I never questioned the bad timing. I would just stop and watch with rapture each and every commercial that heralded yet another magic kingdom that sprang forth overnight from a toxic waste sight. Towering girders of G-Force death! Brightly painted cement mixers to scramble your brains! God, there they all were, waiting for ME!

The day would be at hand. The car, train or bus on which you arrived was merely token conveyance. You arrived on the crest of a wave, a wave of anxiety, anticipation and angst. A thrust of bodies storming the palace of Olympus. The flesh of a thousand competitors pressed and pulled you. You lost yourself in the crunch of the crowd. The compressed masses rumbled and shuddered and, finally, expelled you into the light on the other side.

There are benchmarks in everybody’s life. THIS was always special for me. There you stood, your feet in a wide stance and your arms slightly lifted like a gunslinger, sucking in all your eyes could take.

“I am here, PARK,” you seemed to declare, “I have found you, you fenced-in oasis of SATAN!”

And you issued a sacred challenge, “Try to kill me if you can! HA! Prepare to be abscombed!”

It was a blur of sun and sound, a tapestry of sticky goo and thunder rides that were over all too soon. Of all the people eating behemoths, of all the mysterious nooks and crannies, there was one place I always sought out… The Monster Ride.

Oh, it took many forms. It might have been a flight to Mars or a haunted gold mine. Its inhabitants ranged from decomposing victims of the Inquisition to multi-legged Tiki mask creatures from a nightmare. Whatever it was, it was never enough for me.

Those strange vehicular contraptions always intrigued me. Who built these cramped creaky whatsits on wheels? I trusted they would stay together long enough to get me back from Davy Jones’ locker or the land of the Amazon headhunters. I’d keep getting back on to re-observe every detail, like an avid reader of a mystery novel. Paper mache caverns swallowed you whole. Raggedy buccaneers cackled a scratchy, overplayed and almost unintelligible threat. There were coffins and treasure chests, sometimes even abandoned hulks of real cars and airplanes, along with some not-so-real spaceships. Ambushes and booby traps, each with a dayglow ghoul on a hinge, came and went before I could savor their wonderfully cheap construction.

I would spend summer nights in bed longing to be allowed free reign in such secret places, to peruse and touch the specters that always left me wanting more. Be careful what you wish for.

December 1994, and all my show biz irons were in the fire and all the phone calls were made before the big holiday lull. I had nothing to do for a month. Some of my cohorts were digging up part-time jobs and I figured, “What the hell, pocket money AND another ‘life experience’ for my acting resume. A full-page ad in the Sunday times job section said it all. Universal Studios Theme Park was hiring temporary help for the month.

In a nutshell, if you were not a convicted murderer or expressed a strong desire to become one, you got a Christmas job at Universal. If you could add, subtract and multiply a bunch of numbers, which apparently I couldn’t, you worked at a concession stand. If you were not really good at ANYTHING, you walked around the park and swept crap into a box on a stick. If you fell anywhere in between, it was welcome to Ride Operations. There were two rides that needed extra people, BACK TO THE FUTURE and ET: THE ADVENTURE. My job-hiring guy flipped a mental coin. I was extraterrestrial bound.

Everybody who got hired, people who could count, people who could sweep and people like me, got lectures from super-happy human resource types for a week. We learned the history of Universal (it used to be a chicken farm). We learned about the multinational conglomerate that owned Universal, in case we wanted to invest, I guess. We learned how to treat people, how not to treat people, about dress codes, fires and nuclear attacks.

Basically, we watched a lot of movies about how we were now ambassadors to the world and representatives of one of the most powerful and creative entities in that world… at least until we all got ditched in January. We were told to always stop what we were doing to help a ‘guest’. We learned the layout of the park like he backs of our hands and the emergency codes like the backs of our other hands.

First aid lessons and lawsuit prevention eventually brought us to Central Wardrobe. Everybody got perfectly fitted for our respective uniforms, and then we never saw that perfectly fitting uniform again. Employees were expected to arrive twenty to thirty minutes before each shift, receiving and returning their uniforms at a place that looked like the biggest dry cleaning shop on Earth. The ET uniform was matching tan bombardier jacket and slacks, with a green Izod-looking shirt. ET people had to supply their own tan work boots.

BACK TO THE FUTURE people got to wear Hawaiian shirts and lab coats, like Doc Brown. I asked what we were supposed to be. No one was sure, but the consensus was that we were part of the government science team that was after the little space monkey. Anyway, what came back from Central Wardrobe every day never fit right and you walked around all day looking like Jethro Bodine.

Early one morning, I showed up at the pre-arranged area of employeeland and met my fellow inductees, all of us tugging at our ill-fitting space monkey chasing regalia. Besides myself, there was Carl (a Black Muslim), John (a Spanish guy), Jennifer (an eighteen-year old free spirit from the Valley) and a small, quiet woman whose named we could never pronounce. There was also some metal-head kid, but he seemed totally overwhelmed by EVERYTHING and quit by the end of the day. It was there and then that we were met and commandeered by Charles.

Charles was some kind of middle-management senior ride operator and was working his way up the ET/Universal ladder. He was around thirty years old and, as I overheard, an ex-Marine. He was nice enough, but he always seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders and something on his mind. Charles had two jobs. One was teaching and drilling us on every known death/decapitation that could possibly happen. The other job was to take us on all the rides.

We took the famous tram tour that takes you past the ‘Psycho’ house and all the other movie sets. This ride also included the Earthquake and the Jaws and King Kong attacks, and they were all very cheesy. Each tram had a guide that incessantly rambled, cajoled and joked to the passengers. Charles told us that tram guides were the most sought after and highest paid jobs in the company. He also hinted that we would never ever EVER get a chance to make out an application.

BACK TO THE FUTURE is okay, if you like getting a concussion while being bounced around in front of a movie screen. Somebody told us that only one person had ever been killed on it. We finished our tour at our new home away from home, ET: THE ADVENTURE. I soon suspected that Spielberg didn’t have Jurassic Park on his mind when he okayed the plans for THIS dinosaur.

You’ve seen it on TV. Well, what you’ve SEEN are throngs of delighted children flying through the air on bicycles. What you GOT was nine-seat gondola, hanging from an overhead track. The first row got a pair of handlebars and a bike basket. I don’t think anybody was fooled. As the ‘adventure’ began, you were first flung through a forest that had been taken over by K-Mart mannequins. They all had maps and radios. They were all after our intrepid star. Their mouths never moved when they yelled commands at each other.

Inside secret: every ‘character’, human and alien, had a name. They were used as coordinates along the ride track. Example: A guest dropped his camera near ‘Chuck’.

A few more woodland scenes followed the first woodland scene; all populated with equally wooden characters. Every once in a while, some car parts came through the bushes to suggest chase vehicles. Then you hung over this really bad miniature city. Godzilla would have passed this over for a better meal. Next, a tunnel with disco lights signified space travel to ET’s home planet, where all the mushroom people were dying. To me, a sick mushroom person was indistinguishable from bathroom fungus. Good thing I wasn’t a space doctor. ET made everybody healthy again, and a hundred whacked-out looking, yet inanimate, clay figures celebrated an alien Woodstock.

Oh, yes, be careful what you wish for… as part of my job, I had to ‘walk the track’ every night after closing. There they all were, in their paper mache, Styrofoam and cardboard glory. I got to look at them as much as I wanted to. I also got to sweep up all the stuff that fell from people’s pockets and mop up where the fog machine flooded the place. I got to explore every nook and cranny.

It took about thirty people to run the ride. It was a bulky, sprawling expanse of not-so-modern gobbledygook that was obsolete as soon as it was built. It was like a big electric train set. It took about five people to get 'guests’ into each car, all checking and double-checking for hand signals that meant ‘all clear’. There were dozens of exits, emergency zones and escape routes. There were fire apparati and big cranes hiding behind every facade. There were lookout platforms hidden along the route and a dozen crewmembers making sure that the same number of people came out as went in. It was a very dark and scary place.

On top of that, it was a cattle drive. Thousands of people an hour, waiting and pressing and losing themselves in the crunch of the crowd. We had to keep them moving, as there were three times as many waiting outside. If we took too long with somebody, we got in trouble and the delay cascaded down the system. So much for being an ambassador to the world. I hated it. I was a people shoveler, feeding the engines of the American Dream Machine.

Of the half-million people I loaded, locked and launched, I do actually remember one little boy. There was a five-second delay before his car took off. He was psyched, he was ready, and he was about to meet ET. He looked up from his seat, as I stood on the platform in my chase uniform, my finger poised on the firing button.

“What’s it like?” he asked.

I looked down the paper mache people-swallowing cavern, then back into his happy eyes.

“It’s gonna be great,” I told him, “But you should see what I get to do. I get to walk around in there when it’s closed.”