Johnny Hangtime by Dan Gutman

out on the family one day and didn’t come back.
    A year later, he had the nerve to sue Ricky and Ricky’s mom. He claimed that he had supported the family during the years Ricky was growing up, so he was entitled to part of Ricky’s future earnings—millions of dollars. The story was all over the tabloids. It was the first time a parent ever sued his own kid. Ricky’s dad actually won the case, giving new meaning to the term child support .
    Getting dragged through the courts made people feel sorry for Ricky. That made him more popular than ever and gave him more publicity. So he made more millions, and his dad wanted even more money. It was a real mess.
    Come to think of it, Ricky Corvette’s life wasn’t so charmed after all.
    Anyway, when Out of This World went off the air, Ricky made the jump to movies. He’s a terrible actor, but he was in the right place at the right time, as usual. Skate Fever hit the theaters just as skate-boarding and in-line skating were getting hot. All across America—and around the world—kids were trading in their balls, pucks, and racquets for Rollerblades, snowboards, mountain bikes, and other tools of the new “extreme sports.”
    Everybody in my school went to see Skate Fever , some of them over and over again. The movie made hundreds of millions of dollars. Ricky Corvette became a movie star. I was dying to tell everybody that it was me up there on the screen, not Ricky. But my contract, of course, prohibited telling anybody.
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    I did all of Ricky’s stunts in Skate Fever II, Skate Fever III , and Nightmare in L.A. Roland directed them all. They were awful movies, but they were all hits. As Ricky became a Hollywood heavyweight, Roland was getting a reputation as the hot new director in town.
    In those first few movies, Ricky had to do a lot of acting. But it didn’t take long for the movie studio to figure out that audiences weren’t coming to Ricky Corvette movies to see him act. They were coming to see Ricky jump off high objects, fly through the air, get himself into impossible predicaments and find a way out of them. All the stuff that I was actually doing in his place.
    Every Ricky Corvette movie got more and more action oriented. By the time we made New York Nightmare , Ricky was hardly doing any acting at all.
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    So that’s why I didn’t spend my weekend worrying about Boris Bonner. I spent it risking my life at the top of the PsychoClone, thebiggest and baddest roller coaster in the world.
    We were filming a new action flick called Great Adventure . Here’s the plot, if you can stomach it: The teenage daughter of the president of the United States invites her whole class to an amusement park for the day to celebrate the end of school. Some escaped prisoners who had been hiding out for a week in the haunted mansion find out the president’s daughter is coming. They decide it would be the perfect opportunity to kidnap her. They do, threatening to kill her unless the president allows them to leave the country.
    The girl finally gets rescued by a kid working in a cotton candy booth. He captures all the convicts and locks them up in the Ferris wheel cars until the police arrive to take them back to jail. The movie ends with the president pinning the Medal of Honor on the cotton candy vendor, who then plants a kiss on the “First Daughter.”
    Pretty sappy, huh?
    The president’s daughter was being played by the beautiful Augusta Wind. The cotton candy vendor was the one and only Ricky Corvette.
    The climax of the film was the roller coaster scene. Roland and I worked all day on it. This was no run-of-the-mill dive-off-a-building gag. The script called for me to leap off a moving coaster.
    It wouldn’t be so tough on most roller coasters, but PsychoClone was no ordinary coaster. There was a sign at the bottom that said:
    PERSONS ARE NOT ALLOWED ON THIS RIDE IF THEY ARE PREGNANT, SUFFER FROM A