Fun House (6 page)

To kill time between 5:30 and 8, Layla and I go on our third date.

Given the tight time parameters, I don’t think it’s going to be, you know, real “third date” material. I’m not sure where the rule about sex being a semi-given on date number three came from, but no way are Layla Shapiro and I going to get intimate during the two and half hours between the Fun House and the crab pie—not that I typically need that much time to, you know, express my intimacy.

Besides, at the risk of sounding girly, I’m not really ready. I like to know someone before I
know
them in the biblical sense. (Learning that “know” was code for “have sex with” may have been the highpoint of my Catholic education.)

Instead, we head over to the boardwalk.

Turns out Ms. Shapiro has always wanted to see a real Fun House, and we have one on Pier Two. In fact, it’s one of the oldest attractions in Sea Haven. The Fun House isn’t a thrill ride, because you don’t ride: you have to walk through it on foot to experience it. It’s what they call a participatory amusement. It’s also why nobody’s building the rickety things any more. People today, they like to sit in cars after they’ve driven their cars to where they’re going.

We stroll up the boardwalk. Soak in the blinking lights, gaudy sights, and greasy smells. Layla is nibbling on a cyclone of cotton candy. I’m not. I’m still in uniform and nobody wants to see an armed cop looking like a two-year-old with a gob of pink gunk stuck to his nose.

“Thanks for hanging with me, Danny,” says Layla. “I just needed to get away from the Nut House. Take a break.”

“No problem.”

“Marty’s been driving me crazy.”

“How so?”

“The ratings.”

“They’re good, right?”

“Yeah. This week. Next week, who knows? It’s like they say on
Project Runway:
‘One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.’”

I’ll take her word for it. I’ve never watched
Project Runway
. Don’t think it’s about airplanes.

“So where’s this real, live fun house?”

I point to a brightly colored building dead ahead.

“Those big red lips?” says Layla.

“Yeah. The clown’s mouth is the entrance.”

The front of the Sea Haven Fun House is basically a two-story-tall clown face with a huge gaping mouth under demented eyes, because the Fun House clown has the same psychological profile as the one in Stephen King’s
It
. The red carpet you walk down after giving the ticket-taker five coupons is the big monster’s tongue.

“Do they have those mirrors in there?” asks Layla. “The ones that make you look fat and skinny?”

“Definitely. Two sets of ’em. Wouldn’t be a Fun House without funhouse mirrors. There’s also a barrel of fun—a rolling hallway you have to walk through. And, my favorite, the Turkey Trot.”

Layla laughs. “What’s that?”

“This long corridor with an oscillating floor. Three planks sliding back and forth. I set the indoor world record. Trotted the whole thing in under twenty seconds.”

“Danny, tell me: Exactly how much of your misspent youth was misspent in the Fun House?”

“One whole summer. Right after my second year of high school. My buddy Jess’s dad used to run it. Gave us both summer jobs as ‘custodial engineers.’”

“You were a janitor?”

“No. I think the janitors made more than us.”

“I see.”

“It was a blast,” I say, remembering how the guy in the control booth would blast air up unsuspecting girls’ skirts, giving them their very own Marilyn Monroe moment.

Every once in a while, Jess and I would sneak behind the body-warping mirrors and say funny stuff to the girls checking themselves out, especially if they were girls we knew from school.

Well,
we
thought it was funny stuff. The girls didn’t always agree. Especially since most of our mirror material included the words “big,” “boobs,” and “butt.” Fortunately, Jess and I knew every nook, cranny, and secret passageway; knew how to get to the exit slide faster than any of the girls chasing us.

“Hey, Danny,” says Layla, “is it too early for a cold one?”

She’s eyeballing this pizza stand tucked in next to the Fun House entrance. It squats underneath a “Draft Beer” sign shaped like a frosty, overflowing mug. A strobing red arrow full of chaser lights points down to the promised land of liquid refreshment.

“Well, I’m still in uniform,” I say.

“I’ll drink. You can observe. Slap the cuffs on me if I get out of line.”

“That’ll work,” I say.

We head into the pizza joint, find a couple swivel stools at the counter. Layla has a beer, almost as tall and frosty as the one on the neon sign. I order a Coke so everybody can see that their public servant is not drinking a beer. Unless they think it’s a Guinness or something. Darn. Didn’t think of that.

“Marty’s a snake and a hack,” says Layla after her third sip of beer, which, I guess, has completely washed away the lingering sweetness of the cotton candy.

“Really?” I’m sipping my soda through a straw now. Nobody drinks Guinness with a straw.

“He’s a backstabber and a hack. All he knows are crappy cliches, because that’s all he’s ever done. His last three shows totally tanked. That one about the oversexed cougars looking for love with pizza delivery boys?
Hot To Trot
? Nobody watched it. And the only reason he wanted to do
Fun House
was so he could be closer to Atlantic City. He didn’t have any ideas on what to do with the kids in the house; he just wanted to hit the casinos on his nights off. That’s why he needs me. To do his thinking for him, because I have ideas like some people have pimples. They just pop up.”

“Like putting steroids in the show?”

“It’s reality, Danny. Steroid use to keep your body buff is a very real, very contemporary issue. When drugs turn up, like they did today, we shoot it. It’s a conflict that hits home with males 18 to 24, the sweet spot of our target audience demographics. You live around here?”

Okay. That was rather random.

“Excuse me?”

“Your apartment. Is it close?”

“Not really. I’m about thirty minutes south.”

Down where the rents are cheaper.

Layla whips out her iPhone. Swipes her fingers across the face. “It’s six-fifteen. Maybe we should skip the Fun House.”

“Huh?”

“You need to change into your undercover clothes, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And get to the restaurant to meet Ceepak by eight.”

“Right. Twenty hundred hours.”

“Six-fifteen to six-forty-five, six-forty-five to seven-fifteen. That’s just the travel time.”

She’s right. I need to boogie.

Layla gulps down the foamy dregs at the bottom of her plastic beer glass. Slams it on the counter. “How long will it take you to change?”

I shrug. “Not long.”

“Five, ten minutes?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Seven-fifteen to seven twenty-five. We’ve still got thirty-five minutes.”

“Oh. Okay. You want to grab a slice or something?”

Layla smiles at me.

“What?”

“Danny, how long do you need to take a shower before you change clothes?”

“Don’t worry about it. I took one this morning.”

“How long?”

“Another five minutes.”

“Good. That gives us thirty minutes.”

Now I’m confused.

Layla reaches over, puts one hand on each of my thighs.

“Danny? It’s our third date.”

Oh.

I think I know how she wants to spend those thirty minutes.

And it’s not eating pizza.

7

M
Y HAIR
’
S STILL DAMP WHEN
I
WHIP MY JEEP INTO THE PARKING
lot of Morgan’s Surf & Turf.

Yes, I grabbed a shower.

No, Layla and I did not hook up, get busy, or “know” each other.

She offered. I turned her down.

Fine. Go ahead. Kick me out of the red-blooded-American-male club.

“Drop me off at the front door, okay?” she says. “Pull into the handicap parking slot.”

It’s empty. I’m not parking. Technically. I pull in.

In the rearview mirror, I can see Ceepak standing with a short woman in the only other empty parking spot in Morgan’s gigantic lot.

The woman is leaning on the handle of a rolling case of some sort. Ceepak, on the other hand, is glaring at me. He would never, ever pull in to a designated handicapped-drivers-only spot. To do so would be considered cheating.

“Good luck,” says Layla as she blows me one of those Hollywood style “m’waw” air kisses and hops out of the Jeep. “I need to check inside. See if the watermelons arrived. Catch you later, Danny.”

She bops up the walkway to the restaurant’s front doors.

Tons of people are streaming in and out of the restaurant. The Early Bird specials leaving; the 8 o’clock reservations arriving.

Layla shoves open the front door.

“Hey, Danny!”

Before the front door glides shut, I see Ceepak’s wife, Rita. She’s right where we first met her a couple summers ago: near the hostess stand.

She waves. I wave. The door whooshes shut.

I’m figuring Rita, who used to waitress at Morgan’s, came down to see some of her friends become TV stars, serving dinner to the famous kids in what Morgan’s calls their Party Room. It’s a couple long tables that can be sealed off from the rest of the dining room with an accordion wall. It’s where the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs hold their monthly meetings. Tonight,
Fun House
has it closed off for their etiquette contest. Layla tells me that the winner of the competition gets “immunity,” which is a very good thing to have in reality TV shows because that means you can’t be booted out of the house that week.

“Danny?”

This from the other Ceepak.

The one waiting—somewhat impatiently—for me to drive our surveillance vehicle (my Jeep) into position for the sting, which is, geeze-o, man, supposed to take place in like twenty minutes!

I slam my ride into reverse, peel wheels backward, cut a fishhook swerve to the right, jam the transmission into drive, and blast-off for Ceepak and the empty parking spot, twenty feet away.

Ceepak and the short lady have to dodge my front bumper when I screech to a stop.

“Hey,” I say as nonchalantly as possible when I climb out the Jeep. The engine is ticking, trying to cool down. My tires smell like it’s rubber-burning day down at the town dump.

I notice Ceepak stealing a glance at his personal time control unit, what other people might call their wristwatch. His jawbone is popping and out near his ear again. I think he’s ticking and trying to cool down, too.

“Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“When I was a Boy Scout, our troop leader encouraged us to operate on what he called White House time.”

My face must say “Huh?” because Ceepak clarifies.

“When invited to the White House, if you are not five minutes early, you are considered ten minutes late.”

“Sorry,” I say.

“This our rig?” says the lady with the rolling luggage.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak. “Danny, this is Ms. Tory Wood. She is a sound technician, working for Prickly Pear Productions.”

“Gimme a hand with this stuff, kid.” She pops open the rolling case. I see all sorts of electronic gear stowed in custom-cut foam slots. She pulls out a suction-cupped antenna, slaps it to the hood of my Jeep. “Put the recorder in your cargo hold. But be careful. That’s a Nagra Six.”

“Okay,” I say, placing what looks like the high-tech gizmo into the back of my Jeep.

“Ms. Wood will be recording Paul Braciole’s conversation with Skeletor,” says Ceepak.

“Just the audio,” she says as she runs the antenna wire through the passenger-side window, heaves it behind the seats to where I just stashed her knob-covered recorder. “Paulie’s wearing a wireless mic. They all do, all the time. Stupid kids forget to turn them off when they hit the head, which they do an awful lot, seeing how they guzzle beer 24/7. I should mix together a bootleg compilation of their longest farts and pisses. ’Scuse me.”

She says this, not because she’s “crude as oil,” as my Irish grandmother used to say, but because she’s crawling into the Jeep to go fiddle with her dials and slap on her headphones.

“Are we getting video too?” I ask.

“Roger that,” says Ceepak, gesturing toward a van parked three spaces away. Its running lights flicker. I wave to whoever’s behind the tinted windows.

“That’s the ‘A’ camera,” says Ms. Wood, crouched in the back where I usually toss crap. Like the Styrofoam ice chest she’s using as a seat cushion. “I’m not sure where Rutger put ‘B’ and ‘C.’”

Up arches Ceepak’s eyebrow. “B and C?”