CW: blood, death and dying.
When I worked at Disneyland in the summer of ’65, it was strange enough even without what I found in the dumpster. This was the sixties, and the Magic Kingdom, no matter how many long-haired hippies it denied admission to, couldn’t escape the decade. Peter Pan and the Big Bad Wolf were both on acid. My best friend, a crewcut engineering major from UCLA, was the Kingdom’s main hash dealer, though I wasn’t a customer (drug wimp that I was). There were rumors that Disney himself had died, his head taken to the famous cryogenic tanks in Riverside, and that it was an audio-animatronic duplicate of him that was acting drunk in his private quarters above Main Street.
A kid, trying to sneak into the park by hanging under the Monorail, was sprayed all over the employee parking lot, and the janitors went on strike, refusing to clean it up. A woman stood up in the Matterhorn and lost half of her skull, and this didn’t get into the papers either. It wasn’t just the media. The Anaheim police were not going to cause trouble for Mr. Disney. Even if something was investigated, nothing ever came of it.
The multilingual girl tour guides with their tartan skirts and riding crops were the highest paid, with Mickey and Minnie and the other Talent Inc. characters just below them, and the Jungle Ride “skippers” just below them. If you were a busboy with a little black bowtie, even if you looked like Huck Finn (which I did—red hair, freckles—and it got me the job), you were treated as the lowest of the lows. Your union was the Culinary Workers 103. You were paid almost nothing because—well, because this was the Happiest Place on Earth, right? Wasn’t that enough?
All you heard as you bussed tables and swept the patios and walkways in Fantasyland II was Peter Pan’s voice shouting again and again from the ride, “All right, everybody, here we go!” and the Evil Queen in the Snow White ride shouting, “Have an apple, dearie!” Even when you were back home in your room, trying to sleep, you could hear them shouting it.
There were doors—ones the “guests” rarely noticed—that you could pass through to the backstage area where, if you put your head down on the table for a moment’s nap, a supervisor would smack you. “No sleeping!” he would shout. The man had worked here for a decade already and would still be here in twenty years, I knew.
At orientation, in a room at Kingdom headquarters, a man with pancake make-up sat behind a big mahogany table and, as we stood before him like Army grunts, said, “When you’re here in the Magic Kingdom, you’re on stage. You’re representing Mr. Disney. Nothing else matters. Recently a girl, a pretty Snow White, lit up a cigarette as she passed through a backstage door. Needless to say, she’s no longer with us . . . ”
If you were a busboy, you had to use a green sawdust when someone threw up at the teacups—usually right when they stepped off. You had to sprinkle the sawdust, wait and then sweep it all into your little pan. You also had to sweep under tables that some guests, especially celebrities, didn’t want you sweeping under, and you got screamed at. You had to empty the trashcans into the dumpsters back stage, where the broken Dumbos and Peter Pans and teacups lay on the asphalt like a bad dream. The dumpsters were huge and rarely emptied and stank—and if you weren’t careful, you’d fall in.
Which is what I did one day. I lost my balance with my trash can and fell five or six feet, hitting plastic and paper and condiments that squished. Once I settled in, the wind knocked out of me, I felt something else. It didn’t feel like trash.
A shaft of sunlight reached where I was lying, and if I raised up just a little, I could see what I was lying against. A big black garbage bag, bigger than any that lined the cans, had fallen open, and something had slipped out.
An arm.
A pale, pretty arm with catchup, or blood, or both. I kept blinking in the dim light, feeling the trash under me and wondering whether I was already covered with blood and catchup too.
The arm was protruding from a puffy blue and red sleeve gathered up near the shoulder.
I knew that costume. I’d seen it, like everyone else, in the Park, the Talent Inc. girls wearing it, pretty and pale and walking and smiling. I’d seen it on the ride, too—the Snow White of the ride—the one time I’d taken it before becoming a busboy.
The arm didn’t move. It wasn’t as white as I’d first thought. It was gray, like something dead.
I got up on one knee, hands shaking, stomach turning, but immediately fell over. I tried again and, steadying myself with one hand, stayed upright, while my other hand pulled at the black garbage bag to free more of the body.
When her arms and head were free, I was sure the red on her skin was blood, not catchup, because it was dry, and the catchup on my own arm was wet.
As I stared at her, wanting to touch her—to see if there was any life, I think, creepy though it was—and as my hand moved closer to her skin, her arm moved, and I almost screamed.
Her face was looking at me—big eyelashes, red lips—and, though the lips barely moved, I heard a whisper.
It sounded like “Don’t leave me.”
“What?”
“If you do . . . I will die. The little men cannot hide me. She will find me . . . ”
How could she possibly be speaking? She was dead. You didn’t turn gray like that if you weren’t dead, did you?
“I shouldn’t have tasted it,” the whispering went on, “but you would have, too . . . ”
And then something started to crawl from her mouth, and this time I did start screaming.
• • • •
I kept screaming until finally a brawny arm pulled me up and out of the dumpster. Without changing clothes, I went immediately to security on Main Street and asked them to call the city police for me. They were reluctant, wanting me to explain why first—and because what happens in the Kingdom stays in the Kingdom—but I looked and sounded crazy, and they probably wanted me out of the park.
I wasn’t optimistic. It was the Anaheim police, after all. At the station, my clothes still unchanged—my face covered with condiments and blood, I have no doubt—I told them what I’d seen and touched, and how they needed to go look for themselves. Park security hadn’t even checked yet, I knew.
• • • •
In the end, when I called city PD for the thirtieth time, I was told that the Park’s response was simple: It wasn’t a human being I’d found. It was an audio-animatronic ride character, and in those days when the Park’s shop engineers decided a character couldn’t be fixed, they simply threw it away. Much, much cheaper that way. Something about “internal” tax write-offs.
I didn’t believe it.
“Did you do an autopsy?” I asked the clerk on the phone.
“On a puppet?” the desk clerk laughed, and then someone shushed him. He said quickly, “I need to go,” and hung up.
I remembered what her arm had felt like when I’d gone ahead and touched it.
It had been warm.
• • • •
Years later, when I was married, with kids, I took my family to the Kingdom. I hadn’t been back in twenty years, and it wasn’t the same place. At least that’s what I told myself.
My wife knew the story and was concerned.
“How are you doing?” she asked by the teacups in Fantasyland II. We were not, we’d agreed, going to take the Snow White ride, though it was still there, unchanged.
“Fine,” I said, and then repeated it. “Fine . . . Fine . . . ”
I was speaking loudly, and I could hear something odd in my voice, not a tremble, but something more mechanical.
“You’re sure, Keith?”
“Fine,” I said again, adding suddenly, “The hag can’t get her anymore.”
There was a distinct clicking somewhere—in my head, or outside it—but Jennifer didn’t seem to notice or ignored it. She knew my tics, she’d known them for years.
“The hag can’t get her anymore,” I repeated, and, though Jennifer looked at me oddly and checked to see if anyone around us had heard, she nodded and soon was leading two very happy kids to the long line for the teacups, while I stood perfectly still, unable to move, while the clicking went on.
