The Dark Side of Disney

by Leonard Kinsey

  If you see a snake in this pose, RUN THE FUCK AWAY!

  And just to further stoke the paranoia of those with snake phobias, snakes have been found INSIDE on-site hotel rooms! If you are deathly afraid of snakes, you absolutely should request NOT to have a ground floor room! They can get in under the sliding glass doors on ground level rooms and have been known to hide in the drapes or even in the beds. Again, I am not shitting you, there’s a 33-page thread with pictures at Disboards: http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2116495

  Fire Ants. These aren’t like ants in other parts of the US that just walk around and eat your food and annoy you. No, these giant red fuckers with huge venom sacks in their asses will get in your shoes, under your pants, in your underwear, in your hair, in your fucking ears and bite the fuck out of all of your most sensitive parts, leaving monstrous burning welts in their path. Enough of these bites can kill and infant or old person. These asshole ants are bad news! They build massive anthills in the dirt, so if you see a big cone-looking dirt pile, DON’T KICK IT OVER unless you want swarms of stinging red ants everywhere! Of course, as a kid, it was great fun to do just this and watch the ants go apeshit, or even better, to pour gas all over the anthill and light it on fire. These ants will show you no mercy, and they deserve none in return!

  The bites of fire ants are among the most painful of any insect

  Cockroaches. Living in Tampa for the first 18 years of my life, I assumed that cockroaches all over the US looked like the ones in Florida. Turns out, no, the ones in Florida are monster-sized versions of the tiny little things they have all over the rest of the country, so it’s always entertaining when a non-native first sees one of these massively disgusting bugs and freaks out.

  I promise, they have been walking in your food

  Orlando roaches are huge, most clocking in a 2” long or more, they fly, they make weird noises, and they are literally everywhere that food can be found. Yes, you will see them scurry across the floor at Disney restaurants, and yes, you might find them in your resort room. The worst thing is that if you see one, there are probably dozens more hidden away, just waiting for the lights to go down so they can swarm. In the worst infestations, you can go into a kitchen, turn on the light, and the countertop will be pure black, completely covered with roaches, who will then scatter into the walls in a matter of seconds. They carry diseases, they’re hard to kill, and when you step on them green goo spills out. There is not much to love about cockroaches, as opposed to….

  Love Bugs. These black and orange flying bugs are literally a bunch of little fuckers. Twice a year for about a month they swarm over Florida, covering every brightly colored surface, getting clogged in radiators and smashed on windshields, and landing on your hair, in your eyes, in your mouth, etc. Which would be gross enough except that what first appears to be one long bug is actually two bugs joined together at the crotch, fucking until death! Have fun explaining that one to your kids!

  Good luck explaining this to your kids!

  Brain Eating Amoebas. Yes, it sounds like something out of a bad horror movie, that doesn’t make it any less real. Naegleria fowleri is an amoeba that lives in the bottom of lakes and enters your body through the nose, where it hauls ass into the brain and proceeds to feast on your gray matter. Warmer temperatures allow it to replicate more, and it thrives in stagnant, shallow areas of a lake. Which is one of the main reasons why Disney no longer lets you swim in the beaches along Bay Lake, and is also why some think River Country was shut down. In 2007 six people died from the bacteria, and three of those deaths were in Orlando! If a single amoeba is inhaled into the nasal passages it can first cause flu-like symptoms, followed by hallucinations, and finally coma and death in as little as one day. So when the signs on the beach at The Polynesian tell you “No Swimming”, they’re not kidding around!

  Naegleria fowleri look pretty, until they’re eating your brain

  Chapter 4

  Off-Limits Exploration

  SNEAKING INTO THE UTILIDORS

  It’s your fourth or fifteenth trip to Walt Disney World. You love the place dearly, but by now you’ve gone on all of the rides many times over, explored all of the resorts, and eaten at all of the best restaurants. You’ve even traveled off-site to Universal and Sea World, and maybe even to The Orlando Love Loft. You’ve done it all, and the thought of going back and doing it all again seems a bit boring for an adventurous spirit such as yourself. But yet you’re still drawn to Walt Disney World…. What to do?

  This is the spot my friends and I found ourselves in back in the summer of 1995. Three guys who were born and raised in Clearwater, and who had all been to Walt Disney World more times than we could count. Hell, we used to go there on school field trips! Being total geeks, EPCOT was our favorite park, but we loved them all, and combined we’d probably made over 100 trips to each park in our lifetimes. It was a second home, and Walt Disney was our cool Uncle. But we were becoming adults, and wanted to rebel against the boredom of safety and false security Uncle Walt had provided us. We were too old to think that “It’s a Small World” was fun, but not yet old enough to enjoy it on a nostalgic level. In short, if we were to keep going back to WDW, something had to give.

  And it finally did give, for the better, the summer after our freshman year at college. I’d enrolled at a prestigious private university, purposefully getting out of driving distance from my family in Florida. Newmeyer, a pudgy nerd who’d never touched a girl (much to his dismay), had only reached Atlanta, where he was happily partaking in the social rewards of a veritable geekscapade at Georgia Tech. However, he’d started a disturbing shoplifting habit which at the time seemed harmless and funny, but which would eventually land him in jail. McGeorge, a lanky self-avowed anarchist and social outcast with bad skin, had stayed behind. He’d actually moved closer to The Mouse, going to school at UCF in Orlando. Out of the three of us, he’d changed the most, growing his hair out, drinking a lot, and nearly flunking out of school.

  When we got back together in Tampa that summer, it was like no time had passed. We were still the best of friends, and were thrilled to have a few months to hang around each other again. But it seemed as if the outside world had changed: our parents were more annoying and demanding, our siblings were more childish, summer jobs were more tedious, and Walt Disney World was… boring. I went a few times that summer with my family, and other than Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, and the cheap thrill of seeing girls losing their bikini tops on the slides at Blizzard Beach, I was bored out of my skull. “RIP, Uncle Walt,” I thought to myself.

  The summer went by quickly, though. I had a job as a cart-pusher and bagger at Publix, which I promptly quit after three weeks because the idiot manager insisted cart-pushers wear dark slacks. Any guy who has ever worn dark slacks outside in the humid Florida summer heat knows that you sweat like a pig, and the sweat drips down your back, onto your pants, and quickly forms white rings of dried salt below the band of the pants. Not to mention the soaked armpits on the knit polo shirts we had to wear. Judicious application of Right Guard stopped the stench but still couldn’t stop the actual sweat from soaking your entire body. Sweating like this and going back inside to bag groceries made me look and feel disgusting, and I felt awful touching people’s groceries and trying to be polite when I was desperately in need of an hour-long shower.

  So much to my mother’s dismay I quit the grocery store job and started a band with Newmeyer and McGeorge. We played a nonsensical mix of Gershwin, The Beatles, Zappa, and death metal. I was on guitar and vocals, Newmeyer on bass, and McGeorge on drums and keyboards. We played the local coffee shop on the weekends and I made more money each weekend than I’d been making each week at Publix. “Fuck Publix, and fuck my mom for making me get such a bullshit job!” I proclaimed triumphantly. I was in full-on adolescent asshole mode. But things were going great with the band, and we’d each saved up enough money for an end-of-summer trip.

  “I don’t want to go to Daytona!” yell
ed Newmeyer.

  “Why not, you dick?” I shouted back.

  “Will you two shut the fuck up?” screamed McGeorge, desperately concentrating on trying to download a single pornographic picture from a BBS over a state of the art 14.4K baud modem.

  “I’m fat, and everyone will be walking around in bathing suits,” seethed Newmeyer, completely ignoring McGeorge. “I’m not taking my shirt off!”

  I sighed. “Sweet Christ. Okay, fine. So no beaches? It’s Florida, dumbass! Where are we going to go where there’s not a beach?”

  “Let’s go to Disney,” replied McGeorge, not looking up from his computer. “Fuck! The connection got reset! MOM!!!” He jumped up, opened his door, and started screaming into the hallway, beet red. “DID YOU JUST PICK UP THE PHONE?! I TOLD YOU TO ASK ME BEFORE USING THE PHONE!” He slammed the door. “We’re going to Disney! Now stop your bitching and whining and help me download this porn!”

  Newmeyer and I looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Really, Disney?” I asked, incredulously. “That sounds a bit boring, McGeorge.”

  “No, wait…” started Newmeyer, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s perfect! We can stay at a fleabag motel, get our Florida discount on the tickets, and McGeorge can hook us up with a shit ton of booze through his UCF connections.”

  “Yeah,” said McGeorge, not paying any attention to us. “I’m awesome. Porn.”

  “I’ve already been there like eighty times this summer with my mom and my sister,” I said, getting a bit desperate. “It was boring! McGeorge!” I yelled, breaking him out his modem-noise induced stupor. “Can you seriously get us booze?”

  “Yes, yes, fine,” he wearily replied. Suddenly he jolted back to reality. “Wait, I just remembered something. Check this shit out.”

  He cancelled his porn download, and Newmeyer and I gasped. “This must be awesome,” I thought.

  After ten minutes of BBS searches, McGeorge connected to a server and downloaded an ASCII map (i.e., a map drawn with text characters, thus taking up significantly less bandwidth than an actual line-based image) of The Utilidors, the secret network of tunnels underneath The Magic Kingdom, restricted to Cast Members only. And so it began….

  ASCII map of The Utilidors

  We memorized the map, borrowed a video camera from McGeorge’s uncle, and headed up to Kissimmee. McGeorge actually cut his hair and shaved in anticipation of the trip to The Utilidors, knowing that his faux-hippie appearance was totally contrary to “The Disney Look” and would immediately get us singled out from the rest of the Cast Members down there. Newmeyer and I also showed up that morning clean shaven and with our hair more closely cropped than usual.

  When we got to the main gate we backtracked until we found the closest motel we could afford, dropped off our suitcases, loaded up our backpacks, and headed out to The Magic Kingdom.

  Pulling up to the far right booth of the Main Parking Gate, McGeorge started in on a scam we’d cooked up. “Uh, we’re, uh, here to meet a friend at The Contemporary,” stuttered McGeorge.

  The lady at the booth seemed unconvinced. “Name?” she demanded.

  “Uh…” McGeorge looked at me. I shrugged. “Uh… Frank… Sinatra?”

  “Seriously?” asked the wrinkled booth operator.

  “Yeah,” piped up Newmeyer from the backseat. “Friend of the family! Didn’t you know he was staying at The Contemporary this weekend?”

  She screamed across to the booth to her left. “Bill! Is Frank Sinatra staying at The Contemporary this weekend?”

  “I dunno?” slurred Bill. “Maybe? Yeah, maybe.” He furtively swigged from a flask. “Sinatra!”

  We all cheered. Wrinkly Booth Operator pushed a button and the gate lifted. “You boys better be telling the truth!” she exclaimed as we drove off, veering to the left, away from The Contemporary and heading directly for The Magic Kingdom’s parking lot.

  “Fuck paying for parking!” I yelled, and we all cheered. This was going to be an awesome trip.

  After taking the tram from the lot to the Ticket and Transportation Center, McGeorge and Newmeyer bought their tickets, bitching about the price, but still happy that they’d received a sizeable discount with their Florida IDs. I had a “Four Season Salute” pass, courtesy of my mom.

  “Pretty cool that your mom got that for you,” said McGeorge as he shelled out his hard-earned band cash for a ticket.

  “Yeah…. It was pretty cool, I guess.” I replied. For the first time that summer I actually had something nice to say about my mother.

  We took the Resort Monorail from the Ticket and Transportation Center to the park. I liked seeing The Polynesian and Grand Floridian on the way in, and the line was always significantly shorter for the Resort Monorail than it was for either the ferry or the direct-to-gate monorail. That was the day we found the “hidden dick” on the monorail, a distinctly ball and cock shaped moulding attached to the door hinges. Many obscene pictures would be taken over the years next to these mouldings….

  It’s hard to get off the monorail, go through the gates at The Magic Kingdom, and not feel a sense of nostalgia. Even if you’ve never lived in a small town that has a “Main Street”, there is something in the American cultural subconscious that Walt Disney tapped into here. Some sort of zeitgeist that we can all relate to on an almost genetic level. Walking through the train station tunnel and seeing Main Street, and catching a glimpse of the castle on the horizon produces a visceral reaction in even the most jaded citizens. And Newmeyer, McGeorge, and I were about as jaded as you could be at that point. Yet we paused at City Hall, looked at Cinderella’s Castle, and turned to each other, smiling at the anticipation of a whole new sort of Disney adventure.

  “Let’s do this!” I shouted, and we charged towards the castle, knowing exactly what our first ride would be. Not Space Mountain, or Thunder Mountain, or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. No, we were headed straight for The Utilidor entrance immediately northwest of the castle.

  We sprinted through the rose garden leading up to the castle, taking in the sounds and smells of our surroundings. Exhilarated, running full speed, we quickly reached the location detailed in our ASCII map.

  But we saw… nothing. No heavily barricaded door, no “Keep Out” sign, no semi-obvious security cameras, no plain-clothed Disney cops, no off-limits entrance whatsoever. Dismayed, we parted shrubbery, looked under the bridges for secret ladders, and kicked at the pavement for trap doors.

  “Fuck!” I yelled, causing a lady nearby to glare at me and cup her hands over her daughter’s ears. “Give me a break, lady!” I shouted to her, and turned to McGeorge. “Your map sucks!” I was pissed. “I can’t believe we came all the way here, spent money on a hotel, and then it turns out the damn map is a fake! We’re all a bunch of idiots for believing some anonymous jackass on some stupid BBS!”

  “Yeah, McGeorge, I’m never listening to your damn modem butt-buddies again!” shouted Newmeyer.

  “Shove it, Newmeyer, my computer is smarter than you’ll ever be!” spat a flustered McGeorge as he punched Newmeyer in the arm, hard. Newmeyer immediately put McGeorge into a headlock, and they both fell on the ground.

  “Get off me, fatass!” screamed McGeorge, his voice raised an octave into an ear-piercing shriek, causing birds to scatter.

  Disgusted, I turned and started walking away, not wanting to be there when the Disney Police showed up.

  And then I saw it. Just beyond the simple and unobtrusive Sleeping Beauty fountain was a double door with two smooth black handles, completely inconspicuous in the shadows with its bland brown and slightly dirty turquoise paint, contrasted with the shimmering ornate gold trim on the nearby castle. No warning signs, no locks, no lights, nothing drawing attention to itself in the midst of a whole park which was having the exact opposite effect on the senses. A door specifically designed to not be noticed. Brilliant.

  The Mythical Utilidors Entrance Next to Cinderella’s Castle

  “Guys!” I yelled under my breath
. Newmeyer was on top of McGeorge, a long thread of phlegm hanging from his mouth, dangling above McGeorge’s face. McGeorge screamed, and it was so loud I just about bolted then and there. “Assholes, the door is right in front of us!” I hissed.

  Newmeyer sucked the spit back into his mouth, jolted around, and jumped off of McGeorge. “What, where?!”

  I pointed to the door. Newmeyer gasped.

  McGeorge got up with a frenzied grin, apparently forgetting he’d come within a second of having a puddle of snot dropped onto his face. “Fuck me, that’s smart!” he laughed.

  We all stood there, staring at the door. Breaking out of my stupor, I quickly realized that security would be arriving any second. “Guys, we need to get out of here, and fast.”

  “Down the rabbit hole?” asked Newmeyer apprehensively.

  “That’s what we came here for,” responded McGeorge.

  So I walked to the door, opened it, and stepped inside. Newmeyer and McGeorge followed right behind me, and the door closed silently behind us.

  And what we saw was completely anticlimactic: an ugly fluorescent-light lit room with a large pile of wheelchairs and strollers in the corner, stacked two high, and a stairway whose handrails were covered with chipped paint. A cockroach scurried across the floor.