Catch As Catch Can

by Joseph Heller

  Coney Island has a boardwalk that seemed to me the largest and most splendid boardwalk in the world. It has a beach that is long and wide and of very fine sand: one has to stumble in shock upon the rocky shore-fronts of Nice, Villefranche and Brighton, England—and realize that these also are called beaches—to begin to appreciate the beach at Coney Island as a geographical feature. And Coney Island had those long, paved streets that were better playgrounds for us than anything any recreation engineer has ever devised.

  The amusement area of Coney Island—that section containing the rides and the games, the food stands and penny ar cades—was of greatest interest to us in the cooler days of spring and late summer, or on hot days when someone would give us free passes to Luna Park or Steeplechase. Luna Park and Steeplechase were the only two true amusement parks; every other attraction was an individual enterprise. Stauch’s indoor arena was still standing, where championship prizefights had taken place and where marathon dance contests were then being conducted. And famous Feltman’s was still there, grand and garish in structure but dying of neglect now that Diamond Jim Brady and other celebrated patrons of the past were gone. We did not know of Feltman’s illustrious history, nor would we have cared. It served an inferior frankfurter, and that was all that mattered.

  We learned early that a boiled frankfurter is not as good as one cooked on a griddle, and that no frankfurter is as good as Nathan’s; that the Wonder Wheel was better than the Ferris Wheel but that both were for squares or for adults accompanying children who were squares; that the Cyclone was far and away the best of the roller coasters; and that it was futile to search anywhere in the world for a tastier potato knish than Shatzkin’s. This was useful knowledge that trained us to expect value for money. Later we came upon a different principle that trained us toward cynicism, the fact that it is often impossible to obtain fair value. We learned this from the barkers who offered to guess your weight, guess your age, guess your name or occupation, the part of the country you came from or the date you were born, guess anything at all about you for a dime, a quarter, a half-dollar or a dollar, because here was a setup where the customer could never win. Phrased more accurately, while the customer might win, the proprietor could never lose, for the prize at stake invariably cost him less than the customer spent to win it. But a kid could win a coconut for a penny at the penny-pitch game, make a hole through the shell with a hammer and nail to get at the milk, then smash the whole coconut into a dozen frag ments and distribute it liberally to everyone around. Today you can win a plastic comb or a paper American flag made in Japan.

  There was rivalry between Luna Park and Steeplechase. Luna Park had the Mile Sky Chaser and the Shoot the Chutes, which was a pretty good ride. The Mile Sky Chaser was the highest roller coaster on the island (God, it was tall!) and I approached it the first time (at the age of eight in a Cub Scout uniform, I recall) in the same frame of mind with which I suppose I shall eventually face death itself—with the conviction that if other people could go through it without harm, I could, too. As it turned out, the Mile Sky Chaser was a cinch. It soon, in fact, became a bore, for, though high, it was not nearly as fast or exciting as the Cyclone, the Thunderbolt or the Tornado; after experimenting a few times in the front seat, the back seat, the middle seat, we could anticipate every twist and joggle of the Mile Sky Chaser with our eyes closed (we often did take the whole ride with our eyes closed as an additional variation). The only excitement the Mile Sky Chaser provided us was the opportunity to demonstrate to awed strangers how casually we disdained its apparent terrors.

  Steeplechase, “the Funny Place,” was always cleaner and more sensibly organized, and much of it was under a roof, away from the sun. For 25 cents you bought a pink ticket that entitled you to 25 rides. For 50 cents you bought a blue ticket that allowed you on 31; the added six were the best ones there. The trick was to get inside any way you could and then ask well-dressed ladies and other people who were leaving for the remainder of their unpunched tickets. In this way, you could accumulate enough tickets to go on every ride as many times as you wished. But most were rather tame. Of the 31, you soon figured out that all but a few went around in a small circle in one kind of seat or another and, so, were really only modifications of each other. Luna Park seemed the better of the two areas. And Luna Park, of course, is now out of business. The most weirdly designed housing project I have ever seen stands in its place, so the spirit, at least, has managed to survive. Steeplechase has never looked better than it does today.

  Each year after Labor Day, the traditional end of the season at most resorts, there is a week of parades that are quaintly called “Mardi Gras.” If you hate parades as much as I do, you may love the Coney Island Mardi Gras, for it epitomizes everything about parades that is sordid, debased and synthetic. On the other hand, its purpose is more honorable than most: its purpose is profit, rather than anything demagogic. It is intended to draw crowds to the island for an extra week and keep business at a high volume.

  We would go to the Mardi Gras every evening, although it was always really the same parade. One might be called “Boy Scout Night,” another “Policemen’s Night,” another “Firemen’s Night,” and there would be heavier concentrations of these groups than the night before; but the floats were identical, the same monophonous brass and clarinet bands would go clumping by and there was always a goodly sprinkling of the ladies’ auxiliaries of things—whatever they are. (To this day, I don’t know what a ladies’ auxiliary is, since I have never made the acquaintance of a lady who is a member of one.) People would buy confetti from vendors with gunny sacks and fling it into the faces of strangers. We would scoop up the confetti from the filthy sidewalk and use it secondhand in the same way. On Saturday afternoon there would be an utterly fantastic procession called “the Baby Parade,” a spectacle, I believe, which has since been abolished by humane societies and which was too barbaric and grotesque even to contemplate in retrospect.

  One night I saw Mayor La Guardia at the Mardi Gras, and I am very glad I did, now that I can appreciate what an exceptional person he was. Nowadays it is standard campaign procedure for political candidates to come to Coney Island for a frankfurter and a smiling stroll on the boardwalk, introducing themselves to the populace. It really seems too much of a burden to impose on a neighborhood already afflicted with poverty. In past election years, we’ve had Wagner, Javits and Lefkowitz. One of the most vulgar sights in recent memory was a newspaper photograph of Nelson Rockefeller sinking his choppers into a hot dog. Even Henry Cabot Lodge has lent himself to the ritual, and one can only be amused by the inner repugnance he must have suffered as a result of his fastidious good taste, and hope some mustard dribbled down his sleeve. It is sufficient to have such men as public officials without having to endure their fellowship as well. None come because they like the place, and they would not walk through Coney Island smiling if they had to live there.

  The years of our childhood were the years of the Depression when there were few automobiles, and we could play in our wonderful streets almost without interruption. Best of all, they were right outside our doors and windows, and we could see in an instant what kids were already out and what kind of game was about to start. During the day, we usually played one sort of ball game or another, or hockey on roller skates; in the nighttime, after dinner, the streets were ideal for “tag” and “ring-aleavy-o,” “hide-and-seek” (which we called “hangoseek”) and “red rover, red rover, let Joey come over.”

  Possibly the most valuable resources we had as children were other children, great quantities of other children nearby to play with, enough children of all ages to organize any kind of activity and field any kind of team, even football. The streets were divided into segments by intersecting avenues, and each of these segments on every street contained enough children of all sizes to form a self-sufficient recreational community.

  This, then, was “the block,” a section of a street filled with all the companionship we needed, and ou
r interests were centered exclusively on our own. Our best friends in school might be classmates from other blocks; but outside of school we seldom saw them and never had anything to do with them unless it was to challenge their blocks to a game of punchball or hockey. When a family moved from one street to another, the children almost inevitably attempted to maintain their affiliation with the old block and resisted assimilation into the new. Occasionally, two blocks would decide to have a fight; when that happened, we would mass our respective forces a safe distance apart, throw small stones at each other for a few minutes, and then depart and return to our customary diversions without antagonism, which probably had not even existed in the first place.

  I suppose it was the beach that exerted the strongest influence on our activities. In autumn we played football there, which meant we were spoiled and tenderized by the soft sand and unfit for the game when the time came to play on hard terrain. (I take pride in the fact that not a single one of the fellows I grew up with ever amounted to anything as an athlete. It is also to our credit, I feel, that no one I knew in Coney Island ever attended a freak show or voted for Herbert Hoover.) Our favorite team sports were punchball, which was played with a rubber ball and is not too dissimilar to baseball, hockey, football and association, a game that is played in the street with a football and requires more dignity and technical skill than touch football.

  There was a rhythm to our sequence of games that was both seasonal and instinctive. One day in spring the sun would come out, and suddenly kids on every block were punching grounders at each other, and the punchball season was on. There would come a certain moment after Labor Day when every boy would know that the summer had really drawn to a close and that it was time to start throwing footballs. The same was true of hockey; all over the island, on almost the same day and on every block, the footballs would vanish from the air and the grinding of roller skates would be heard in the land. In the summer, of course, there was the beach and swimming. Even at night the streets were much too busy for games, and we roamed the board-walk for hours watching the gaudy, colorful world of grownups enviously, until our older brothers or sisters were sent searching to find us amid the strolling crowds and drag us home to sleep.

  Considering how little we were watched and the late hours we kept and the vast influx of strangers into the island every summer, it is surprising how little harm befell us. There were few crimes or serious accidents in our neighborhood. I can’t, for example, recall a single murder in Coney Island up until the time I left there to enter the Army at the age of nineteen. (Since the War, there have been two killings that I know of, both involving people mixed up in bookmaking and Shylocking.) I was never made aware of a single incident of rape or child molestation. Occasionally, one of my friends would be hit by a car and suffer a broken leg. One summer, when I was just into my teens, a young boy in my building was drowned. I knew his sister, and before a week had passed, he was almost forgotten. Before the summer was over, like that lovely, doomed girl in Antonioni’s incomparable L’Avventura, it was as though he had never existed at all.

  One year I was almost killed reaching persistently for a kite that had caught on a radio wire strung just out of reach beyond the low parapet on the roof of our apartment house—while my mother stood chatting with the neighbors on the sidewalk far below. (What a sight that would have been!) I was almost killed one night when I wouldn’t come upstairs after I was called, and my brother Lee was sent down to get me. I was a swifter and trickier runner, and I led him a mischievous chase back and forth across the street. It ended with both of us stretched out against the bumper of an automobile that screeched to a stop just in time. I was almost killed, I think now, every time we played tag in the empty bathhouses and I leaped from the top of one row of lockers to the top of another. And I know I was almost killed every time I swam out to the bell buoy, even though nothing perilous ever happened to me.

  The summer would begin officially, I suppose, on that day in late June we called “promotion,” when we would come running home on that last day of school, waving our final report cards and shouting to everyone we knew that we had been promoted. By that time, though, we were already brown enough from the sun to be the envy of every pale adult, for we would have been swimming in the ocean and romping around in our bathing suits for over a month. The Coney Island beach, then as now, was packed inhumanely on Saturdays and Sundays, but that never bothered us as children, for we never looked for a place to sit. Instead, we were always in and out of the water, jumping off the wooden jetty or skipping nimbly out to the end of the breakwater of mossy rocks to rest or watch the strange adults who fished for hours and who never caught a damned thing.

  It seems, now that I look back, that there was an inordinate number of young men who played the ukulele or guitar in those days. The sand burgeoned with them, and it was there at Coney Island, surrounded by the stout mothers with their thermos bottles and the men from the old country playing pinochle or klabaitsch, that I first heard songs like “Red River Valley.” Today, I suppose, there are transistor radios and people Twisting. There were also a great many impromptu acrobats. I think I would go goggle-eyed today if I saw a man bend over and stand up on his hands. But then, anytime you looked, there were always at least two or three people walking around on their hands. God knows why! I don’t know where these people have gone or what has become of them, and I don’t care. I have not seen a per son at a beach stand on his hands in years, and I hope I never see one again.

  We learned to swim in shallow water by the age of seven or eight. The waves at Coney Island are seldom high, since the beach is shielded in part by the Rockaways and Sandy Hook and is not really exposed to the open ocean. From the day we discovered we could keep afloat for more than a stroke or two, we began preparing ourselves for the swim to “the third pole.” This was not really to a pole, but to the heavy rope marking the outermost limit of the protected swimming area. The distance from the first pole, at the shore, to the third pole was perhaps no more than forty yards. At low tide we could walk more than halfway. But the day we did get to the third pole for the first time—no matter how—was a day on which we had accomplished a noble and heroic feat. To be able to swim there and back regularly was to possess definite status in the young masculine community. After that, the only sea challenge left was the bright red bell buoy, ringing and rocking back and forth endlessly on the water almost half a mile out.

  It was not an especially dangerous swim, but I would not attempt it now for a million dollars. There was really no way to ease up toward it. A day would simply come when we felt we could make it, and we would just tag along with a group of other boys who had been to the bell buoy before and survived. Courageous as we were, and young, we were nevertheless too cowardly and too mature ever to try it alone. Harbor poles leaning left or right in the barely visible distance would tell us which way the ocean was flowing, and we would move up or down the beach three or four blocks so that the tide would carry us toward, rather than away from, the small, floating buoy that was our destination. The tide was usually very powerful that far out; and if we had ever miscalculated and missed the bell buoy, I think we would have drowned. We were only ten or twelve years old, and not nearly strong enough to make the trip out there and back without a substantial rest.

  First, we would swim directly to the third pole and pause to replenish what little energy we had spent. Then we would start swimming straight out leisurely, doing the dog paddle mostly and a comfortable side stroke. We would talk a great deal as we swam—I forget about what—and gradually the bell buoy would come closer. It was not a strenuous challenge, really; it was more a matter of patience. You simply kept paddling and talking calmly, and, after a while, you were nearly there. The only moments of fear might come when you looked back at the dwindling and miniaturized shore and realized—if you had an imagination like mine—how far away help was. (Today, the mere memory of that sight is enough to make my blood run cold.) But, of course, help of a
sort was always near in the friends we were swimming with. And all the while, the tide was carrying us closer. When we were fifteen or twenty yards away, we would turn over impatiently into the Australian crawl and swim the rest of the way as rapidly as we could. And when we arrived finally, we would haul ourselves aboard and clang that bell triumphantly.

  The swim back never had that keen anticipation of danger that is often exquisite to a young boy taking a chance, mainly, I suppose, because each minute afloat brought us closer to safety. And this time our objective was a few miles of beach that would have been impossible to miss. One time, though, in a group of four, one boy tired suddenly and exclaimed that he did not think he could make it back. Without panic or a sense of danger, each of us simply took hold of a piece of him and towed him gently in, close enough to the rope at the third pole for him to go the rest of the way alone. I don’t think any of us had an awareness then that we had just saved his life. Seven years later, he was killed in Italy by an artillery shell. His name was Irving Kaiser, and his death is more saddening to me now than at the time it occurred.

  Puberty and World War II, in that sequence, produced explosive changes in our attitudes, responses and social groupings, and so did moving on to our high school, which was in Flatbush, miles away from Coney Island. For the first time, we found ourselves associating with people from other parts of the world, even if they were only from other parts of Brooklyn. A year’s difference in age no longer meant merely a difference in class levels, but a difference in schools, with different classmates for acquaintances, different loyalties and different interests and activities. Old relationships began to dissolve and new friendships formed. Boys from different streets organized into clubs that were as interested in girls as in athletics. To the dismay of those who were younger, the old ties of “the block” were melting away.