Thrill-Bent Read Free Page A

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