah. But Steve Jobs, he changed the world. I'm just a lowly little games manager in a small, mid-sized park in Kansas City.

By midday, down in games. three, that is Dustin, who's wearing the full-body banana suit that Haley handmade for him, which looks amazing. But it is 94 degrees, which is sapping everybody's energy and business is slow. Hey, you guys have a great day. Though, as the day wears on, people slowly migrate from the rides to the games.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, let's go look at Technoball. Look at this.

It's six of your staff and

two, three other guys all dancing.

in a big circle.

Yeah, four other guys all dancing in a big circle to Technomusic.

And how many people are actually playing?

Zero.

Hey, Dominic. Hey, Dom.

That's Dominic, the team leader here at games two.

Oh, look, Dom's all, like, embarrassed.

Hi, Dom.

How many people are playing the game, Dom?

Attracting a lot of attention.

Yeah, but why aren't we turning that into gameplay?

Maybe they should dance inside the game instead of on the walkway in front of the game, so people would be pulled into play. Dom does not want to do this. And listen to what a good boss Cole is. He's firm, but he's very nice about it.

You're so close. I know. You're so close.

Did you see how much attention that just attracted?

I did. But then you didn't have anybody.

out here talking to them, saying, hey, why aren't you playing the game? I know. I was hoping that they would realize that. No, no, no. They're not going to realize that.

you should know that. They're not going to just.

be like, oh.

It looks fine. I mean, all the lights. I'm not going to deny the awesomeness,

but I am going to say that no more dance parties. I really think the dance parties are not going to help you win.

I walked down to check on Games 3.

Yes, I had a lot of fun. I had no idea what time it was until about 20 minutes ago when I checked. It just didn't occur to me that I needed to check the time.

Because it was going by so fast?

Yeah.

When did you take your first break today?

I haven't taken a break.

Wow.

Yeah, I guess I'm kind of used to it.

This is Claire's third year here. She's 18, going to Missouri State in the fall to study nursing. And she tells me what a lot of kids here tell me. She wouldn't keep coming back to work at Worlds of Fun if not for Cole.

Definitely not. I don't think any other boss would do the rally days, the death match, the Sweet 16, the Toss, the Boss,

just all the fun stuff that we do that keeps us going through the season and just keeps this job exciting every day. Sam, one of the leaders for Games 4,, has been here for three summers, and he also says that Cole is the reason that he keeps coming back.

Honestly, no one else could do a better job. He was made to do this.

It's funny watching him do something like sing a goofy song for you guys in the morning. You can imagine high school students and college students sort of rolling their eyes at somebody doing that. But nobody does.

No, it's weird. It's almost like that's the thing to do. Whatever Cole does is the thing to be doing at that moment. And we just all feel like that was the right move.

Do you remember what it was like the first time you saw one of his videos?

I do. I remember seeing it and I was like, that's my boss and he just made that video. And it was so cool because I went and even showed some of my friends. They're all like, who's this guy? It's like, that's my boss.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that he is seen by his bosses as some kind of superstar. He gets respect, sure. Everybody likes him. His immediate boss, Matt, thinks that there's nobody better at games than any of the 11 amusement parks owned by their parent company, Cedar Fair. But Cole was working at one of the smallest of the 11 parks.

So, the one thing that I always say is, I mean, I'm 25 now. I started here when I was 14.. And the weird thing is is that I'm getting older, but everybody else in the department is staying the same age.

I'm going to set the tape right there. Yes, I know. Matthew McConaughey is confused. Cole's seen the film too. But the thing I'm wondering for you is, do you feel like, somehow, accidentally in this job, you got stuck in high school?

I like working out in the park with the kids. Absolutely.

100%. The goofball.

part. The goofball part.

The part where you get to act their age instead of your age. Yes.

Does that make me sound bad? I mean, I'm still a manager. I'm still overseeing 100 people that work for me. But at the same time, 10 years from now, I don't think I can still be a goofball. I think that'd just kind of get creepy.

Do you worry that you'll never be happier in any job than you are in this one?

Yes.

That's a weird fate. To know that you're in the best job you may ever have at 25.. Especially when it's a job that you know in your heart, it can't last.

Carnies. There's creepy carnies and hot carnies and carnies that people married. A bunch of people called and told stories about carnies, like making the ride go too fast or keeping them on the ride too long.

My amusement park story involves the Gravitron.

Let me interrupt real quick, because the Gravitron, that was the most popular ride people talked about in the phone calls. That's the one where it's a cylinder and you climb in it and you put your back up against the inside wall of the cylinder.

Right, and it spins around and the board drops out.

Yep, and you're stuck to the wall.

There was a carnie there and he was waving us all in and we had purchased tickets, and I guess our first sign that this was going to be an interesting ride was when he said no to the tickets we offered him and just kind of waved us in. I was working for the World of Wonder sideshow last month.

I had made friends with the carnie who was running the Gravitron.

He started up the ride and the music was blaring, and I remember it was Motley Cruz, Dr.

Feelgood. Anyway, he gave me a private chilling where I'm riding inside this thing, the music's blasting.

And the lights were going and we were spinning around and the centrifugal force was pushing us up against the wall. and the next thing I know this carnie steps out from behind his operating box and comes out into the centrifuge and proceeds to pull himself up and place his feet on the spinning wall and walk over the rider, step by step, with his body completely horizontal to the.

earth. He's standing on the wall next to me, surfing inside of the Gravitron.

The ride operator left the control panel to start surfing the inside, parallel to the ground. The force was holding his feet against the wall and it was just the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. Best experience of my life.

So I know, because you told me right before we sat down, that a lot of the stories that people caught in to tell were love stories.

Tons of love stories. Or like-like stories.

than others. My name is Natasha and in May my boyfriend proposed to me on a rollercoaster.

I called Natasha actually to see if they'd found it yet, and she said that the park had called her recently and said they found a ring, but it wasn't hers. It was another engagement ring. Really?

Yeah.

Well.

it's good to know that her fiancé wasn't the only dummy. Right.

And then we got a bunch of scary calls. This is a scary one. Wendy, in Austin, Texas. she and her friend went to the fair and they were getting on a rollercoaster. It was like one of those medium-sized fair rollercoasters where there's one big drop and then a loop-de-loop, and as she was getting on, she was futzing around with her purse.

I reached up to pull the harness down over me and it locked above my head and I have nothing holding me into the.

rollercoaster. So.

I look over.

in horror as.

the carny guy that was running the ride looks at me and he pushes the button to go and the thing starts to go and I'm telling him wait, wait, wait, stop, stop. I don't have my.

seatbelt on. But he doesn't stop. So, I know, so now she's like going up the hill. So she said she turned to her friend and she just decided to wrap her arms and legs around her friend. I know, and so they go down the hill and then they go through the loop-de-loop.

As tight as I can to stay inside the ride. and what really got scary is we whipped around the corners. I almost got thrown out, but I didn't.

She said that she had whiplash for a week and that she was too young to realize that she probably could have sued them. So, there's another story from this woman, Susan. Her three-year-old wanted to go to the fair, but it was super late at night. And so they humored him and they were like, sure, we'll take you, but they figured he would fall asleep on the way there. But he didn't.

So I said, okay, I'll take you in for one ride on the Ferris wheel and then we'll go back to the car. My husband, Dinoon, put his shoes on because we didn't think he'd make it there. So we took him to the Ferris wheel and he kept pointing to the scrambler, saying that he wanted to go on the scrambler. And I said, no, no, no. And when we got off the ride, I held the chain for the person behind me to come out.

I'm glad we finally have some unequivocally pro-carny material in this story. Me too. Hi. My.

amusement park story takes place in Disneyland. And I was really excited to go on the haunted house ride. I forget what it's called. Anyways, the door opens and you are let into a room. And the door opens.

And.

then we both realized that it was not part of the haunted house and that we were just waiting in line with each other. And we pretended like nothing happened.

And finally there were the puke stories.

Oh, a lot of people called it that, puke. And is the story more than just? I was on a ride and I puked?

Yeah, it's, I was on a ride and I puked, or I was on a ride and I got puked on.

Well, I don't want to hear that. Was there any that had like a twist? Was it a surprise putt twist?

The one that stands out for me is this lady was on that ocean motion ride, you know, that's like a big boat that swings back and forth. And it basically just goes up and down. Yeah, it just swings. It's like a pendulum. And so she was up in the highest part of the boat and she saw the guy on the other end of the boat start puking.

And did she see the puke in midair? Yeah, like in slow motion.

Coming towards her.

I could see in slow motion this line of vomit coming towards me.

And it hit her? Yeah. Eww.

About two seconds later, it splattered the entire right side of my body.

There's nowhere to go.

You can't get off the boat.

The smell of garbage is really bringing it all back in a rush. Maybe I could bring back a bag with some salt, water, toffee.

How close did you live to the pier?

Um, I mean, as you've seen, getting here, my sense of direction isn't my forte. Um, man, it's like the whole summer. I was just like floating around in like a jar of formaldehyde.

Do you remember where on the pier?

you were? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I'm trying to like, I think I mean, if anything, maybe that little shack right over. there was the arcade where there's a roller coaster going over it. now.

Yeah, that's my job. I take money from them.

That's your whole job, is just blowing bubbles? Not only.

And shine with laser.

Shine a laser in people's eyes? No. No, of course. The bubble girl tells me she is from Bulgaria. The Bulgarian bubble girl is very young-looking, like, first time away from home, young.

It's alright. This boardwalk's getting bad. At night time, this boardwalk is bad.

You go two blocks off the boardwalk,

there was a shooting and a stabbing the other day. It's worse under the boardwalk.

What goes on under the boardwalk?

Sex and drugs. I park underneath my store, and you can see underneath it here. And you catch them all the time down under there. They go right down them steps and right underneath the boardwalk.

Wow.

Sex under the boardwalk. Who? Me and you. Oh. Yeah.

Yep. Alright. See you later.

You got the lowest amount of points you can get.

You're like my son that I'm taking out. You got the lowest one, Dad.

That little beer, cozy's gonna be mine.

No longer will my hand have to be so frigid when I'm drinking a Budweiser.

Watch the tram car, please.

Listen to this music. Don't you feel like you're gonna round the corner and you're gonna see Joe Pesci beating someone to death with a baseball bat? That's all I can think about. It's a song called Wildwood Days. Do you hear it?

Most of the stuff I do is just off the top of my head. It's whatever I can think of on the spot.

This is Dutz Bonas, Jr. The sounds you hear are of people shooting at him with guns. Dutz Bonas, Jr. is a human paintball target. He shuffles back and forth and eggs on the crowd while being splattered like a Jackson Pollock canvas.

You know, I'll put it as blunt as I can, because this is how it is on my tax forms, too. I'm an entertainer. Not the dancer kind, but basically I get suited up in a hockey gear and I get shot at all night.

And that doesn't start to get to you a little bit? Do you dream about it?

No. I love it. It's entertaining to me, because this is one of the jobs that I can be as creative as I want to be. It's just like web page design. When you go in, you can do whatever you want.

Before Dutz, human paintball targets simply shuffled from side to side holding a shield. Then one day, Dutz dropped his shield and began to moonwalk. Soldier Boy was to follow. He also invented shadowboxing at the paintballs and running towards the shooters. Dutz is protected by a suit that looks like what you'd come up with if you tried to build a Michelin Man costume out of moist newspaper and epoxy glue.

Yep, that we provide. Because a lot of people want to bring their own, but we don't allow that. It's just not going to happen.

The suit that you wear protects you from any pain?

For the most part, yeah. There are some weak spots, but I can't say where the weak spots are, because then a lot of people will find out. Then it becomes a little dangerous.

Before agreeing to talk with me, Dutz wanted to finish his break with the woman who works next door at the old-timey photo place. As it turns out, she's his wife who he met on this very boardwalk. Dutz might spend his day getting fired at in a cage, but at least on his time off he has someone to talk to, someone with whom to share the secret weak spots in his armor.

Johnathan Goldstein is the host of the podcast Heavyweight. He and the team over there are hard at work on an eighth season of that show. Coming soon, wherever you get your podcasts.

A lot of winners today?

Everybody wins.

What would you say to get a guy like me to come over?

I don't know if I would call you in. You don't look like the type of guy that would spend money here, you know? You get three shots for five...

Was he saying that I'm too cool a customer or was he saying you're too cheap a Jew?

You see, I went on the roller coaster.

last night when I was feeling bad.

Down by the sea in Santa Cruz.

And I was feeling sad, But we went down and around and it knocked me.

out of my head.

It sounds like a weird.

thing, but we really have the softest turtles in town. You should feel one. They're really soft. I'm, Eric Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. A roller coaster.

by the sea, thank you,

for helping me. Roller coaster by the water.

you made me feel more as I hotter and more.

Oh yes, you knocked me out of my head.