"Please," said Yossarian, stepping around her.
"I'll do you both for a nickel each. I'll do you both at the same time for a nickel each. Pop, I'll do you both for the same nickel."
Michael, with a strained smile, skittered around her. She plucked at Yossarian's sleeve and held on.
"I'll lick your balls."
Yossarian stumbled free, mortified. His face burned. And Michael was aghast to see his father so shaken.
10
George G. Tilyou
At a rolltop desk many levels below, Mr. George C. Tilyou, the Coney Island entrepreneur, who'd been dead almost eighty years, counted his money and felt himself sitting on top of the world. His total never decreased. Before his eyes were the starting and finishing stations of the roller-coaster he'd had brought down after him from his Steeplechase amusement park. The tracks had never looked newer as they rose toward the crest of the highest gravity drop at the beginning and climbed out of sight into the cavernous tunnel he occupied. He filled with pride when he gazed at his redoubtable carousel, his EI Dorado. Constructed originally in Leipzig for William II, the emperor of Germany, it still was possibly the most magnificent merry-go-round anywhere. Three platforms carrying horses, gondolas, and carved ducks and pigs revolved at individual speeds. Often he would send his EI Dorado carousel spinning with no riders aboard, merely to study the reflections of the silver mirrors at the glittering hub and to revel in the stout voice of the calliope, which was, he liked to joke, music to his ears.
He had renamed his roller-coaster the Dragon's Gorge. Elsewhere he had his Cave of the Winds, and at the entrance churned his Barrel of Fun, which brought the unpracticed to their knees right off on the circling bottom and kept them tumbling against each other in tilted disarray until they crawled out the farther end and regained their feet or were assisted by attendants or other customers more experienced. One who knew how could pass through without fuss merely by walking on a mild diagonal contrary to the direction of rotation, but that wasn't fun. Or stride and stride uphill upon the descending floor without getting anywhere and remain forever in the same place, but that was no
t much fun either. Onlookers of both sexes took special delight in witnessing the unbalanced distress of attractive ladies clutching to hold down their skirts in the days before slacks attained respectability as a befitting mode of female attire.
"If Paris is France," he could remember stating as the playground's foremost spokesman and impresario, "then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world."
The money he sat counting every day would never deteriorate or grow old. His cash was indestructible and would always have value. At his back rose a cast-iron safe that was taller than he was. He had guards and attendants from the old days, costumed in red coats and green jockey caps from the old days. Many were friends from the beginning and had been with him an eternity.
With a genius uncanny and persistent, he had defied and disproved the experts, his lawyers and his bankers, and had succeeded in time in taking it all with him, in holding on to everything he valued particularly and was intent on retaining. His will made adequate provision for his widow and his children. Deeds of ownership, cash instruments, and currency in a large amount were sealed, as directed, in a moistureproof box resistant to decay and interred with him in his sepulcher in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, and his tombstone bore the inscription:
MANY HOPES LIE BURIED HERE.
While heirs and executors disputed with each other and with government tax officials, Steeplechase (the "Funny Place") relentlessly disappeared part by part from the face of the earth, except for the phallic, steel-beam, bankrupt skeleton of the Parachute Jump, which came in long after he was gone and was an attraction he would have rejected. It was tame and orderly, and did not frighten or tickle the customers or spectators. Mr. Tilyou relished things that surprised, threw people into confusion, annihilated dignity, blew boy and girl clumsily into each other's arms, and, with luck, flashed a glimpse of calf and petticoat, sometimes even feminine underpants, to a delighted audience just like them who viewed the comedy of their utter, ludicrous helplessness with gaiety and laughter.
Mr. Tilyou always smiled when he recalled the inscription on his tombstone.
He could not now think of anything he lacked. He had a second roller-coaster now, called the Tornado. Overhead he heard continually the stops and starts of the subway trains that had brought crowds in the hundreds of thousands to the beach on summer Sundays, and the sputtering exhausts of automobiles and larger vehicles of transportation traveling to and fro. Hearing the rippling and lapping of a canal of flowing water on a level above, he had brought down his flat-bottomed boats and reinstituted his Tunnel of Love. He had the Whip and the Whirlpool, with which he could lash patrons about and fling them aside, and the Human Pool Table with its vertical slide inside a chamber and spinning disks at the bottom to spin them supine in one direction or another while they screeched with hapless pleasure and prayed all the while it would soon come to an end. He had electric shocks on the railings for the unwary and mirrors for the normal that deformed them into merry and ridiculous monstrosities. And he had his grinning, pink-cheeked trademark, that demonic flat face with a flat head and parted hair and a wide mouth filled with cubes of teeth like white tiles, which people shrank from disbelievingly on first encounter and next time accepted good-humoredly as natural. From some unknown level below he heard repeatedly the passage of smooth-running railroad cars whose turning wheels rolled by day and night, but he was not curious. He was interested only in what he was able to own, and he wished to own only what he was able to see and watch and could control with the simplest action of a switch or a lever. He loved the smell of electricity and the crisp crackle of electrical sparks.
He had more money than he ever could spend. He'd never trusted trusts or seen much foundation to foundations. John D. Rockefeller came to him regularly now to beg for dimes and to cadge free rides, and J. P. Morgan, who'd commended his soul to God with no doubt it would be embraced, sought favors. With little to live on, they had not much to live for. Their children sent nothing. Mr. Tilyou could have told them, he told them often. Without money life could be hell. Mr. Tilyou had an inkling there would always be business as usual everywhere, and he could have told them, he told them.
He was spruce, dapper, alert, and tidy. His bowler hat, his derby of which he was proud, hung spotless on a hook on his coatrack. He dressed daily now in a white shirt with a wing collar, with a dark ascot tied perfectly and tucked neatly into the vest of his suit, and the points of his thin brown mustache were inevitably waxed.
His first major success was a Ferris wheel half the size of the one that had caught his fancy in Chicago, and he boldly proclaimed his own, even in advance of completion, as the largest in the world. He decked it out with dazzling streamers of hundreds of Mr. Edison's new incandescent lightbulbs, and enchanted patrons were diverted and thrilled.
"I have never cheated a soul in anything," he was wont to declare, "and I've never given a sucker an even break."
He liked rides that went round and brought the participants back to the place they had started from. Almost everything in nature, from the smallest to the grandest, seemed to him to move in circles and to return to the point at which it had originated, to perhaps set out again. He found people more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and he liked to manipulate them in this guise with tricks of harmless public embarrassment that would give pleasure to everyone and for which all would pay: the hat whisked away by a jet of air or the skirts gusting upward over the shoulders, the moving floors and collapsing staircases, the lipstick-smeared couple floated back into light from the concealing darkness inside the Tunnel of Love, baffled to know why the onlookers were shaking in laughter at the spectacle they made until ribald jokesters cried out to tell them.
And he still owned his home. On Surf Avenue, across from his Steeplechase amusement park, Mr. Tilyou had lived in a good-sized wooden-frame house with a narrow walk and shallow steps built of masonry, and all seemed to begin sinking into the ground shortly after his burial. On the vertical face of the step at the bottom, the one joined to the sidewalk, he'd paid a stonecutter to chisel the family name, TILYOU. Year-round residents walking by on the way to the movie house or subway station were the first to note from the position of the letters in the name that the step seemed to be settling into the pavement. By the time the whole house was gone, there was not much attention paid to one more empty lot in a dilapidated neighborhood that had passed its prime.
On the north side of the narrow strip of land that made up Coney Island, which was not a true island but a protruding spit about five miles long and half a mile wide, lay a body of water called Gravesend Bay. A dye factory there consumed much sulfur. Boys nearing puberty touched lighted matches to the yellow clumps they found lying on the ground near the building and were intrigued and gratified that they ignited easily and burned with a bluish glare and an odor that was sulfurous. Nearby stood a factory that manufactured ice and once was the scene of a spectacular armed robbery by perpetrators who made good their getaway in a speedboat that raced out to escape into the waters of Gravesend Bay. Thus, there was fire and there was ice before home refrigeration grew practical.
Fire was an ever-present danger, and great Coney Island fires blazed periodically. Within hours after Mr. Tilyou saw his first amusement park destroyed by flames, he posted signs selling his newest attraction, his Coney Island fire, and he kept his ticket takers busy collecting the ten cents admission charge he took from customers eager to enter the devastated area to cast their eyes upon his smoking ruins. Why hadn't he thought of that, mused the Devil. Even Satan called him Mr. Tilyou.
BOOK
FOUR
11
Lew
Sammy and I enlisted the same day. Four of us set out together. All of us went overseas. All four of us came back, although I was captured and Sammy was shot down into the water and crash-landed another time with a forgetful pilot called Hungry Joe, who forgot to try the emergency handle for lowering the landing gear. No one was hurt, Sammy tells me, and that pilot Hun