Thrill-Bent (2 page)

“
Hey
!” I yell as loudly as I can, cranking my upper torso outside of the car. I squint to see a wild-haired woman and a man who looks like he’s trying to comfort her with
there-there
words we’re too far away to make out. They are huddled together in a tidy lump, except for her hair, which flies like a big ripped flag toward Manhattan.

“They can’t hear us,” says Ralph, calm as a moose. We search the ground for someone who looks like they might care. It’s hard to tell what’s going on down there, through the giant maze of peeling white latticework and loopy tracks. A few tiny people are walking around, but none seem to be stopping.

“
What’s going on
!” I holler. But my voice wafts away on the wind like an errant napkin, gliding over the clown-go-round at Astroland and drifting down over the pastel-painted Wonder Wheel and the faded freak show murals, landing daintily near Nathan’s Hot Dogs on the other side of the park.

“This is crazy,” says Ralph. He calls down to the station agent, “Hell-ooooo!” in a mellifluous, almost operatic voice I’ve never heard him use before. I try not to be insulted (I didn’t call correctly?), but Ralph’s voice gets lost in the dead atmosphere just like mine did.

“Maybe the carny who runs the ride had a heart attack and died right on the brake lever!” I suggest. Ralph laughs. “How can you laugh? Maybe there’s a psycho killer loose in the park, and they figure we’ll be safer up here. Maybe someone’s mom brought dinner and they’re taking a little break to say grace.” I start giggling too. “Maybe one of those huge Coney Island rats chewed through a wire, and everything automatically shut down. Maybe the world just ended. Maybe they finally got Bin Laden and we’re having a national moment of silence. Maybe we’re being punk’d.”

I seriously consider this option, searching the dark area underneath our feet for an implanted secret camera. All I find is a wad of fossilized chewing gum. “Maybe this is something they do every day at 5:34 and we’re the only ones who don’t know about it.” I chew my lip and examine the midway spread out like a postcard below. “Maybe we’re dead. We died but purgatory’s not ready for us yet because of a paperwork jam.”

I shiver, shot through with a sudden chill. This inauspicious start to my roller coasting tour is giving me the creeps—is this a bad sign for the entire trip?—but I have to admit I am also a little bit thrilled at the unexpected turn of events. Whenever things don’t go according to plan, I get this jump in my stomach and the world snaps into radiance, unfurling convulsively in its gorgeous lack of predictable continuity. I pound the sides of the train with my fists, unbalancing our car and letting out hollow little booms.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Ralph chides. “Let’s just consider our options before we start taking it out on the equipment.” He puts his arm around me and holds me tight. “I’m sure they’ll fix whatever the problem is, and we’ll get going in a minute.” His eyes are steady, gas-blue and hot as stones. Ralph doesn’t need a jacket, ever—my theory is that lubricious thoughts keep his body heat hovering somewhere above normal at all times. Being enclosed in Ralph’s warmth and calm is so unlike our immediate predicament of being suspended in cold, wide-open space that I allow myself to take solace in the oxymoron of the moment. Exhaling slowly, I notice that the ancient message facing us on the inside of the car, which once urged riders to remain seated, has been scrubbed with keys and fingernails until it can barely be deciphered as a ghostly communique: main seat.

Living in New York City, I’ve learned not to look up; it’s the first lesson you master if you don’t want to be pegged as a tourist. I’ve gotten used to the eye-level view; the world has been reduced to a horizontal strip four feet to seven feet high. I am constantly bombarded with other people’s faces and bodies, doorways and stoops, shop windows filled with bizarre things like paraplegic mannequins and human jaw bones draped in blood-red satin scarves and stuttered with
Planet of the Apes
action figures. Seeing grown men pick their noses or overgrown rats shimmy up fire escape ladders is old hat, but miles of airspace with absolutely nothing in it is remarkable. Sure, I’ll glimpse the bottom edge of sky when I flee to the Hudson River on one of my restless jaunts. Once my eyes sidle around leather boys cruising or dancing or sucking or kissing in the shadows of the pier, I have the whole industrial New Jersey shoreline to peruse. The sky is merely a backdrop, adding to the kitschy effect of the old-fashioned neon Hanson’s coffee sign. The view from the East River is a bit more expansive, but my eyes always seem to get sucked over to that old irresistible Statue of Liberty. Or the massive bridges, the majestic Brooklyn and Manhattan, will command contemplation. The sky is there, of course, but it is the part of the canvas that hasn’t been painted: not very interesting in its own right, yet integral to the cohesive beauty of the scene. Now, as I allow my vision to drift upward and outward, levitating above Coney’s broad boardwalk—nearly empty on this early spring evening—and the fitful gray sea, I feel a pressure lifting as well. The clouds are crocheted across the atmosphere like a loose-weave sweater. In the finger holes are blue-gray triangles of sky. It is really quite breathtaking.

I met Ralph when I was writing a story about Greenpoint for
igotcherbrooklyn.com
, a website dedicated to debunking remunerative borough stereotypes from gangster films and Mario Puzo novels. I was supposed to find the “real” Greenpoint, and a friend of a friend gave me the address of Ralph’s frequent haunt, an old-timey hall with exquisite plaster pillars and a big stage full of empty keg barrels, the Snake Ranch Social Club. I stopped by one afternoon to check it out, and the next thing I knew it was ten p.m. and Ralph and I had gone through at least twenty bottles from his back-room mini-fridge, which was filled with hundreds of plastic bottles of airplane liquor he’d scored from his ex-girlfriend’s brother, who worked as a ramp agent at La Guardia. At some point I began poking the bottoms of empties with a safety pin and stringing them together with dental floss. A little wadded-up toilet paper in between, and by midnight I had produced a nice lei for Ralph, in which I made him hula for me naked and pretend his penis was saying,
“He aha ke ’ano!”
(the one phrase I learned in Hawaii when I was twelve, which means “What kind of nonsense is this?”) over and over again. What can I say? Ralph is the kind of guy who makes me want to break the seal on a thimble-sized bottle of liquor and engage in some spring-break-style homespun entertainment.

Ralph’s life in Greenpoint is a daily miracle of schemes and plans, phone calls and hook-ups requiring immediate attention, friends dropping by at all hours, clandestine meeting points. And he’s not even a drug dealer. Not strictly, anyway. Ralph used to drive a taxi, but lost his license due to a DUI two years ago and it’s still suspended. Yet his lack of employment, his dependence on an old Schwinn Sting-Ray, and the fact that he lives with his recently hatched parolee cousin in an inherited brown-stone still decorated with his dead aunt’s Hummels—these do not seem to be deterrents for a man whose bartering network encompasses twenty square blocks. If your carburetor needs rebuilding, you talk to Jimbo, who’s a whiz with engines, and he’ll help you push your car downhill to his mother’s driveway where he can work on it. Forgot your house key? Crazy Jerry downstairs, when he’s taking his meds, has an uncanny ability to crack any lock from combo to barrel to Club. Your DVD player is out of whack? Mr. Ed’s got seventeen of them in his basement, in various states of repair. Do you have a key to the gaming devices illegally located in your uncle’s bar? A copy of that key buys you three hundred channels of bootleg cable. In the several months I’ve known Ralph, I’m still not sure how he gets by. I know he trades airplane booze for prescription Darvocet tablets (Ralph refers to them as “levelers”) and happily reissues them at $5 a pop.

“Hey, look!” Ralph says, and points directly below us to the pavement by the entrance to the Cyclone. A few people have gathered, so tiny they look like pink mice dressed as people. When I squint, I can see that they are pointing up at us, craning their necks and waving their flimsy little arms. One mouse has what looks like a scrap of drinking straw. He raises it up to his face, and we hear a tinny squeak fighting its way up through the atmosphere, unintelligible.

I can’t believe it. “A megaphone? That’s their high-tech public communication device? What, did a cheerleading squad just happen to be passing by?” Ralph tells me to shut up so he can hear what they’re saying. Again, I’m tempted to ask if testosterone ears are more powerful than regular ears, but I shut up.

“I can’t tell what he’s saying,” says Ralph. “But at least they’re trying to make contact. That’s a good sign.”

“Yes,” I reply. “These humans might just turn out to be friendly creatures after all.” I yell back to our fellow passengers the good news, complete with extravagant arm gestures, in case they were too busy crying and comforting to have noticed the mouse megaphone. When they see me going through my contortionist act to try to communicate with them, they both wave and smile as though we’re at a cocktail party.
Oh hi! We’re just taking in the scene, we’ll come over and chat with you kids later.
The guy gives me the thumbs-up sign. Does that mean he heard what the man with the mouse megaphone said, and that it was good news? Perhaps someone in a ninja suit will shimmy up the latticework scaffolding and rescue us. If this were a disaster movie, right about now the woman in the back car would turn out to be Shelley Winters, and she would reveal the fact that she once was a professional trapeze artist in a close-up direct-address monologue. She would be getting sweaty just thinking about the crazy stunts she used to do. Hurry up, Shelley, show us those vine-swinging, toe-grabbing, greatest-of-ease skills already!

I’m tense and still cold, but Ralph is grinning at me in a giddy, lurid way, and the unidentified couple behind us seems perfectly content. Apparently I alone have a stick up my ass about being stuck motionless in midair. Ralph puts his hand under my lambswool coat, worms between the flaps below the lowest button, and finds his way under my dress. His fingers are warm, so warm, and he is one smooth inveigler, serenely stroking the inside of my thigh with his thumb. He strums in a slow rhythm, up and down the frets of my lament. The pressure of his touch is always the biggest turn-on, firm but almost mindless, as if his thoughts are elsewhere. He’s done this, stroking the soft flesh of a woman’s thigh, delving deep into her fluent pussy, a million times, he could do this in his sleep, he could do this while dreaming of bread pudding fresh from the oven with crusty ridges and steaming amber-colored whiskey sauce raining down all over. I close my eyes and open my legs a tiny bit wider.

Ralph likes when I wear dresses. He asked me to wear this one today. It wouldn’t matter to him, I don’t think, if I wore a fabulous beaded flapper number or an orange polyester housedress from Wal-Mart. I certainly never thought I’d be taking sartorial suggestions from a perpetually drunk homeboy. But I do, I wear dresses at his request. Once I even went home to change out of pants because he asked me to. Part of me is ashamed, naturally, to be admitting this. But in that moment, when I see the look in his eyes, so directly asking for what he wants, and the delectation he experiences when I perform a certain task, the corner of his lip rising and quivering, it’s so easy for me to give in to him. Of course, part of me wants a lover who gets just as hot for me in chinos and a flannel shirt, hair unwashed and face un-made-up, as he does if I am glammed up in a Wonderbra, lipstick, and heels. I am playing dress-up with Ralph as though it is a game; I feel secure in the notion that I am the more intelligent one of the two of us, that my knowledge of Barthes’ theory of metalanguage (not to mention my lower blood-alcohol level) will somehow protect me from the lasting harm of being pigeonholed, locked inside an intricate snow job.

Of course, my own mother was the poster child for the fallacy of this logic. She was smart, refined, and beautiful. She held her head up very high while she was being reduced to fluff by my mercurial father. Her big brain may have survived intact, but everything below, including her eyes, was bleached white as new carpet in a house up for sale.

I’m no longer cold. Now I’m hot. Ralph’s hand has traveled up under the elastic in my underwear, his fingers are circling lazily through my pubic hair, his heat flushing my skin in a quick contagion from my knees to my breasts. My legs automatically part a little more, just to let his hand know that I want it there. He’s taking his time, staying on the surface, twirling and stroking lightly. My face is tucked in the nook between his neck and his collarbone, the rough curve of his jaw resting on my cheek. I can feel the vibration of his breath, and the low sounds he is barely uttering, words I can’t understand or maybe just syllables, sweet talk that sounds kind of dirty, or dirty talk that sounds kind of sweet. I want him to go in, but he is teasing me, stroking up and down my center seam, pressing just hard enough to let me know he intends eventually to go further, not quite hard enough to penetrate. I know that as soon as his fingers push past the banks, he will find a lush underground river. My fingers crawl down the cushioned lap bar to the section just above Ralph’s actual lap, then slide around and drop the few inches onto his khaki-clad thigh. He’s wearing old army pants, the kind with the big patch pockets in front, and I fish around in one of these for a minute, amazed at the heat radiating from his leg. I find a dime and a Zippo lighter, both warmed significantly by being next to Ralph’s skin. The Zippo is satisfyingly weighty, as Zippos are, and fits in my palm like a girly pistol or a miniature deck of cards or a pacemaker. Searching around a bit, I feel a nylon-covered ponytail elastic, the kind I sometimes wear when I bundle my hair straight up on the top of my head for a Pebbles Flintstone look. I look to see what color this one is; it’s yellow. Not a yellow found in nature, but marshmallow-Peeps yellow, crime-tape yellow. I wonder when it could have made its way into Ralph’s pocket, and I start dragging the lake of my memory for when I last saw Ralph wearing these pants. Of course, it’s possible that the hair band doesn’t belong, never belonged, to me, but resides there, in the most convenient storage place, after being pulled lustfully out of the ponytail of some other girl. His American Airlines flight attendant ex-girlfriend—whom Ralph has told me he occasionally sleeps with when she’s in town (doing what she does best)—doesn’t strike me as the type who would be caught dead in a ponytail. She has big Charo hair with broccoli bangs, the puffy kind that curl over her forehead in enormous florets. I have more meatlike hair, which hangs in thick flanks and wiener curls, just begging for someone to lop off a little filet and make themselves a sandwich. Could Ralph be having a fling with some Hello Kitty backpack-toting, pigtail-sporting high school hussy?