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eyes down into narrow slits when Paulie says that, because John Ceepak lives his life in strict compliance with the West Point honor code: he will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.

“BLEEP you,” says Mike as he climbs up on his machine. Totally wasted, he slips on the slick surface, falls backward, and bangs his head. Hard.

“Omigod,” gasps Soozy. “He’s BLEEPING bleeding!”

A camera zooms in on Mike as he sits in his Skee-Ball lane, holding the back of his head.

“He’s BLEEPING bleeding!” Soozy shouts again. Then she burps.

“Who gives a BLEEP?” says Paulie, who discovers he can just jam his arm in and out of the fifty hole to ring up more points.

That’s when Ceepak enters the frame. The camera is behind him, so you can’t see his face, just his buzz cut. First, he pulls a sterile gauze pack out of the hip pocket of his cargo pants and tosses it to Mike Tomasino.

“Apply that to your head wound, sir.”

Next he whips out his SHPD badge and calls out to Paulie.

“Sir?”

Paulie, who has his back to Ceepak, totally ignores him. Keeps pumping his fist in and out of the fifty hole. Bells ring. Whistles whoop.

“Sir?” Ceepak raises his voice. “Sea Haven Police.”

“Where?” Finally, the drunken muscleman swirls around. One last wooden ball is gripped in his right fist.

“Please climb down off the Skee-Ball machine.”

“Why?”

“You are drunk, sir.”

“So? It’s the Jersey Shore. Everybody’s BLEEPING drunk.”

“I’m not, I assure you,” says Ceepak.

“Aw, BLEEP you, you BLEEPING BLEEP wipe.”

“Please step down from the Skee-Ball machine, sir.”

Believe it or not, instead of doing as officially instructed, Paulie tugs up his T-shirt again. Points at his rippling man breasts. “Yo? You see this? I am The Thing you wish you could be.”

“No, sir. You are not. You are drunk and disorderly. You are also in direct violation of several municipal codes, not to mention the rules of fair Skee-Ball competition.”

In the background, I hear police sirens racing toward the boardwalk. I’m guessing Rita, Ceepak’s wife, had dialed 9-1-1 while Ceepak marched over to deal with The Real Idiots Of New Jersey.

Ceepak turns to Mike Tomasino, who is moaning and groaning, pressing the patch of gauze to the back of his head, trying not to ruin his up-do.

“Keep applying pressure to the wound, sir,” says Ceepak. “Paramedics are on the way.”

More bells ding and dong. Somebody has hit a jackpot.

Ceepak and the camera swing back to Paulie’s lane. He is, once again, jamming his arm in and out of the fifty hole.

“Sir?”

“What?”

“Cease and desist.”

Paulie spins around.

“BEEP you, jarhead!”

And he chucks that wooden ball straight at Ceepak’s head.

2

Reflexes?

Ceepak’s got ’em.

He makes this incredible Mr. Miyagi, Karate Kid move. Up flips his left arm. Fingers splay out. Palm springs open.

Boom!

Without flinching, he snags the hard wooden ball in midair, two inches away from his eye.

Clutching it with a very firm grip, he addresses Paulie Braciole: “Now we need to add assaulting a police officer to your list of infractions.”

“BLEEP you, you BLEEPING BLEEP,” says Paulie, reciting what I like to call the New Jersey state motto, even though he’s from Staten Island, which is in New York even if it wishes it could be in Jersey.

“You’re not a police officer!” screams Soozy K, rallying to her muscleman’s defense. She plucks at Ceepak’s polo shirt. “This isn’t a police uniform. My dad’s a cop.” Only when she says it, it comes out “My dashahop” because she’s been mixing her vodka and beer again. She did it on Episode Two, too. Fell face-first into some kid’s sand castle. Took out two towers, crushed the moat. Ended up with a bright yellow plastic sand shovel stuck between her boobs.

This is when the cops working the Tuesday night shift show up. Dylan and Jeremy, the Murray brothers, storm into the Coin Castle. Jen Forbus and Nikki Bonanni are right behind them. They all got their pictures in the New York Post Wednesday, slapping on the cuffs, stuffing The Thing and Soozy K into the back of police cars.

“Leave me the BLEEP alone, your BLEEPING po-po!” Paulie screamed as he thrashed between the two Murrays. It took both of them to haul his chiseled butt out of the arcade. Dylan told me later that the guy was in such a rage, it felt like they were wrestling with Dr. Bruce Banner in the middle of morphing into the Incredible Hulk.

Jen and Nikki dealt with Suzy K, who went ballistic when one of the female cops dared touch the top of her bullet-shaped hair to help her scrunch down into the back of their cop car. Apparently, her Conehead hair bubble is her trademark.

“You guys make good TV,” says Marty Mandrake, head of Prickly Pear Productions and the brains (I use that term loosely) behind Fun House.

It’s Friday afternoon, August 6. We’re in the chief’s office at police headquarters, watching the raw footage of The Thing and Soozy K being taken into custody on a TV monitor built into the chief’s manly mahogany bookcase.

“We’re gonna open next week’s episode with this next shot,” says Mandrake. “Wait for it.”

We see the two Murray brothers hauling a very wiggly, very wired Paulie Braciole out of the Coin Castle. His head looks ready to explode. “Fuck you, you fucking fucks!” he screams at the camera.

They haven’t had time to edit in the bleeps.

“Boom!” says Mandrake. “I love that shot. This one, too. This one is gold.” Soozy K’s official SHPD mug shot fills the screen. “You see that mascara running down her cheeks? The tracks of her tears. We’ll slug in the old Motown tune!”

“All right,” says Chief Baines. “That’s enough.”

Mandrake presses a button on a remote. The video stops.

The chief, who looks like a handsome TV anchorman back in the days when they all wore mustaches, plucks at his lip hair. He is not happy to be having this meeting.

“Just wanted to give you a preview of coming attractions,” says Mandrake. He’s a big, burly bear with a beer gut who wears a baseball cap with a prickly pear cactus stitched where the team logo should be. Sporting a white goatee, a purple velour tracksuit, high-end Nikes, and sproingy black-and-white eyebrows, I’m guessing he’s pushing sixty even if he dresses like he’s barely twenty.

“By the way,” says Mandrake, “have you boys seen the overnights?” He snaps open his sleek Italian leather briefcase to retrieve a sheaf of papers. I know it’s Italian leather because he told everybody it was, the last time we had one of these “Production Meetings.” I also know it cost eleven hundred bucks because it’s a Salvatore Ferragamo, which, I think, is a very rare breed of Italian cow.

“The overnights?” says Ceepak. “What are those?”

“The ratings! From last night’s show!” This from our mayor, Hugh Sinclair, who is a big booster of Fun House because, according to him and his crack team of economists (three kids from the high school math club interning at Borough Hall for advance placement college credits), having the TV show filming in Sea Haven is pumping bajillions of dollars into the local economy. I know the local liquor distributors are happy. The kids crammed into the rental house on Halibut Street have single-handedly doubled beer sales.

“Our numbers are through the roof!” says Mandrake.

Layla Shapiro, who is an associate producer on Fun House, rounds out the meeting. She’s sharp, funny, and smart. Back in June, she also helped me take down a nutjob toting a tactical shotgun, so I like her a lot more than anybody else associated with Fun House, which even straight-arrow Ceepak calls Dumb House when the chief’s not around.

“Boys,” says Mandrake, “‘Skee-Ball’ pulled in five point three million viewers last night. That’s two hundred percent higher than where we were for Episode Five last Thursday. After ET, TMZ, and Access Hollywood hyped the episode, everybody in America just had to tune in to see the local cop making his Miyagi moves.”

He does a quick “whoosh-whoosh” impersonation of Ceepak catching the flying wooden orb barehanded, adding in a sideways leg kick, because he works in reality TV, so that means he likes to take what really happened and punch it up a bit.

“Hey, Chief,” says Mayor Sinclair, “have you seen this?”

He pulls a