As a kid, I always loved that my last name had the word “Man” in it. It made me feel cool. In the 90s, I’d daydream someone saying something catchy like, “You put the man in Mancuso, Vinny.” Never happened, but a guy can dream.
In reality, my brother and I had four sisters, leaving us outnumbered two-to-one. And while you’d think that would bind us together, the eight-year gap between us may as well have been a gorge at some points.
Now, Michael was a good older brother. I will never forget him bringing me along to Tony Fucinaro’s house to watch Royal Rumble ‘97. Stone Cold may have won the Rumble, but Michael won the night. He didn’t have to bring me. You can’t expect an 18-year-old young man to always want his kid brother along.
However, when my brother was going to be married, my dad did something we’d never done before: a men’s trip.
So, in July of 2003, we set off for Cañon City, Colorado, and our first (and only) whitewater rafting adventure.
If you’re unfamiliar with Cañon City, it’s home to the Royal Gorge, a nearly 1,000-foot-deep chasm.
You can raft the Arkansas River as it flows through the gorge, but that adventure was on another trip without my family. This time around, I only crossed it via the bridge, which we all thought to be the world’s highest suspension bridge at the time.
I remember walking across. About halfway, Michael leaned over the rail and spit. He wanted to see how long his eyes could follow it down. Typical guy stuff.
My memory gets fuzzy here, but I’d like to imagine that’s probably about the time we spotted something ridiculous not too far away: a giant swing.
The Royal Rush Skycoaster is a large A-frame that sits on the western side of the gorge. We recognized it as something similar to the Ripcord at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City. Riders are harnessed in, pulled back on a cable, then let gravity and the laws of physics have their fun.
And while this was about half the size of the Kansas City ride, its drop was significantly deeper.
Naturally, our testosterone drove us to do it. We made our way, finding little to no wait. Pops paid, and the three of us got escorted to a little platform where the harnesses waited.
Now’s a good time to describe the three of us. Michael has always been a big guy. I don’t mean obese, I mean big. Strong. Muscular. Imagine something halfway between the perfect 90s jock and Rob Liefeld’s Captain America. I was a chud before society knew the word. Pops was probably the lightest of the three of us, but even that wasn’t saying much.
And they still strapped us into a single contraption as we stood on this platform. As they did, the guy gave us some basic safety instructions—how to pull the release cord, how we could unlink our arms after the third “swing,” and other tips.
Without much warning, the platform lowered, and instead of standing, the three of us hung horizontally in our harness, arms linked. But before the attendant could start the ride, Pops had a last-minute question:
“Hey, do you guys have a camera on the other side? Photos would be cool.”
I’ll never forget the last words we heard before being pulled back and launched over the gorge.
“Oh, no. We only got this last month. The camera equipment hasn’t come yet.”
It was too late to stop. I believe it fell on Michael to pull the cord. Which meant that at some point, one of us had to make the conscious decision to release three large men from the relative safety of a cable and send us plummeting toward the earth.
I don’t remember the plunge downward so much as the moment we were swung outward. The internet says the gorge is less than 1,000 feet, but memory differs. It had to be thousands of feet below.
Before we could gather our thoughts, we were laughing as gravity pulled us backward. It was after maybe the seventh swing we all realized we could unlink our arms—the ride was pretty much over by then. Three grown Mancuso men—well, two grown Mancuso men and one teenage boy the size of a grown man—clinging to one another for dear life while swinging back and forth over the Royal Gorge.
I spent 23 years thinking the man had lied to us about the camera, a prank to scare three guys already hanging helplessly over a gorge. It was only in writing this that I learned the Skycoaster had, in fact, opened in the summer of 2003.
He was telling the truth the entire time.
Every man should probably experience something like that at least once.
Something controlled and safe that doesn’t feel remotely controlled or safe. Something that leaves everyone laughing afterward and asking the obvious question:
Why did we do that?
I hope someday I get to do something equally stupid with my son.
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