Up, Over, Down and Done With

There are 1.5 people killed each year on roller coasters in America, compared with about 40,000 killed on the nation’s highways, but I will tell you in unequivocal terms that I would still rather take my chances on the 110 during rush hour than on the Superman at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

When I die I want it to be the way God intended us to die in L.A. in a heap of twisted automotive metal with a highway patrolman looking in the window and television helicopters circling overhead like angels waiting for my spirit to rise, if it ever does.

I don’t want to be flung into space 40 stories up from a little car traveling at subsonic speeds in a 360-degree loop while little girls scream in delight and brave men wet their Dockers. No way, Jose.

My decision was reinforced the other day at L.A.’s Imax Theater during the preview of a film called “Thrill Ride: The Science of Fun.” It’s one of those large-format productions intended to put you in the front seat of a roller coaster doing drops, loops, twists, turns and other unnatural kinetics for what is known among the intellectually impoverished as fun.

The idea of the film, in addition to creating waves of mal de mer in its viewers, is to explore the history and construction of roller coasters, but to me it didn’t answer the essential question of why humans, who ought to know better, will subject themselves to the terror of riding those things.

I asked a psychologist friend that question. He usually replies in long, detailed explanations peppered with references to the id and the subconscious, but this time when I asked why people rode roller coasters he replied, “Because they’re crazier than hell.”

*

I suspect there’s probably a more scientific explanation of why 290 million humans a year are willing to pay up to $35 each to drool in fear on a ride that is generally 3,500 feet of calculated terror.

You stand in line for hours, pay the exorbitant amount and then scream your lungs out for 2.5 minutes and feel as though you’ve achieved something wonderful. In fact, you have achieved nothing at all, either physically or spiritually, unless you are suddenly introduced to prayer at the top of a 370-foot drop and walk away believing in salvation.

My only roller coaster experience took place at an amusement park called Playland at the Beach in San Francisco, which no longer exists. Well, San Francisco still exists, more or less, but Playland doesn’t. I was an undergraduate student at S.F. State and was showing off for Cinelli, not yet my wife, and regretted every second of the bravado.

I came out in such a state of emotional disarray that to this day Cinelli never asks of me anything more daring than tending an herb garden.

“Thrill Ride,” the movie, did at least give us what they call “fun facts” about roller coasters. Among them was the fun-fact that the first roller coaster in the United States started as a coal train in 1829 and was called the Mauch Chunk Switchback because it was near Mauch Chunk, Pa. It ran coal in the morning and people in the afternoon for $1 a head and the rest is fun-history. Now there are 300 roller coasters in America and all they carry are adrenalin junkies.

*

On the basic question of why people flirt with death, I don’t know. I can understand why we’ll risk everything for the sake of exploration but never for a misguided sense of enjoyment.

Nevertheless, almost every year a roller coaster is developed that out-terrorizes the coaster that was built the year before. They get taller and faster and longer and loopier, in every sense of the word.

The worst of them bear names like the aforementioned Superman and the Beast, the Rattler, the Viper and the corkscrewing American Scream Machine. Clubs form around each one, magazines are published, online home pages developed and millions of dollars spent to perpetuate the cult-like adoration of roller-coasting fear.

There are those who would conclude that riding a roller coaster with their arms flung in the air while falling at 100 mph is an attempt to end an otherwise useless existence, but I don’t think so.

I suspect it is linked somehow with an accelerated pace of life that creates risk even as it condones violence. Movies have gotten louder and bloodier, stunts crazier, guns deadlier, bombs bigger, missiles more accurate and serial killings more commonplace.

I’m not saying this is all due to the roller coaster, by the way, so save your e-mail assaults for another day. But roller-coasting is related, however casually, to a life on the edge that has created free-falling and bungee jumping and is likely to go on from there.

I take my thrills just sitting here teasing the people, and while it can be occasionally risky, the odds are that I’m not likely to be flung into space praying for redemption while I’m doing it.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com