I pull up to Disney World and hit the vape. This was the big one. Walt Disney World was one of the great American wonders, along with the Statue of Liberty, the Hollywood sign and Chicago. Acting as a kind of wonder-palace, the entertainment resort complex was nestled in the heart of the violent wildswamps of Florida. I had often wondered about Disney World, having it been promised to me as a child for eight consecutive birthdays, yet never having the chance to enter the amusement park until now. America by Baudrillard rests on the passenger seat, along with my vintage briefcase, a green poker visor and a half empty bottle of tequila. I squeeze the visor on and think of Disney.
Walter Disney was famous for being cryogenically frozen, as well as founding the animation studio and connected theme park that has become the entertainment juggernaut we all know and love today. Walt first had the idea for a theme park after visiting Luna Park in Coney Island. One ride on the wooden rollercoaster gave him a severe neck injury leading to spinal fluid started leaking into his blood stream. This somehow gave him faster reflexes and he felt more in-tune with the business side of Disney Corp. By combining elements of circuses, theme parks and freak shows, Walt Disney bought a bit of swampland in Orlando and turned it into the institution that every American child pays fealty to as they recite its special anthem every night. Disney World had become the spiritual home of modern America, with Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader acting as surrogate saints in the meaningless swill of U.S. culture.
The board of directors lived and worked at Disney World, occupying the top floor of its famous Cinderella Castle. They smoked cigars all day and paced around the room, shafts of light cascading through the windows and onto producers pitching them ideas for new films.
“Lion King 3”
“Wall-E 2”
“Star Wars reboot”
“Live action He-Man”
The board of directors went quiet, looking up from their broadsheet newspapers and manilla folders.
“Yes?”
“Live action He-Man reboot trilogy, eighties nostalgia, potential secondary market value two billion.”
“Yeah? So who’s He-Man?”
“It needs to be a professional wrestler. Positive correlation between professional wrestling and professional acting, good audience share for an established talent, if we can pick the right guy, we’d have the next The Rock.” Says the producer calmly. The directors all start puffing on their cigars happily.
“You got someone in mind, doll?”
“Nathan Frazer.” she says, then Nathan Frazer himself pushes open the double doors of the boardroom and starts flexing his muscles.
“I have the power!”
Meanwhile I’m down at the entrance smoking a Marlboro Red, trying to act casual around the ICE agents stood nearby. The three men have their faces covered with scarves, MAGA caps shielding their eyes from the harsh summer sun. They wore tactical gear, with little pouches placed around them containing dust, and each wore a set of desert camo trousers tucked into steel toe cap boots sponsored by Capital One. A Disney security guard is stood next to them, tucking his thumbs into his belt and smiling like his face needed a moustache. The queue shuffles along and I flick the cigarette into a trash can, try to act natural, calm, cool, carrying a briefcase full of criminal substances, starting to toss my head to one side and make a little sighing noise.
“I can’t wait to go to Disneyworld Orlando.” I say to the family behind me. I had a fake American accent I had practiced for hours in the car, mimicking the DJs on the radio, repeating things people had said to me again and again until it didn’t make sense. Every time I saw a sign welcoming me to a town I would say “Don’t mess with me, I’m from Bumfuck, Alabama.”, or wherever I was passing through. I had no idea if I sounded American at this point, as I’d been mostly talking to myself for about a month now in different made-up voices, but it looked like all my practice had paid off. The ICE agents didn’t pin me against the wall and threaten to kill me, they just kept waving at the flies that had gathered around them because they smelled of shit. I talked to the clerk in a booth, pressed a bunch of buttons on a touchscreen computer that signed my human rights away and entered the American Mecca.
Walt Disney World Resort.
Home.
I booked a room in the Wilderness Lodge, rushing to crank
the air conditioning up. The heat and humidity was like being in a shower
cubicle, except every time you opened the door you entered a more hotter and wetter
cubicle than the one you’d just left. I threw my briefcase on the bed, ran the
shower and sat beneath the cold water for a while, groaning. I opened the
briefcase: 200 cigarettes, 5 grams of cocaine, 2 grams of MDMA, 2 grams of
ketamine, half an ounce of Purple Kush, 3.5 grams of peyote, 5 grams of Salvia,
a blister pack of Valium, a bottle of 5-HTP and multivitamins, a box of
paracetamol, a device, two sets of clothing, a pack of tarot cards, a phone
charger and 17 grams of dried psychedelic mushrooms. I chew a mouthful of
mushrooms, light a cigarette and watch the tv in the hotel room for a while. The
Wilderness Lodge wasn’t what I had expected. For one thing, it wasn’t in the
wilderness. The other being that it wasn’t a lodge. It had the aesthetics of
what you might expect from the early colonisers of the Americas, with moose heads
on the walls and fake log walls made from plastic. I had booked myself a Twin
Room, as I liked a bed to lay out my things and the other one to sleep in,
though as the mushrooms started to take effect, I wondered to myself. What am I
doing?
The hypothesis of this quest was that I was to witness the fall of the American empire. Yet I wondered if this reflected the fall of my own empire. My body. I looked down at the ageing flesh, the sagging skin, the fat belly, the white hairs on my chest and legs. I was getting old. I couldn’t stay awake for weeks on a cocktail of drugs any more. My therapist had gone insane. My mind had softened, forgetting the names of people I had just met instantaneously. I was far from home, far from youth and death seemed to be the only thing ahead. I decide to take more psychedelics to calm myself down, triple check my pockets for the keycard to my room and begin to take a walk.
