Speed Queen

On Vienna's Prater and my (perhaps pathological) obsession with roller coasters

Recently, my therapist suggested I may have some “autistic traits.”

Preposterous, I thought to myself. Then I remembered my childhood.

From age ten on, I was obsessed with roller coasters — so obsessed, in fact, that when a high school “friend” vandalized the theme park I’d designed in Roller Coaster Tycoon — painting my signature attraction bright pink, renaming it “Steven’s gay coaster,” and making all the trains collide—I cried.

In class, I doodled corkscrews and loops, lift hills and barrel rolls, priding myself on their realism and naming the tracks after gastrointestinal problems I knew too well — the “gut scrambler,” the “barf-o-matic.” After school, I’d beg my father to take me downtown to watch the one pathetic roller coaster in Seattle make a series of dainty twirls culminating in a double helix. “Windjammer,” it was called, its signage featuring an angry cloud.

Looking back, I think I liked rides because I was an only child with two older parents and I needed a distraction from my home’s deathly silence. Riding a coaster, or even just fantasizing about one, was an easy way to switch my brain off: nothing thrusts you into the present like being thrust upside down.

But even back then, I had a hunch I’d never become a roller coaster “Imagineer”: while my dad is a mathematician, basic algebra eluded me. Instead, I dreamed of dressing the rides, or coming up with the stories behind them.

Sadly, I chose a “practical” career in college (journalism, lol) and the closest I came to Imagineering was attending the grand re-opening of Universal’s Jurassic World, alongside a cadre of vloggers. (Never share a ride with vloggers unless you like hearing people say “hey guys,” “HEY guys,” “heyyy guys,” for ten minutes straight.)

As an adult, I didn’t have the money to make theme parks my personality, though I still held a torch for them, and was thrilled to discover Vienna’s Wurstelprater when I moved here. It’s an amusement park tucked inside the larger green Prater and is named after Hanswurst, a little sausage-shaped clown from an eighteenth-century Viennese puppet theater.

Like Luna Park in Copenhagen, Wurstelprater is a pay-as-you-go park, filled with rides designed to give you a moderate backache and some run-of-the-mill whiplash. Its thrills break no records, and the mechanics behind them are mostly unremarkable. But where the park lags in technical achievement, it excels in decor that looks like a Bosch-esque hellscape:

“This is the exact opposite of Disneyland,” my partner says one recent rainy afternoon as we stare at a disfigured mermaid near the front of the park. “I feel like I’m in Bucharest.”

Next to the mermaid, a possessed-looking clown peers out from inside a gramophone, eyes wild. He could be on shrooms, though he’s picked a strange place to hide. There’s also a dead bird splayed across the grass, though I think that one’s real.

My partner hates noise, so he hates Wurstelprater. But I love it. The words “free entrance” dissolve like cocaine in my blood stream. I love seeing the wide spectrum of humanity on full display: unruly teens fighting over who can pound a punching bag hardest, tough Eastern European men screaming like little girls, and a middle-aged woman with a mouth full of braces laughing so hard at her friend that she starts to wheeze.

****

A decade ago, I convinced my partner to ride a launch coaster at Heide Park and he’s held it against me ever since.

“I could feel my face melting off my skull,” is how he described the experience to friends, though the ride maxed out at a measly 60 miles per hour. “And this asshole had the audacity to call it family-friendly.“

My aunt hated me, too, after I talked her onto Splash Mountain. “I’m going to need a moment,” she said afterward. “I think that ride gave me brain damage.”

Thankfully, my partner can still manage dark rides, provided they move at a glacial pace, so I buy two tickets from an unsmiling attendant outside a grotesque castle splayed with the words Die Ganz Große Geisterbahn (“The Very Big Ghost Train”).

Once settled on the train, I’m disturbed that I can see little plastic ties holding its wiring together. Still, I admire the brisk pacing and the way the carriage twists depending on the scene. The designers seem to have run out of money halfway through, falling back on spray-painted walls, but they make up for it by employing a lethargic-looking man waving a gas-powered chainsaw for the finale. It’s no Haunted Mansion, but it’s better than the county fair.

Outside, we spot a mannequin sitting in an electric chair the way gay people sit — a little to the side, uncomfortably. His hair is matted, pupils facing opposing directions. Someone has painted his finger nails blue and red, but not in a fun or festive way.

(Leslie Stahl voice): “Gay.”

“This is queer art,” I tell my partner.

Nearby, a dinosaur walk-through attraction is listed on Prater’s website under “the fun of creeps.” It has a 2.7 star rating and all the dinosaurs outside also look gay. (Complimentary.)

Praters’ grounds are split in two: the aforementioned amusement park, and a vast promenade running through an actual park with lakes and free-roaming areas for dogs. The whole place was a royal hunting ground until Emperor Joseph II threw it open to the public in 1766. The Viennese never left.

Here you pay for each ride individually, which is a great deal for a little snack of adrenaline and a terrible rip-off if you want the whole Megillah: at roughly €5 a ride across 250 attractions, you’re looking at €1,250 to experience everything— or about 17 times the price of a ticket to Disneyland Paris.

Rides here are owned by different families, passed down from one descendant to the next. The most storied dynasties are those of the Schaafs and the Kobelkoffs, who eventually intermarried. August Schaaf created a traveling show with rare animals, eventually settling down and acquiring a Panoptikum filled with figures made of plaster. His empire expanded to include various ball throwing games, shooting ranges and the “first hitting machine,” according to Prater’s website.

Nikolai Kobelkoff (1851 – 1933)

Nikolai Kobelkoff was born in Russia without arms or legs, toured Europe and America as a sideshow act billed as “the Human Torso,” learned to write and fire a pistol with his stumps, fathered eleven children, and in 1913 bought a toboggan ride at Prater that stayed in the family for generations. Footpaths at the park are dedicated to both men.

Today, the familial dynasties that own the rides are living my dream. I no longer want to run a whole park (too much work), but owning a single pirate-themed dark ride sounds heavenly. “Did that parrot just call me a motherfucker?” I imagine a customer asking his friend after I program the bird to identify assholes.

That said, everywhere at Prater there’s a feeling of light corruption: while some families treat their attractions like offshoots of the Haus of Maus, other rides appear soon-to-be-condemned. And while all the rides supposedly pass their maintenance checks, I have my doubts about some of them — like the Wild Maus near the front of the park, which has a lift hill you could hop onto and promptly disfigure yourself.

Outside the rides are lists of extensive rules, though lawsuits aren’t nearly as lucrative as in the U.S. — there’s no such thing as punitive damages here.

I also wouldn’t count on your injuries being believed by the workers at Prater, who seem to universally hate their lives. The sight of you, giddy and about to ride a roller coaster, seems to fill most attendants with fury. One man slammed my change on the counter after I handed over my €10 bill. “No photography,” he barked, as if he was a celebrity.

*****

I wish I was still able to ride all the rides at Wurstelprater to my heart’s content. At thirteen I could have ridden the new looping coaster five to seven times, racking up a significant bill, but this time I rode it once and felt as if my organs had been thrown across a tarmac by angry baggage handlers.

It’s sad becoming a geriatric millennial. I can’t even imagine confining myself on a ferris wheel — in 2024, I had a mid-flight panic attack that culminated in me, supine, on the wet floor beside the economy bathrooms.

But I still want to own a roller coaster, preferably one that reflects my turbulent emotional life. No one will die, or barf, or even walk away with neck pain. I’ll name it “Steven’s Midlife Crisis.”