When I drove to the park the next morning a new sign was at the entrance leaning against the pole that held up the old sign:
AMERICA'S FIRST ADULTS ONLY THEME PARK RIDE
Featuring RIVERBOAT TRIXIE
and minnie
in
AN ADVENTURE IN CANNIBAL COUNTRY
Rides at 4 and 5 p.m.
STARTS TOMORROW
(No one under 18 admitted)
"I'm only eighteen myself, Joe," I said when I got to the dock and saw everyone waiting for me. Darren and the other black guys were wearing loin cloths and that was it. Minnie had a bathing suit on which was a riot. It was pink, a little bit like the color of her skin but not a lot like it, and it had painted nipples on the top and black hair painted on the bottom where her your know what was supposed to be.
"Oh my God," I said, looking at her.
"Shut up, creep! You're gonna wear one, too," she said.
Minnie's suit was two piece but you couldn't call it a bikini because she was too fat for anything that small. Mine was a real bikini. It had painted nipples like hers but the hair painted on the bottom was blonde like the hair on my head. I put the suit on in the trailer and came out feeling like a complete dope while everyone looked at me and made comments that I was cute in it but you would have to be about two miles away not to realize I was wearing a bathing suit.
Joe rubbed his chin. I could see he was thinking. Then he told us to get in the boat and we headed for Cannibal Country. We had only that day to rehearse and get the show ready, he said, so he wanted us all to cooperate and do our best so we wouldn't disappoint the customers on our big opening.
Joe's idea for the show was pretty simple and also why it was going to be for adults only. When the boat got to Cannibal Country it would stop in the river. People would see the clearing with a big black pot sitting there and next to it a barbaque pit with a pole on top. All of a sudden two girls would come running out of the woods being chased by three cannibal black guys. The cannibals would catch the girls and pretend to have sex with them and then they would put one of the girls in the black pot, that would be Minnie, and the other girl would be tied up on the pole and put over the barbecue, and that would be me. The whole show was supposed to take fifteen to twenty minutes depending on how well the fake sex scenes went.
We were on the riverbank, having just left the boat, and I was feeling self conscious in my bikini with the guys looking at me, and I don't mean Darren. The other guys were Ben, who was a big guy and very muscular and Eric, who was a small, skinny guy with a big head and big white teeth. Darren was acting cool, like he could care less about chasing a couple of white girls around and pretending to screw them and cook them for a dinner but Ben and Eric were looking at me like I was piece of candy.
"Um, Joe, which guy is going to chase me and which guys are going to chase Minnie? That's number one, and number two is I don't think I want to be in a porn show and this sounds like a porn show to me."
Joe looked like I had offended him.
"Hey, I researched this. This is how cannibals act. This is going to an authentic theme park kind of ride. It's educational. It's the way cannibals are in the jungle, Elle."
"Hmmm." I didn't know what to say if he had researched it.
"You think there's rides like this anywhere else, bitch!?," Minnie said.
After Minnie made her nice comment to me Joe got us to stand in a line near the black pot while he went to the boat to see how we looked from there, which would be the same view the customers would have of us. I could tell he wasn't happy. He came back, stroking his chin and looking at me.
"Um, you know, this ain't really an adults only sort of situation the way it is, I mean with these here bathing suits, girls. Probably wouldn't even get an R, probably get a PG13 if it was a movie. Customers gonna complain if they pay forty bucks for an adults only show and they get PG13."
"Forty bucks!," Darren said.
"Yup. Gonna give each of you guys five bucks of that for every customer. Figure it out. If we got a full boat for each show, you guys would pick up two hundred fifty bucks a day just for these two rides."