Thrill-Bent

by Jan Richman

  I smile as I recognize that special hybrid smell of stale marijuana smoke and acrid, unwashed clothing. One glance around the room reveals the kind of “keeping up” that goes on. There are no windows in this little hutch, and the walls are covered with yellowed posters and clippings. I notice one large color print of an apocalyptic rabbit—very creepy-looking, with large, egg-shaped bug eyes and comic-booky Cheshire cat smile—and some smaller, detailed stills from the animated film Watership Down.

  “You must like bunnies, huh?” I ask, sipping the last of my Potato Head mugful. Furry stops what he’s doing and spins around to look at me, pigtails flying. He glares at me for a moment, and Bob, Ken, and Mike are so silent they must be holding their breath. Everybody is frozen. I’ve obviously said the wrong thing, but I can’t imagine what was so transgressive about my inquiry. Why so touchy about liking rabbits? Furry’s nose twitches and his pigtails visibly quiver. Behind the ratty couch I spy a gold display case, the kind you’d see in a high school civics classroom or a Boys Club gymnasium. I decide to change tacks.

  “Is that the famous collection?” I ask, nodding toward the case. I glance around, hoping to see a coffee-pot, but there is only a large, messy computer desk (the giant monitor features a colorful bunny screensaver, I notice) and a small unmade bed.

  “Yep,” Furry assents, and shakes his head as though to joggle my previous comment from his mind. He reaches for his key ring one more time.

  Bob, Ken, and Mike shuffle around to the opposite side of the room; as I follow Furry over toward the display case, they mirror my movements and navigate inversely toward the door. It’s comical, an animal scuffle that maintains the most civilized eye contact, almost as though they don’t want me to see their backsides. Furry pays no attention to the mercurial creepings of his motley crew. He runs a finger along the edge of the gold-plated border of the case and leans in to examine the reflection of his glassy-eyed face.

  “Mmm,” he groans sensually. “This baby hasn’t been cracked in months.”

  When he pushes open the glass panels, they creak like swinging saloon doors. Furry seems reluctant, now that I’m here, to let me go all the way.

  “Don’t touch!” he warns frantically. I bypass his neurotic admonition, duck under his arm—which is raised as if to protect someone in a passenger seat—and take a long look at the loot. It is spread out in perfect symmetry, each item dated with a homemade bird’s-egg-blue strip-label. In some semblance of an order—not chronological, not alphabetical, but according to some abstract Furryesque aesthetic—the following items are push-pinned onto a corkboard: a prosthetic index finger; a lace-fringed baby bootie; a Mickey Mouse cap; a glass eye; a gold tooth; several wooden tokens for someplace (a strip joint? waxing salon? bakery?) called Bun Dusters; a dried humanesque turd; a long white evening glove; a Tamagachi electronic pet, expired; a fat orange goldfish, ditto; a Diego Rivera-muraled calendar page from March 19, 1983, previously badly crumpled; a fish hook; a wedding ring; a toupee; a “Micro-jammer” toy electric guitar; a pink orthodontic retainer; a Jack of Spades; a bottle of heart medication; a note scrawled in pencil on lined notebook paper that says “I Heart Furry!”; two balsam tongue depressers stamped with the name “Jack Hurtz, DDS”; and an impressive cascade of sunglasses that range from heart-shaped Lolita to rhinestone-studded Alexis Carrington.

  The glass eye is blue, familiar as daylight. Furry gazes at me as I gaze at his collection. His weight shifts rapidly from one foot to the other; the heel of his hand presses into his forehead, in the I-coulda-had-a-V-8 gesture. I can see his skewed reflection in the swung-open glass of the display case: a funhouse Furry, taffily elongated and diagonalized, his chin a slappy stroke of flesh-colored paint. His eyes, which even in the distorted reflection are clearly fastened on me, are unmistakably blue, blue as the earth seen from afar, blue as Mister Potato-head’s shoes.

  “What do you think?” he asks when he notices me pause, and then he answers himself. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “You are an indescribable and portentous artist, Furry,” I say. I’ve seen less interesting, and much less moving, collages in the Museum of Modern Art. I get a sudden urge to kiss Furry right on the mouth—I want to enter him somehow, to hear again the creak of his long-shut display case opening, to witness firsthand the insides of someone who would think to create such an arcane underworld. But at the last minute I swerve and kiss his cheek instead, which is only a little furry, angular and warm, like a lithe cat—or rabbit?—who has been sitting in the sun all day.

  “Whoa! Wait! Don’t leave, boys! Don’t you remember you promised to take our guest on a private Tumbler joyride before the park opens?” Furry is flushed apricot and excited, his pigtails swinging as he jerks back from my lips, looking away.

  The three stooges are on their way out, having managed to slink backward all the way through the front door while Furry and I were otherwise engaged. Only Bob’s shirttail is visible, flapping red plaid into the room after his body has been delivered elsewhere. He pops back in at the sound of Furry’s voice, his eyebrows riding high on his face.

  “Hmmm?” he asks innocently, like a girl with a purseful of stolen makeup.

  At 9:52 a.m., I am snug in the back car of the Tumbler with Bob. Mike and Ken are in the front and second cars, respectively. They didn’t discuss this arrangement aloud, but I saw them exchange a hasty rock/ paper/scissors as we were walking toward the train. Furry convinced me, before he took off to make his final unlocking rounds of the park, that the backseat was the whip-crackingest ride on the Tumbler, the most desirable place to be along the sweep of the dragon’s tail. I didn’t need to be persuaded; I almost always opt for the back car of a roller coaster when I have a choice, though many people would name the front car as most coveted. But I do not want even the simulation of captaining the expedition. I want to have everything done to me. I prefer to be bullied and carried along, knocked around at the whim of a gear switch or, nowadays, a computer chip. I don’t want to see what’s up ahead because I already know that seeing won’t help me to understand or to control. Why give yourself the illusion of power in a situation where you are as powerless as you possibly can be?

  Bob yells, “Blast off!” and we are cast into motion. The Tumbler is smooth, oiled steel gliding along a grooved track, and I feel secure in kind of a wussy way, strapped tight in a medium-tech theme park ride designed for sober Mormon teenagers whose hormones are on overdrive. I am in my element. My traveling companions are thirty-something wildebeests of questionable hygiene habits—slaves, as far as I can tell, to a man with a Willie Nelson hairdo.

  I wish I’d thought to bring something to drop during the loopscrew, something for Furry to find later when he’s combing the area for treasures. I don’t have a barrette in my hair or a dollar in my pocket—besides, it would have to be something he could trace, something rubber-stamped irrevocably with the Mayday of me. I feel around in the pockets of my jeans for some token of affection, some good luck charm with little numismatic value. The only thing in there is a fortune-cookie fortune I got at Hop Kee last month that says, “Everything you touch turns to old.” I still don’t know whether it was a typo or some kind of Confucian joke. I clutch it in my hand to release at the appropriate moment.

  We’re sucked up the steep lift hill with speed and precision, and even though we know what happens next, all four of us hoot and cheer loudly, and we keep it up for the rest of the ride, our voices echoing joyously in the so-far silent day. We are Hell’s Angels, exhilarated by the ritual of whipping wind and fast motors, soaring past conventional commuters, intoxicated with noise and pomp and our mythological status. When the loopscrew is in view, I hang on tight to Bob’s thick belt and throw my ambiguous fortune to the wind. I wish I had a leather cap with a death’s head logo on it.

  As we exit the Tumbler, Bob puts his hand on my ass. He presses his flat palm into my flesh without looking at me, like he’s copping a feel on a subway.
The habits of Furry and his friends (the title of a whimsical, yet psychologically disturbing children’s book?) are vastly different than those of any coterie I’ve ever encountered. My genetic legacy is chock-full of freaks. Both the Mormons and the Jews have a history of some strange practices (uneven husband/wife ratios, bathing in lambs’ blood), but neither of them go around engaging in circle jerks before nine a.m., or handling the derrieres of visiting journalists. And most of my friends in New York are of the droop-lidded variety. If you caught them straddling a centerfold or seeming unnaturally fond of rabbits, they wouldn’t even pause to blink. You’d end up feeling like an unhip intruder who hasn’t read enough French post-structuralist theory to appreciate the cunning of voyeurism. But Hunter S. Thompson rode with the Hell’s Angels for a full year, and so I let Bob’s invading palm linger for a one-thousand-one before I sashay out of his range.

  The park is ambulant now, broken into roving limbs, its slow-moving appendages crawling with insects. The view as we step off the ride’s long ramp and walk back down to the tiny hut of furry disrepute tells me that it must be just past ten o’clock. Time for tots who’ve already been up for four hours, fueled by Juicy Juice and the Cartoon Network, to invade the vast perimeters of these grounds. There is already a line in front of the Tumbler. The canopied maze of metal handrails in the waiting area is half full, mostly with kids bobbing their heads methodically to a beat twice as fast as a heart coming from their Discmans. It’s hard to tell who’s together and who’s alone—everyone stares off into space and jiggles their knee hyperactively. I notice one boy—wiry, square-jawed in a way you can tell will be dangerously handsome when he’s older—kicking another, littler boy. Just routinely kicking him, half in jest and half serious, each thrust of his foot stopping just short of really doing damage. Each time the foot connects, the little kid gives a kind of attenuated grunt, one he must have learned from overhearing one of dad’s porno movies or watching too much gritty crime TV. The kicker is a teenager; even if he’s short for his age he’s got to be at least fourteen, and I notice he’s got tattoos like spider graffiti lining the insides of his arms. The younger one is substantially younger, still a child, and while he’s trying to be cool in his ultra-baggy jeans I think I sense fear tucked into the furrow between his eyes.

  They are last in line, partially concealed by the enormous empty dumpster, marked in red stencil TUMBLER TRASH and parked strategically to wall off one side of the coaster line. I have to pass right by them, and I can’t help making a comment. “What are you, LAPD?” I say to the perpetrator.

  He looks me up and down. “This my bitch, he mouth off he get kicked,” he says matter-of-factly.

  What’s going on in America? Teenage girls are bagging their newborns? Kids are hammer-kicking their little brothers while using gang slang?

  I watch Bob and his buddies skitter ahead into the moving crowd. “Listen,” I pull in chest-to-chest with the teen, grabbing the sticky edge of the dumpster to hoist myself even closer. “No one is your bitch, I don’t care how many Eminem songs you’ve memorized.” I can see a tiny reflection of myself in the mirrored pupils of this wannabe gangbanger’s eyes, and I’m puffy-haired and enraged, a den mother who has snapped. “So quit beating on your brother here.”

  I have no real business impersonating an authority figure, and I briefly wonder if these kids have a syndicate of tattooed, weapon-wielding friends who will hunt me down and force-feed me excrement or slice off my nipples with a scout knife. But the bully’s feet are both planted on the ground now, and the runtier kid just looks at me with his mouth hanging open, as though Santa Claus just ripped off the red suit and revealed a naked set of double-Ds. I am relieved to have interrupted the cycle of abuse in this tiny but nefarious instance, and I feel the spurt of adrenaline trickle down into my limbs as I trot to catch up with Furry’s trio, who have been swallowed completely by a sea of strangers. After a moment, I glance back to the brothers. They are now clutching each other in the manner of pro wrestlers waiting for the protracted clang of the opening bell, looking even more pugnacious than before.

  As I approach Furry’s hut, I see Bob, Ken, and Mike slip through the front door and close it quickly behind them. I knock, but there is no answer. “I know you’re in there!” I whisper. I hear a couple of yelps and some attenuated scuffling. I walk around to the side of the hut, looking for a window, but Furry’s house seems to be utterly sealed up. I start to make a loud, sarcastic comment, but just as the words are pressing out of my mouth, I spot a crack in the doorjamb where the front door isn’t quite flush. Through it, I glimpse a thin slice of activity: the guys are pulled into a huddle. I spot another person, a stranger, in the clutch of the intimate group. A short man, well-groomed, sweaty and immense, is swiv-eling and gesturing. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but his hands are flying fast, tugging and adjusting something. I can’t tell what it is, the object at the center of the gathering, but I think I see a flash of ears and a pink felt triangle of nose.

  “Furry?” I call out. The commotion halts. All heads swivel toward the door. Finally, the sweaty man steps to the side, and I get a full view of the group. Bob is wearing bunny ears; Mike has on a pair of white fur boots, and the beast at the axis of the hub is in fact Furry, and yet it is wholly fauna—a Furry-sized, protean rabbit. He looks more like a feral hybrid you’d expect to see in a circus sideshow (“Half-Man-Half-Hare”) than a theme-park mascot or a Jimmy Stewart sidekick. This costume must be expertly home-sewn, certainly not something off the shelves of a novelty store, and his face is exposed but whiskered and pink-nosed. What is frightening—no, disconcerting—is that the specter is so utterly Furry-like, as if this lapine creature is the real Furry.

  “May we help you?” Furry calls out, fake-friendly and tart. He sounds like a clerk at a Brooks Brothers store. He takes a half-step toward the door and stares at me hard. Does he know it’s my eye he’s looking at through the crack?

  “Oh, no. Sorry ... I just ... lost an earring, and I thought this might be the lost and found.” I shrug, nodding my head to somehow emphasize my lie. As I nod, my eye catches a distracting shine from my own chest, where the puff-painted tabernacle on my new sweatshirt gleams in the sun.

  Furry doesn’t smile. Our affiliation, dubious as it may be, seems lost on him for the moment. He is caught between worlds, teetering on the cusp between animal and key-jangler. “No earrings,” he says loudly, twitching his pink nose vigorously. “Come back in a while, and ... we’ll see.”

  My mother used to say We’ll see when she meant No. But Furry wouldn’t say to come back if he were banishing me forever, would he? I send one last meaningful hook into the unreadable ocean of his eyes, hoping to reel in something profound. Mike, Bob, and Ken do not change their expressions. They stare toward my face but not into my eye, as though they are trying to memorize my features in case they’re required to identify me in a police lineup later on. I slowly turn and walk away, still nodding unconsciously in that vague way that communicates complete bafflement.

  Dejected, I head for Mormontown. Its location on my map of the park is in “Pioneer Village,” a sort of Knott’s Berry Farm without the jam, as far as I can tell from the promotional blurb. I’m sure it’s going to be one of those theme-park homages, like Dollywood, or like Southern Heritage Park in Georgia, which pays tribute to a historical era by recreating the details (porch swings on real wood verandas, mint juleps at $12 a pop) and leaving out the messy controversial crux of the thing (slavery). I know when I’m getting near it because I hear cannon fire—a bewildering audio accompaniment to couples in Gap walking shorts and Bass weejuns strolling hand-in-hand along “rustic” wooden sidewalks. As I hone in on the booming, I notice that, with the exception of a few cobblers, millinery shoppes, and doll museums, the aspect of pioneer life that gets the most play here in Pioneer Village is the buying and selling of small arms. Guns, slingshots, crossbows, cannons—no stone has been left unlaunched in the histo
rical approximation of weaponry’s divine enterprise. Replicas of turn-of-the-century rifles and revolvers are perched oiled and shining in storefront windows like tanned girls sunning poolside. Ye olde ammo shed is crouched barrel-like between gun markets, its hand-lettered sign promising “the finest powder, wicks, and genuine lead pellets to protect your kin.” I pass a street stand where dozens of heavy pistols are lined up like toy soldiers, hoisted upright on tooled leather racks. Kids are gathered around, begging parents for dollars, excited to get their little digits on a pewter trigger. “Be forewarned, li’l shooters, gunslingers and outlaws have been known to frequent these parts!” crows an early settler in a cocked hat and breeches. Some of these kids are in gangsta clothes, probably bought at the Tweeners section of a suburban Walmart, but I doubt if anyone in this quaint village has ever witnessed a gang shooting or a drive-by, been mugged or held up, or had any experience to tarnish the giddy, ghetto-lite connotation from the pairing of flying bullets and unpredictable youth. Of course, the bullets in these pistols have been replaced by caps, and the explosive sound of cap guns being detonated punctures the air all around. I can’t help but accelerate my pace a little when I spot the Mormon Visitors Center, where a statue of Brigham Young stands at its entrance, butt flat as an empty paper bag, head pointed full speed ahead, one cocky arm curled high to exhort the masses to follow him to salty, beautiful Utah.

  The Visitors Center looks like it was made from Lincoln Logs, a fake-wood cabin safe from minimum-wage gunslingers. The angel Moroni presides over the center’s front doorway. Seeing me pause at the sight of a hand-painted banner that reads “Mormons: Our Journey,” a middle-aged thespian in a granny gown slowly flaps her hideous papier-mâché wings and gestures me toward a dark room in the back of the building. “Follow the Father and the Son,” she recommends eerily. Squinting, I see a bustle of beings huddled in the rear hallway. An awed murmur spreads through their ranks as God and Jesus voraciously trot through the center, all but pushing people down in their rush to inspire a feverish hallucination in the sweaty soul of one Joseph Smith. The Almighty, who’s wearing a fanny pack over his robes, checks his watch as he hustles. “Showtime, folks!” he yells good-naturedly. “Let there be light!” Jesus purses his lips and holds his beard to one side as he takes a last sip from his can of Sprite. Then he expertly finger-rolls it into a metal trash can, mumbles “Two points!” and enters the Chamber of Visions.