My Trip to Disney World, Yesterday, During COVID Lockdown

Yesterday, I woke and went with my lover and her children to Disney World, the “Most Magical Place on Earth.” This is what happened:

On waking, the children literally jumped with excitement and frustration that we were not already in the car headed to the park. We played very loud music that I couldn’t sing along with because I mostly know the words to the rock songs of the 1970s and 1980s and the songs in the Baptist Hymnal, and a few chants I learned from my studies of Hindu, and a few poems of Robert Frost and Walt Whitman (I LOVE “Pent Up Aching Rivers” by Whitman)—but I can’t sing along with many rap songs even though my youngest son is a professional jazz drummer and can rap like a wizard. As we drive to the park, the bass guitar rattles the car and I wonder if Whitman would have been a rapper had he been born in 2001.

Then we get to the park and I start to feel the delicious pain of remembering my parents as their younger selves and me as my child self when they brought me to the park to stay the year the park opened and how we stayed in the campgrounds—part because Outside was more fun and part because Outside was in the budget and credit cards were a new idea and you put Santa on lay-away because the credit cards didn’t yet put people in bankruptcy or slavery the way they can now.

I paid a little extra to park closer to the door and we went into the park pretty easily and walked smoothly onto the boat that would take us to the doors of the Magic Kingdom.

So far, things felt like what they have been like, except, of course, everyone (not almost everyone), everyone is wearing a mask.

We laugh and run up the stairs of the boat since everyone knows that when you are a child the uppermost seats are best. Then, we walk/run to the front, since the front is better than the back when you’re on a boat.

Now, things start to feel a little off: you’re not supposed to be able to easily park near the gate and walk to the front of the boat at the Magic Kingdom, usually, there are too many people for that. It feels like when you go to a meeting and not many people are there; so, you start to wonder if you’re in the right place.

Still, the morning air is cool, almost sharp but still comfortable, and I can see the Captain of the boat through a window and I can hear the diesel engines and feel how easily their power pushes us into a headwind of 10 knots at a speed of 10 to 12 knots toward the Cinderella castle in front of us across the lake and the children are talking incessantly with happy voices that say nothing with the words but say everything about why people would want to be alive.

The whole scene feels like it should be a great place for a photo, so I back up two steps and ask my crowd to drop their masks so I can take a photo that includes the boat railing, the morning sky, Cinderella’s castle, and their smiles.

Before I can snap the second photo, I hear an angry man’s voice shout over the sound of the diesels, “PUT YOUR MASKS ON. YOU MUST WEAR YOUR MASKS AT ALL TIMES!”

I turned around to see black eyes glaring so much that I could see the white his eyes all the way around the black in the center, even the white by the lids, the exophthalmos glare of the enraged or of someone with severe hyperthyroidism—glaring from behind a face-shield covering the face that was covered (all-but-the eyes) by a black mask.

I could still feel the solid wind blowing cold across the bow first in my face and now into my back as I turn the face the man who had shouted at me and the children and at my lover. All within a second, I looked behind him to see a boat mostly full of faces, staring at us, all from behind masks. Nothing but eyes and masks. So, as a physician and a mathematician, I redo the calculations and easily see that with a 20-knot wind (headwind plus boat speed) on the open deck of the boat that there’s a zero chance that anything that comes from my bronchial tubes will land in the nares of the people on the boat. But, I can not see their mouths—only their eyes: so I do not know what they think. Are they really afraid (I feel sorry and ashamed that they may be), are they made into children afraid of the monster under the bed by this man’s anger? Are they laughing at the ridiculous nature of his demands? Are they angry at me for risking the life of every man, woman, child, and infant on board? I could feel the fear and embarrassment of the children of my fiancé now behind me. I turned back to them and told them to put their masks back on, and I turn around again to be sure the man is satisfied and not walking closer (his surprise approach and his anger has woke my instincts to protect those looking up to me, though my left brain knows he’s not really a threat, my lizard brain is on the edge).

I’m relieved to see him strut away from us, and I feel no anger, only pity for him because it feels to me that this police work just lifted his self-esteem.

I turn back around to snap another photo with the masks pulled back up, but now the scene lacks the smiles. I can only see Cinderella’s castle, and the railing of the boat, and eyes and the tops of people’s heads and I decide there’s no need to take more photos on the boat and hope the cloud that just came over the bow will pass.

I mumble to my fiancé’, “I’m glad he kept us from slaughtering everyone on board.”

Then I turn to see a young man standing near us, I see that he overheard me—he’s also on the rail on the bow. He holds his young lover near him and I can hear his laugh and I can see he’s strong and wearing short sleeves in the cold and he nods a nod of “I’m OK with you” and I can see that his young woman is melting into him and that he has given her his passion and she has given him hers, that morning, before getting on the boat, and that she is his and that he is hers and that they are not afraid of the wind or of our naked faces.

He’s standing between me and the window on the other side of which is the Captain of the boat and the Captain is looking straight ahead at the approaching dock not seeming to notice that one of his people under his charge has become the mask Gestapo. I’m reminded of a Jack London novel but then it’s a vague reminder and I watch the Captain with my mask back over my face and the children are now quiet. I think he’s been a Captain in the coast guard and has captured drug runners and fought high seas or else Disney would not trust him as Delta prefers captains who flew jets in the Airforce and in the Navy. Now, I wonder what he thinks about his present back-and-forth taxi and what he says to his wife when he goes home at night when they watch TV.

After entering the park, the children and my fiancé first ride Space Mountain. The youngest is too short for the ride, so I take her for ice cream. The man who sells us the ice cream wears a mask when he speaks with more enthusiasm than the transaction demands: I cannot tell if he is smiling or if he hates his job and the mask. To eat the ice cream, and to avoid the mask Gestapo, the rules say we must sit still…no walking and eating at the same time (everyone knows viruses can’t jump off of you when you’re sitting like they do when you’re walking). The ice cream melts and drips onto my black Levis as I watch the crowd and I notice that I don’t care.

I do not see a smile anywhere. The park sells masks with smiles painted on them; many people buy the mouse ears and wear them but I see no one wearing the masks with the painted-on smiles.

I cannot see a smile, not one, only masks that all seem black to me now no matter what the color. I see no one kissing (though my fiancé and I did try it once through a mask and gave it up as a worthless pantomime). I feel like I’m caught in a Brave New World; and I wonder if anyone who walks by me has read the book and I want to yell for everyone, anyone, please take off your mask and kiss.

We go to my favorite ride, “It’s a Small World.” I want the song to be stuck in my head for the day, for the week, forever and I watch the little puppets that were high tech when I first saw them when I was 12 in 1972 and rode the boat with my then young parents.

I think about them and about my grandfather who never went to school because he was born out of wedlock at a time when there was no safety net and so was “farmed-out” (a form of indentured servitude that young children—yes white children—endured in the south when their parents could not afford to feed them). I wonder what he would think if he were in this place. I remember my younger self being there in the Magic Kingdom as a child when everything was new. I remember bringing my three sons there when I was single, after their mother and I split. I grieve the loss of that time when I was the father of young sons and could show them the world, the whole thing, as much as I could, and tried to show them that this world (wherever you are in it) is the most Magical Place in the universe because this is where we are and we can make it so, and I wonder if they remember or was all of it masturbation and they remember nothing of it and it only served to make me feel happy to be a father without producing the offspring of showing them anything at all.

Then I look around and see the children of my fiancé and wonder if I’m doing anything to make their day better, and I think not, so I just relax and let them show me how to find magic even with our masks and forget teaching and become their student in our new world.

On the way out, I buy everyone cookies at one of the shops and we are steps from the gate, so we drop our masks to eat them and as we pass through the gate, leaving the park, we are chewing our cookies when the woman at the gate yells to our backs, “YOU MUST WEAR YOUR MASK AT ALL TIMES.”

Later, that night in bed, I see where my sister writes on Facebook about how it’s good that people quit publishing a book that offended people, and I try to think of a book that has offended me, or could have offended me (I think of You Might Be a Redneck IF, since I’m from Alabama) and I think, “Would I would want this book to go out of print?” I think about how people have insulted me and how they dressed up my grandfather as a child and made fun of him because the clothes didn’t fit and then sent him to the fields to work and never to school (and how he never told me about it, my father did). I think of the woman I know who as a child said something offensive to someone at her school in Russia and so the authorities came to her home that evening and questioned her parents—who were at risk of prison or worse if they answered the questions wrong. I remember another woman I know who came to the US from Ukraine as a young woman with $25 and when she arrived dropped her bags and cried because she felt free (now she’s a wealthy anesthesiologist in New York City). I think of another woman who as a child was a refugee in a Vietnam prison camp and how her father sent her and her mother here and couldn’t join them until years later and then he died from cancer soon after his arrival. I think of Bella Thorne (who started at Disney) and how her video showing love between women was banned by YouTube. I remember hearing Larry Flint say, on stage in Las Vegas, when he was old and in a wheelchair and spoke in broken sentences in his weakness and breathlessness (I shared the stage that day to discuss my O-Shot® procedure), “I took Jerry Falwell to the Supreme Court for one reason—freedom of speech. They don’t start by banning what you want to hear. They start by banning what you do NOT want to hear: then you go along with it, and then you lose the right to hear what you DO want to hear. You can agree to ban what you find offensive, but, in the future, you cannot choose who will decide what is offensive.”

He continued with one of the most important most patriotic sentences I’ve ever heard, “Until you’re willing to fight for the freedom of people to say what offends you, you do not deserve freedom of speech.”

“If you’re not going to offend somebody, you don’t need freedom of speech,” said Larry Flynt

I remember the book about How to Kill Eleven Million People and I wonder if my sister has read it, if the man on the boat read it, if the Captain read it, if any Jew read it, if anyone has read it.

I remember a YouTube channel of mine (with 142 videos on it that took me hundreds of hours to make) being removed/banned ten years ago by Google for my talking about sex from a scientific standpoint and for my video about how to mix growth hormone (to help the patients I had involved in a research project I was doing—they said it encouraged illegal drug use). I remember how it was impossible to talk with a person at google about my censorship; so I started a new channel, but also started putting everything important on Vimeo in case Google censored me again.

I go back online and read again about Bella Thorne and I’m grateful for her, and I salute her courage (and I think, “Maybe if Whitman reincarnated, he’s come back as Bella Thorne“) and I cheer for her and for her fans and I hope that a friend of mine, Phoenix Marie, in the entertainment industry will join her cause and that my sister will join her cause: that “We should be able to celebrate love, and ask, “Why are we allowed to glorify and celebrate violence but not love? And, who is anyone to play G-d and decide what I can say?”

But, then I realize, there’s really not much I can do, not really, not about any of it, not about much of anything really, except for what I can reach with my hands within 2 feet of where I sit, and with the very few who may read what I write and read it until the end, and I wonder if I did the math wrong today on the boat (maybe I did actually kill everyone on the boat today even though I’ve already had COVID and survived it after being vaccinated by the actual illness) and I go back to Walt Whitman and I want to go outside and read a poem, to be a poem, and to hear the children, and to hear my children and their children, and I’m sorry for everyone who had to work under another man’s whip and I’m sorry for everyman and every woman’s offense, especially those who I have offended (and there have been many), and I’m grateful for every offense that made anyone angry enough to do more than would have been done without the anger, and here in my own magic kingdom I want to strip my lover naked and forget the masks and kiss with bare lips with nothing between.

Walt Whitman…

O for you whoever you are your correlative body! O it, more than all else, you delighting!)