This story was originally published on Wednesday, September 14, 2005.
I plan on writing a few stories in the near future that are tied to one central place. As much as I desperately want to write those stories right now, they will not be as profound if I don’t first write about Lambert Fun Zone, the place where Three Happenin Guys used to work. Lambert Fun Zone was more than a family skate rink; It was Utopia. But like all great civilizations it would eventually come toppling down. This is the tale of the rise and fall of a great empire.
Clint was the first to work there. He signed the dotted line the day that Fun Zone opened it’s doors, and his description of the place was so unbelievable that John and Chris and I had to see it for ourselves. Walking through those red double doors for the first time is probably the closest thing I can imagine to that scene where the ticket holders first enter Willy Wonka’s factory. Fun Zone was an all ages Chucky Cheese on steroids. There were bumper cars, there were arcade games everywhere you looked, there was a rock climbing wall, a virtual roller coaster, cyber pods, skate rink, snack bar, moon walk, and tubes – tubes as far as the eye could see. A manikin with a pink wig and roller blades was suspended from wires up high next to a bunch of busted drywall to look like, get this, He Had Crashed Into The Wall! The skaters, most of whom were either little kids or kids springing their first pubes, sweated to the pulsing beats of only the crunkest hits. They chanted along to classic lines like “sweat drop down my balls”, as the DJ cranked out the jams in a booth underneath a giant purple Styrofoam octopus.
In the farthest, darkest corner of the building, far from regular adult surveillance, there was a nonstop budding pubescent heavy petting makeout orgy. A congregation of sweaty thirteen year old ChismItes and white trash bumped and grinded in the shadows, interrupted only occasionally by a concerned manager. Those interventions just meant that the sexual activity would be moved to the enclosed video games and the tubes, the miles and miles of tubes. The party never stopped at Fun Zone.
The future coke whores and the young men that would eventually beat them weren’t the only ones having fun at Fun Zone though. As I found within days of being employed there, Lambert Fun Zone was the easiest job on earth with the most immediate benefits. For starters, there were chicks wall to wall. Hot chicks with huge T’s. And the managers hired them by the dozen, so Three Happenin Guys saw huge T’s everyday. In fact, Chris and I were denied employment the first time we applied because two chicks with huge T’s got the job instead.
The greatest benefit was the complete lack of employer leadership. All day long you could play video games. You could eat free pizza till it came out your ears, and free candy till you reached the ‘if I eat another piece of candy I’ll throw up’ point. Nobody gave a F. You could watch some little kid fall and scrape his knee and say “Hey little kid you need to learn how to skate cause you skate like a dumb piece of S”. You wouldn’t get in trouble. You could play some video games, eat some free cotton candy, take a free slice of pizza and throw it at some kid’s grandpa’s face, then leave work for two hours, come back to work and dump some trash in the moonwalk, then clock out. You’d get a fat check at the end of the week. It was a lawless frontier.
If you think I’m making this up then just go end your life now because I’m trying to tell you about the greatest job on earth and you refuse to believe. Now in all honesty not just anybody working at Fun Zone could pull off such poor work skills and keep their jobs in tact, but Three Happenin Guys did on a daily basis. We discovered the Fun Zone secret: Our managers didn’t want to take the time to hire our replacements. Plus, we had made such good friends with them that they didn’t care what we did, and they knew that the owners were too busy avoiding the IRS and the investors who they owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sleeping around and getting trashed to make sure that the place was being managed properly.
It paid minimum wage, but it was the greatest job imaginable. All day long we would talk to chicks and watch little kids crap their pants. There were other employees like Chris Oates who loved Fun Zone so much that they would never leave. These kids would clock out after their shift and keep on skating, keep on eating free candy, keep on requesting their favorite song, keep on getting crunk like it was their last chance ever to get crunk. Every single day they would do this, showing up even when they weren’t on the schedule. Fun Zone was so great that it consumed their lives. It became their home. It was a golden age.
That golden age would slowly fade over a two year period though. Management changed. There was a crackdown on pizza theft. Dirty ace crunk music was taken off the playlist. Fun Zone was now going to try to appeal to white families only. The T’s on our co-workers became smaller and smaller. When a video game broke we really had to fix it. When a kid took a S all over the floor, Three Happenin Guys actually had to clean it up.
It had become an actual job. Clint quit almost immediately. Chris and I sucked it up and continued to earn our checks. And although that golden age of Fun Zone was long gone, it had produced a handful of incredible stories, and the place continued to produce incredible stories even after its prime. These are stories that will change your life, so if you’re already satisfied with your life then read something else. Chicken Soup for the Soul or something like that. You’ve been warned.
Previously: Natural Selection
