Thrill-Bent (14 page)

“The loopscrew is basically a vertical loop and a corkscrew right on top of one another, which you’d think would be obvious from the name, but most people have no idea,” he snorts as we scramble beneath the tracks, his head darting back and forth, scouting for treasure. “They were popular before the multi-element craze, when the new coasters got leaner and meaner, incorporating fancier inversion elements.” Furry knows his coaster trivia, and I nod appreciatively. “I guess you’re aware that they want to put in a Superman coaster here instead.” He eyes me like I might be the one responsible for the egregious idea.

I spot a dead-pet-sized heap a few yards away, and point it out. “Looks like the usual—a sweatshirt that was probably tied around someone’s waist. Tourists are eternally optimistic about the weather cooling off, but lately it’s hot anytime after March ... global warming.” Furry says excitedly. He seems to be perpetually aflutter, and I hit upon exactly what is so familiar about him: he’s got the standard-issue speedfreak deportment.

He holds up the offending garment, which is indeed a tourist’s sweatshirt, complete with the Mormon Temple braided in gold on the front. I ask if I can have it as a keepsake, or if it must be tagged and itemized for direct deposit into his collection. Somehow, I think Betty would appreciate this. He tosses me the shirt and jogs around in circles, giggling.

“Ooh, you gotta see my collection!” he sings. “Gotta, gotta, gotta!” He skitters around like a rabbit, crouching and hopping intermittently and calling out his archeological finds. “Sunglasses!” “Clip-on earring!” “Coin purse!”

In a minute he returns to where I’m standing clutching my new Temple wear. “Come on,” he urges, tapping me on the upper arm and scrambling back through the gate and down the hill to a tiny yellow house tucked in next to the ride’s turnstiles. Another key from Furry’s ring unlocks the door, and as we enter three bearded men look up from their positions astride a magazine that is spread across the floor.

“Aha!” shouts Furry, with obvious delight.

“Well, hell, Furry, you coulda warned us that you were bringing a full-blooded female into the clubhouse,” the scraggliest of the bearded guys says. “Excuse me, ma’am.” He straightens up and sort of bows in my direction while the other two scrape up the magazine and back up as far as they can as quickly as they can, which isn’t all that far or fast.

“This is Bob, Ken, and Mike,” Furry says as he heads into the hut. “They sort of work with me here, keep the place up, you know.”

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.