by Jan Richman
“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?
I remember when I last saw Ralph wearing these pants. Just a few weeks earlier, we were playing pool at the Snake Ranch Social Club. Ralph knows almost everybody inside the Ranch at any given moment, and often he’ll telephone the bartender before we go over and ask him to put our names up on the pool chalkboard (in fact, immediately after sex, sometimes while he’s still inside me, Ralph reaches over to his phone on the bedside table, and I hear him whisper, “Hey buddy, it’s Ralphie. Listen, do me a favor and put me on the board, man.”) Ralph and I were particularly hammered from a marathon combination of vodka, marijuana, and levelers, and I was kicking his ass in a surreal game of eightball. I kept missing easy shots—I couldn’t remember getting even one stripe down, but every time I turned back to the game after dancing dizzily but intensely by myself to Janis or Bill Withers on the jukebox, I’d somehow be in the lead. Finally, Ralph came over to dance with me and leaned into me, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. As we swayed, I felt something hard in his pants, something bulky and bobbing, like a sack of fibroid tumors or those oversized glass grapes that grandmas have on their dining room tables. He rubbed against me lewdly, grinding back and forth until I reached down into his big front pockets and came up with six striped billiard balls, three on each side. He had been stealthily palming whichever of my stripes was most convenient every time I turned my back, waiting for me to notice. But finally, he got impatient, or maybe he was just incredulous that I had so little trouble accepting my mysterious conquest. “Not many men would have the balls to pull that stunt,” I said, pulling Ralph into the Ranch’s back room and rolling around on his multiply balled lap, slipping and sliding like I was log rolling. “I want to earn my stripes,” I crooned. I don’t remember whether my hair was in a ponytail that night, or whether Ralph pulled the elastic out of my hair during my wild ride on his lap.
I do remember, though not with much warmth, an incident from earlier that same evening. A cabbie had walked into the club, and Ralph called him over to where we were sitting. Ralph left to feed the jukebox and the man and I made affable conversation for several minutes. Neither of us introduced ourselves by name. I was reeling on my barstool, steadying myself against the solid wood bar with both hands, remarkably charm-schooled, I thought, for being so drunk. When Ralph returned, he said to me, “This is Tommy, he drives for the Slope.” He turned to Tommy and gestured toward me, “And this
is J ... J ... J ...”—the stuttering was subtle and brief; I probably wouldn’t even have noticed it except for what came next—“Judy,” he said.
I didn’t correct him; the whole situation seemed too absurd. I had been sleeping with Ralph for months. He’d yelled my name when he came, breathed it in his sleep when he reached for me, announced it when leaving messages on my voicemail, underlined it when he left notes jammed into the slot in my mailbox. He knew my name. So why didn’t I give him shit right then and there about being so “leveled” he’d forgotten it? Was it only the fact of this cabbie standing between us, shaking my hand heartily and having no idea that my name wasn’t Judy? After a fraught silence, Ralph derailed the moment by looking away from me, distracted by another conversation. His head spun so fast, I knew he realized the severity of his mistake. As he turned, his face lost its solid features. I had no idea who he was. I was the one who’d been de-named, but I felt he’d lost his identity, as though he’d let something slip that revealed him as a blurred imposter.
I raise my head and see miles of air and no ground in the immediate vicinity. I feel like I’m a character in a small child’s drawing, hovering wide-eyed in space, no horizontal line to represent the horizon. I’m scared, and I would like to be held tight against any prospect of harm, but I can’t get any closer to Ralph because of my lack of swiveling capability. I grab his hip and try to turn him toward me, but he locks like a turnstile after a ten-degree rotation. He looks at me, our heads directly opposite, but our bodies can only flap vaguely toward each other, trapped in a dream of perfect symmetry. His eyes are narrowed and he gives me a horny half-smile; I can see that he’s afraid I’m going to lose it right here, I’m going to flip out and we won’t get back to our business at hand, much less to dry land.