Our Kingdom of Dust (12 page)

“Wow.”

“I miss her, Blaine. She’s got a tough exterior, but on the inside she’s still a scared little girl who needs to be protected and made to feel safe. I definitely failed at that job….” He trailed off. “Every time she did The Dust I wanted to puke. She seemed to need it so badly, but I just couldn’t keep watching her do it. It was horrible. She said being in The Magic Kingdom was pretty close to the feeling she got from The Dust. But when the lights went down and the gates closed… that’s when the panic and the depression and the cravings kicked in.”

“Have you heard from her?” I asked.

“No. Nothing. You?”

“No. I called her and left a message, but she never called me back.”

“She seemed to trust you.”

“Apparently not enough to let me help.”

Jay sighed. “Even though I don’t expect she’ll ever want to talk to me again, I really do hope she’s going to be okay. I got her hooked on the stuff, and that’s a heavy weight to carry.”

He stood up, holding The Queen’s box.

“Anyway, hopefully that explains why I can’t give Charles his statue back. Not right now, anyway. Maybe once I’m over Lisa…. Maybe.”

“He’ll be less than thrilled,” I said. “But, maybe I can make him understand. He’s a cool guy, Jay.”

“I know. We had some good times together. I’m glad he’s off The Dust and doing well for himself.”

I stood up, too, drained physically and emotionally.

“Let’s put the last few boxes in the truck and get the hell out of here,” I said.

“We still have to unload everything at the storage facility.”

“Holy shit,” I said. I was about to drop from exhaustion. “Fuck that. We’ll swing back by Home Depot and hire some of those day laborers to do it for us.”

Jay started to object, but I cut him off.

“I’ll pay for it. No way I’m lifting another goddamned box today.”

So that’s what we did. Jay loaded the last two boxes into the truck and got into the front seat, carrying The Queen’s box and Charles’ statue. We drove to Home Depot, him cringing every time we hit a bump in the road. A few guys were still standing outside, so I got out, gave them each a hundred, and they piled into the truck with us.

“Nice tattoos, mister,” said the one sitting next to Jay.

“Thanks,” he responded.

“You like Disney, eh?”

“It’s my whole life,” said Jay.

“I like Disney, too, but they won’t hire me,” He pointed to the tattoos on his knuckles.

“You know, they have makeup for that,” said Jay.

“Aw, I can’t afford that stuff,” said the man. “And besides, if they don’t want me the way I am, then I don’t want to work there.”

We drove the rest of the way in silence. The man’s words looped in my brain, over and over again. He was right. Lisa shouldn’t have to hide who she was, hide her past, to work at the place she loved. That was bullshit. Fuck Disney.

The two men took less than thirty minutes to unload everything into the air conditioned storage unit I’d rented for Jay.

“We’re just keeping all this here until you get back on your feet,” I said to Jay.

“Technically, it’s all yours now,” he stated. “You’re the one paying the bill for the unit.”

“I’ll keep it here for you as long as you need me to.”

“I really appreciate it, Blaine.”

He hugged me, and I hugged him back.

“Let’s go to The Beach Club, okay?” I said.

“Can’t wait,” said Jay.

We dropped off the two men and the truck and snagged a cab back to The Beach Club. Per Jay’s request we avoided Charles by circling around the side of the resort and past the gift shop, instead of going through the front doors. He probably saw us anyway, though. Couldn’t get anything past that dude.

We walked into the suite, and Jay nodded, smiling.

“Wow, this is amazing,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s pretty nice.” I pointed to the couch. “So that’s your bed. I think it folds out. I’ll have to get you some blankets, though. There’s a half bath over there. You can use my shower but wait until after I’m done with it in the morning. I’ll let Semi-Hot Sandra know that you can use the Lounge….”

“Semi-Hot Sandra?”

I laughed. “Yeah. She’s an ultra-prude. But she totally wants me.”

Jay looked at me, confused, shook his head, and fell onto the couch. Within seconds he was snoring.

I guess I had a roommate.

--

I went downstairs to get a massively overpriced bottle of wine from the gift shop, so I could drink it in the Jacuzzi. I needed something to help me sleep after all the shit that had gone down that day.

Charles was hanging out in the lobby as I exited the gift shop. He was smiling at everyone who walked past, saluting some people and calling out to others by name. I walked over to him.

“Mr. McKinnon!” he said. “What a nice surprise!”

“Hey, Charles,” I said.

“And what have you been up to today?”

“Oh, boy,” I said. “Well, for one, I helped Jay move out of his house. He’s living up in the room with me now.”

“So he really did hit rock bottom.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure.”

“Mr. McKinnon,” Charles said, hesitating. “Did you by any chance talk to him about my statue?”

“We spent a really long time talking about it, actually,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

“I just want my statue back.”

“Yeah, I totally understand. But there’s a lot more to it than just the statue. Jay has… serious issues. And that statue has come to mean a lot to him.”

“It meant a lot to me, too,” he said.

“Yeah… I know. It’s… well, shit, there’s no reason not to tell you. That was Lisa’s favorite piece of memorabilia that Jay had at his house. She attached all sorts of emotional significance to it, and now that she’s left Jay, well, he’s attached all sorts of emotional significance to it.”

“I see…” said Charles.

“So, like I said, it’s complicated. He really thinks that every little Disney memento he has is like a piece of his soul or something crazy like that. Anyway, it did seem like he’d be more willing to part with it once he’s over Lisa. That might take a while, though. I’m going to try to get him to go to therapy, too, so maybe that’ll help.”

Charles nodded, but didn’t speak.

“He needs it more than you do right now, Charles.”

“You’re a good friend, Mr. McKinnon,” he replied.

“Thanks for understanding,” I said.

He patted me on the back. I nodded, and walked towards the elevators.

Jay was still snoring as I quietly opened the door to the suite and walked back in. Like a total weirdo I watched him sleep for a minute, and then went into my room and drank the whole bottle of wine.

It was strange, but also kinda cool, having someone else around all the time. I’d been living alone for so long that I figured even the annoying stuff about having a roommate, like someone snoring on my couch, for example, would be new and funny and, well… really nice.

We spent the next day sitting out on the balcony, me drinking gin and tonics, him drinking lemonade. A little lizard scattered across the concrete, over Jay’s toes and up my leg.

“Ah!” said Jay, screaming like a girl. He grabbed a magazine, rolled it up, and was about to swat the lizard off my leg.

“Don’t you dare,” I said.

I looked down at the lizard, picked him up, and gave him a peck on his cute head. The little bastard latched onto my lip! It was the same one! I turned to Jay, the lizard dangling from my lip, and laughed at the horrified look on his face.

He hung from my lip for a good hour before deciding to move off to a better spot to sun himself. I loved that little guy. I decided to name him Bill, after the lizard in
Alice in Wonderland
.

Now I had a roommate and a pet. Things were looking up.

Chapter 18

Jay and I spent the next few weeks bumming around the parks, him showing me lots of cool backstage shit. All of the employees seemed to know him. People were always waving to him. I guess there was some sort of unspoken agreement that since he’d sold drugs, The Dust or otherwise, to so many Cast Members who were now high-level managers, he pretty much had the run of the property. Nobody wanted to risk having their past, or current, indiscretions exposed.

We rode bikes around the back of MGM – apparently any bike that’s green is communal property that the Cast Members can use to quickly get back and forth between the expansive backstage there. That was a ton of fun until I accidentally biked onstage into the Streets of America and just about mowed down a family of five. We stopped riding the bikes after that.

Theresa Skywalker wasn’t anywhere to be found at MGM. I was worried about her, so I talked to one of the cheerleaders after the
High School Musical
show, and it turned out that Troy Bolton was also MIA. So either she’d taken him hostage and was holding him as a sex slave in her basement, or, hopefully, the two were madly in love and would live happily ever after.

Jay seemed to know something that he wasn’t telling me, because he wasn’t the least bit concerned.

“Did Theresa Skywalker try to get more of The Dust before you were evicted, Jay?” I asked.

“She did come to see me,” he said. “But it wasn’t to buy The Dust. She was actually trying to sell some back to me.”

“What?!”

“Oh, she was fine. It only took her a few days to kick it. She was never a heavy user, anyway. Sort of on and off. She’d meet a boy and obsess over him and I wouldn’t see her for weeks, then the boy would leave her and she’d be back that day. Her self-esteem was quite low.”

“So she was already off of it when she came to see you?”

“She was. She wouldn’t stop talking about this Troy fellow. He’d been offered a six month job performing on one of the Disney cruise ships, and was going to bring her with him.”

That cracked me up something fierce. I laughed so long that my stomach started hurting. Tears were streaming down my face. Jay looked on, clearly not amused.

“Holy shit,” I said, sniffing and wiping my eyes. “Can you imagine six months cooped up on a cruise ship with Theresa Skywalker? You sure this guy wasn’t on something, too?”

“Now, Blaine, be nice. She’s a really sweet girl deep down. Just very, very insecure and awkward. Perhaps this Troy was a little more insightful than you’re giving him credit for.”

“I saw the dude. He looked kinda like a douchebag. Like someone who would drive a Miata.”

“What’s wrong with Miatas?” asked Jay.

Which, of course, set me off on another laughing fit.

“Well, regardless,” he said, talking over my laughter, “as far as I know they’re living on a cruise ship together. I’m sure we’ll get a postcard from her first port of call.”

“Either that, or he’s already pushed her overboard,” I said, still chuckling. “Nah, I shouldn’t joke about that. I hope she’s happy. I kinda regret not fucking her, though.”

“Why didn’t you?” asked Jay.

“Uh….” I stammered, thinking about the agreement I’d made with Lisa. Couldn’t very well tell Jay about that. “Uh, it just wouldn’t have been right. And I was afraid she’d stalk me if we hooked up. Yeah, that’s why.”

“She probably would have stalked you.”

“Yeah,” I said. But thinking about it, I actually was kinda pissed that I hadn’t fucked Theresa Skywalker. It’d been years since I’d scored, and it certainly didn’t look like it was going to happen with Lisa. I was such a tool.

The next day we circled the entirety of EPCOT Center’s perimeter, entering the employee-only area via a small walkway to the left of Guest Services and continuing all the way to a door on the right side of the Main Gate, just past The Living Seas. We went into Costuming and got pictures of the two of us trying on silly Cast Member outfits. We passed the Illuminations barge, tied to a dumpy looking dock in a dirty lagoon. We saw the shell of a sub from the
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
ride sitting in a field behind the area slotted for the unbuilt Equatorial Africa pavilion. Then we hopped on a Cast Member bus and rode it all the way to the Imagination pavilion, where we stopped to visit the maintenance bay for the ride vehicles. I briefly considered starting an axle grease fire and laughing like a maniac as the whole pavilion burned to the ground. But it wasn’t the building’s fault the ride sucked now.

The day after that we went to Animal Kingdom, where a manager took me and Jay on our own personal Kilimanjaro Safaris tour, driving down paths that the regular ride didn’t use. A big stupid rhinoceros got in our way at one point. We honked and honked but the fucker wouldn’t even acknowledge our presence. He finally dropped a monstrous loaf in the middle of the road and then sauntered forward, looking at us with an air of complete aloofness that said, “Smell that shit, bitches!” And damn did it smell bad! We had no choice but to drive over the huge mound of feces. It squished under the wheels and then flew up behind the bus like a big turd explosion. I giggled like a schoolgirl. The manager seemed pissed because he said he was going to have to power wash the entire vehicle before any Guests could get in it. But, whatever. Turds are always funny.

What wasn’t funny was that there seemed to be a fucking turkey leg stand every two feet in the park. By lunchtime I was so grossed out from watching everyone around me tearing into gristle and veins that the thought of eating meat made me want to vomit. I ended up walking around for a good hour looking for decent vegetarian options, and was totally fucking starving when I finally found a place that served really shitty personal cheese pizzas. I ate one of those and some fries and ended up with the worst heartburn of my life. It did not leave me with a favorable impression of Animal Kingdom. I mean, seriously, if you’re going to make a whole park about animal conservation and then almost exclusively sell food that contains dead animals, well, that’s just kinda fucked up.

We did hit The Magic Kingdom that week, but only briefly. I think we both knew that we were only there to look for Lisa. So it was a bit of a half-hearted visit, although I did enjoy walking backstage at The Haunted Mansion, seeing how all the effects worked.

Nobody at Mouseketeria had seen Lisa in at least two weeks. Someone had heard through the grapevine that she’d punched a Guest, a father who was disciplining his daughter a little too harshly. Another person heard she’d been fired for yelling at a manager. One person said they thought maybe she’d been demoted to a meet-and-greet at EPCOT Center. But nobody had any solid information. The saddest thing was that she obviously didn’t have any close, or even casual, friends at The Magic Kingdom, and as a result nobody paid much attention when she’d suddenly disappeared. Like she’d never really existed there at all. A ghost dressed up as Snow White.

Since we were nearby we took the Resort line monorail over to The Grand Floridian to visit with Miss Nancy. We waltzed into the bright majestic lobby, the sound of a piano floating through the air. I didn’t blame her for spending all day here. It was so relaxing.

We took the elevator downstairs and spotted a stack of teddy bears’ heads peering over the back of a sofa.

“Hey, Miss Nancy!” I said as we walked around the front of the plush couch.

No answer. Something was wrong.

“Miss Nancy?” said Jay.

Still no reaction. She looked pretty normal, except that her eyes were wide open and unblinking, and a white film covered her pupils. She smelled terrible.

“Holy shit,” I said. “She’s dead, Jay. Way, way, dead.”

Jay started freaking out.

“Somebody call an ambulance!” he yelled. He ran to the Front Desk. “We need a doctor over here!”

“Jay!” I yelled. “It’s too late for a doctor, you dipshit! She’s been dead for days! Maybe weeks!”

He ran back over, stared at her for a full minute, and then collapsed on the couch across from her. I sat down next to him, and then we both stared at Miss Nancy until the ambulance came. They, predictably, pronounced her dead on the scene, and unceremoniously carted her body away.

“She was too old,” I said. “Her heart obviously couldn’t take the withdrawal.”

“I can’t believe nobody here noticed she was dead,” said Jay, shaking his head.

“She said that if people bothered her they’d get fired. I guess nobody wanted to risk it.”

“I saw her a week or so before I was evicted,” said Jay. “She came to see if I had any more of The Dust. This was before Theresa tried to sell hers back to me. I told Theresa to sell it to Miss Nancy, but I guess that didn’t happen.”

“You didn’t have any hidden away that you could’ve given her to help with the withdrawal? I mean, maybe if she’d gradually stepped down the dosage or something….”

“No, I’d been completely out for a week, at least. She offered me a hundred thousand for an eighth. Then she offered me a million. Then ten million. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have any. Believe me, if I’d had it, I would have just given it to her. I told her if she could front me the money I could get the ingredient, but that it’d take weeks if not months to arrive. I guess she knew she wouldn’t last that long.

“She was nice about it, though. She didn’t scream or yell or anything. We sat around for a few hours and talked about everyone, and I told her about Lisa, and some stuff about my past that I don’t really discuss with anybody. She was a very smart and kind woman who had been through a lot, and she had some really interesting perspectives on my life. It was an… illuminating conversation.

“It’s funny…. As I was talking to her I started realizing that I didn’t really know anything about her except that her husband had died. But she’d lived quite a life. She pulled out some pictures of herself when she was a nurse at the tail end of World War II, and she was so pretty, Blaine. Just a total knockout. Did you know that she actually knew Walt Disney? Her father ran Red Cross ambulances with him in the first World War. Whenever they were in town, Walt would invite them over for dinner. Her father ended up becoming one of the higher-up execs at Bank of America, and he was instrumental in green-lighting the financing for Disneyland. She told me how she walked through the park before the concrete had been poured on Main Street. And how she knew, even then, that she’d never be able to get enough of that magical alternate reality that Walt had created.

“Anyway, we had this amazing conversation. Then she hugged me and left. And that was the last time I saw her.”

“Does she have any kids we can get in touch with?” I asked.

“No. Her husband was impotent. She told me that when she wanted to be around kids she’d just hang out in the parks.”

“That’s kinda sad.”

“It really didn’t seem to bother her. She said her husband filled her soul and she was more than happy to devote herself fully to him. That’s why she was so crushed when he died.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Yeah….”

Poor Miss Nancy. That goddamned drug.

“And you’re sure there’s no more Dust? It’s all gone?” I asked.

“Not unless someone else has been stockpiling it. I know there’s a guy in Anaheim who makes it, but I imagine he’s having the same supply problems I am.”

“But you’re totally out of it? You swear?”

“I swear. There’s none left.”

“Good riddance.”

A Cast Member walked over to Miss Nancy’s sofa, put on latex gloves, opened a trash bag, and started throwing her teddy bears into the bag.

“Hey!” said Jay. “What do you think you’re doing with those bears?”

“I’ve been told to discard them.”

Jay looked at me pleadingly. I nodded, and turned to the Cast Member.

“We’ll handle it,” I said. “We were friends of hers.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that due to sanitation issues,” said the Cast Member.

“Is Phillip the shift manager today?” asked Jay.

“Yes, sir,” said the Cast Member, surprised.

“Go tell Phillip that Jay wants the bears.”

“It’s really not my place to….”

Jay stopped him, his face beet red. I’d never seen him so angry.

“Go tell Phillip I’m taking Miss Nancy’s bears.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and ran off.

“Little shit,” I said.

Jay picked up Miss Nancy’s two suitcases, which were sitting next to the sofa. He opened them and started packing away the bears. I joined in and within a few minutes they were all safely stowed away. We each took a suitcase and walked out of The Grand Floridian.

I never went back there again.

Jay didn’t seem to give a shit about taking the back route into The Beach Club this time. Still, when we rounded the corner in the lobby and I spotted Charles, I motioned for Jay to go upstairs. But he didn’t. He walked up to Charles and gave him a hug. Charles, surprised, hugged him back.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard about Miss Nancy?” Jay asked, breaking away from the hug.

“I did. The Greeter at The Grand Floridian called me a couple of hours ago, when you found her. Damn shame. She was a lovely, complex, wonderful woman.”