I used to obsess over movies and wrestlers, only not as much as rollercoasters. My favorite toys were these little matchbox cars made of diecast metal, and I used to imagine myself driving them through my house, making the engine gurgle through my vocal cords: vroom vroom vroom, brbrbrbrbrbrbbr.

I would try to design a new rollercoaster track, either steel or wooden. My mother used to buy me rubber tracks, which I bent and twisted to make a rollercoaster for those matchbox cars. But there was never enough track to make it complete. I needed more. None of those toys ever satisfied me enough. I had to blueprint my dream track on a sheet of paper with a pencil instead, despite how unexceptional I was at drawing.

I rode my first one at eight years old after my father goaded me.

“What are you, a chicken?”

“I’m no chicken,” I said.

“Yeah you are. Bock bock bock.”

He made it worse by flapping his arms in front of other people and walking and bobbing his head like a chicken.

“I just don’t wanna go on it,” I said. “Now leave me alone.”

“He’s right,” my mom said. “Leave him alone.”

“You can’t ride the kiddie rides your whole life,” he said.

I watched the rollercoaster roar on its wooden track. Its wheels clicked across the iron and rolled down another hill.

“What if we die?” I said.

“What if?” he said. “If you go down, we all go down.”

As if a communal death was supposed to sound more comfortable. It was the same as jumping from a tall diving board into a cold swimming pool. So I waited and waited for the courage to ride that thing.

And when I finally did, it wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was thrilling to feel the g-force lift me from my seat when the coaster dropped me down the very first hill. From there it shook me, bumped me, spun me around until it hit the brakes at the station. I was hooting and hollering to go back on. We went back on two more times.

After that, rollercoasters were one of the few things to look forward to for summer vacation. I wanted to go there every weekend, but my parents said it cost too much money. They would take me there only twice each summer: once in the beginning, once at the end before I had to relinquish my freedom once again to school.

I rode every rollercoaster there except for the one with the loop-to-loop. The image of me falling out was too great to be overcome. I was no physicist, but how could that thing on wheels make it through that loop alive? It shot out of the station with rockets and powered through the loop, only to come to a hill where it stopped for a moment. Then it fell back down and blazed backwards through the same loop before returning to its station. No thanks.

It was never wise to show up at the amusement park on a weekend. The lines were crowded on the day of my eighth-grade graduation. Thousands of guests stuffed the park as soon as the gates opened. Other guests scrambled to their favorite rides, and the lines only fattened by the hour.

I was stuck in one for over two hours for the Viper. Its track whipped around in seven loops. I was pressured, once again, this time by my friend. It certainly would crash and burn.

The coaster was lifted by a chain from its station to its peak, where my head was well above the mountains. I was thrown down its steepest hill to the first loop, a gigantic climb, and it felt as if there wasn’t enough venom in the tank to get me through. I blacked out for a hair second just as the ride was sniffing the top of the loop, and it twisted me around a curve to a set of double loops and it whipped through a second turn and it shot up into a butterfly loop, and it curved semi-upside-down and coiled into a sideways loop and it winded through two corkscrew loops before it reached the end. I lost my breath.

By then, my head was shaken like a can of Sprite, and I kept on screaming for more and more. But more and more would’ve taken another three hours to wait for that time of day.

There were other coasters to ride, though none as thrilling as the Viper. The Colussus was old school wooden. No loops. Eons ago, it was the tallest wooden rollercoaster in the world.

We stood in line, my friend and I. As we were next, he turned to me:

“You heard about the lady who fell off this thing?”

“What thing? This thing?”

“Yeah. She fell right out, into the parking lot.”

“How did that happen?”

“Dunno,” he said. “I guess the safety bar didn’t hold her in or something.”

Right after he said it, the coaster returned to the station. The riders climbed out of it, hooting and hollering. The coaster went pffft pffft. The turnstile unlocked and let us through. And everyone on both sides of me started racing to the seats, but not I. I stood there at the turnstile until my friend shoved me.

“Come on, you pussy. Get in there. Let’s go.”

The only remaining seats were the ones at the very back, the ones most dangerous. As soon as I sat down, I pushed the safety bar to my lap with every muscle in my arms. The bar wasn’t locked. It kept rising a little back up.

The attendant hustled by, and I yelled:

“Sir, sir. This safety bar isn’t working.”

He came to the switchboard and nodded at me. “You’re okay, little man.”

He flipped a switch, and the coaster began crawling out of the station.

“Let me out,” I said. “Let me out.”

“Shut up, you pussy,” my friend said.

I kept playing with the safety bar, still pushing it down, but it still wouldn’t lock.

The ride wasn’t smooth like the Viper either. It was bumpy, like a dinosaur. My teeth were chattering across the tracks. The Colossus’s bone white paint had been flaking after decades of abuse.

The story that my friend had told was enough to scare me when I was carried up that first hill by its chain. The whole damn time, the whole damn ride, I was pushing down on the safety bar while I kept thinking about that poor woman spilling into the parking lot.

And once it reached the top, and I couldn’t see the track below, the coaster stopped for a second before it threw me down its steepest hill to the bottom, and the wheels rattling across the iron like the ones on a faulty shopping cart the whole way up to the first curve, a left turn to another drop, followed by several bunny hops to a second curve.

Needless to say I survived. The ride was less of a rollercoaster and more of a root canal.

The park became my favorite place on Earth. I went there at least three times in the summer with my friend, and I always made it a point to ride the Viper.

I once rode a suspended coaster there called Batman. The coaster hung from the track above. It sent me through a whiplash of loops and curves. I couldn’t even begin to memorize its design.

And after the ride, as we were leaving the station, I reached for my wallet in my back pocket, and it was gone. My heart was beating faster than it did on the ride.

“What’s wrong?” my friend asked.

“My wallet, it’s gone.”

“What did you do with it?”

“What do you mean what did I do with it? I lost it on that stupid ride. It fell out.”

“So go get it.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll just climb the fence and search for it under the track.”

“Then what’re you gonna do?”

I didn’t waste any time. I hurried over to the ride operator and urged him about it.

“Sucks for you,” he said. “People lose their stuff on here all the time.”

“But I have to get it.”

“Then report it to the lost and found.”

He underplayed the importance of my wallet missing. Not only were my license and my credit card in it, so were my fourteen dollars. To a twenty-year-old, fourteen dollars may as well have been forty dollars. It was two hours’ worth of delivering pizzas.

I was the one who’d driven. My car was parked in the lot next to the Colossus. My friend, who was also twenty, didn’t even have a license.

I had to call my father, who was a hundred miles away, to pick us up. He wasn’t happy.

The park would never retrieve my wallet. From then on, I connected chain wallets to my jeans. And from then on, I stopped going to the park. My enthusiasm for rollercoasters waned, and for amusement parks as well. I drive past there, from time to time, on the highway, sometimes thinking about going back.