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Excerpt from Hey Gerry! For the next week the two of us hit every twisting, whip-
ping, dropping, bopping, thumping, bumping, flying, upside down ride in Coney Island, from the Eldorado disco bumper cars on the south side of Surf Avenue; to the early 1900s an- tique organ playing B & B Carousel on the north side of Surf Avenue; to the Enterprise and Music Express in Astroland; to the Scrambler, Spookarama, and Wonder Wheel on Jones Walk; to the smoke spitting Dragon’s Cave on the Bowery where the Bobsled used to be before the bulldozers came; to the decep- tively terrifying Wild Mouse on West 12th Street; to the Jumbo Jet on West 15th Street where the Tornado burned down just two years earlier; to the resplendently decrepit Thunderbolt roller coaster, defiantly still running, the lonely wooden house over which it was built mysteriously still inhabited, big dogs inside the windows barking at the boardwalk to the patient bemusement of its towering next door neighbor the Parachute Jump, which we would have tried to get on too if it wasn’t for the fact that the Parachute Jump had been closed down for as long as I could remember. Our friends didn’t recognize us anymore. We walked
around with our bodies slightly slanted, our heads slightly tilt- ed, a far away look in our eyes and our faces frozen in a giant, teeth baring, ear to ear grin, just like the exalted funny face of Steeplechase the Funny Place, which had watched over Coney Island for sixty-one years until real estate baron Fred C Trump and his cronies had a brick throwing party one month before my first birthday, smashing it in and tearing it down before we ever had a chance to see it.
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