You know, if I would have told a reporter that story a year ago, you would have had to watch out for falling board members. They would have jumped out of the fucking windows on the top of the thirty-second floor, man. But since I sold and I’m no longer in the mix, the gloves are off, as they say. I’m off the leash, so not only can I tell you what happened in the boardroom after the hurricane because no one was smart enough to get an NDA out of me, but I can tell you what happened while I’m atop a pile of cash that I could never possibly spend in this life. After what my dad put me through when I was a kid, I have no problem spilling the beans.
What was I put through? Just like I told you. How do you think life shakes out for you when your dad is the Dreamer in Chief, the guy whose name is as big as Walt Disney or Steven Spielberg? You are constantly, in every little action and moment, judged against that monster of a legacy, and there’s no escape from it. Try to be the good child, you’ll never be good enough. Try rebellion on for size, and it doesn’t matter, man. The press wants you to be the bad seed, and anyone you’d hang around with, they never actually accept you into the group. You’re the guy with all the money. That’s what I’ve been to every social group I’ve ever been a part of, the rich guy. At least now I’m on boards where they’re honest about that sort of thing.
So I wandered, man. I tried on a bunch of personalities. I was a punk, then I was an angel, then I believed in God, then I played tennis, of all fucking things, then I found where I fit—business school. I had a knack for it, plus when I started doing well, my dad’s right-hand man Ollie Tracks stepped in and mentored me, and he did a good job, if I do say so myself. He taught me about all the nasty bits of running the park, that part Dad didn’t want to think about. Truthfully, I think he was happy to have an ally with the Fresno name. It’s my legal name, by the way. I’m half Lebanese, from what I can tell. Dad never wanted to claim we were anything other than white, but … hello! I’m the darkest guy on all the boards I serve on. I don’t even tan.
Regardless of never fitting in, I was always a bright cat, so I graduated high school, got my degree in business from Dartmouth, pulled some strings and got into the Harvard Business School, and by then I had found other folks who were in my same boat. Things calmed down on the personal front, and I really sank my teeth into business school. I got a rep pretty early as a left-leaning badass, which was sort of a rare thing. I cared about workers but was relentless in pursuit of best practices. The thing I wanted people to know was that if you were front line I was your friend, and if you were management, I was going to get the best out of you if it meant leaving your corpse smoking and bloody in your office. Once you were in the upper echelon, you were my bitch, man. I would work you hard, and then I would go to the bar and laugh at you. That’s the rep I got, it’s the rep I wanted, and it ended up working well for FantasticLand. Up to a point.
See, the dirty little secret of FantasticLand was that we were insanely profitable and we actually had less to work with than Disney or Universal. Our footprint was significantly smaller, our brand not nearly as well known, and when I took over, our finances were pretty bad, man. If dad hadn’t kicked the bucket, the park might well have closed. I took over as CEO, and Ollie was my right hand until he died, but before he did, we were able to completely 180 the park, from loser to lean, tight, and profitable. I had presidents calling me, man, wanting to know how I did it, and if I could do it for this business or that business. I always listened, but at the end of the day I just wanted a cold beer and a hot lady, you dig? That’s kind of how I got my second rep as a party boy, but I never really partied, per se. I was a regular at a bar and I was always solid at work at 7:00 a.m. Always.
Let me set the stage for the hurricane. Phil Mueller, the head of personnel, that guy was a beast and a half. He talked slow and was easygoing, but that guy demanded the best and got the best, so we were buds. He had a brain for analytics, unlike most older dudes, and I loved him for it, so he figured out the best way to move folks in and out of positions, he knew when traffic peaked at the park and how to put the best employees where they needed to be, and he was just an all-round super dude. I trusted him, so when he came to me with Operation Rapture, which Trolly had pitched to him before he passed on, I was onboard because it was Phil. No other reason. Plus, it sounded like a decent plan to put a skeleton crew in the park to protect the property. On paper, great idea, man.
So Sadie, that bitch, she hits, and I call Phil, and he assures me, like, “Yeah, everything went off without a hitch, we’ll check back once the storm passes.” Then the power goes out. Then the power stays out. Then the power stays out and we are in the middle of a national nightmare with my park in the center of it, and there’s literally no way to get to the park without a fleet of helicopters or a Jet Ski or super-duper hip waders and an Olympic athlete’s respiratory system. And I kept on Phil, man, I told him, get it done, get with the National Guard or whoever, make contact, and he kept on saying, “Red tape, red tape, red tape,” every damn time I talked to him. By the time we were in the second week of the thing, I was writing most of the park off, man, I figured there was no saving most of the infrastructure. Good thing I had a monster head of insurance, because we actually made money in the case of a total Act of God-style loss. America, man. What can I tell ya?
I called an emergency meeting of all the VPs the day after the hurricane passed, and it went fine, as these things go. Then after a week I called an emergency meeting of the board. I told them we’re out of contact with the park, we have this protocol in place, and we were going to hope for the best till the lights came back on and everyone was cool. Everyone was chill. So we wait, and we wait, and then I start getting reports.
The first report was from Phil. He said he had received a call from one of the emergency sat phones. There were only three of them in the park. It was Sam Garliek, who was the guy in charge of the shift and the guy Phil had given the keys to before he ran for the hills. He said things were going to shit and there were dead bodies. Phil, being Phil, exploded at the guy and said, “Fix it or I’m going to stick my foot up your ass until you taste shoe polish,” and apparently, from what I’ve heard, Sam did something that ended with a bang, if you catch me. Then the next report I got was a few days later from my IT guy, saying the Exclamation Point was gone, and I was like, “What do you mean gone? It’s five and a half tons of fucking concrete and fiberglass and shit,” and he was like, “I’m looking at our satellite feed right now, and it’s not fucking there.” And sure enough, it was gone. So that’s when I stepped in.
I have zero contacts in the military, but I know dudes who do, so I was about seven phone calls in when I learned someone had told the military that things were hunky fucking dory in the park, and they had all the water they needed, and go ahead and save other people. I don’t know, to this day, what idiot from my company made that call, and if I ever find out I’m going to beat them with the nearest heavy implement, man. I’m not a violent dude, but I have seldom been as upset as I was when I heard that. So I’m on the phone, pumping every contact I have, and it’s not going anywhere. Then I finally get something done, I sit back, and then the reports start coming in. And they’re bad.
I remember one time when I was a kid, I saw my dad totally break down. It was over the dumbest thing, too. He was crying because he couldn’t build a giant restaurant in the park. He was so exercised over not being able to see the ocean from high up that this mighty man, this pillar of American innovation and imagination, was crying in our goddamn kitchen, man. I never knew why. I think the closest I ever came to understanding it was when I heard there were bodies on the Golden Road and bones in the gift shop. It was like, this thing, this all-encompassing thing that had been my torment and my motivation and my pain and my work and my identity and my triumph, I knew in that split second that it was done. I knew it would capture everyone’s imagination and that it was impossible to contain, and I knew, in that moment, that the park was going to close and
not reopen, man. I knew it. But that didn’t mean I was going down without a fight.
I told Phil and everyone else who was worth a shit to start gathering information from every source they possibly could. I got the board together. Four hours later everyone was in the same room—I didn’t want to risk a teleconference—and I laid it out. Things had gone bad in the park. Kids were killing each other. At that point, I had two photos and some scary-ass reports about heads on spikes and whatnot. Now, remember, we had seen violence before now because of the hurricane. Communities were cut off, and some of them started shooting each other, but—and I don’t want to sound racist or anything—it seemed like what you read about gangs, you know? It didn’t seem … God, what’s the word … it didn’t sound horrific. It sounded like people shooting other people, which is easy to forget about.
You know what’s not easy to forget about? Fucking dead bodies in an amusement park. That’s not easy to forget about.
The board, at this point, they totally let me down. Fear, I’ve learned, is never a good place from which to operate, and you’ve never seen as many rich assholes go as deathly white as they went when I laid it out. They knew what I knew, in their hearts, but then they just started making the dumbest decisions you could imagine. They actually said words like “cover up” and “suppress” and they meant it, man. They didn’t understand that the cat was already out of the barn, or whatever. That there was no way in hell the media wasn’t going to bite onto this as hard as they could and that the public wouldn’t lap up every detail. It was picture perfect for twenty-four-hour news, man. It was a breaking story with gory photos that could distract people from the awful response to the hurricane while at the same time letting them feel superior and outraged. It, like, hit all the fucked-up news sectors you wanted to hit. But the board was, like, obstruct-obstruct-obstruct. And when it became clear that wasn’t going to work, they were all spin-spin-spin, and when that didn’t work, I threatened to quit the company my dad built if they didn’t start acting like men and own up to this. And they didn’t.
I don’t want to get into the weeds, man, but the entire plan seemed to be “don’t say anything,” which was an impossibility. We had media camped out at our building and news reporters saying things like, “There is no response from FantasticLand management” six times an hour, twenty-four hours a day. I begged them, I threatened them, I yelled at them, I cajoled them, but fear is a powerful thing. Fear is so powerful; it takes Ivy League–educated dudes and turns them into scared little schoolgirls. I don’t remember the exact moment I said “Fuck this,” but I remember that when I made the decision to leave this mess that was my father’s legacy, I moved fast. I put out feelers to buyers and had the thing sold so fast the board hardly had time to react. I was done. I went on the news and made my famous “FantasticLand is overseen by cowards” speech, and then I was done. Gone. Outta there. Bridge burned all to hell, man. I don’t regret it for a second.
A lot of people have asked me why I sold a multibillion-dollar company for $700 million, well below market value. Easy. I was already getting paid seventeer million dollars a year as owner and CEO, and that’s without the profits from the park, which were easily in excess of a billion dollars a year. Of course we put a lot of that money back into the park, but we aren’t publicly traded or anything. Dad owned the park, and when he died he left it to me, man. I had the keys to the empire, and I wanted out, so I sold. And now, I’m a regular at a bar, I’ve learned a couple of musical instruments, I’m married, and life really isn’t bad, man. I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m richer than Midas. I travel where I want, when I want. I still get calls from presidents. My life is better than yours, it really is. And I don’t have this god-awful mess to clean up.
Why do I think it happened? Hell if I know. Throw a bunch of kids into a toxic mix like that, man, and nothing good is coming out, but that’s not my fault or the fault of anyone in the park. I did tour the grounds, though, one time before they knocked the whole thing down. I got to see it all shabby-like, and it was tough, I don’t mind telling you. By the time I went through there, the blood had been all cleaned up, obviously, but I spent a couple hours just walking. I remember, at one point I found a cannon in one of the ponds, and I stood and looked at it for, like, ten minutes, and I was just thinking and thinking, “How did that get there?” And I tried to come up with a scenario where someone thought it was a good idea to throw a cannon in a pond and I came up with nothin’. I guess I’m gonna have to read your book, huh?
I don’t mind talking about how painful it was. Even with all the cleanup they had done, when I walked through the empty park my mind filled in all the blanks, man. I knew the basic gist of the story by then, so it wasn’t hard to imagine Pirates and Robots or whatever it was, fighting and killing each other. To be honest, it only reinforced my decision to sell. The park was tainted, man, and it had to go.
I didn’t watch when they demolished the park. Couldn’t stand it. I spent the day watching sports and getting blind stinking drunk. But, to be honest, what the hell else were they going to do? It was no longer FantasticLand, now it was Slaughter Land or Brock Hockney Did This At This Place Land. It wasn’t FantasticLand. Sadie blew her away, and those kids dug the grave where she landed. I didn’t watch because, and you’re gonna get something out of me here, part of me always loved the place. I have this, like, Technicolor memory of the first time my dad bought me a candied apple in the World’s Circus. I remember the way the sun shined off the caramel coating, I remember the sun and the smells of food and sunscreen, I remember hearing giggling and happiness all around, man. Most of all, I remember my dad beaming at me, like he knew he had just given me the perfect memory. Then I grew up and was a hard-ass for the company, but there’s part of this tubby old drunk who never let go of that little boy.
So, yeah, I’m not a big fan of what they’re planning to do with it. A park where people can pretend to join a tribe and fake fight with other visitors. That’s fucked up on a very fundamental level.
They’ll probably make their money back in a year and a half or so.
AFTERWORD
As a reporter, I’m already uncomfortable with appearing in this reporting as much as I have. The Brock Hockney interview, in particular, is painful for me to read. However, after my editor pushed me to write an afterword to wrap up what my reporting uncovered, somehow the idea didn’t feel as self-indulgent as I feared it would. There are so few conclusions to what I found, so much detail but so little new information, a wrap-up might provide the reader with some sort of absolution, some sort of point. In other words, I have one more chance to tell you why I think this happened, why the young people of FantasticLand started down a path that led to an amusement park bathed in blood. I get a chance to tell you why, so maybe you won’t feel so fascinated or so scared.
On this front, my dear readers, I can offer no real help or comfort.
The events that transpired in FantasticLand were senseless. There was plenty of food. There was plenty of water. There was more than enough room for everyone to ride out the extended period after the storm in peace and comfort. There was no reason this had to happen. If I have found one new fact in all my reporting, it’s that I believe many who were involved have come to accept this. The Brock Hockneys of the world aside, I think once the media storm died down and the online “What tribe are you?” quizzes all fade from the most-viewed page lists, a profound sense of sadness has set in. Sadness at the lives lost, but also sadness that it came to this in the first place. What I sensed in my interview subjects was sadness, with maybe a twinge of embarrassment at how easily FantasticLand resorted to violence and how quickly we ate it up.
Even though I don’t have any answers, my editor would kill me if I didn’t at least share my theory. If there’s one question I was asked more than any other over the course of my reporting, it was, “Why did they start killing each other so quickly?” Of course, I can’t answer this question for every employee wh
o found themselves trapped in “The Place Where Fun Is Guaranteed,” but many of them expressed or implied a disassociation with reality while in the park. In some ways, that makes perfect sense. The park was supposed to transport visitors to a different place, but in this case it seems the effect was only heightened. Some said it was the lack of people where they had only seen crowds that made the whole thing feel unreal. Some said their heightened emotional state and sudden change of diet put them in a fog. And, of course, there was the young man from the Robot tribe who told me, “Nothing in the park was Facebook official.” Not to be glib, but I think the Robot has a point. We would be naive to discount the role of technology in the “battle for FantasticLand.” The young people were accustomed to constant stimuli in a safe environment and suddenly they found themselves, like so many in the past, suffering from “intense boredom punctuated by moments of absolute terror.” They were used to sharing every aspect of their lives, and when the most exciting and noteworthy of circumstances befell them, there was no way to share it. I’m not smart enough to know exactly how, but that had to have a profound effect.
It’s safe to say that sadness and shame tainted FantasticLand immediately after the news broke and long after. The park never reopened after the storm. Demolition began six months to the day after the first photos from the park leaked. Ritchie Fresno’s sale of the park was unprecedented in its speed and in the amount of litigation that followed. The new owners have not shared their plans for the space, particularly after an idea to build a monument/amusement park based on the “Battle For FantasticLand” was met with derision from every right-thinking person in the country.
While good taste might have prevailed in that case, we remain positively fascinated by FantasticLand. Some employees have parlayed their temporary fame into more substantial work. Jill Van Meveren now works as a security consultant, for example. Sophie Ruskin has a podcast. Glenn Guignol appeared on the last season of a monster makeup reality competition show. Books have flooded the market. TV shows dedicated to the event routinely receive top ratings. There are T-shirts you can buy at the mall. In this way, FantasticLand will never die.
FantasticLand Page 29