Slapping a Mickey

 

I was working the midnight shift at Disney - we started painting when the park closed, and worked until morning - we painted the wooden frames that the rides were built on, and that kind of thing, but we got out there almost every night. I was drinking heavily - that seems to go with painting - I drank before I went to work, a little during work, and then more in the morning when I finished. It wasn't related to Disney; actually I liked Disney. It was more related to a woman who had caused me serious problems.

So often I'd hit these bars that Disney people frequented, and I'd go to them at dinnertime, about when I woke up, and I'd have some dinner and start drinking before I even went to work in the evening. I was just waking up, but I'd see a lot. On this one night I ran into my friend, Beth, who was also a heavy drinker. She invited me to sit down with her and her friend Carol, who was sitting with her. They were both about my age, mid thirties. I due to my devastated confidence was not in the market for a relationship really, but I always liked female company and these two were at least lively and interesting. Both worked for Disney.

I liked my job painting structures at Disney; in the early mornings, when the sun came up and I was done painting, the castles and the fairyland kinds of things glowed in the sun, and I felt the magic. It was my favorite time of day, about five in the morning, and they were just getting ready, getting everything clean and full and prepared; we were putting away tarps and work equipment, and it all looked beautiful. I worked hard, and they paid me adequately. I had no illusions; I knew that if they could pay me a dollar less, they would. But I was one of the few people I knew who defended Disney and felt good about it. These bars were full of people who had fallen out of the dream, who were experiencing the other end of it.

Beth, for example, worked in one of the executive offices by day. I could often envision her in her professional suit, and high heels, an icy stare as she told people they were laid off or were having their salary reduced. Her entire job was to save Disney money somehow, or earn Disney more, to help the bottom line and impress the stockholders. If they could charge an extra dollar for parking, they would. If they could send people out selling parkas the minute it rained, they would, and they would charge whatever they could get. They knew full well that these people were on vacation and didn't feel like pinching pennies. At night she was a serious drinker; that's what we had in common. She wasn't really my type, though I liked her, but we both drank seriously, while people like Carol would slow down so as to come out at the end of the night still knowing who she was, if not still able to drive.

Beth introduced Carol as a woman who liked to slap a Mickey every chance she could get. "Slap a Mickey?" I asked. "I thought the expression was 'Slip a Mickey.'

"It is," Beth said. "Slipping a Mickey is giving someone a pill, usually in their drink, to put them asleep so you can take advantage of them. We have that problem too; in fact, this very bar probably has that problem. But Carol likes to slap a Mickey. You know those Mickeys that run around the park? She likes to slap them."

Carol laughed a little. She was prettier than Beth, but probably still not my type; it was too soon to say. I liked her. She was a character actor; she played one of the Seven Dwarves. We talked about the way a lot of the character actors were stalked. She'd been stalked one time by a woman who didn't know she was a woman, inside her Bashful costume. If you're a good enough actor, she said, they see you as Bashful and not as a person in a Bashful costume. The Mickeys have it worse, she said.

"So many people have been in love with Mickey, forever, since long before they came to Disney, and they come here, and things aren't that great, and they still want that fantasy, that magic. So they go after a Mickey. And they get fixated on him."

"So what's this about slapping a Mickey?"

"Well, the Mickeys around here are either little people or women, because they have to be small to be Mickeys. I know most of them. If they're men, I warn them, they get fresh with me, or something like that, I'll slap them, I don't care if they''re a painter or if they're Walt Disney himself. But I get the most pleasure out of slapping Mickeys. That's why she (poking Beth) is teasing me. I do it a lot. It's most fun when they are in their costume, but of course that won't happen here." Costumes were not to be worn outside of the job itself, so we didn't expect to see them in the bar, though it was known to happen.

A little while after she said this, we were actually joined at our table by a Mickey. His name was Jim, and he was a friend of Carol's. He was out of costume, of course; this was a bar. But they both knew he was a Mickey, and even teased him for it, and he vouched that, yes, Carol had slapped him more than once, in costume and out of it. It's just the way she is, he said, and it never hurts. It reminds you to wake up from the dream. This is not a fantasy, looking serious and banging his beer glass on the table a little.

Jim was interested in the politics of Disney, which was so large, so expansive, that it was actually separate from the state of Florida in some ways and was able to make some of its own rules. Sometimes these rules went against the state of Florida or made people mad in some ways so there was always a kind of push and pull going on. Of course in a bar you're only going to get the more colorful aspects of the story, and not necessarily entirely accurate all the time, but that's where Beth came in. She worked in the executive offices; she knew the truth, usually. Jim and Carol, and I, would talk from a worker's perspective. But Beth knew a lot of things we didn't.

Some time passed, and the bar was lively; I knew it would be my time to go to work very soon. The place was colorful, and was getting more crowded; there were symbols of Florida and Disney on the walls and they'd turned on the neon signs once it got dark outside.

From the corner of my eye, way over on the other side of the bar, I saw something very strange and scary. A woman had gone to the restroom, and in her absence, a man dropped something in her drink. His action was furtive and unseen by most people in the bar. It was only because of our seat in the corner, and the fact that I was facing toward him, that I happened to catch this. I was shocked but as I replayed it in my mind I was sure that that's what I'd seen. Slipping a Mickey! His victim came back and sat down, and he began pressuring her to finish the drink, so they could go. I couldn't even hear him, because I was so far away and the place was noisy, but I knew that was what was happening. I alerted Beth, Carol and Jim to what I'd seen.

Beth was deeply disturbed by what I said, and, looking over at them, she decided to walk over and mix in. If that's what it was, she'd find out pretty quickly. Meanwhile I saw something else that disturbed me greatly: over in the other corner of the place, my ex was being courted by some man who also was rather unsavory. 

It turned out later that he was one of several Captain Jack Sparrows in the park; lots of women hit on him, but my ex was one of them, and so it was possible they had a thing together. This of course made me mad, but what could I do? If a woman wants to go after a pirate captain instead of a set-painter, it's a free country.

There was nothing I could do about that, except to have another drink, which I did, as I watched the scene with Beth and the couple play out. Beth had started talking to the couple right as the man was trying to get the woman to finish her drink and leave. Of course he wanted this woman out of there as soon as possible and before the drug took effect. But Beth knew this, or at least suspected it, and her objective was to stall. Beth was winning; she was an executive; she was a step ahead of him. He was angry now at something she said. The woman had not entirely finished her drink though she'd probably had enough of it for the drug to take effect. Sure enough, I could see the woman begin to lose her bearings, gradually. Beth and the man were still arguing.

I was glad to be diverted, because I didn't want to watch what was happening in the other corner of the bar, where my ex could do whatever she wished and there wasn't much I could do about it.

But right at the table in front of me, another diversion. Jim made a comment about females playing male characters like Bashful, and Carol slapped him. She didn't slap him hard enough to hurt, but she slapped him hard enough to get people at nearby tables to look at us. "You slapped a Mickey!" I said, happy to see what they'd been talking about earlier.

"Doesn't count!" she said. "He's not in costume!"

I laughed again. But two police, a male and female, had entered the bar and were walking over to the table where Beth had stalled the man and woman. The woman was now slumped over, asleep; they'd have to carry her out. Better them, the police, than the man who had drugged her. They were questioning him and getting ready to arrest him. I could have been a witness that he'd spiked her drink, but it wasn't necessary; everyone could see it now.

I was proud of myself, having almost accidentally gotten a criminal like that put away. But I had no time to glory in my success; I had to go to work.


Note: This story is part of a collection I now call Slapping a Mickey: & 20(?) short stories from the House of Mouse - the title, of course, is tentative, as is the final number of stories, but you get the idea. This one still needs some work - I'm not happy about the undeveloped ex, for example, and I might add a stalker. There will be some tinkering. But as the first story of the collection, it's very important that it set the tone, and give an overall view of Disney. I'm still working on that too.

The baby was found in the middle of a battlefield somewhere in Virginia during the Civil War. After the battle, there were dead and injured soldiers all over the place, with discarded muskets that had to be checked and gathered up. But they found this baby in a basket crying, and she had apparently been left there by someone figuring that the authorities would gather her up and take care of her.

They did that, though it took them a while and she went a few days without proper care. By the time she found a loving home, it had been a couple of weeks, but the home she ended up in seemed to work for her and she grew up in a farm family in western Virginia for the next fifteen years.

Nowadays DNA testing would tell you exactly where she came from and who had put her there in that battlefield, but in this case we don't know so we just have to take their word for it that this was what happened.

Meg was a poor girl who lived about five miles from the battlefield. She had been married less than a year when the war came through and her husband, Caleb, went off to fight it on the Confederate side. He was not actually so enthusiastic about the Confederate side itself, but his friends had all gone and had pressured him to go with them, and to stay home would make it seem like he was a deserter or traitor.

But, since they were farmers, things began to go downhill for Meg right away, especially when the new baby came. A local woman had come to help with the delivery, but Meg's mother had died before the baby was born, so she really had no source of support at home. She had two brothers who had gone off to fight as well, but she had no sisters and nobody to ask for help or to move in with. She ate up the food she got from her mother's house, but her mother didn't own that house and the owners were glad to get it back. She tried hiring herself out in the community but with the baby that became harder. Pretty soon she was hungry.

When the war swept through the area she knew that the local boys were using the old field out past the river, but the northern side knew that too and attacked them right there. Meg was hiding in the woods when it happened. She had taken the baby out to the river not knowing what to do, and they were both hungry, the baby crying and Meg crying inside. She couldn't take it anymore. When the battle was over, and both sides had retreated in different directions, she set the baby in the middle of the field and walked home.

Her plan was to go out west somewhere where nobody would know her, but she clung to the hope that Caleb somehow would come back from the war. Instead of leaving the area - she had no money for a bus ticket anyway - she found her way to Charlottesville and worked as a waitress in a small restaurant. The restaurant owner gave her a room to live in.

The war finally ended and things got back to normal to some degree, but Caleb never came home. Sometimes he would appear in her dreams; she would be in the woods, peering out at the battle, and somebody would kill him, or he would kill someone, or someone would come chasing after her and the baby. She would wake up in a cold sweat screaming.

She had an old friend, Esther, in the town she had left, and Esther had promised to inform her if Caleb ever came back to that town looking for her. The problem really was that Esther might not have known, if he DID come back. Esther worked in a bakery, and a lot of people came through the bakery, but would Caleb have come there looking for her? Not many people had known Meg, as she'd lived out in the country; few knew that she'd married; even fewer knew that she'd been pregnant. The war had disrupted everything.

One day a man came into her restaurant and, to make a long story short, he ended up proposing to her. He lived out in the country, in fact not that far from where she had been. He did not know her, or Caleb, or her back story before he walked into that restaurant. He was a horse dealer and was fairly successful. She agreed to marry him and moved with him out to his place in the country. She eventually told him about the baby and about Caleb. The war had disrupted lots of marriages, though. It was not unusual for people to be starting over.

So she was living with this horse dealer, Alvin, and had married him and was now pregnant with his child, and was back in her original town doing an errand. She stopped in on Esther, who told her that Caleb was back. Caleb had come to the bakery two days earlier, and had enquired about Meg, and Esther had told him that Meg had moved to Charlottesville. Esther knew that something was up with Alvin but omitted that from the story so as not to make Caleb mad. But Meg was shocked, and asked Esther what took Caleb so long to come back home. She'd thought he was dead.

Well, they had sent him off to fight in Georgia, and he'd been captured, and when they released him he had no money, and it was this kind of story, The Confederate Army had just kind of fallen apart at the end there, and was unable to even get him home to where he was from.

Just as Esther was relating Caleb's story to Meg, there in the bakery on a clear fall morning, Caleb walked into the bakery. He and Meg recognized each other instantly. He walked up very close to her, but did not reach out to hold her. She filled up with the stress of everything that had happened: the hunger, the giving up of the farm, the abandonment of the baby; she had not forgotten any of it. She told him there was a baby and the baby was in the area somewhere. He slapped her hard across the face and ran out of the bakery.

He was never seen in the town again, and this was lucky for her, because she now had another baby to worry about, and she didn't really want to get Alvin involved. She stopped in at Esther's bakery about once a month and asked every time about Caleb, but Caleb had apparently left town and was not pursuing the issue.

About three years after that incident, she was in the bakery when a farm family of four, mother and three children, came in. The youngest child was about five and had the distinct look of Meg and Caleb both. She was sure that this was her child. She watched the child carefully, and the child noticed her, too, but she was busy taking care of her new toddler, and they didn't really have time to talk.

Caleb was killed in a gunfight in Colorado; he'd robbed a train in Missouri and was by then an outlaw. He was still angry about his wife and had somehow sensed that she'd remarried and he'd lost her. He'd been injured in the war and also knew he'd never be able to keep up the farm, or at least not for long. He was better off just using the gun for what it was for, and run that out until the end, which he did. He spoke her name as he was dying, on the barrom floor in Colorado, but nobody knew any Meg and they buried him out in the wash behind the bar. Years later genealogists came looking for the parents of the young girl, as she'd grown up and had eight children, but could find no evidence of who her birth parents were, and had to wait for the possibility that DNA testing might uncover the truth.