Chris Mitchell

by Cast Member Confidential: A Disneyfied Memoir

  I lost it. I don’t remember what I said, but by the time I was finished with my tirade, I had managed to pack everything I could into my duffel bag and backpack and was loading it into my Jeep.

  “Call me soon, okay?” Johnny was tilted against the sliding glass door, blinking in the glare of my taillights. Behind him, in the kitchen, Jazz was rolling the band members into the pirate flag like pigs in a blanket.

  As I sped down the highway, I wrestled to put order to everything that had just happened. My mom was quitting her chemo treatments, my photographic career at Disney was finished, and my roommate was such a useless alcoholic, he couldn’t even hold a thought in his head. I was homeless, friendless, and jobless, but at least I still had Calico. I turned down her street and pulled into her driveway. I didn’t think she’d be off work yet, so I was surprised that her car was in the lot. As usual, her door was unlocked.

  “Hello?” I didn’t want to call out too loud because I didn’t want to alarm her. I made my way to her cluttered kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. Clearing a space on her table, I noticed a bunch of photos that I hadn’t seen before: Calico lying on the deck of a boat, water skiing, posing on the sand. Occasionally, I saw a photo of some guy that I almost recognized, but couldn’t quite remember. His face was never clear enough. I pushed the photos to the side and set my water glass on an unopened credit card bill.

  Something about those pictures was bothering me—not Calico or that vaguely familiar guy, but something else. And then it hit me: the time code. According to the date stamp on the bottom of the prints, the photos had been taken the weekend I’d made reservations at the Portofino, the day Calico had been in Tampa getting her biopsy.

  A sudden crash from Calico’s bedroom startled me, and I dropped the snapshots. On the soft carpeted floors, my footsteps fell dead silent. I could hear music coming from her room and the sound of somebody sobbing.

  Her bedroom door was open wide enough for me to see her naked body bucking and contorted on the bed. What I had thought was sobbing was actually gasping through a sheet that was bunched in her teeth. Crouched naked, with his face in her crotch, was the same guy from the photos, but this time, I recognized him. It was her greeter.

  “Bad dog,” Calico was growling in her fake English accent. “You’re a miserable, naughty little puppy.”

  I stood there, frozen in the door, unable to take my eyes off them, but unwilling to tear myself away. I felt sick to my stomach. When her greeter mounted her, I decided to get out of there. I backed out the doorway and into the living room where I could only vaguely hear the sounds of their fucking, and sat down in a chair.

  Should I wait for them to finish and come out of the bedroom? Should I write a good-bye note? Should I trash the living room? A thousand thoughts raced through my head, but I decided that it would be best just to leave. I made sure the door was closed behind me.

  I Will Fly No More

  “Zip-a-dee-do-dah, honey.” My mother’s voice sounded faded and distant over my mobile phone. “What time is it?”

  “It’s about 10 A.M. my time.” I winced. I hadn’t realized I was calling so early. “So about seven for you. How are you?”

  “Me? Oh, I’m fine. Everything’s wonderful here.” She cleared her throat. “Are you at work?”

  Through the slats of my window shade, I could see a few thin lines of daylight. At Animal Kingdom right now, somebody in maintenance would be cranking up the AC on Pride Rock to lure the lions out near the tour buses. “Not exactly,” I said. “I left the photography job.”

  “But you loved that animal place.”

  I wanted to tell her everything, but I didn’t have the energy. “It was time to move on,” I said.

  “Does that mean,” her voice turned hopeful, “you’ll be coming home for Christmas?”

  Christmas. Three weeks away. Now that I wasn’t a Disney Cast Member anymore, I could do anything I wanted for the holidays and the weekends and every day in between. “I don’t know,” I said. “Go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  “Call anytime,” she said. “And let me know about Christmas. I’m really looking forward to seeing the whole family together one more time.” The way she said it sounded like “one last time.”

  “I’ll call you soon.” I rushed words in to fill the silence. “I promise.”

  I held the phone to my ear until long after my screen had gone dark. I felt weak, winded from the effort of holding back words that needed to be said. In months past, I would have simply gone to one of the parks and extinguished my misery with garish celebration. But this time, there was nothing to distract me—not a parade, or a hot air balloon, or even so much as a sparkler to take my mind off the disastrous events that had left me alone and out of work in a dark motel room that smelled like Swisher Sweets and Glade. I closed my eyes and sobbed into the pillow, my Disney Dream shredded around me like a bed of decaying kelp.

  I struggled to remember why I had come to Orlando in the first place. What had I been trying to find? Magic? Immortality? I had a vague memory of my own blind faith and the promise of a better life. When I first arrived in Orlando, I had clung to that promise, and everything it implied. I was hopelessly optimistic and positive that I would be able to refurbish my job, my relationship, my friends—I had been looking to upgrade my LA life to some Disney version of it where people were always happy and trust was unquestionable, and I had failed.

  Twelve months in the Magic Kingdom, and I had nothing to show for it. At least I finally understood the wisdom of Marco’s words: life at Disney was just like life in Everywhere Else, USA; no matter where I went, I would always have to contend with good and bad. From now on, I resolved, I would make better choices. I did not know what I was going to do exactly, but I was prepared to take the next step with my eyes wide open.

  In the bathroom mirror, my reflection looked older. I had a four-day-old five o’clock shadow and my eyes were bloodshot. I shaved and styled my hair into something respectful, then pulled on a nice pair of slacks and a dress shirt. I tasted blood when I pushed my labret back in, but I didn’t care. I’d earned that pain; for abandoning my identity, I deserved it.

  Throwing open the front door, I surveyed the grand expanse of parking lot in front of the World Famous Budget Lodge. It was the same place I’d stayed when I first drove into Orlando, and the closest place with a VACANCY sign above the door. The night attendant wanted $56 a night, but I talked him down to $50, since I had my own towel.

  As I drove away from the garish mini-malls of Kissimmee, the landscape turned wild. Crabgrass spread, ivy grew unchecked along the cracked streets. Here and there, plants were dying, giving way to new growth. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember the last time I had truly interacted with nature outside of Disney’s cultivated communities. In LA, outdoor adventures had been an integral part of my life: surfing, backcountry skiing, rock climbing. I had surrounded myself with natural beauty right up until the time I moved to Orlando. How had I slipped so far from something that made me so happy?

  The service for the elderly greeter was being held at a cemetery near the orange groves of Clermont. It was quiet here, away from the highways and the BGM; I could hear wind—not recorded climate conditions, but actual blustery weather—and real birdsong, so voluminous and full of natural timbre, that it felt as if I could ride the wave of sound. For the first time in almost a week, I was feeling something other than self-pity.

  His name, it turned out, was Walter. He had died in transit on the way to the hospital and pronounced DOA. There were only a few people gathered around his urn, including Orville and Marco. Halfway through the somber service, it started drizzling, and we stood beneath umbrellas. From the sparse words his family offered, I got the impression that Walter had been that eccentric relative people liked to forget about until Christmas cards were due. Neither Orville, Marco, nor I spoke.

  At some point, it dawned on me that I had been to this cemetery before. In fact, all I h
ad to do was look over my shoulder to see the tombstone where Nick had done his infamous wall ride. At the time, it had seemed like a harmless prank, an interesting backdrop for a sepia-toned action shot, but from this perspective, I was struck by the irreverence of what we had done. Had it really seemed significant back then? Progressive? A year and three thousand miles later, I was right back where I started: without a home, without a job, without a sureness of whom I could trust. Disney World had turned out to be no more Magical than any other place in the world. My life had become a grim fairy tale, an unfinished story without moral or meaning.

  When the service ended, I stood with Orville and Marco until everybody was gone. When it was just the three of us, they held hands, leaned against each other, and cried. Eventually, Orville walked back to the car, leaving Marco and I side by side under our umbrellas.

  There was a metallic taste in my mouth, something like blood. I swallowed against it. “I didn’t know about you and Orville.”

  “Nobody knew.” He looked down at his shoes, shiny wet and flecked with little pieces of grass. “Orville is the reason I stayed in Orlando.”

  I considered all the petty things Marco had done to annoy me over the past year. None of it seemed so insidious now. “You hungry?”

  He shrugged. “A little.”

  We agreed to meet in half an hour, and I watched him and Orville drive away. There was one more thing I had to do before I left Orlando. I crossed the slick lawn and put my hand on the tombstone where I imagined I could still see wheel marks from Nick’s wall ride. I ran my fingers from the rough surface to the polished part where the letters were etched into the stone. “I’m sorry,” I said to the cold granite. “Rest in peace.”

  Universal CityWalk was close. I parked in the Spiderman lot and shuffled along the people mover until I reached the crowded square with all the shops and “streetmosphere” entertainment. Over sandwiches, we talked about our lives, and Orville and Marco told me how they had ended up in Orlando. Orville had grown up in the panhandle of Florida and dreamed of one day owning a comic book store. Always shy, he had picked up photography as a way to meet people, then discovered he was pretty good at it. Marco had studied photography in Puerto Rico and saved up all his money to come to Florida. His dream was to be a fashion photographer in Miami, but he had learned quickly that New York photographers shot most of the Miami jobs, and he didn’t have enough resources to get to New York. At first, Disney had just been a way for him to get money together, but he had quickly fallen in love with the place.

  “It was the colors and the cultures,” he explained. “I loved how Disney could bring people together, no matter where they were from or what they believed in. Disney was a common ground for everybody. And for the first time in my life, I was the best photographer around.” He flashed a sheepish smile. “At least until you came to Animal Kingdom.”

  “You’re way more technical than me,” I protested. “I don’t know half the techniques you do.”

  “It’s true,” Orville agreed.

  Marco put down his sandwich. “When I started dating Orville, I felt like I had everything in one place. I thought ‘I don’t need New York or Miami.’”

  “It’s so easy here,” Orville said. “You settle down at Disney and you meet all these people who are more deviant than you could ever be—weird and wonderful—and it’s like, for the first time, you’re not the black sheep of the family. You’re just a part of somebody’s Magical Experience.”

  Marco rested his chin on his hands and closed his eyes. I felt a touch of regret that I would never again be able to experience that backstage Disney world of blue Schwinn bike rides and Julie Andrews discussion groups.

  “You know what’s really crazy about this whole situation?” I stirred the ice around my glass. “I came to Disney because I wanted to get away from drama and tragedy. I wanted to go backstage where the fun never stopped and everybody lived happy ever after in Never Land. I found this amazing, magical place where nobody ever dies, like the Bermuda Triangle, only in a good way, and I actually started to believe that I could settle down here. I honestly thought I had it in me to be a lifer.”

  Marco looked at me, puzzled. “What are you talking about? People die at Disney World all the time.”

  I shook my head. “There’s never been a death at Disney. Even Walter. The paper reported he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

  Marco and Orville exchanged a look. Orville took a deep breath before he spoke. “Nobody’s ever been pronounced dead on Disney property because that’s Disney’s policy. If somebody passes away at one of the parks, the body gets loaded into the alpha unit and pronounced dead in transit. Remember the guy who had a heart attack waiting in line to see Cinderella last month? His heart stopped beating before he hit the ground. It was probably the same with Walter, but Disney doesn’t want anyone to know that because death ruins the Magic.” He reached across the table. “Hey, don’t look so sad. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  In reality, I wasn’t at all that surprised. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I knew that was the case the whole time. What really threw me was my apparently innate talent to deceive myself into believing the most absurd fantasies: that I could escape reality in an amusement park, that I could continue to live a life unexamined. After all, hadn’t I deserved to be fired from my old job? Hadn’t I pushed my ex-girlfriend away? I ran from my mom when she needed my support the most. I was a shallow, self-centered bastard.

  Marco leaned his chair back and squinted up at the sun. “You know what I’ve been thinking about the last few days?”

  “What?”

  “When I first came to this country,” he said, “I was amazed by how big everything was. The cars, the houses.” He held up his sandwich. “The chickens! I thought, wow! This must be the best place in the world. Everybody has such wonderful big things! But then I found out the other side to the story. The big cars guzzle gas and ruin the air. The big houses have the same problems as little houses, only bigger. The big chickens are only big because they are pumped up with chemicals! But by that time, I had become too involved, and I couldn’t escape. I kept thinking about my uncle—the words he said to me after he dragged me out of the waves one day when I was first learning to surf in Sitches. He said, ‘Jamas le des tu espalda al mar.’ Never turn your back on the ocean.”

  The moment he said it, the second it was out, everything came to an abrupt halt. Music stopped playing and jugglers quit juggling. Lovers paused their kisses to listen. And in the eyes of every child on the CityWalk, a smile, as they waited for Marco’s words to sink in.

  It was like an awakening—what Disniacs call a “pixie dust moment”—when your vision clears and you suddenly see your life in perspective. Orlando wasn’t my destiny. It was a detour, a wonderland of fantastic stories and people who covered my retreat into false magic. Disney had been a convenient location for my escape, considering the hours of happiness and fantasy I’d found at the feet of my Disney heroes, but running away to live at Disney hadn’t made my life any better. It hadn’t healed my heart or made me happier. It had only taught me how to appear happy until I was finally able to confront my issues.

  Of course, I had tried to believe the fantasy. I wanted to think that I was moving toward enlightenment every time I guided somebody up a wheelchair-accessible ramp or photographed a fellow Cast Member doing whip-it hits in a Donald costume as if happiness was a goal that could be achieved by making people around me smile.

  I wanted to believe that I could successfully plug myself into the theme park world, that all I needed was a support group of entertainers and a book of rules outlining wardrobe, hairstyle, and attitude—a neat, prepackaged lifestyle that would work for me the way it worked for hundreds of other happy Disney Cast Members. I had listened to the legends of sex and drugs in the Magic Kingdom and come to believe that they were a kind of inspirational legerdemain, a mythology that might guide me to acceptance and, ultimately, hap
piness. But I had miscalculated.

  The truth was I didn’t have it in me to be a lifer. It had taken me no more than a month to shatter the veneer of Disney’s chaste brand of Magic and only a few weeks more until I, myself, was distorting the Experience with out-of-character photos and SOP trysts. No wonder I had burned out on Disney so quickly.

  I didn’t need Walt’s wonderful world to make me happy. I didn’t have to be a part of anybody else’s Magical Experience. I only needed to be there for the people who mattered most in my life: my mother, my family, my friends. For them, I needed to Provide Immediate Recovery. As Tarzan once told me, everybody can be a hero.

  At that moment, with my former boss and nemesis sitting across the table, it occurred to me that even with all the stories and the parades and the music and the character sets and the fireworks shows, it was time to leave Orlando.

  “So,” Orville smiled as the music revved back to life and, all around us, guests and waiters and street atmosphere performers went back to doing what they were doing. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Now,” I said, imagining my mom and dad opening presents under an impossibly tall Christmas tree. “I’m going home.”

  Circle of Life

  It took me four days to drive back across the country, ample time to chastise myself for dropping my safe, journalistic objectivity and getting carried away with the Disney Dream. In New Orleans, I changed my ringtone from Jiminy Cricket’s “Give a Little Whistle” to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” In Dallas, I uploaded a hazmat icon as my avatar. By the time I crossed the Arizona state line, however, my self-immolation had run its course, and I was glad for every single experience at the Magic Kingdom.

  Nikki left a message to say that she and her partner had been selected to adopt a Colombian child. Johnny left me a couple of messages describing the awesome ascendance of Boy Banned, but by the time I got to New Mexico, he had given up calling. Calico, on the other hand, called me every day, crying, commanding, begging, cajoling. She ran the full gamut of emotions from martyred to manipulative, but I let all her calls go to voice mail. I couldn’t decide if she was schizophrenic or if she really thought she had me fooled.