Living at Cedar Point#2: A tale of Debauchery and Depression

(Part two)

The Games Department

 

 

Last time I attempted to write a detailed account of my time at Cedar Point, my old typewriter died. I like to think its gears are happily spinning in robot heaven. Now, here I am, starting over.

At Cedar Point, you have several job options. You could be a French fry cook, a ride operator, or, as in my case, a game host. Game hosts are often seen as nuisances by overworked dads and people who dislike being approached by strangers. To put it simply, game hosts are those who shout and cajole you into parting with your money, offering little value and possibly detracting from your experience. I chose this role mainly because I enjoy the spotlight, and the other jobs seemed soul-draining.

However, being a game host came with its own set of challenges.

The Caste System

As a game host, you're essentially a salesperson. Instead of selling something desirable, you persuade people to spend money on the slim chance of winning something they probably don't even want. Game hosts are often more desperate and overworked than your average used car salesman. There's an arbitrary hierarchy designed to keep you constantly selling, with your very livelihood dependent on your sales metrics, or "per caps." These per caps are calculated by comparing the day's performance to the same day in the previous year, adjusted for visitor numbers. Strangely, only the management knew these critical numbers, which could doom some to failure while elevating others to almost mythical status.

We could only guess our fate from the ominous schedule board—a glass and wooden oracle that dictated our shifts without sympathy. Watching it, we felt like zoo animals, anxiously awaiting our feeding time, wondering whether we'd be rewarded or condemned to the dreaded morning shift.

The Morning Shift

The morning shift was the proverbial corner for misfits. It was slow, less lucrative, and required waking up very early, offering fewer hours than the afternoon shifts. It was a miserable experience: lower pay, no nightlife, and empty afternoons. Nobody pitied those on the morning shift—they had been deemed unworthy by the almighty schedule board, and those on top kept their distance.

Thankfully, I only endured this shift for a week before I managed to escape.

Factions (Explained Using Game of Thrones)

The amusement park is our Westeros, with different game zones akin to the competing houses.

  • Zone 1 - King's Landing: This zone, at the park's entrance, bombards guests with game offers as they enter and leave, resembling towers in a tower defense game.

  • Zone 2 - Flea Bottom: Known among employees as "the boxes," this zone features the least desirable games and is staffed by less favored employees.

  • Zone 3 - The North: Remote and far from the central office, it's like the distant, cold North of Westeros.

  • Millennium Games - Casterly Rock: Here, we were part of Zone 2 but distinct enough to consider ourselves "Zone 2.5." Unlike the restrictive boxes of Zone 2, this area was free from direct supervision, allowing for a more relaxed atmosphere.

  • Arcade - The Wall: Staffed by the youngest and least skilled, this area felt like a dark, forbidding outpost.

  • Lockers - The Wildlings: An outlier in the department, similar to the unpredictable Wildlings.

In this park hierarchy, game hosts strive to climb the ranks, often facing the same trials and tribulations as characters in a medieval saga. Despite the challenges, my tenure as a game host was a memorable chapter in my life, filled with peculiar characters and surreal experiences.

This post turned out longer than expected, so I’ll stop here.

Living at Cedar Point: A Tale of Debauchery and Depression

Living at Cedar Point: A Tale of Debauchery and Depression (Part One)

Year One Living

Background

After graduating high school, I decided I was going to work at Cedar Point, having visited a year before with two close friends. I recall seeing the onsite employee housing and all the beer bottles lining the windows and saying, “I want that; I want to live the nomadic carny lifestyle. I want to survive on beer and ramen, I want to work hard and play harder.” So, I applied, got a job as a game host, and left five days after graduation, never looking back.

I finally thought, I could be like all my favorite book characters, pumped up with ambition and high on a personal sense of manifest destiny.

I wish I had the wisdom to write about my experiences sooner. Thankfully, the memories of time spent working at Cedar Point are traumatically engraved into my brain like an endearing but really crappy tattoo. These summers represented the best and the worst humanity had to offer. From ghetto-like living conditions to adventures like skinny dipping in one of the world’s largest lakes, these nightmarish tales of amusement and nostalgia stick with me, and it’s time I finally stick them to something else.

Cedar Point is considered the world’s greatest amusement park, containing 17 roller coasters and located on a Lake Erie peninsula in Sandusky, Ohio. It’s the kind of town that you can tell is rough just driving past. It’s a place that clearly has seen better days. The town is like a beached whale; people are around taking pictures of it because it’s a whale on land, and no one sees that kind of thing normally, but ultimately it's just gasping for air, its gills filling with sand and salt, and it will soon die to leave behind some really impressive bones.

Sandusky is basically a stubby concrete tourist trap complete with strip malls, fast-food eateries, and sulfur mines. Yup, sulfur mines occasionally bless you with a whiff of that seductive sulfur smell while hanging around town.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We can cover how awful the town of Sandusky is later.

The Conditions

I was assigned to live in the employee complex closest to the park, actually right inside the park, and it was called “The Cedars.” Historically and aesthetically, it was really cool. The place was as old as the park itself, having formerly functioned as a luxury hotel; it still has most of the hotel bits and pieces even if it has been renovated to be a dorm. The entrance was complete with a grand staircase, those old hotel mail slots, and everything was made with hardwood. Functionally, however, this place is a hellhole, only made livable because of the residents. Those unfortunate enough to have lived through it would humorously refer to The Cedars as the “Shiters.” The Shiters was my first and favorite rat hole.

Deciding what terrible feature of The Cedars to describe first is difficult because it had so many. I think most notably the lack of AC or WIFI would be the most traumatic. The rooms themselves were small, dirty, and cramped and filled with spiders, so many goddamn spiders. My room could be described as a closet that three people slept in, with just enough room for a bunk bed, a single bed, and some dressers. Standing space was rare, and the beds felt like torture devices.

Bathrooms were shared and were constantly decorated with the evidence of last-minute shaving and bio-waste from someone’s heavy night out drinking. It was also common to find the remains of ramen in the sink every morning. You never knew what might be waiting for you in the bathroom; most notably, I recall one morning waking up to find a small dead tree that someone had shoved through the window. Classy.

We had one room, a common room, that had AC and spotty WIFI that must have been installed shortly after the golden age of dial-up. This was also the only spot that had cable and a TV. The only problem was this one asshole who somehow managed to stay employed but never seemed to work, would insist on playing Skyrim almost every day, all day. I hated that guy, I think everyone hated that guy. But for all its faults, the common room was great fun. It was home to many interesting characters and home to many friendly drunken brawls.

The Cedars were run like a developing nation in Southeast Asia with tons of rules and very few means of enforcing them. But if you ever did get caught, the punishment was extreme. You would get these discipline points, and once you collected so many, you could be fired. Most of the time, you would be given a few of these points for showing up to work late or arriving without shaving. One of the main rules was no girls after certain hours, and even then, they had to be checked in and provide proper identification. Bringing girls into the male dorms or providing an underage employee with alcohol could get you instantly fired.

Security consisted of a single guy at a desk who would swipe your employee ID and the occasional Cedar Point Police walkthrough. But mostly, it was just the one guy at this one desk. He was this old gravedigger looking guy who would insist on seeing your work ID every day, even after months of seeing him several times a day. He would wordlessly beckon with his hand and slowly swipe your ID card with immense disdain like you just ruined his best and longest attempt at sitting still while staring at his stapler. This guy was the worst, and if he ever reads this, I hope he knows I hated him and hope he is unemployed with a terrible retirement plan.

His nighttime counterpart, a guy named David, was the exact opposite, possessing the qualities of a saint. He always wanted to help and was known for giving struggling employees money for food. He wouldn’t insist on swiping your card every time and knew every single resident's name by heart. David was the best, and I hope life is treating him as kindly as he treated the residents of the “Shiters.” All hail king David, the greatest of night watchmen and ID card checkers. Like seriously, this guy deserves a framed portrait of himself hanging within the Cedars so that all might know of his generosity and kindness.

Thankfully, the “Shiters” was poorly designed as a dorm and had many alternative routes of entry. Fire escapes, side entrances, and emergency exits functioned as much better alternatives for entry. These alternative entrances provided the means for fueling the hedonistic activity that defined my experience. The fire exit in wing C floor 1 was my silk road for the summer. Beer, girls, and liquor could be transported effortlessly and relatively safely. This was heaven for a 19-year-old, underage, and soon-to-be college student.

The Cedars was the Wild West of Cedar Point living, anything and everything could happen here. It was basically overflow housing and was completely overlooked by the administration in comparison to the other more densely populated employee living centers. (more on those in a later post) As a result, terrible and wonderful things happened here.

Due to its terrible nature, The Cedars was avoided by most American employees who had cars and better sense than to live in such a place. Instead, The Cedars were home to all the international employees who lacked cars and wanted to save money. My hallway, in particular, was filled with Eastern European guys who loved to drink. Most notably, I remember a guy named Hamza who was a total inspiration.

Hamza

Hamza was an older guy from the Czech Republic (maybe 24-25) who worked as one of those annoying guys who take your picture when you enter the park and attempt to sell it to you later. I’m not sure what or who Hamza was before I met him, I just know he was always super friendly. Hamza was the first international employee to show me respect and invite me to various drinking events in his similarly small, but much more popular dorm room. Hamza used to somehow convince these really hot tall Eastern European girls to party in his dorm room regularly. I think this had something to do with Hamza’s easy-going personality and kindness.

I’m not sure what kind of worker Hamza was but I recall him making a wall of all the discipline points he had received, so probably not great. He never did anything actually bad, I mean, I think one time he got in trouble for peeing on a tree, but that’s the worst it ever got. He was, however, fired for not shaving one morning and going to work.

The weird thing was he got issued an insane amount of points at once for not shaving, like the amount of points you might get for coming into work really drunk. Just for this one offense! When this kind of thing would happen, we called it blacklisting. Blacklisting was when the park wanted you gone and they would wait for a reason to make you scarce. If you were an undesirable employee, the park would use and do anything it could to get you removed fast. I once knew a guy who was fired after buying a water and getting a fountain soda instead within the employee cafeteria. I also knew other people who would receive random drug tests that for sure weren’t random.

Regardless though, Hamza was fired. I asked him what happened, he said, “my fucking fat manager noticed I didn’t shave and took me into her office and fired me, it happened in like 40 minutes.” I asked him what he was going to do, how was he going to get home? He told me, “I will not leave, I love America, I am staying.” And so he did. For the next few weeks, we would hide Hamza in various people’s rooms and even the common room. Security was always looking for Hamza but could only really remove him, so every time he was caught he would just come straight back and keep on sipping Four Locos like he never left. I think he spent more than one night out in the woods near a local McDonald's. Thankfully that McDonald's was hiring, and Hamza got a new job, though he continued to live within the Shiters until his visa expired.

Spain Dude

Across the hall from me lived these two kind of wild American guys named Ryan and Marcus who had lived with another even wilder dude who was from Spain… I sadly can’t remember his name which is really disappointing because I used to see him very regularly. Not only did he live across the hall from me, he would also provide me with free food from the employee cafeteria. He worked as a cashier and would regularly abuse that privilege and give me free meals. I even once went to go see Carly Rae Jepsen live with him. He was also a heavy shoplifter who for some reason loved to steal expensive cologne, every free day he had Spain dude would go out stealing.

Regardless, Spain dude ended up being extradited back to Spain for almost killing some dude. Apparently, he got really drunk one night and ended up making friends with some dude at the local employee bar and brought him back to his cramped, crowded, and smelly dorm room. His roommates thought it might be funny to play a practical joke on Spain dude and this other random drunk guy. So they grabbed an air horn and proceeded to circle around the building to blast the air horn sound through their window and have a good laugh. What they found, on the other hand, was much more devious. They discovered that Spain dude’s new friend was indeed gay and that he enjoyed the feel of male genitals in his mouth. Ryan and Marcus, being the wild troublemakers they were and hopefully still are, proceeded to blow the air horn regardless.

The story takes a turn for the dark now. Spain dude became enraged immediately and diligently and methodically started beating the living shit out of the man currently engaged in what will soon be his most confusing blowjob ever.

We can only guess that Spain dude was trying to prove that he was not indeed gay, but we may never know. Because shortly after the beating commenced he dragged his now recently less than enthusiastic sexual partner outside using the fire escape, I guess so more might know that he is not indeed gay. This is when I became awake to the yelling, beating, and now dragging of a random gay ride operator outside my door. I walked outside to find several Romanian guys restraining Spain dude on the concrete and an unconscious gentleman splayed out on the ground bleeding.

We never heard or saw Spain dude again, he was taken by the police and we think was extradited back to Spain to hopefully serve time for beating up that guy.

Roommates

Finally, I want to say I had two of the greatest roommates of my entire life, Ozgur and Ahmet. These guys had traveled all the way from the Turkish side of Cyprus. I can’t say enough about how great Ozgur and Ahmet were.

But before them, I was rooming with this guy named Chris who was probably the gayest person I had ever encountered at that point in my life, ironically Chris was not gay at that time, though he came out later. Me and Chris had started talking using Facebook while on the “New employee” group page. He approached me about rooming and since I knew literally no one this seemed like a good deal. It was when I first found him hanging out in the park with this large girl that I realized I wanted nothing to do with this guy, he was wearing a Katy Perry T-shirt and had kept asking me about pop songs. We both quickly realized we would not be friends, but we had one of those weird relationships where both of us realized we would never be friends but since we had arranged this relationship we pretend like we actually were friends but never talked or did anything with each other. Then there was also a third guy, this is a three-person room after all and the third guy, well he was actually gay. I became pretty good friends with him, he would party most nights and would sometimes invite me along, one time he even used his connections at the “thrill park” to get us a bunch of free rides on the go-carts and the mini bungee jump. Sadly, he moved first and for a bit, it was only me and Chris, and then one day Chris left without saying anything and the room was all mine for a moment.

Ozgur and Ahmet came after and it was a positive change. The first interesting thing about them was that the two of them were the best of best friends I have ever encountered to this day. Together they had enrolled in the military of Cyprus to pay for college, went on to earn master's degrees in engineering, and then fled the country together.

They left Cyprus because they had joined the military to fund their education but didn't want to serve. They felt that the military and government were being controlled by Turkey, and they disagreed with that direction. So, they fled and started working in America as amusement park workers. The two of them taught me about their culture, and I helped them with their English. I took my first taxi ride with them to Walmart and learned so much from hanging out with them. I'm eternally grateful for their friendship.

For my next post, I’ll be describing the culture of working in the games department.