In the summers I keep the ride open late. You never know when a bunch of teenagers from Montclair might show up. The Puerto Rican families stay out until midnight on the weekends. More and more, too, I get the kids—I call them kids, but they’re in their twenties—out on a date, trying to impress each other on the bumper cars and Whack-A-Mole. Big night for them, I guess, to look at the freaks, or to pretend like they’re freaks themselves. When they make it over to me, which they almost always do, I slow the carousel down so they can enjoy each other. The young have certain needs. I was young once, too, and once there was romance in my life.
Sometimes special circumstances arise. It was after 11 p.m. I yawned into the newspaper; no one had been by for a ride in at least forty-five minutes. I decided it was time to shut down.
Two girls came along the boardwalk. They weren’t beautiful in the way that you see on TV, or naturally beautiful, either, but they had style. In fact, they had a style that I hadn’t really seen before, hair done a certain way, t-shirts of a certain design, their skirts real short, cut at a certain angle. They had a look about them that just seemed, well, contemporary. I’m not a contemporary guy, but I could still tell.
They stopped in front of me. I felt my breath sting my chest, which happens when I get excited. One of them said, “Please don’t tell me you’re closed.”
I gulped. Sixty-four years old, and still a sucker. “Just about to,” I said.
“Shit!” she said. “You’ve got to let us ride.”
“What?”
“We really need to ride the carousel.”
She reached into her purse and took out a twenty.
“For both of us,” she said.
“It doesn’t cost that much.” Then—don’t ask me why—I said, “You two ride for free.”
The other girl, prettier than the first, touched my arm. I felt a jolt travel down my spine and into my brain. I’ve always been stupid around women.
“Aren’t you sweet?” she said.
“We’re gonna ride for three songs,” said her friend.
“Okay,” I replied.
I was going to lose a little money. I didn’t care. It had been a profitable summer. So I started up the carousel.
The first few notes of the organ coming to life scare me. It sounds like someone being resurrected from the dead, against his will. Didn’t seem to bother the girls, though. One of them got on top of a tall black horse in the front. The other took a digital camera out of her purse. While the first girl rode and waved, the other one took pictures. When the song ended, they switched places quickly.
While the second song was still playing, the girl who was taking pictures walked to my booth.
“I’m gonna get on the carousel with my friend,” she said. “Will you take our picture together?”
“Okay.”
“We’re on a scavenger hunt,” she said. “We need proof of being in different places and doing different things.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It’s very fun. You should come with us next time.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I have to …”
“I was kidding,” she said. “Oh.”
She got on the carousel for the third song. They sat together on a bench. I stood in front of the ride, camera ready.
“Take our picture!” called out one of them. I couldn’t tell which. The carousel had started moving and they were blurry. The first time around, I got them with their arms in the air, shouting. But it was a little out of focus.
“Again!” one of them said.
When they came around the next time, the photo took nice and clear. The girls were kissing. Not on the cheek, either. Really kissing. And they kept kissing until the ride was over. I’d never seen girls do that before.
“You get the pictures?” the first one asked.
“Oh yes.”
“You got us kissing, right?”
“Yes.”
She put the camera in her purse. The other girl patted my hand. I blushed.
“See you next time,” she said.
No one was going to Coney a dozen years ago. It was really at its low point. So when I bought the carousel, I didn’t expect to make any money. I’d retired from my city job with some savings. When you start at twenty-two, you can stop work pretty early. My wife and I didn’t have any kids, and we didn’t enjoy each other, either. She doesn’t like traveling, and I don’t like going out to dinner. I needed something to do. One day, I was walking down the boardwalk, trying to remember what it’d been like as a kid. There was a For Sale sign.
I talked to the Russian who was taking care of the ride. He obviously didn’t give a shit. The paint on the horses was chipping off, the poles were rusted, and the room was decorated with a faded mural dating, at the latest, to 1965, but probably further back than that. It was dingy and depress-ing.
“Who wants to ride a fake horse, anyway?” the Russian said.
He was asking a little more than I had available, but what the hell? I went to the bank and pulled some financing together. A guy I knew from the city was able to grease the walk-through inspection. After I closed the deal, I went home for dinner.
“Where’ve you been?” asked my wife.
“I just bought the Coney Island carousel,” I said.
She looked at me hard. I’ve never been able to figure out why she hates me so much.
“So?” she said. “You think you’re special?”
I’d definitely made the right choice.
The heating system was old but still pretty efficient. I spent the winter—which was miserable, with winds like knives—chipping away the rust. I bought some industrial cleaner and gave the whole place a scrub, which took about ten days. Then I hired some mural painters, real cheap, students from Parsons. They did up the horses beautifully. I wasn’t as happy with their work on the mural, but it was fresh paint, so it didn’t really matter. I hammered together a comfortable little booth to sit in. Someone came out and worked on the organ. Before I knew it, April had arrived.
I went up to Martha’s Vineyard for a few days, and didn’t take my wife. Told her I was going to visit mother in the home. The carousel operator on the island couldn’t have been nicer. I was a quick study. The day after tax day, 1992, I opened the ride.
The girls came back two weeks after their first visit. It was around the same time of night. They looked even cuter than before, if that was possible.
“Remember us?” asked one of them.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m Katie, and this is Diane.”
I took Katie’s hand. “Hello,” I said.
“Can we ride the carousel tonight?” said Diane.
“Of course!”
She handed me a twenty.
They got on together this time. But they didn’t ask me to take a picture. They just rode around. Katie pulled out a little flask, and they sipped from it. I didn’t usually allow drinking on the ride, but it was late and no one was going to get in trouble.
They got off when the song ended.
“You want to ride with us?” Diane asked.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to operate …”
“I can do it!” she said. “For one song! You can show me how.”
For some reason, I said okay. It didn’t take a genius, after all. She picked it up pretty quickly. Did a practice spin. Then Katie and I got on. We sat together on a bench.
The carousel started going round.
“This is so fun!” she said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
When the ride stopped, Diane got up from the booth. Katie and I were sitting on the bench. Diane pointed the camera at us. And then Katie kissed me, hard, on the lips. I felt her tongue tickling my teeth, and I opened my mouth gratefully. My eyes were closed. Through the lids, I could see the flash going off. She kept kissing me. It felt wonderful! Another picture. And then it was over.
“Hey,” she said, “you’re a great kisser!”
>
“Thank you.”
She got up. Diane was scrolling through the pictures. Katie went over to look.
“Holy shit!” she said. “Did I really do that?”
“You did!” Diane replied.
“We’re gonna win this one!” said Katie.
They walked away, giggling.
“Wait!” I called out. “You’ve still got one more song!”
“Next time, handsome,” said Diane. She whispered something in Katie’s ear. Katie laughed like crazy. They turned around and looked at me and laughed even harder. I laughed back. I wanted them to know I understood.
I got home around midnight. My wife was still awake. She was always awake.
“What are you smiling about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
Sometime in the last ten years, Coney got hot. The people attending the Mermaid Parade started getting younger. Lines got longer at the freak show. Riding the Cyclone became cool again. I saw a headline, “Not Your Father’s Coney Island,” in that Time Out rag. I raised my prices by a dollar. Summers became extremely active. Then they opened the ballpark, and things really went nuts.
The new kids seem desperate to me. For fun, or for something. I spent the sixties behind a desk at the Water Department. My kid brother took me to a Springsteen show in 1975. It was okay, but I never really had a taste for rock-n-roll. Not like I want to deny other people their good time. Life just doesn’t seem like a party to me, and it never has. Except with those girls.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the girls and their scavenger hunt. First, I’d never had a kiss like that. Second, the whole idea of a scavenger hunt as an adult activity baffled me. I thought it was something for a child’s birthday party. Just a dumb activity for dumb times, I supposed, like goldfish-swallowing, pole-sitting, or telephone-booth-stuffing. Maybe they’re trying to forget that there’s a war on. Or maybe they don’t know.
Still, I couldn’t wait for them to come back.
They showed up late on Sunday night of Labor Day weekend. There were still a few people riding the carousel, because it was a holiday. Katie winked at me. Diane waved. I smiled. They leaned against the entrance, smoking.
It took about half an hour for me to get everyone else out of there.
“Hello, ladies,” I said, approaching them. “Good to see you.”
“Good to be seen,” Diane said.
“Another scavenger hunt?”
“Yeah,” said Katie. “High-stakes. Winner gets ten grand.”
“No kidding?” I said. “How can I help.”
Diane looked around.
“Pull down the gate,” she said.
“We don’t close for a little while.”
She sidled against me, and I felt something stick into my ribs. Her eyes glared.
“You’re closed,” she said.
I pulled down the gate.
“Shut off the lights,” Katie demanded.
“What?”
“Shut down everything.”
“Aren’t you going to ride?” I asked.
Diane pulled the gun out of my ribs and waved it in front of my face.
“Do it!” she said.
I turned the lights off and shut the power down. The grate was closed. Diane nudged me into the booth. She pointed the .38 at my head. Katie stood behind her, with the camera. “Open the cashbox,” Diane said. She then took a picture. The flash went off. “But …”
“Open the fucking cashbox!”
I did, and took out the money: $275.
“Throw it on the floor,” Katie said.
I hesitated. Diane pressed the gun hard into my ear. I threw the money. Katie took a picture. Then she bent over and started picking the money up. There was enough light coming in from the boardwalk that she could find most of the bills. I looked at her face, back-lit by neon, and she didn’t seem so beautiful anymore.
“Now get on the floor yourself,” Katie said. “On your back.”
I did what she asked. Diane bent over me. She put the gun in my mouth.
“Try anything, and I pull the trigger.”
Katie took another picture.
With her spare hand, Diane undid my belt buckle, and the button and zipper of my jeans. She seemed to hover for a second.
“I can’t do this,” she said.
“What?” Katie replied.
“I’m not going to suck this guy’s cock.”
Oh, please do, I thought.
“Well, I’m not going to do it, either,” Katie said.
They both stared at me. I stared back. Maybe one of them would change her mind.
“Get up and open the gate,” Diane said.
I sighed and did what they said. Diane caressed my cheek.
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Keep the money.”
“Good boy,” said Katie.
“But don’t come back,” I added.
“Don’t worry,” Katie said, “you’ll never see us again.”
And they were gone.
I stopped for a couple of drinks on the way home. On the television hanging over the bar was a news report. Some yuppie kids had been arrested trying to stick someone up in front of the TKTS booth in Times Square, and a similar incident had occurred at the Bronx Zoo. They said they’d been on a scavenger hunt. The Scavenger Hunt Robberies, the news called them.
By morning, the Post would have reports of a half-dozen. Mine wasn’t among them. It never would be.
I got home around 3 a.m.
“Who do you think you are?” said my wife.
“No one,” I answered.
Just the creepy guy who runs the carousel.
THE CODE
BY NORMAN KELLEY
[PRODUCED BY T-SOUND. 17:20; EP
Prospect Heights
Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.
—Donald Rumsfeld
Code had always survived by the philosophy that he lived by; he recognized no other man’s law but his own: Take whatever is needed and fuck all the rest. He was the real thing: a bona fide nigga-man who lived and survived the streets. Unlike an array of fake niggaz who recorded stories about the ’hood, he was the real deal. He had the scars to prove it, the wages of sin, and he made sure that bitchez paid special attention to them when they worshipped his battle-scared body. No bitch ever left his threatening grip without kissing his keloid medals of the street, wounds received from rival niggaz and Five-Os.
Upon arriving upstate he had shanked two motherfuckahs Day One who looked at him as if he were sweet meat. He wasn’t gonna play that faggot shit. He got their minds right—as well as the whole cellblock. He had no time for that shit. His time was short and he wasn’t going to be cornered into taking sides in simple-minded prison gangs. A tag quickly went down that Code wasn’t somebody you wanted to fuck with. He sat alone and was given respect. OGs nodded and went their way; the younger ones just kept moving.
Code did his time: He worked in the prison shops, did his daily 300 push-ups, and worked on his rhymes. He was planning to make his own luck when he returned to the city and produce his masterstroke: The Code It would be the story of one bold, bad, crazy nigga’s life in the ’hood, back in Brooklyn, back in Prospect Heights. It would have everything that urban contemporary airplay craved: phat beats, flowing delivery, and the chronicle of a real nigga’s life, not back in the day but here in the moment, meaning a nigga telling it like it is—gun-play, lurid depiction of urban scenes, and plenty of fucking. He was going to go even further and have the screams of snuffed-out bitchez mixed in. Of course, no one would know if the cries were true or not (except him), but he would let others know that when he spoke of contemporary urban reality, he was beyond keepin’ it real. He was making it a fuckin’ reality. He had no time for fake niggaz frontin’ a reality he already knew about.
When Code’s lurid tales of murderous mayhem coursed their way
through the underground, neighborhoods that had been relatively quiet spiked in crime. It took awhile for the police to figure out what was going on in certain neighborhoods, but they eventually found a correlation between Code’s underground tapes and an increase in robbery, spousal abuse, and urban cowboy antics. He “Ain’t Fuckin’ Around,” as he relayed in one song:
There was nobody or
No one to hold me down
I’ve kicked every motherfuckah
Even my mama around
Niggaz knows me as a man about town
Ain’t no motherfuckah who doesn’t know that
I ain’t fuckin’ around
Or:
Yeah, baby, let me do it to you
I knew you’d love it since you’re just cooze
I’ve never met a bitch that wouldn’t do the do
It’s my God-given right to smack you & be cruel
You know you like
You know you like that
You know you like it
And if you don’t you’re still gonna be smacked
“You Know You Like It” was accompanied by the dickhardening, ass-smacking sound of a woman screaming, “Yeah, fuck me!” That caught the ear of Dr. Rhyme, one of hip hop’s most influential producers, the genius behind Da Sick Niggaz Convention Rhyme put his trackers out to find that “crazy motherfuckah with the sick-ass lyrics and slick production.”
Word went out on the street, and Code’s hands went into his pocket when two unfamiliar niggaz unexpectedly approached him at his local hang spot, Club Prospect on Franklin Street.
“Who the FUCK sent you?” he screamed at one, who was down on his knees, mouth bleeding from the pistol whipping he had just received from Code. Code was nervous; rumors were circulating that two of the other chart-topping rappers, Wuz Dat and Killadelic, had ceased their war and were thinking about jacking his ass up: The new nigga on the block was a threat. And Code could always smell another nigga’s evil ways blocks ahead.
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