“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
Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.
Prospect Heights
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.