CONEY ISLAND IN JANUARY SUNSET CHILL

"The city could be nothing but a woman…

You know her tossed head in the auburn crowns of molting autumn foliage. Riverhead, and the park. You know the ripe curve of breast where the River Dix molds it with a flashing bolt of blue silk. Her navel winks at you from the harbor in Bethtown, and you have been intimate with the twin loins of Calm's Point and Majesta. She is a woman, and she is your woman, and in the fall she wears a perfume of mingled wood smoke and carbon dioxide, a musky, musty smell bred of her streets and of her machines and of her people.
You have known her fresh from sleep, clean and uncluttered. You have seen her naked streets, have heard the sullen murmur of the wind in the concrete canyons of Isola, have watched her come awake, alive, alive.

You have seen her dressed for work, and you have seen her dressed for play, and you have seen her sleek and smooth as a jungle panther at night, her coat glistening with the pinpoint jewels of reflected harbor light. You have known her sultry, and petulant, and loving and hating, and defiant, and meek, and cruel and unjust, and sweet, and poignant. You know all of her moods and all of her ways.

She is big and sprawling and dirty sometimes, and sometimes she shrieks in pain, and sometimes she moans in ecstasy.

But she could be nothing but a woman….

From Ed McBain/Evan Hunter's
87th Precinct Novel
THE MUGGER

Coney Island in winter. Empty streets, the crowds gone, the only vibrant color left on the Cyclone Rollercoaster, the Ferris Wheel, and the Parachute Jump, waiting for jumpers it will never have, yet beaconing in its bright magenta paint.

I stood on the open platform of West 8th Street in Brooklyn in January sunset chill.

You can forget this city can have wide sweeping sunsets.

The sky was pink cotton candy, shredded, wisps through shades of pastel blues, over the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the deserted Coney Island, waiting for resurrection in summer.

This is criminal.

This is the place that was called the 8th Wonder of the World before King Kong was.

This is the place where they built a hotel in the shape of huge elephant.

Really!

Trunk and all. There were rooms in the trunk.

I wondered if you had to pay extra to stay in the trunk and look out its windows.

There were rooms in the massive legs.

This is the place that had the Alpine Roller Coaster Ride, with the first air conditioners, blowing frigid gusts of icy wind at riders, to transport them to Switzerland in that brilliantly lit far edge of Brooklyn.

You can forget people came here from all over the world. Stars lunched at Lundy's. The restaurant keeps going bankrupt these days.

You want to get a glimpse of 1920s Coney Island, more than a glimpse, get hold of Harold Lloyd's beautiful film, SPEEDY.

Lloyd could afford to shoot on location at Coney Island.

And Yankee Stadium and with Babe Ruth.

And use Manhattan as a backdrop for one of the last horse drawn trolley cars, racing through the city streets, crashing into a steel girder near Washington Square Park.

For real.

Metal bent. Wheel flying. Horse twisted in terror!

Lloyd kept the unplanned, real crash in the film. Devised, on the spot, on location, how to get a wheel back on the horse drawn trolley. He used a sewer cover. Cartoons would rip the gag off for decades. Maybe even until today, the perpetrators not knowing where the original source material came from.

I've studied photos of all the electrical façade that shone for decades in night-time Coney Island.

Gone now.

Shades of gray expanse with the exception of the rides, the splash of exciting hues in the wintry quiet.

I stood in the cold wind. I saw the sunset. Colors smeared on the Atlantic Ocean surface, but no one would be fooled into thinking the water was warm.

It brought to my mind a memory of a summer a few years back. I'd driven a couple of women visiting from Oklahoma to Coney Island. Surf Avenue was completely closed, traffic was a night-mare. The short stout one was loud voiced and full of ideas without a clue to Brooklyn geography, and probably life in general. She was the type of person who revelled in bringing misery into other people's lives, from the safe backseat. Cottage cheese flesh and cottage cheese brains.

When we walked out onto Surf Avenue there was a parade in full swing.

Bare breasted women with Mermaid costumes played to the gathered sidewalk crowd.

On a side street, a lesbian photo shoot was going on, women pressed against each other, hands and lips caressing.

A huge guy, bald-headed, muscled body tattooed everywhere, strolled past us with a pale yellow Burmese Python wrapped about his neck and shoulders.

I had never seen anything like it in Brooklyn in all the years I'd been there.

For the women from Oklahoma, I suppose this was the mythical city they'd imagined.

I'd seen more exotic things in other cities, especially New Orleans, where I was almost arrested as a Pimp, but that's another story.

There's always another story. That's life.

I'd been in areas of the city at times you were warned not to be there, but I'd never seen this kind of display.

I strolled through Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and Hell's Kitchen at 2 am, 3am, finding finally places and people who understood the things I loved dearly, and why I loved them.

It's the early morn hours when you wake in bed, and all the haunts stalk you, all the things you did, or didn't do, come at you unrelentingly, refusing to let sleep or calm come to you.

The true terrors.

It was the annual Mermaid parade, the only time you might see a Mermaid eating a Nathan's hot dog, dripping relish onto her tits.

Now, the half naked Mermaids were gone.

I saw the dead Coney Island. I saw the remnants.

Turn the other way, and if you're lucky, for a moment, in the right spot, you can see the sun melting in golden glare on the far, high skyscraper windows of Manhattan.

And you truly, for an instant, will think it is the city of gold.

You see the dying sun flames brilliantly blinding your eye, reflected off 50 or 60 or more stories of glass.

You see the promise. You see the reasons people come here from everywhere.

You see the possibilities in that molten enticement, hot like sex, and there isn't a hint of the gray hardness, the downside, the paradoxes of this city.

They don't make it easy to live in Manhattan. You want to be here, you have to work for it, you have to fight to stay.

And every once in awhile, you'll get the molten promise.

Don

P.S. The world lost Evan Hunter in 2007. I can't imagine a year where I cannot read a new Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain novel. I miss him dearly. I miss his books dearly.

If you go to www.EdMcBain.com, look up Evan's piece on a writer's contract with the reader. It's one of the best pieces on what a writer owes to the reader you'll ever read.

And then get ahold of the 87th Precinct novels, or his Evan Hunter books, SONS, BUDDWING, PAPER DRAGON, and so many others.
Tell 'em Don sent you.

REPLIES

Craig Hamilton wrote:

Damn, you're brilliant!

Don replied:

Thanks, Craig! Nice words come from good people like you. Helps too on a morning where I learned I was somehow hacked. Huh? Michael's already written me how to get rid of the Hacker. Still don't know how it was possible for anyone to get the Password. Anyhow, I'm glad you enjoyed the piece on Coney Island. Getting back to Rainier and Denning, and Keaton and Scotch. Promise.

Michele St. Martin, Illustrator wrote:

This was lovely... and sad. Made me sort of melancholy. You're goooooooood!!!

Don replied:

Exactly how I felt, Michelle. Lovely...and sad. That's this city. But there's always the fire and heat, as in your current icon.


Michael Bair wrote:

Thanks for sharing some great writing with us Don..in a strange way this made me think of growing up in Washington, D.C...of going to HS in Georgetown..of how much I loved the city, the streets,the homes, the people, the smells..almost everything..I remember the last time visiting the place..and aching for it to be the way it was in my youth..but that time had past..instead of the drifting smell of flour from the canal warehouse..it was replaced with a street carny air from the shops that went up in the Reagan era..It also reminded me of a line I loved from one of your stories..about mourning one's youth..that idea stuck with me over the years whenever people spoke of times gone past..
it's alot of power in so basic an emotion..then again..today will be someone's yesterday..
so it all even outs in the end...thanks again for the great Blog, my friend.


Don replied:

Thank you, Michael. What a moving response. I wondered what you would think of it.
We both have been transplanted to Brooklyn, and your insight and humanity made me think this piece would resonate with you. The lines you write about, mourning one's youth, were I'm sure, me looking forward trying to capture a truth we all share. Recently, in talking with Tess Fowler, I'd gone over some of the Sabre material she was reading, to refamiliarize myself with what she would be experience, and saw lines that I'm sure were trying to remind me not to forget something vital, important. Something I'd forgotten, and probably would have to relearn.
I'm glad the lines stayed with you.
And thanks for being you, Michael.


Malcolm Deeley wrote:

I wonder if the real location of the molten promise isn't in our own hearts, Don.
I have never been to Coney Island, but I saw it alive in the 1930's in your Nathaniel Dusk story, and I felt that I visited its grave today, reading this piece. But if dead... torn down, neglected, left hollow...its strange vibrancy is certainly still alive the rare kind of remembrance a place can have, when it has left its mark in a fine writer's soul. You're right, the city is a myth and a tease, a harsh lover and a cruel one at times -- and in other moments, a place of transcendence. New York City perhaps more than any other. But echoes of the visions you described above, where people drift toward an edge of some sort to (perhaps) try and find something, rekindle something, be excited by something (even for the briefest instant), are everywhere around us. It's been years since I visited the town where I grew up (a suburb of Boston), and I remember a surprising depth of pain as I saw the movie theater where I watched old newsreels and film shorts was a hollow decaying shell...the soda fountain in Woolworth's where I would drink the best ice cream sodas while reading comics was gone. From that town as a boy I dreamed of cities and the fierce burning promises of life on the keenest edge. When I got to the cities, many weary eyes around me dreamed of the gentler pace of towns like the one I had left. That promise of sights and feelings still has a magnetic allure for me. I may never stand on a boardwalk and look out at a Coney Island sunset, but you took me there today. Among the memories of ragged mermaids with hot dogs from Nathan's, you keep faith with the
promise of the city of gold. With your words, with your heart.


Don replied:

I agree, Malcolm. The molten heart of things is not any one place. This piece wasn't about that, but the startling vision, which I have only seen twice, of Manhattan aglow, a view come upon startlingly quick and gone as quickly. So mythically powerful, you'd believe it was a CGI effect if you saw it in a film. I suspect I was prompted to write this as much as wanting to include a quote from Evan Hunter/Ed McBain. Those opening paragraphs were from his 2nd 87th Precinct novel. His 2nd!
In recent times, Dean Mullaney called to tell me he'd just read a much later 87th Precinct entitled SEE THEM DIE. He said he couldn't help but think of me as he read it. "This book must have really connected with you!" It opens with paragraphs about Spanish Harlem on a Sunday morning.
And ends with the sentence: "Two people will die on this street today." Dean was right; the book did.
My Mom told me (again, not too long ago) she never suspected I would move to the city. I knew this city, not geographically, I didn't even understand up from down, but I knew its emotional content because of Evan. His novel, BUDDWING, which is about a man waking up one morning in Central Park, and not knowing who he is, and following his efforts for one day, for 24 hours, to learn who he is, is one of the great New York City novels. It's also one of the great search for individual identity books. It's one day, or an entire life, between the covers of a book, however one wants to interpret it.
Anyways, here's the deal: You ever come to New York, you stay with me, and I'll take you to Coney Island, give you personal tour. Not that I'm expert, far from it. Lot of stories about filming on the Boardwalk in that area, when I wrote/directed DETECTIVES INC.: A TERROR OF DYING DREAMS. Maybe some day I'll write in detail about them. I'd love to read any comments on the TRAILER for the film, so any of you out there who view it, please drop a line or two. I spent two years of my life directing it, more years editing it with Chris Clements. I had nothing to do with the trailer, though, that was all Paul Scrabo, putting it together for me without my knowing, but including the DETECTIVES INC THEME SONG, and clips I'd never have thought of a way to include. Anyhow, beyond Coney Island, I'll take you on a non-tourist view of Manhattan. Just don't make it when Craig Hamilton and I are doing the photo shoot for every location in the new DETECTIVES INC. script I'm writing: A FEAR OF PERVERSE PHOTOS/A REPERCUSSION OF VIOLENT REPRISAL.
Other than that, we're on!


Lauren wrote:

Well dad I know this took me forever to come here and read this. Sometimes life just gets in the way of things you want to do. I'm so glad that tonight after talking with you, and the thought clear in my mind to go over here and read it, that I did!!! It is a beautiful , vivid, piece of writting! As I read it, I could see the sunset as if I was standing next to you on that lonely boardwalk in the cold wind of winter. You really captured my imagination.
It was so nice to talk to you tonight and combined with that and reading this I just really wish that I could see you right now! I really really miss you like gangbusters!
You are an unbelievable writer, it is breathtaking to know that someone that can write with such power and passion is my dad. You always amaze me with your stories. From the time I was a little girl to the present!


Don replied:

Honey, I'm answering you with blurry vision, through tears in my eyes.

I have written this before.
I will write it again.
I have said it many times.
I cannot imagine my world without you in it.

As I wrote on your site,
You're my Harry Houdini,
My Wolfie Mozart
My cutie-kins,
and so many other names.

I remember watching
stories with you in the 70s.
PETER PAN and
I SPY and its wonderfulness and
77 SUNSET STRIP on 16MM,
sitting together on a bright orange
bean-bag chair.
This was before VCRs.
You would go around school
singing the themesong to
77 SUNSET STRIP, and I
wondered what the teachers
thought. How does this little
girl know a themesong to
a television series long before
her time.

I still remember the end of summer,
when you were a little girl,
6 and 7 and 8 and older
and we'd sit around the campfire,
and I'd tell one last story in the night,
one last story for the year probably,
because then you would be gone.

And when you were older
and wanted me to tell more stories.
How could those stories match what you
remembered?

I recall telling you and Scotty stories
in the car, as we drove. You and
Scotty were always in the stories.
One dark night, as we drove on that
darkened country road
that lead to and from a place
we both loved,
I told you both a story of
a Vampiress flying in the woods,
very like the dark trees we were passing
following a car
much like the one we were in
on a lightless hilly two-lane
blacktop.
And Scotty was about 11.
And you were maybe 6.
And the Vampiress was coming through
the gnarled trees.
Coming toward the car.
And the tire blew out!

I knew I could get away doing this on
that deserted road.
I slammed the brakes on, and the
tires screeched.
The car slewed slightly.
And you started screaming.
Loudly.
I'd told the story too effectively.
I pulled to a stop, and kept telling you,
"It's just a story. There's no Vampiress.
She's not going to get you or Scotty."
Scotty just wanted me to keep telling
the story.
See people are going to read this and
think, Oh, Man, that's terrible, Don should
not have done that.
But you always asked for more stories.
So, I recall this one.
I suspect you remember it, too.
But not as well as the one about the
Creature in the lake.
I was really cooking that night.
Wish I could recall what I made up
and voiced in the firelit dark.

How could I not be inspired to tell
the best story I could on that last
night to you.
To my daughter.
Love,
Dad