On June 12th, 2016 a shooter entered the Pulse LGBT nightclub and slaughtered forty-nine innocent people. You always see stories of mass shootings on the news, or online, and you feel for the victims and become angry at this country’s lack of gun control, but there’s a level of devastation I didn’t know was possible when it’s your city.
I was not involved in the Pulse shooting. I have actually never been to the club, and I’m not sure I had heard of it before then. I did not personally know any of the victims, but I want to talk about what it was like to be in Orlando that horrible day. Occasionally I need to write things just to write them, and this is one of those times. Some of these may not be in the correct order, but I know they happened that day.
At the time, I was a Team Member at Universal’s Islands of Adventure on the opening team for Skull Island: Reign of Kong. Our first soft open had been on June 9th during my last shift. I hadn’t been there the two days in between.
My alarm went off around 4 a.m. I was scheduled from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., but with the bus and getting into costume I had to leave about an hour and a half before my start time. I groggily rolled out of bed and began the stumble around my apartment to get ready. I remember checking my phone and seeing a friend of mine had posted about a shooting at an Orlando night club. I am ashamed to admit I remember rolling my eyes and thinking, “Not another one.” I didn’t click on the article. I dismissed it, thinking it was probably a drive by of some sort with minimal damage. I wish I had been right.
The bus is always quiet in the morning, no one really talks because we’re all still waking up. I played Words With Friends against my mom. It seemed like a normal day.
I had no idea the gravity of the situation until I arrived in the Kong break room. The television mounted over the engineers table was on the news, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach. It was Latin night at an LGBT night club called Pulse. It was about 5:45 a.m. at this point, so the news reports were still just starting to roll in. The death toll was being estimated in the twenties, and I had no idea how bad things would get. I didn’t want to run the risk of waking my mom up so I sent her a Facebook message asking her to call my grandmother and tell her I was okay. I knew she would panic as soon as she saw Orlando on the news and wouldn’t stop until someone talked to her.
Universal shifts always begin with a meeting in which the leads (supervisors in Universal speak) go over the expectations for the day. This one included two of our managers, saying if we needed anything to let them know. The whole room was generally silent and we headed to our positions.
I get a lot of questions about what happens when you work a ride that isn’t actually open yet. It is basically a whole lot of sitting around with the occasional button pushing if you are inside the building, and pretending to be a parrot answering the same questions over and over outside the building. We usually had four or five greeters up at any given time during those days, or had indoor positions that were not necessary for cycling (like groupers and glasses) stationed outside to help with guest questions. An average rotation was a spot inside, a spot out front, a spot inside and then break.
I was at unload with a kid named Mark*, who apparently frequented Pulse and his friends had invited him out last night. He was understandably freaking out, and kept going on at length about what if he had gone. He then insisted he was going to get his parents to help him get a gun to keep under his bed, and I had to resist the urge to tell him it wouldn’t help. Another guy, Dave*, joined us and did everything he could to change the subject. We wound up in a lengthy discussion about the woes of not being able to get Chick-fil-a on Sundays.
Everyone processes differently.
I got my lunch around 10:30 a.m., and the news reports were showing much higher numbers. I stared at my peanut butter sandwich, I didn’t feel much like eating. Between the news on the television screen and social media, it was non-stop. I have a friend from my college program who is now a camera man for the local news and he was one of the first on the scene, so I was getting his updates live from Facebook. The death count was now estimated to be up to fifty. My mom still hadn’t viewed the message I sent her, so I called my grandmother myself to tell her I was okay. She asked if my friends were okay, and I had to tell her I didn’t know. I sent one of my best friends from home a text message, asking him to humor me and stay out of night clubs for a while. He told me not to worry. I don’t think he had realized what had happened yet.
I went down to Badging, which was the position where you sat at the door to the building making sure people had the right credentials to enter. One of my leads came in, Becca*, with this quiet, sad look on her face. I had never seen her not in a good mood, and I asked if she was okay.
“Yeah, just my boyfriend is at the hospital waiting on someone.” She left, and Dave showed up a few minutes later, sitting on the stairs with his phone in his hand.
“I couldn’t take it in the break room anymore, so I’ll just hang out with you.”
“Are you okay?” Stupid question. No one was okay, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“Yeah, it’s just… it’s hard,” his phone buzzed, “when you have someone…” He trailed off, tearing up, then stood up and ran out the door.
A little later, Becca and another lead, Ethan* were looking at the rotation board trying to figure out where Dave was. I told him he left all of a sudden after he got a text message. Becca huffed in frustration that he should have asked first, and Ethan said he’d take care of it. I later heard him tell one of the managers he had let Dave leave.
The guests in the park seemed to have no clue it was anything but an ordinary day. I’m not surprised. People take on a whole new mind set on vacation and shut the real world out. I had a sick feeling in my stomach and my chest felt hollow.
Around noon, some of the closers started showing up. They weren’t scheduled to come in until 4 p.m., but they knew we would be short staffed. We weren’t really short yet, but this allowed people who wanted or needed to leave to do so. I told the leads I would stay until 6 p.m. if they needed me to.
I got my next break close to 1 p.m., and by then the safety check on Facebook had been activated. I had requests pending from friends all over the country to know if I was okay. I checked in and sent requests to a few of my Orlando friends who hadn’t responded yet. Only a handful were unaccounted for, and that was a big weight off my shoulders. Several friends commented their relief and then one of my relatives said, “Knew not the kind of place you’d be at!” I resisted the urge to go off on her. If I still went out, Pulse was exactly the kind of place I would be.
With the exception of Atlantic City Dance Hall, and that barely counts, I have not been to a night club in Orlando. However, I used to frequent one in particular in Knoxville, before it closed: the Carousel II, Knoxville’s LGBT bar. Two of my best friends came out in high school as gay, and two more as bisexual. A lot of my favorite people I met in college are gay, so that was where we went on Friday nights.
The friend from home I had texted earlier messaged me to see if I was okay. He had seen the updated news reports and promised he’d be careful. As if being careful could help anyone in a situation like this, but it made me feel a little better. I still hadn’t heard from my mom. Names were slowly starting to be released. We didn’t know if Universal had lost anyone yet.
It was about then I stumbled on a certain presidential candidate’s tweet and my blood started to boil. I was already angry enough that it was being labeled domestic terrorism instead of a hate crime. I threw my phone in my locker and bumped back in. The day that seemed it would never end dragged on.
Word started spreading that management was saying we had a choice if we wanted to soft open that afternoon or not, that the park executives said Kong could stay closed if we wanted. I never found out if that was true or not, but I would have chosen to open. It wasn’t fair we were the only ones given that option.
I was back at Badging when the rest of the closers arrived. My friend Colin* came through and stopped to hug me, thanking me for asking if he was safe.
I was at exit greeter when we opened, and instantly our line was over two hours. Soft opens, or technical rehearsals as Universal calls them, are a tricky business. We try to operate as normal and allow people to ride, but we can literally shut down at any moment. Protocols are still being established and nothing is routine the way it is at a regular attraction. As luck would have it, this would be one of our first evacuations.
I helped evacuate Pirates of the Caribbean a million times. Even the new Cast Members have a decent idea of what they’re doing because they’ve got experienced Cast to follow. We had nothing to go off. This is where I saw one of the main differences for working at Disney vs. Universal. At Disney, you do not allow people to enter a line for a down attraction and you dump the line before you go to an evacuation. At Universal, people could still get in line and we didn’t dump the queue until we knew it would be a long downtime. Since we were in technical rehearsal, we were told to stop people from entering or reentering the line.
The reentering was where I started running into problems. People with family in the line that had left to use the bathroom couldn’t get back in, small children that had gotten hungry or just people who had gotten too hot and wanted a drink. Needless to say, they weren’t happy. I came up with the best compromise I could, they could wait with me. If and when we reopened, I would help them get back to their family. For a lot of guests, that wasn’t good enough, but I didn’t know what else to do.
A Team Member from Universal Hollywood arrived and showed me his ID. I don’t know who he was, but his ID was the kind that meant he was someone important. He told me had talked to Cameron*, one of our leads, earlier about getting on when we opened. I told him we were down, but if he wanted to wait I would get him and his two friends escorted up as soon as we opened. He was fine with that, and we started chatting. After about the fifth person yelled at me, the girl with him looked at me and said, “You’re having a bit of a day, aren’t you?” “You have no idea. I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but it’s been pretty stressful. I’ve got friends who I still don’t know about.” “You poor thing!”
Six o’clock came and went, but I didn’t want to bother my leads about letting me go home. We finally reopened and I got on my radio to find someone who could walk the guests up since I couldn’t leave my spot. Cameron answered me, “Hey Chelsea, your bump out is coming.” “Great! That’s not why I’m calling. I need guests escorted up the exit, but I can take them myself when the bump comes.” I took the guests up with a special needs family that had appeared while we were waiting, and they thanked me. The girl said she hoped everything would turn out okay.
I grabbed my gear and headed out, I finally had a text message from my mother: “Haven’t heard from you. Hope you’re doing okay.” My mom is the most wonderful person in the world, and she normally knows about things happening in Orlando before I do, I don’t know how she missed this.
Actually, I do. It turns out the news in Tennessee was barely reporting it.
I waited until I changed back into my street clothes and was in the parking lot to call her. “Largest shooting in American history in my city, no, I am not okay.”
She hadn’t even seen anything about it until late afternoon. “I never dreamed you would know people!” She kept apologizing, and after my initial anger wore off I told her it was okay. I think she’s now got like twelve different news alerts for Orlando set up. She hadn’t noticed my Facebook message until late in the day, and I told her I had already called my grandmother. She asked what my plan for the night was and I just wanted to go home and try to process.
My Facebook feed was flooded with posts. People waiting six hours to donate blood, blood banks turning people away and asking them to come back later, vigils being scheduled. Watching the community come together was the one bright spot in an extremely dark day. I also saw some of my LGBT friends on the far side of the country posting about the lack of response they were seeing in their own cities, that they felt this horrendous hate crime at Pulse was being ignored in the straight community. I hurried to correct them.
Screen shot from tumblr.
Screenshot from tumblr.
I completed two versions of the same painting the following week, the word “‘Ohana” in white on a rainbow background. It wasn’t much, but it was something I needed to do. I gave one to the friend who I had texted asking to stay out of clubs for a while, and I still have the other one. I had an idea for another painting that I never got around to, and the concept would eventually become the Twenty Something In Orlando logo. I’m hoping to complete the actual painting soon and find something meaningful to do with it.
It’s been a year, and the sick feeling in my stomach returned this morning listening to the radio. The station I usually listen to was broadcasting live from Pulse, and that left me bouncing between the other two stations I have on preset. One was also very somber in remembrance, and the other one, which I have stopped listening to their morning show because their host is a conservative, close-minded moron, was talking about how they were “going on with their lives” because if they didn’t it would be “letting them win”.
I don’t know who “them” is, but yes life goes on. Orlando will never forget the tragedy at Pulse, but we will overcome. Love will always overcome hate, and we are stronger together.
*Name has been changed.
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