I remember the first "Playplace"-type piece of playground equipment I ever encountered. It was at a Burger King. In the summer. In Texas. And it was hot outside.

I'm not talking about the kind of hot that makes you sweat a little, or makes you want a lemonade. I'm talking about the kind of heat that plasters your shirt to your back, the kind that sucks the liquid out of your body, the kind of heat that means you're not getting out of your leather-upholstered car without a spatula.

Now that we've got the setting down, I guess I should mention that I was about five years old at the time. Burger King had just gotten their huge, fancy, glorious fiberglass and plastic monument to capitalism, and everyone in my small town was flocking to see it. Well, I was right up there, begging my parents to take me to see the glory. And they did. About four months after the thing had come to town.

So, where to begin? Well, I suppose with standing on the astroturf, baking in the sun, staring with awe at the great wonder. Then someone informed me that I had to take my shoes off. Well, I never wore socks, so I quickly removed my footwear and hotfooted it across the sizzling astroturf and into the little entrance chute, several other small children on my heels.

The first thing I encountered was the ball pit. Fun, right? Wrong-o. Although the balls looked soft, supporting, and not unlike a swimming pool, when I put my weight on them, they gouged, jabbed, and bruised me here and there as I gradually disappeared beneath the balls and a mass of other children. Crawling along the bottom of the pit, fighting the dreaded ball pirhanas, I eventually found a rope to grab onto and drag myself out of the mire.

To my chagrin, I discovered that the rope was, in fact, connected to a very large, brutal rope ladder. I say brutal because I do believe that the ladder was woven not out of real rope, but rather out of shredded sandpaper, specifically designed to mangle small children. I also say brutal because the net - er, ladder - was woven in such a way as to entangle small children so the evil playground spiders could drag them away and feed on them at a later date. I also say brutal because I like the word. Brutal.

After successfully disentangling myself from the rope net - er, ladder - I moved on down along the line to find a real net made out of the crash webbing from wrecked cars. This could have been loads of fun. However, the crash webbing was tacked together in a strange manner, leaving squares roughly the right size for a child to get his or her head caught in them. I actually saw a demonstration. But that was a later visit. No, on this visit I had a much more considerable problem. Namely, the five-year-old-sized hole in the crash webbing net... right in the middle of it. Well, due to the massive amount of people behind me, there was no way in hell I could have turned back. So, I very carefully inched forward, trying my best to straddle the massive hole in the flimsy netting that suspended me no less than three feet off the ground.

Now, there is one thing you must understand about this form of amusement. Once you go in, you don't go back out. Period. So, as I hesitated over the massive rift in the netting, peer pressure began to build. No, literally. There were so many children pushing up against me and so many children pushing up against them that there was a massive bulge forming in the tube behind me.

Finally, either by skill or by excessive pressure, I managed to squeeze my way into the tube part of the structure, towards the top. Now, one must understand, this is before they came up with the idea that children needed certain things. Like airholes. So, there was roughly 100 yards of tubing swirling around fifty feet off the ground, and the only ventilation we got was when someone leaned too hard against a plastic window and splattered all over the ground. So, I slipped through the sweat-slicked tunnels, gasping for air, choking on carbon dioxide, and getting shoved along by other five-year-olds. Eventually, I came to a place in the tunnels where there was fresh air blowing into my face. Hallelujah! Or so I thought...

The trouble was, the open air (and, incidentally, the end of the tunnel) was at the end of a mile-long slide. And everyone expected me to go down it - get this - face first. Well, there was no way in hell I was going to do that. And so I tried to turn around and get in a position to go butt-first. Bad idea. For one thing, there wasn't enough room in that tunnel to turn over a toothpick, nevermind a five-year-old. Secondly, remember the peer pressure? Yeah. Still goin' strong. Ouch. Well, I started trying to turn around, and halfway succeeded. Halfway. And that's exactly how I went down the slide, too. Sideways.

And so, I lay there, burned, bruised, trampled, strained, and gasping for air, staring at the sky, glad as ever to be outside again and on stable ground. I stood up, dusted myself off, and walked back around to the front of the play place. I stared at the entrance for a time, and then, in what is quite possibly the stupidest moment in the history of mankind, trotted up there and started the whole thing over again. I probably went through that playset five dozen times in my young life, and never learned better, either.

END