This story was originally published on September 15, 2005.
At Fun Zone there were certain things that you came to expect to see on a regular basis. You expected to see pissed-off parents who wanted their money back for all the broken games and rides that they paid to find covered in Out of Order signs. You expected someone to fall on the skate floor and become disabled for life about once a month. You expected to see Chris Oats pursue all the eleven and twelve-year-old girls. When Mrs. Lambert came in with her sixth or seventh new husband, and her bratty ace kids told you to give them a bunch of free toys and candy because their mommy was your boss and she said they could have whatever they wanted today, you didn’t bat an eye. It was just another day. You weren’t surprised when Animatronic Man showed up and skated like a sixty-year-old android. And when Ticket Boy won thousands of tickets at a time, and he looked around at all of Fun Zone’s inhabitants with a look of great pride- pride that he had mastered the skill of hitting the Cyclone jackpot- on his gangly toothed, mullet framed, chubby face, you thought nothing of it.
Those were things you came to expect. There was another thing you came to expect at Fun Zone, and even though you expected it, it was always a crazy surprise when it showed its ugly brown face. That thing was poop. Fun Zone was full of little kids, and poop is like a currency to them. They make the stuff like they’re afraid they’ll get behind schedule, and they don’t give a F where they are when they do make it. Poop would show up in the ball pit. There was poop in the snack bar. It would get dumped on the floor in front of skate rental where people walk barefoot to get their skates, smearing warm diarrhea between their toes. Poop once found itself streaked by roller-skate wheels across the shiny black skate floor. When a group of middle eastern women found that particular pile they exclaimed that the floor was “unclean” and fled in disbelief, but it wasn’t all that unbelievable if you worked at Fun Zone.
The tubes were just one long twisted rainbow colored toilet. Kids would piss and puke and S throughout them like they were leaving a trail of bread crumbs. One special little boy crapped his pants, got the poop all over his ace, then slid down the wavy tube slide, WEEEEEEEE!, leaving a long wavy streak of poo for all the other children to slide through. Chris and I cleaned that one up.
It was a poop zone.
In the summertime Fun Zone would get most of it’s weekday business from group field trips- YMCA’s, youth groups, vacation bible schools, retarded kid groups, and year-round schools. The year-round school groups always came from the poorest black counties in Alabama. They’d drive three or four busloads of elementary school kids miles and miles to Fun Zone to tear the place up. The kids were poor, and they were dumb as S. They smelled like S. They communicated in a crude patchwork of the words Be, That, and Is. Even their teachers couldn’t speak proper English. For every Fun Zone employee there were about a hundred of these dirty little customers. It was hell on earth.
Now if this all seems insensitive to you don’t assume that I’m completely shallow and heartless. I’m perfectly aware that these children are less fortunate than myself, and that they never had a chance to receive decent schooling. The fact that their educators weren’t even educated is testament to that. Blame the school system, blame the state, blame the taxpayers, and blame whoever else you suspect. The kids were a product of their environment. Nevertheless, when you are being manipulated by a hundred of these little jerks, having compassion for each individual one isn’t an option. So let me continue my negative description.
The kid’s were f’n thieves. They’d steal the D between your legs. They’d sneak their thieving little hands behind the prize counter and steal prizes with you looking them in the eye. If you went to fix a broken game for one kid, twenty kids would crowd around you and say that the game took their money too. Even the kid’s parents stole S, and they weren’t any more clever about it. Poor, dirty, and dumb; you get the picture.
It was very easy to despise those groups and despise the days that they visited. There was one time though that poop made the whole day worthwhile. I was working at the rock wall, hooking up the dirty little crooks to the twenty foot mountain. Clint was loading children into the virtual roller coaster. Across the building I spotted Christopher of Three Happenin Guys laughing and shaking his head behind the prize counter. He motioned for us to come over and find out what was so funny. I began walking his way but was stopped about fifteen feet short by an impenetrable force. A smell.
This was a smell that I wouldn’t wish on Hitler. It wasn’t a smell that just stunk, it made you question existence. This smell was so unimaginably awful that it made you ask how a just creator could put us in a world where such horrible smells exist. When I first tried to describe this smell to others I would make references to other things that stunk, like “It smelled like if somebody took a dump inside a month old beached whale in a steam room”, but those comparisons are irrelevant. It was nothing other than a poop smell. It was just that that simple poop smell, which is arguably the worst smell there is, was magnified at least ten times than the worst smelling dump your dad has ever taken. If you think you’ve smelled something as bad or worse than this then you’re an idiot and I hope you never talk to me again. There has never been and will never be a smell as bad as this. Ever. Enough said.
Chris was heaving with tears in his eyes as he laughed at what was in front of him. I held my breath and got close enough to see for myself the twelve year old boy with S smeared down the back of his shorts. It was a greenish brown. I was becoming dizzy so I ran to safety and watched the scene from there. The kid stood looking at the colorful prizes underneath the glass as people walked by and immediately scrunched their faces in agony. “What that smell is?” the other children would cry before running for their lives. The young man left the prize counter to tour the rest of Fun Zone so Three Happenin Guys followed and observed from a safe distance. Everywhere he went people nearly fainted, but they were so dazed by the stench that they didn’t realize who it came from. The filthy child walked up to a wrestling game where four other boys were playing.
“Nigga you be stank!” exclaimed one of the horrified boys. All four of them abandoned the game and got as far away as possible. We watched Poopy Butt walk up to play the abandoned game and noticed that he was unfazed by his classmate’s reaction. He had the expression of a man who didn’t know or care where he was. It was as if poop coated shorts were part of his every day attire.
We eventually lost track of the kid as he mixed into the sea of young faces. Three Happenin Guys figured that his accident would be discovered on the bus ride home and the teachers would deal with it. We couldn’t have been more wrong. As I worked the floor a male teacher approached me and informed me that one of the students had made a mess of the bathroom. Three Happenin Guys went to investigate.
The teacher and the culprit were already inside the boy’s bathroom before we arrived. The second we cracked the door open that smell blasted out in concentrated form. I gagged and began to heave so we shut it back. The poop was stronger than we expected. Three Happenin Guys had to see the damage that could create such a stench, no matter how ugly it might be, so we took two steps back, filled our lungs with clean air, prepared ourselves mentally, then rushed in.
The teacher and Mr. Poopy Britches stood solemnly in front of the shrine that had been created. In the closest stall to the bathroom door there was a sight never meant to be seen by human eyes. There was greenish brown S smeared across the toilet seat. There was S streaked down the outside of the bowl and across the floor tiles. There was S dripping off the toilet paper dispenser. There was S on the partitions and S on the door. There was S smudged all over the wall. S was everywhere.
How could another human being do such a thing? How could the young person in front of us justify such a horrific act internally, and how could his young body produce such a vile substance in that huge amount? At what point did he decide that the ceramic environment would be more absorbent than bathroom tissue? I searched his face for answers, but there were none. Not a trace of remorse or regret. Just, “I be in the bathroom”. I turned to the teacher and his face told me that this wasn’t unusual in his line of work either. It came time to breathe again and I made the mistake of doing it through my mouth. I’m pretty sure I know what poop tastes like now. We quickly escaped the room.
Three Happenin Guys blocked the bathroom door while our manager, after realizing that Fun Zone could not afford the pay raise necessary to get an employee to clean up the S, cleaned up the S. We told all the men who approached to come back later, but when two particular young boys came to the door we let them in without a warning. The door shut behind them, then immediately flung back open. They were wide eyed and pale, like they had just seen some sick snuff film. “What that was?” cried the first one out the door as he flew past us. The two ran far, far away. It was the kind of scene we had come to expect.
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Previously: The Rise and Fall of Lambert Fun Zone
