2013 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize
Finalist
“Greetings
From Coney Island”
by
Daniel Penny
You have never seen a crowd until
you’ve been to Coney Island. You may have had to squeeze into a piss-soaked
subway car or wedge yourself into the corner of a once hip, now over-hyped bar,
but those hardly count as crowds. You will find the real crowds at Coney
Island, where sweaty New Yorkers go to take off their clothes and eat hot dogs.
They bake in the sun and their vomit bakes in the sun. If this city is a body,
the boardwalk is that strip of hairy skin right before the thigh becomes
groin—smelling of sex, good for a tickle. Hot and revolting and infinitely
mesmerizing.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Coney
Island’s history has been one of so-called “mass spectacle,” when trams,
trains, ferries, and finally the Brooklyn Bridge connected the mobs in
Manhattan to the once remote island off the southern edge of Brooklyn. An early
resort getaway and even proposed nature preserve for the weary bourgeoisie,
Coney Island soon became overrun with what cultural critics like Lindsay
Denison[1]
called, “human flotsam and jetsam.” According to members of the old guard like
Denison, the Island had been invaded by “every defaulting cashier, every
eloping couple, every man or woman harboring suicidal intent.” In spite of
Denison’s protests, the human tide came unrelenting, unperturbed, softening the
once rigid upper-middle-class foundations that had supported the great
Victorian hotels like The Oriental and the Brighton. Owners of the Brighton
actually moved the hotel five-hundred feet back from the waterfront in 1888.
They jacked the six-thousand ton structure onto one hundred and twenty railway
cars without breaking a single pane of glass. Though the Brighton managed to
flee the physical erosion of the beach and reopen for the season by June 29th,
its doors and windows were shuttered within a few short years, never to reopen.
The new “Sunday vacationers” weren’t
staying in the fancy hotels. They wanted cheap thrills like “The Tickler” and
fantasy worlds like Luna Park’s “Trip to the Moon”: replete with three
astronomically-themed chambers, thirty dancing “Moon Maidens,” twenty giants,
and sixty “Lilliputians.” By the time Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton filmed
their rollocking 1917 “Coney Island,” the once serene strand had become
unrecognizable to its former summer residents, who remembered when beach-goers
required a private carriage and hotel reservations to reach the Island. With
the expansion of public transit, visitors needed only a nickel. So the moneyed
chose to summer elsewhere, picking up their beach blankets and spreading them
in the Hamptons, Montauk, and Shelter Island while the hoi polloi trundled
across the blistering brown sand: dogs, kids, and towels trailing behind.
Good -bye My Con -ey Is -land Ba
-by, Fare -well my own true love.
I’m gon -na go a -way and leave
you. Nev -er to see you an -y -more.
I’m goin’ to sail up -on a fer -ry
boat, Nev -er to re -turn a -gain.
So good
-bye, fare -well, so long for ev -er,
Good -bye
My Con -ey Isle, Good -bye My Con -ey Isle,
Good -bye
My Con -ey Is -land Babe.
My grandfather
grew up in another Brooklyn—before the McKlarens and golden-doodles and
artisanal mayonnaise shops—when Brooklynites had undesirable accents and
pronounced “certainly,” Soy-tan-ly.[2]
A greaser hood in the making, my grandfather began sneaking cigarettes in the
alley next to his house by the age of ten. At thirteen, he swaggered down the
boardwalk, found a hole in the wall shop, rolled up his sleeve, and got his
name, “Bill,” needled into his upper shoulder. He had the tattoo sit high on
the arm so he could hide it from his mother, a strict woman who supposedly
spent Mondays through Saturdays cleaning houses and Sundays in church. Freshly
inked, he sauntered through the front door of his Bleecker street apartment in
what is now Bushwick with a teenage grin that can mean only a few things, none
of them good. A sudden bolt of pain galloped down his shoulder—his mother’s
calloused fist connecting with his new tattoo, turning his arm to carpaccio. He
howled and cursed, not quite the Cagney he’d imagined himself to be, but when
the purples and yellows withdrew from his pale flesh, the graceful black
letters remained intact, unsmudgable.
Among the galleries of bloody corpses
and tenement infernos featured in “Murder is My Business” an exhibition at the
International Center of Photography, I stumbled upon a room filled with gauzy
photographs of a faded Coney Island. Arthur Felig, or Weegee, is best known for
his pulpy, flash-bulb images of crime scenes, leering onlookers, and passed out
drunks—not smiling sun-bathers. On display until the end of the summer, these
comparatively placid images lead to a short color 16mm film documenting a
dreamy, oft-imagined, long gone Coney Island. It begins with Weegee’s camera
panning over the roiling crowd. Thousands of bodies shiny with sweat and baby
oil, naked children shrieking as the water laps at their heels, teenage girls
draped across their boyfriends, their skin glued together. An old man stalks
the wet sand with purposeful strides. Bare chicken legs sprout beneath his dark
suit jacket, pants folded across his arm, shoes and socks clutched to his
chest. A Jersey tomato splurts in the mouth of a bug-eyed boy. Sailors crowd
around accordions and radios, feathers of smoke weaving between limbs,
diffusing in the ocean breeze. Old, toothless women clap castanets and mug for the camera. A young couple awkwardly sways to
the music, the frame drifting down to the woman’s wiggling behind.
A girl reclines on a wrinkled blanket
surrounded by other beach-goers, her hands placed over spindly legs. She
flashes a coy smile at the photographer, a handsome young man with a cigarette
perched in the corner of his mouth. He puffs lightly as he searches for the
right focus, a Seagram’s sign blurring in the background, her slender limbs
sharpening. It is 1952. My grandmother is fifteen, my grandfather a wizened
seventeen. I wonder if they were among the thousands of “lovers” Weegee
captured on the beach, each pair pretending to be alone among a crowd of one
million. It is hard to imagine them this young—my grandmother’s nervous
flirting and popsicle-stick limbs, my grandfather’s tennis-ball biceps and
shock of swept back hair so similar to my own. For a quarter each, they rode
the cyclone as long as they could stand, whipping around turns in the last car,
plummeting sixty-four feet in the front, laughing at the queasy kids puking up
their neon jelly beans and fried dough. They stayed out watching the galaxies
of fireworks flare into existence and shimmer back to earth, whispering those
things teenagers whisper into each other’s ears, swaddled in the humid air and
the glow of dancing lights.
“Warriors,
come out to play!” intones Luther, the shaggy-haired villain and leader of
rival gang, the “Rogues.” His hand bends into a strange claw, an empty glass
bottle protruding from three fingers. He clinks them together in a steady,
menacing rhythm. “Warriors, come out to plaaaaaaaaay!” Luther’s voice is now an
animal screech, the bottles building to a crescendo. The bedraggled Warriors
prepare for the inevitable rumble. They tear detritus from the underside of the
boardwalk: pipes, a broken chair leg, a thin scrap of metal. They are tired,
and Coney Island is a forgotten shithole, barnacles clinging to ancient pylons
like hemorrhoids, but this weirdly multi-ethnic group of kids are prepared to
die for it. It is their turf.
The Mermaid Parade celebrated its 30th
anniversary this June, which makes the march down Surf Avenue ten years older
than I am. I imagine the event as a kind of older sister, a young-ish woman who
remembers a grittier, pre-Guliani New York. I had always meant to come as a
teenager, but somehow, the parade eluded me; camp or family functions always
standing in the way, blocking my view of what I’d often heard was a salacious
event. I hadn’t spent a summer in the city in years, so I was determined to
scratch the parade off my list of New York things I never did when I grew up
here.
Emerging from Stillwell Avenue into the
hot sun, my friends and I squirm into the throngs trying to sniff out a good
spot from which to view the procession. We wait for the bawdy marchers and pass
the time by watching the stretch of asphalt shimmer. Runny suntan lotion stings
our eyes, but no one complains. This will be fun, maybe even a little
debauched. First, the vintage cars roll by to
mixed review: Thunderbirds, Cadillacs, and the odd Grand Am. A Delorian coughs
along to great admiration and I remember that in a few days, Marty McFly
is slated to blast into 2012. The meme has been plastered all over Facebook for
weeks: a film-still of a digital clock indicating his imminent arrival, pithy
comments on our current lack of hover-boards usually tacked below. What did
Coney Island look like in 1985? A scene from Requiem for a Dream springs
to mind—the one where a wild-eyed Marlon Wayans sprints from the cops, his face
splattered with blood and bits of nameless organic matter.
A thin school of mermaids emerge from
behind the curtain of heat, waving to the crowds, tossing cheap plastic beads.
I expected glamorous blue eye-shadowed P-town drag queens, creatures with names
like Musty Chiffon and Thirsty Burlington, but instead find mostly tweens and
their scantily clad moms. A vaguely aquatic man hands out blow-up swords to the
cheering crowd and two separate hands grab for the same hilt. One belongs to an
elderly Asian man wearing a fishing hat, the other to a small child. The old
man attempts to wrestle the sword from the little boy’s grasp, his teeth
gritted, his eyes steely. The boy whimpers, clearly losing the battle until the
mer-person intervenes, yanking the sword from the man and handing it to the
little boy ceremoniously. The kid happily
whacks his sword on the fence as more cars trickle through, the whole parade seeming to stop for every red light though
the street has been closed for hours. The elderly man sulks. Every float sponsored by an alcoholic beverage elicits
great whoops and hollers from the visibly pregnant woman standing to my right.
A micro-brewery truck stops and she shouts for a man dressed as a pirate
to throw her a can. I stare at the
striations on her stomach, a combination of tan lines and stretch marks. It is
an ideal coaster.
A venerable tradition of sideboob and
overweight men with leopard print thongs dug deep into their ass-cracks, the
parade offers a glimpse of an Old Coney Island I can only half-remember, the
last refuge of freaks in their natural habitat, a kind preserve for the vulgar
and seedy. When I squint into the sun the right way, the electro-blasting PBR
float disappears, leaving only the unsanitized jiggling and rusted out egg
scramblers of a vestigial past fast losing ground to the present. My
grandfather may remember the bearded ladies, mule-faced boys, a Lynchian dwarf
who blew up the skirts of unsuspecting girls, but I have only the nadir to
misremember fondly. Chipped paint and crusty, crepuscular kids on the nod, hard
slats of light cutting across their slumped bodies in the penumbra of the
boardwalk. I tell myself there was a time when the Thunderbolt really rumbled
past Woody Allen’s bedroom window, a portal looking out onto pyramids of tan
backs and straining arms, carnival barkers waxing their mustaches, natty young
men wearing panama hats without a hint of irony. Luna Park, Steeplechase,
Dreamland: closed, sold off, or burnt to the ground. On Saturday, I arrived at
the Hot 97-sponsored Technicolor mess having missed the golden age and the bad
old days, left with only the familiar aqua and orange of Deno’s Wonder Wheel,
the red skeletal parachute jump, and the clockwork rattlings of the Cyclone.
We decided to take
the train the wrong way, not Manhattan-bound, but headed to the end of the
line. We travelled in a pack—too young to drink forties on a Friday afternoon,
but too old to come home for Oreos and Pokemon. We clanged through the subway
cars, swinging on the greasy poles, screaming as loud as we wanted; few
passengers bothered looking up from their books or their stupors. Three to four
p.m. is a special kind of corridor—no sharp-toned rebukes, school bells, or gym
whistles. More crimes occur in New York during this short hour than any other
time of the day. Ours were relatively minor: jumping the turnstile though we could pay the fare with our school-provided
Metrocards, hanging upside down from the steel tubes meant for tired grown-up
hands, our shirts pulled towards our chins, baby fat and new breasts drooping in unaccustomed directions.
Tiring of one car, the herd lumbered forward,
the bravest among us turning the heavy steel handle of the emergency exit door.
“Riding or moving between cars is prohibited,” the signs read. I remember
sliding the door open for the first time, how it seemed miraculous, like a
spaceship or a bulkhead. I must have taken a tenuous first step, but I can’t
picture it, only the crack between the cars yawning wide.
Little Odessa whistles past, flashes of
Cyrillic and whiffs of perogies. It is a short ride from Sheepshead Bay to
Stillwell Avenue, but between two subway cars, time stretches out elastic, its
white gummy strands clenched between teeth and fingers, loose threads stuck to
lips. My long hair flies in every direction and the train roars like some kind
of twisted chimera. The screaming wheels chug along mindlessly. I remember once
seeing a basketball chewed up under a passing train, rubbery shreds hardly
recognizable in its wake. Imagine a body. And then we are on the other side in
the next car playing it cool laughing loud feeling the dampness under our arms.
The march continues until we reach the first car, our faces pressed against the
foremost window. We watch the station devour us like a long rope of mozzarella
cheese.
We took the stairs two at a time or
slid down banisters on our butts, a mass of kids deposited onto Surf Avenue,
unsure of what to do or where to go next. We ruled out the aquarium—that was
for babies and would probably cost money. So we headed south, to the boardwalk,
to empty lots and shuttered arcades, their bleeps and bloops in hibernation,
waiting for the summer.
It is a cold,
glary March afternoon. The rides sit motionless, save the empty Wonder Wheel
cars. They lurch back and forth, the occasional gust of wind carrying their
creaks down to the boardwalk and sand below. The world is somewhere between
color and black and white, an amateurish attempt at faux-historicity, so flat,
so drained of blood. We take off our shoes and head towards the shore in an
effort to feel summery. A figure emerges from the white frothy surf, a ruddy
sausage squeezed into a bathing suit casing, his black chest hair matted into a
nest of curlycues. He is no merman.
With the wind, the air is thirty-five,
maybe forty degrees and the colorless sand numbs our bare feet. I look out
across the beach scanning for signs of life. We walk alone, save the masochist
swimmer now in the distance, the circling gulls, and an army of unused trash
cans. They are municipal, flimsy and naked, consisting of an open lattice of
metal bars, their lack of contents readily apparent. They wait for the crashing
waves of June garbage, but for now, remain empty. Each can a solitary guard,
mouth open, ready to swallow a half-eaten box of sandy cheese fries, the
jellyfish carcass of a used condom. Wrappers kaleidoscopic, juices bubbling in
the sun, the steaming barrels of garbage dot a shore so tightly packed with bodies they condense under the pressure—a single
undulating mass pressed between the boardwalk and the sea.
[1]
Rich white guys.
[2]
Much of what I know about Grandpa
Penny is second-hand, stories filtered through my father and uncle, but I had
always taken their versions of his life in pre-Moses Brooklyn for granted.
Definitive. When fact-checking this story, I found out that my grandfather had
actually gotten his tattoo on the Bowery, not on the Boardwalk, a detail
blurred over the years like the navy outlines of a mermaid’s breasts. My
Grandfather told me “It made a better story,” that I should stick with what my
dad had said and leave it at that. I now know that shortly after my grandfather
had gotten his tattoo, the unscrupulous tattoo artist’s protege, Brooklyn
Blackie, had moved to Coney Island. It turns out the cursive “Bill” is a famed
Charlie Wagner original, a mark from the man who invented the modern tattoo
gun. My ink-loving uncle still envies him because of it.
