Call Me Brooklyn

by Lago, Eduardo

  Going back to Coney Island after so many years has filled me with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. I asked Nadia to come with me to get some copies of my grandfather’s articles that Ben kept in his Archive. On reading them, I am Iacchus again, the boy who explored a world of fantasy holding his grandfather’s hand, and although I still see David as I saw him then, the adult that I have become feels closer to him as a man. Above all, I’ve discovered the writer in him.

  My relationship with Coney Island has changed, and not just because of Nadia. Everything is different, the people, the streets, and—maybe more than anything—the light. In the old days, we would always go there in the summer. Now it’s winter. There’s very little going on, and besides, the days are very short and silent. In the morning, I walk Nadia to the subway and stroll through the streets of Brighton Beach, then go to a coffee shop and sit down to read and write.

  We sleep late when Nadia doesn’t have to go to Juilliard, and if the weather is nice enough, I take her to the places I discovered with my grandfather in the old days. I like watching her as she reads David’s articles. Very often, once she finishes reading one, I pick it up and read it myself, trying to imagine what she had felt:

  Coney Island looks out at the sea from a long, meandering boardwalk made of solid wood planks. The beach is a wide strip of fine white sand—one single beach, even though the signs give the successive stretches different names: to the east, Manhattan Beach; in the middle, Brighton Beach; and to the west, Coney Island Beach. From time immemorial, ships were not considered to have arrived at the New York harbor until they reached Sea Gate. Sitting on one side of the bay, Coney Island kept a restless eye on the ocean like an ancient city-state. It is a relatively small peninsula: half a mile wide by two and half miles long. Two sandbars protect the shores from the pounding of the sea. When the explorer Henry Hudson arrived at what would become New York City aboard the Half Moon, the ship landed on the shores of Coney Island. There are at least two competing theories about the origin of the name of this place that was once nothing more than sand and marine soil, and each relates to a different animal totem. One of these popular theories attributes the name to a tribe of Indians who lived on the island: a subset of the local tribe that the Europeans incorrectly dubbed the “Canarsie” (after their own word for their home territory, it’s said): these early islanders were supposedly known as the Konoi, or “Bear Band.” The second and more familiar etymology, these days, goes back to a word in the language of the first European inhabitants of the area: konijnen, which is Dutch for “rabbits.”

  David’s stories are no less powerful for me printed as when I heard them spoken. Yesterday, I came across an article that took me back to one of our first trips. My grandfather had asked me to write down the name of all the avenues that we crossed on our way. One day, reaching a corner, I spotted a street sign that read:

  NAUTILUS AVENUE

  Captain Nemo’s ship! I shouted, thrilled. My grandfather stopped, smiled, and patted my head. A detail like that was all he needed to set off a new story:

  Open Letter to My Grandson, Iacchus

  Dear Iacchus,

  The nautilus belongs to the family of mollusks, along with clams and oysters; the difference is that they have very elaborate shells and, above all, Iacchus, that they are a very rare species. Their natural habitat is the southern seas, the Indian Ocean especially, and to a lesser extent the Pacific. The nautilus lives inside a spiral-shaped shell divided into chambers, and whose walls are coated with mother-of-pearl. Of special note is a creature known as the “paper nautilus,” which belongs to the genus of Argonauta. While they aren’t nautiluses, properly speaking, there is a great resemblance between the creatures, particularly the females, who secrete a paper-thin shell used to hold its eggs (a nuptial chamber, if you will). I surmise that you don’t know where the name “Argonaut” comes from. It goes back, like so many things, to Greek mythology. The myth—though this is not the place to go into detail—concerns the story of the sea voyage of the heroic Jason in search of the coveted Golden Fleece. One day I will tell it to you. But, regardless, the nautiluses and their cousins are travelers—not only above the waves, like Jason’s ship the Argo, but through the deepest chasms of the ocean. So it’s no coincidence that Jules Verne would choose that name—which is, indeed, very beautiful—for the submarine in which your beloved Captain Nemo traveled his twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

  One of the places I was most eager to see again was Cooper’s Corner. I went there without Nadia. I was afraid that I would find the place completely different or even leveled. My grandfather was always perfectly aware that it was impossible for us to set foot on Coney Island and not stop there. It was and is difficult to imagine its like—the heaps and piles of toys, comic books, marbles, candy, trinkets, and just about any other thing you could conceive of that might take a child’s fancy. And nothing had changed. Just as it had been back then, there was a noisy conglomeration of kids in the shop, all of them busy trying to load their arms with as many treasures as possible. I remembered a day at Cooper’s Corner when, busy trying to decide on what I wanted David to buy for me (I was only allowed one goodie per visit), he came up to me with a luminous yo-yo in the shape of a mermaid. He said that the mermaid was the symbol of the island, and told me to look around and note all the pictures of mermaids everywhere when we went back out. The yo-yo wouldn’t make it out of the store (a comic book won out), but I saw that my grandfather had been right. Coney Island was swarming with mermaids: they were painted, sculpted, drawn, made of plastic, wood, and neon; in bars, store windows, ads, and decorating the amusement parks. The yo-yo had given him the idea for the topic of his next article. During our reconnaissance strolls, if he found a striking detail, he pulled out a journal he carried in his pocket and took note of it. When he thought that he had enough material collected, he took me to Dalton’s, the beer garden on Surf Avenue. Seated on the terrace, with a mug of beer in front of him, he asked me:

  Do you know where mermaids come from?

  I invited Nadia to come with me to Dalton’s. I’d never been by there during the off-season. The windows were closed and the terrace and the garden—from which there was a good view of the ocean—were deserted. I imagined the sea crowded with mermaids. I had told David, that day, that I didn’t know where mermaids came from, and asked him in what part of the world—if nautiluses lived in the southern seas, as he had said—we could find one. He came out of the web of his thoughts for a moment, gave me an odd look, and said:

  Don’t be silly, there’s no such thing.

  Which was a bit confusing, at the time—after all, his stories were full of cyclopes, centaurs, Amazons, chimeras, harpies, gorgons, and other such fantastic beings. The catalog was endless, really. Was he telling me now that I would never be able to see a mermaid or a nautilus or any of those other creatures firsthand?

  With a hint of a smile, he told me that it depended. Nautiluses, for example, did exist. To a certain extent you could also say that about Amazons . . . At least they had existed, in the distant past, and then the popular imagination had transformed them into fabulous beings. Mermaids were a borderline case. That is, there was a species of aquatic animal, the manatees, which looked a lot—well, more or less: from a distance, anyway—like women with fish tails, and they were the origin of the legend; but as far as actual women with actual fish tails living in the sea . . . well, no. As for centaurs, chimeras, and all the rest, there’s nothing to them. Completely imaginary. They’ve never really existed.

  We were seated at one of the garden tables. The waitresses were dressed as Valkyries, sang in German, and did everything they could to keep the customers drinking. That was the afternoon, come to think of it, when my grandfather gave me the nickname Iacchus—which he only used when we were alone. As always, he had ordered what was considered at Dalton’s a small mug of beer, although I thought it was huge (later I would find out that the “small” was a full liter). Usually
, when I finished my soda, he allowed me to wet my lips with some beer—no more than that—which delighted me. What I’d never seen David do, however, no matter how much they insisted, was allow the Valkyries to serve him a second mug. That day, I’m not sure why, his will weakened. He drank half of his second mug easily enough, but afterward he found it hard to keep going. On that day, he let me take as many sips as I liked. I realized that he was somewhat drunk when, after taking a last, long sip from the mug, he set it in front of me and challenged me to finish it. He was thrilled when I stood, picked up the mug, and drank down the inch or two of beer that remained. Tittering with joy, he patted me on my shoulder, put two fingers on my forehead as if he were anointing me, and in a hesitant voice declaimed:

  Son of the god of wine, from this day on you will be known as Iacchus.

  Among the hundreds of index cards kept in the Archive, I found one that read:

  Iacchus—One of the epithets of Dionysus. It was at once a name and a ritual cry to greet the child-god during the mysteries of Eleusis. Iacchus and Bacchus were avatars of the same deity, although in other versions of the myth Bacchus is considered to be distinct from Dionysus. Iacchus was the son of Persephone: a peculiar child, who laughed ominously in the womb of his mother.

  David wrote about so many things—far more than seem to have wound up preserved in the Archive. I wonder what’s happened to all that material. For instance, I can’t find any written record of all our visits to the public library on Mermaid Avenue (where Cooper’s Corner was), nor of our visits to the archives of the Brooklyn Daily and the Coney Island Times, the two newspapers in the neighborhood. I also can’t find any reference to the Miss Brooklyn contests that used to take place every summer at the Atlantis Club, organized by the Brooklyn Eagle. And who knows what other things I myself might be forgetting, or only remembering partly. I keep taking Nadia to places that were once important to me, but when we get there, as often as not, instead of the corner treasured by my memory, we find ourselves facing an apartment building, a supermarket, or a bank. Holding her hand, I point at them and tell her about what had stood there before.

  It also happens that the past sometimes returns without my searching for it. Last night, walking around with Nadia, I heard a laugh that hadn’t changed one jot with the passing of the years. The Tunnel of Laffs, I exclaimed, pointing to the entrance of one of the few attractions that was open all year long, and told her about the first time I had gone in there with my grandfather. The amplified guffaws of the automatons ricocheted off the vault and the walls of the tunnel. A faint light passed through one of the skylights, barely allowing me to make out the silhouettes of the creatures that emitted such sinister laughter. We had been riding on a train for a few minutes when out of the darkness popped a clown wearing a black polka-dotted suit and a cone-shaped hat studded with stars. He was moving toward us on the tracks, taking fitful steps that made his metallic joints screech. When our car reached it, the dummy let out a hair-raising scream. I thought we had run over it, but after a few minutes of silence, its gloomy laughter returned with renewed force, repeating the same never-ending cadence with the same inflections. I grabbed Nadia’s arm tightly, getting goose bumps from the mere echo of something that had terrified me so long ago.

  That summer I made an important discovery. It was a while before it made sense. A series of isolated episodes gradually revealed to me what it was all about. One day at dusk, watching from a hilltop, we saw a long line of couples on a dock, waiting to board boats bound for a rock in the middle of an artificial lake. After the last one was launched, a tunnel of green canvas unfurled over the row of boats, hiding the lovers from view. The Tunnel of Love, David remarked when the couples disappeared, and he told me that when he was a young man, there had been a replica of the Moulin Rouge at Coney Island—a famous cabaret in Paris, he explained. (Well, his exact words were “It was a Temple of the Flesh.”) You’re too young to understand these things, he said, and we left our lookout.

  He wasn’t entirely right. I hadn’t told him, but I was already learning the nature of that lingering anxiety which sometimes took hold of me. On the basis of what I had seen, what I had heard grownups talk about, and what I had read in books, one day I realized that I had fallen in love. I wasn’t expecting it, and I kept it to myself—not a word to anyone, not even to my grandfather. I knew enough to be embarrassed by what had happened: I was all of ten years old and had no precise notion of sexual desire, although more than once I had seen what some couples did underneath the boardwalk.

  Many an afternoon we passed by a booth with a miniature racetrack. Small crowds gathered to watch and bet on the horses. My grandfather and I usually kept on walking, but one day he asked me if I wanted to play and I said yes. As the barker urged onlookers to lay down their bets, I noticed a very special mannequin nearby. She was life-size, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and very white skin; she wore a short light green skirt and high heels and seemed to have been designed to look about eighteen. It was a mechanical doll. Her movements were very limited: smiling, moving her eyes left and right, and once in a while lowering her arms to adjust her skirt. As soon as a race started, she stood stock-still. Everyone aside from me kept their eyes on the horses, while I stood staring at that blonde mechanical doll. We left as soon as the race was over, but for the rest of the afternoon I couldn’t keep the mannequin out of my mind.

  Because of me, stopping at the booth became a ritual for us. Although we didn’t bet, I always insisted on staying for at least one race, and David always complied. As he watched the horses, I stared at the mannequin with the green skirt, lost in the contemplation of her figure, the outline of her arms and legs, her eyes and lips, all of her features, sketched to be sure, but which I found utterly exquisite. My grandfather never caught on as to why I was so eager to go to that booth, nor did he realize that it wasn’t the races I was interested in. I myself didn’t quite understand what was happening to me. It was simply enough to watch her, if only for the few minutes of the race. The mannequin didn’t have a name, and once we went home, it shifted into the background of my feelings, although lingering traces of her remained despite my best efforts. Some nights, I even had what you’d have to call amorous fantasies about the mechanical doll, innocent and vague, but still full of longing. My love story only lasted a few weeks. When the summer ended and we stopped going to Coney Island, the feeling began to dim until it disappeared completely. Fall and winter passed, and during that time the mechanical doll came to mind infrequently at best, and when it did I thought of it no differently than I did the other summertime attractions. Nevertheless, when we returned to Coney Island the following year, the first thing I did was drag my grandfather to the booth with the miniature racetrack.

  Everything was the same. The barker in his derby hat and black suspenders shouted out the bets in the same gravelly voice as the summer before. The horses were the same and the pretty toy jockeys mounted on them hadn’t aged. The background scenery had the same motifs, painted in the same colors. The only thing missing was her, the mannequin without a name. On top of the old pedestal (a truncated cone, speckled with stars) they had placed an effigy of Sherlock Holmes.

  In the articles that he wrote during that second summer, David explored the world of action, the craziness of the bowling alleys, the shooting arcades, rides like the Whip, barrels, and Ferris wheels. As was only proper, he reserved a very special place for the roller coasters, going over their history. He gave precise details of the ones that had been taken down—a long, sad list. Past or present, no two were alike in origin, height, speed, and length. In one article, he listed their given names with all the gravity of an epic poem. He also made me repeat their names till I knew them by heart: Tornado, Thunderbolt, Cyclone, Jumbo Jet, Wild Mouse, Bobsled . . . His favorite one was the Tornado and mine was the Cyclone. The day Nadia and I rode it, the Cyclone had just reopened in Astroland—the last great amusement park of Coney Island.

  The Cyclone and the P
arachute Jump were naturally paired off, iconically—the latter the most dangerous of all the attractions on Coney Island. They weren’t too far from each other, so photographers were always looking for angles from which they could capture the two great symbols of the island in one shot:

  The first thing you see when you approach Coney Island by land, air, or sea is the Parachute Jump. Its silhouette is reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower, although it also looks something like an oil rig, and then, because of its metallic petals, something like a mushroom cloud as well. From the wide art deco base an iron stem rises, gets narrower as it rises toward the sky, and on reaching its maximum height opens out into twelve curved projections. A carefully folded silk parachute is hooked up to each. Designed in the thirties for the Air Force, it was the last test the recruits were meant to take before parachuting out of an aircraft in flight. Transferred to New York for the World’s Fair (1939–1940), it was dismantled thereafter and installed permanently at Coney Island, where it occupies a privileged spot. Here’s how it works: riders sit on canvas seats at the base of the tower, each of which is fitted with a large, closed parachute; they are lifted up by six guide cables, and when they reach the top of the tower, a lever is tripped sending the riders into free fall. After a few seconds, a white and orange parachute mushrooms into the air. Descent is further slowed by the tension in the cables. Although there is a whole system of shock absorbers built into the platform below, they say the landing is almost as rough as the real thing. It’s a dangerous attraction, and naturally such a system invites all sorts of mishaps. It’s not unusual for the cloth of a parachute to become tangled in the metal frame, leaving customers violently lurching in midair until attendants can climb up and free them. The rescuers are in almost as much danger as the parachutists, and because all this is conducted in plain sight of the public, one can only wonder that so many people are still interested in having a try themselves . . .