Thursday, June 26, 2014

Right Down the Middle of Main Street, USA, Part Two: "How It Begins"

I went to Chicago a year ago to see Drive-By Truckers. It was my first time there. It was a lovely city, and the trains were fairly easy to understand. Local eye-candy didn’t hurt, either, and there are plenty of Starbucks. But I was going there sort of on the cheap, and the hotel room I stayed in was … well, it was a dystopian little hellhole, not to put too fine a point on it. It was like someone took the very concept of Dickensian, made it manifest, and then shaded layers of suburban thrift bazaar on top of it. A mass-produced painting of a dog in a field hung disconsolately over my bed of many springs, and the closet-bathroom’s hot water worked intermittently, grudgingly. It was as if I was being punished for traveling across time zones to see a three-hour concert. I quite honestly didn’t mind. The things you do for rock and roll.

But it’s not as if hotels like that are my first, fifth, or even eighteenth choice. I lived 5/8 of my life in a room exactly like that, and I don’t feel any pressing need to relive the drear realness of my misspent youth. In one of my more honest moments, I said to Joe, “I am impressed by wealth.” This was in relation to having seen the Bay Lake Tower at the Contemporary Resort at Walt Disney World and just being bowled over. I think Joe may have taken what I said wrong at the time. I think – and this could just be me extrapolating – that he thought I was more into being around rich friends. Friends that could treat me to stuff like the Bay Lake Tower when I was on my Disney trips.

That wasn’t it, though. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to treat my friends to this stuff. I wanted to be the guy who makes the Bay Lake Tower happen. Some of it’s my superhero complex. Some of it’s my need to be liked. Some of it’s trying to scrub off the poor from my early years. And quite a lot of it is just because I like nice stuff and it’s fun to do nice stuff with your buddies.

All of that is to say that I’ve been spoiling myself. Last year, I stayed at my first deluxe resort, the Wilderness Lodge at Disney World, and I brought my friends with me. Earlier this year, I stayed at the Contemporary, a long-held dream. It’s a twelve-minute walk to the Magic Kingdom, guys. And when I was last in Atlanta and I handed Joe the Disney Packet of Awesome, one of the best parts is where I was able to turn the page and say, “see this? This is a picture of the Disneyland Hotel. Where we’ll be staying. We’re going to stay there, Joe!”

I thought nothing about this trip was going to top that moment; the planning is almost always the best part of the trip. But you know what’s actually more exciting than looking at a picture of the Disneyland Hotel? Being inside the Disneyland Hotel. I mean, the chairs in the lobby are in the shape of teacups! The headboards light up in LED fireworks and play, “When You Wish Upon a Star”! Oh, and also this happens in the freakin lobby:

Things were off to a great start.

* * *

I should note right here at the very start that my co-conspirator for this whole endeavor was my friend Paul, who I’d first met at my very first trip to Disneyland in the faraway year of 2009. You know, it’s interesting. Paul and I had known each other through LiveJournal, but we weren’t what you’d necessarily call close-close. We’re close-close now. You never know where your best friends are going to come from, or how long they’re going to stick around. One of the best things about Disney is that it provides a place to hang out with all of them. My best friends are all scattered – Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, New York, New Jersey, right here in Boston – but a lot of us have Disney in common, and it makes it easy to pick a place to be together, and to have something to talk about. It can’t be the only thing, which is a lesson I keep learning.

Because I’m all about the rituals and milestones and narratives, Paul and I used the time between my arrival and Joe’s to ride the teacups (which we did first thing last time we were here alone) and grabbed a snack at the Bengal Barbecue (where we first ate when we were last here alone; my brain is like the middle section of a John Irving novel when the patterns start to emerge, usually after the bears but before Amsterdam). Then Paul helped me set up Joe’s gift spread on the bed (which, I swear to God, has nothing to do with buttcheeks) and when Joe walked in after traveling all day I kind of leapt at him and made him enjoy everything. Because my enthusiasm only counts if everyone matches it! I’m not hard to know!

Then with all the whirlwind excitement, we ushered a weary Joe into Disneyland! The main reason I’d chosen to go now was so Joe could see the Mechanical Kingdoms exhibit on Main Street, an impetus I’d entirely forgotten until we actually got there and then I super-smooth covered my surprise and made it seem like it was all part of the plan.

“Hey guys! Let’s go see that! It’s all part of the plan!” Super. Smooth.

If you’re any sort of Disney fan interested in visiting parks on both coasts, one of the fun things to do is to compare and contrast the same rides. Like, Space Mountain in Disney World has a better queue and track layout, but the one in Disneyland has a smoother track and on-board music. The Tower of Terror in California has some really neat ghost effects, but the one in Florida has the fifth-dimension room. Take a lifelong Walt Disney World man to Disneyland, and you’re bound to have interesting opinions … and, for some reason, Abbott and Costello conversations.

“Points to California,” Joe said, as we climbed off of Pirates of the Caribbean, that wonderful musty smell lingering everywhere, as if joy had an aroma.

I thrust out a finger and smiled. We were in California. How do you point to it?

“No,” Paul said. “Points to California.”

I was baffled. Was this a reference to the fact that we were in New Orleans Square? Like, was I supposed to be pointing west or something?

“Oh,” I said, because when you don’t get the joke, you just agree. “Yep.” Do you have any idea how dumb I feel writing this out?

We rode the Matterhorn, and as silly as it seems, that’s my connection to classic Disneyland. I wasn’t there. Walt Disney died before I was born. But when you’re surrounded by living history, it’s almost impossible not to feel echoes of the past. Especially if you’re a conscientious fan, someone who not only loves Disney as it is now, but as it was then. There are plenty of people who go to Disney and it’s just fun and that’s about it. And that’s fine. But when you’re people like me and you read books about the parks, when you visit them four times a year, when you listen to Disney history podcasts, some of that stuff sinks in. It becomes part of your experience when you’re there.

What’s harder is when that history becomes definitive, when things like “Walt originalism” and the concept of the past being static is used as a detriment rather than an enhancement. Here’s where I get into some trouble. See, part of my desire to learn everything about the parks led me to a number of websites that offered weekly reports on the goings-on at Disneyland and Disney World. That stuff is thrilling to me, a way of keeping up with my park love back home. There are usually pictures of things being worked on and new stuff being developed, of special events and flowers in bloom. One of the things I began running into was the initialism, “WWWDD,” or What Would Walt Disney Do? It’s both a noble question and an idiotic question. Noble, because the Disney parks exist for a reason, and the ideals and gumption that got them built are laudable, all these years later. Idiotic because the man is dead, and has been for years. We don’t know what Walt would do.

Accompanying this notion was an odd, prevalent sort of negativity. It was easy to notice in the forums. Forums on any topic in any fandom are redolent with the stench of lunacy and the culture of “used to be better.” According to the Springsteen forums, The Boss hasn’t done anything of worth since 1978. According to Apple forums, the iPod was the worst thing Steve Jobs ever did. And according to Disney forums, letting cast members wear beards is “just like putting a roller coaster on Main Street USA,” and letting guests wear fancy clothes proves that “Disney is nuts,” and putting a Starbucks in the parks is a sign that, “the real fans have lost. This is no longer our park, or Walt’s. The best we can hope for is that when we die, Uncle Walt will be in heaven, and take us on personal tours of that once glorious place.” That’s a fucking actual quote. I am not kidding you.

But then the negativity spread, and the actual reports – the ones that purport to be just relaying the news – started to seem angrier. More resentful of everything Disney was doing. Weasel words began to crop up. “Disney is working on this ride” became “Disney still isn’t finished working on this ride.” “Disney is expanding its fancy private club” became “Disney is destroying part of the park and taking more space away from regular guests.” The Twitter accounts from the writers I followed got even worse. Nasty. For every “I like this” tweet, there were fifty, “everything is terrible” tweets. It became this constant cycle of anger, of rage, of “Disney is for real screwing up my life.”

When you’re an optimist, and a positive thinker, and … no. Better. When you’re an actual critic (which I am, paid and everything), reading nothing but terrible reviews about things that are, on the whole, not terrible … well, it rankles. One of the first things you learn as a critic is that it’s more fun to write bad reviews. It is. You get to break out the thesaurus and go on rants and people eat that up. People love that. It’s harder to write good reviews. It’s more work. Convincing people that things are great is far, far more difficult than convincing them that things are awful. What I found was a lot of lazy reporting. A lot of empty rage. A lot of bizarre contradictions that I couldn’t even fathom (Disney fixing up a mall-like embarrassment into something more classic and impressive on one coast is the best thing ever, but on the other coast is the worst idea no one should care about).

Did I snap? Did I decide to lead a crusade against negativity? Did I say, “Someone has to take a stand?” No, none of that. It all started so small, so inconsequential. On my WestCotCenter Twitter handle, I just started copying choice quotes and pointing out why they were wrong, or ridiculous, or overly negative for negativity’s sake. I had followers by then – followers who had no idea I was Kevidently on my main account – and a lot of them thought my jabs were pretty funny. And I love attention. I love being liked. It’s addictive. And I thought it would be neat to have a persona completely separate from who I am, some place to go to be a little more snarky and a little more pointed in how I feel about the “foamers,” the people who were taking the concept of criticism and perverting it into something uglier.

I never really asked why I was doing it. Not really. Did Disney need me to defend them? Nope, no more than Stephen King or Bruce Springsteen does. As it went on, a part of me tried to justify it as standing for the fans who would read the negativity (and sometimes outright lies, like the one about how Walt Disney World doesn’t do real maintenance and everything is falling apart), but that wasn’t really it, either. I came up with reasons later – with some awesomely disastrous results – but I think at first, I was fed up with the bullshit and having some fun at bullshit’s expense. Pure motivation? Maybe not. But it sure was fun.

* * *

We got drunk that night at Trader Sam’s, the enchanted tiki bar. I got a kungaloosh, the drink of the now-defunct Adventurer’s Club – the steampunky club that used to exist in Downtown Disney. We’d ridden a lot of rides and done a lot of stuff, and Joe and I were feeling jetlagged but happy. The night had closed in, and as Paul pointed out, nights in Disneyland tend to be cool and humidity-free, unlike nights in Florida. We were discussing our first ride on Haunted Mansion, which Joe had judges as being better in Walt Disney World.

Oh!” I shouted, after draining the last of my kungaloosh. “Points to Disneyland. Because they get all the points!”

That was day one.

No comments:

Post a Comment