High Rollers

Already running is Superman The Escape, a "shuttle coaster" at Six Flags Magic Mountain. Though it's not everyone's idea of a roller coaster, it meets the technical definition: It uses gravity and rides on rails. Superman is not a continuous loop but an L-shaped track on which passengers are shot down a straightaway and then up a tower before pausing and falling backward to earth, all in 30 seconds. Its 15-passenger car travels from 0 to 100 in seven seconds, exerts 4-5 G's on the rider and is roughly equivalent to taking off in an F-16 from the deck of an aircraft carrier. At the top of the tower, 415 feet above suburban L.A., riders experience six seconds of weightlessness before plunging back whence they came.

"You can let go of your sunglasses at the top of the ride," says Magic Mountain spokesperson Andy Gallardo, "and they will remain there, floating in front of you." Trouble is, you can "let go" of anything at the top of the ride, and it will remain there, floating in front of you.

If we are living in a roller-coaster Renaissance, the U.S. is its Florence. This nation's technophilia and leisure worship have joined in unholy matrimony to sire an astonishing subculture of coasterdinks and rollerwonks, men and women for whom roller coasters have become a lifestyle—or something more closely resembling life itself. This is not the case with Rich Rodriguez, a 40-year-old man who last summer spent 22 hours a day for 47 consecutive days on the Big Dipper at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, breaking his own Guinness world record for marathon coastering. "I do it in a Lindberghian spirit of adventure," says Rodriguez, an earnest Brooklyn native who is a teaching assistant in the communications department at Miami. "I'm not one of these roller-coaster obsessives who can tell you what kind of bolts are in the track."

Rodriguez is eager to distinguish himself from the likes of Dreadlock Jim, a multiply pierced, Rasta-haired coastermane from Saginaw, Mich., who practically lives in his car. Dreadlock Jim reportedly drove 80,000 miles and visited 101 amusement parks in 1998. He has the elusive quality (and personal hygiene) of Bigfoot. "I saw him in Tampa yesterday, on Montu at Busch Gardens," a 22-year-old rollerphile named Walt Breymier told me last January in Orlando as we stood in the construction site that would become Islands of Adventure.

The theme park wouldn't open for another four months, but the Incredible Hulk was up and running, and, as Breymier explained, "There's something called ERT: Exclusive Ride Time." It is a privilege extended to people like Breymier, of the Virginia-based Coaster Zombies club, whose members were given a no-expenses-paid trip to Orlando to test-ride the Hulk in exchange for the good word of mouth they were certain to spread.

For some Zombies it was the second trip to the construction site in as many months. "I came down at Christmas and watched Hulk run from the outside," said Sam Marks, 41, a customer service manager at Pitney-Bowes in Arlington, Va., which is "24 miles from Six Flags America," where Marks spent at least 28 days last summer.

"I'm giving up a week's worth of work to be here," said Breymier, a night supervisor at the Target department store in Bel Air, Md., who lives within a five-hour drive of 15 amusement parks. "I took a bus here to save money. I've been serious hardcore since '97."

American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE) has 5,800 members, not all of whom are serious hardcore. "Our membership runs the gamut from casual to 'coasters are my life,' " says ACE public relations director David Escalante, whose surname suggests ascents and descents and whose signature ends with a line drawing of a roller coaster. (Such salutations are common among coastermanes: Park World's Ruben ends telephone conversations by saying, "Go with gravity.")

"I'm a gawker," a man in a sweatshirt bearing a likeness of the roller coaster called Raptor told me at Raptor's home, Cedar Point, on the banks of Lake Erie in Sandusky. The Raptor fan, it turns out, was not a gawker but a GOCCer, a member of the Greater Ohio Coaster Club. GOCCers and ACErs and Coaster Zombies gather in cyberspace to discuss first drops and chain lifts and lateral G's and brake runs and camelbacks, and to exchange intelligence about new coaster construction.

"You'll read, 'There are reports of a truck carrying blue track north on 1-95: Where is it going?' " says the Zombies' Marks. "It's kind of pathetic. Some people have broken into parks just to look at the construction of a new coaster." He pauses, lost in thought beneath a beige Gilligan hat with a blinking red light and the souvenir pins of myriad coasters. "By the way," Marks says of such break-ins, "I didn't really do mat once, when I was 16 years old."