The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  And if Eliot Riley had seen Coney Island, what would he have thought of it? What would he have made of the madness? It was a question Cy returned to for some reason as often as he returned to work at the booth down the roads from Sheepshead Bay. As often as he saw the turrets and columns and big wheels and the Cyclone rollercoaster tracks rising against the sky, looking out of the train or trolley window as it moved down the Brighton Beach line. Maybe Riley was the centre-pin by which he judged all engineering and all ideas of craft and social reckoning now, having eclipsed his mother in that regard, he didn’t know. But the big man’s ghost seemingly could enter his head as effortlessly as water left the clouds over Morecambe and entered the sea, three thousand and more miles to the east. Cy’s memory could summon up a fingerless-gloved hand agitating the stubble of a chin, and a voluptuous mouth above it that was flatulent with corrupt and folkish philosophies, and judgments and jibes, faster than it could bring to mind the faces of his new acquaintances. Riley had left his mark all right, just as Cy had divined on the Adriatic. Cyril Parks had the sorry residue of the man’s opinions and bander-snatch politics and inappropriate, spitting laughter like constant drizzle in his mind, for all the escape of death and nations left behind.

  Coney Island. By the decade Cy reached it, it was on the way down, sobering up from its early-century glory when even God had paid his entrance fee amongst the hatted masses and ridden the rollercoasters and giggled at what animation he saw and marvelled at the bizarre golems and part-animal-humans on display that he himself had botched during their creation. When he had joined the ogling crowds at the base of Golgotha rebuilt to watch the nails of entertainment sink in and the centurians rolling dice for the profit of robes. But still, to the present day, the Island churned and rattled and tipped over like a fat girl in costume for the public to be titillated by her privates. Cy could sense the decline almost immediately after his arrival – the atmosphere was like coming late to a party where the hullabaloo had built and perhaps peaked and though it was still loud the partygoers’ eyes had begun to glaze. It remained a fun place, in a frightening and enticing way, but you knew that troublesome events would soon happen, that stories would later be told about all over the city, accompanied by grimaces and winces and scars.

  There was the perpetual hum of electrical rides heard from the train carriage several stops away. The dull scream of voices, the insulated booms and hoots and toots of barges and cannons and carts. Fountains of metal scaffolding erupted on the horizon dropping stomachless couples on fast parachute rides to the ground, fortune machines spat balls out through their mouths so you could know what was coming your way on behalf of God or Ganesha or whatever celestial benefactor or patron you chose. A cacophony of technology was employed to make people rapid and exhilarated. Steeplechase made Morecambe’s ghost train look like a caterpillar crawling beside a great wooden and iron python. Cy could not believe the construction when he first laid eyes upon it – people were bent over horses that rushed along undulating tracks as if being sucked into the mouth of hell on apocalyptic steeds. The massive parks whooped and hollered and honked and echoed with the hubbub of customers letting off steam. Women had their skirts blown over their heads, if not by the strong coastal wind on the wide boardwalk, then by air pumps in the Blow-Hole, a theatre full of mirrors and vents, while men had their bottoms paddled mechanically to the delight of recently molested onlookers in an amphitheatre. There was the buzz, buzz, buzz of adrenalin everywhere, from the loss of gravity on the spinning rides, to the awe-invoking tattoo guns and the shrieking commotion over the freaks, the spectacle of a three-headed cow. Voyeurism was key to any attraction, because Americans at leisure wanted to witness something to take away thought and replace it with emotion, they wanted beautiful smut, a punch in the gut. There was that pivotal ocular quality to anything on offer. The devouring eye.

  And Cy found himself having to bind and fortify himself with British-borrowed opinion so as to remain firm on his feet, tolerating the place perhaps only up to what would have been the limit of Riley’s credulous mind, an imagination which had more elasticity than most of those owned by his compatriots. For there were nasty things on offer at Coney, worse than basins of blood and jokes about ejaculation, worse than accidental sewage and the double-jointed torsion of performers. The parks fizzed with rough energy and raw spirit for all the nice hats of the visitors and the tidy rows of black motor cars parked in municipal lots behind the enormous pavilions and arcades. Riley would have appreciated that spirit. He had possessed a taste for the absurd, the rotten apple of entertainment, the wrong side of the brain. And he could have appreciated the awful individual eccentricity of each and every attraction. The whimsy, the grotesque, the bizarre, it was Sodom’s own wicked comedy room where mule women and savages sent the crowds into a frenzy of disgust and gaping mortification. Riley would have said there was more honesty at Coney than in the Bible or any other spiritual verse, because it read the stupefying human soul accurately at both ends. It was no wonder he had never gone to confession in all the years Cy knew him, as his faith decreed he should; it would have combed out what balance deviance in the man provided and he would have keeled over on to the priest. People wanted to laugh and to loathe, it was simple nature, he would have said, pointing to the freaks as they tumbled and crawled about on stage, hermaphrodites in fishnet and conjoined twins, the horrors of the body become biologically lazy or gone wild. In the freak shows you could have anything, any dark nightmare from the mind made real. And there was the slam of bodies against each other for the sake of fun in motorized carriages, the rowing bark of sea lions in pools, babies painted with pancake make-up on the walkways, with spikes glued on their heads like Liberty herself. Row after row after row of old Russian men took to the plateau of sand behind the domes and palace turrets of Coney and out towards Brighton Beach every morning, bending and stretching in exercise before taking to the water in the milkchurn light of eastern daybreak. If Cy got there early enough in the day he’d see them swim out like suited penguins and return to the shore flapping off cold blue Atlantic water minutes later. It was super-sized seaside mayhem.

  This was Morecambe of international proportions and inconceivable wealth, it was Morecambe gone putrid and suffering without any of its former inhibitions, as if the Tory councillors had packed up their belongings and documents banning distasteful shows and left town, taking their collective prudish notions for ever with them and leaving the occult industries to ferment and sprout and run amok. Here there was far too much attention to detail, far too much gruesome investigation into what would titillate and far too much anarchy of demeanour, and it blew Cy away as if he’d placed a gun to his head and squeezed the trigger. As if this truly was the nation’s purgatory, where any prurient display was advocated, any misdemeanour was acquitted, any sin suspended before a hopelessly hung celestial jury. Or would that have ultimately trumped Riley, taken away his role as contrarian and endorser of all things repellent as well as alluring? Would it have sent him into a sulk of scorn and fury that his brilliance and humour and ornery distinctiveness would be lost in low-level mediocrity in a place like this, lost in the shuffle of New York’s terrible versatility, its many pinnacles, its deco skyscrapers and baroque muses? What was one more drunk amid the clutter and spill of human bodies and empty bottles on the Bowery? What was one more tattoo artist in the parks that were already filled with electric masters? What was one more harlequin soul in such a vast double-diamond-edged circus? What was one more crucified saint or criminal on an already stained and overcrowded Calvary?

  When the Adriatic slid in past Manhattan to Ellis Island Cy might never have been more malleable in his life, never more able to dictate self, and Riley’s ghost might have been exorcized then and there, put asunder, had his apprentice concentrated on that possibility instead of surrendering to incredulity. New York was a dream of architecture and vertical economy, of uncompromising coexistence. Suddenly everybody at the ship’s rail had offere
d one another cigarettes, needing some kind of filter, some kind of method to take it all in, compressed tobacco was the easiest and only filtration tool available so they sucked away at smoke, though some drew out cameras to put a lens between them and what was too much. Cy would never know the city, he thought that moment as the boat blasted her arrival, not the way he knew the back streets and districts and the tides of Morecambe Bay. It was a squall of urban settlement, a storm of existence coming closer on the horizon, and he gripped the deck rail tighter, dizzy with what he saw. He would have to find some corner of it to huddle down in, it was all he would be able to do. Compared to the impending city, the water on which they were afloat seemed to be the only stable thing. Suddenly he wanted that old-timey’s hold and fast written on his own fingers so that he could keep himself from going overboard, tumbling back-to-front and headlong up the tall buildings with the glass reflections telling him he was falling in many ways, up past windows and spires and skyscrapers and up past height itself, up through the sky and out into space. New York was the sacred centre of all pilgrimages, the big catcher’s mitt for every nation’s Diaspora. And Cyril Parks did not even know why he had come!

  The Polish man next to him at the rail, on whose shoulder he had tattooed a heart not three days before, was laughing with tears in his eyes, like a child tipped too far into uncontrollable hysteria and his laughter had become something else, another emotion, unstoppable and debilitating. Cy put a hand on the newly decorated shoulder and the Pole placed in turn a hand over Cy’s stained fingers, his laughter finally tapering. And the two of them held on.

  But where had Europe been when New York went up? What had Europe been doing? Hunting for old-fashioned ideals like a shell on a beach while behind its back something enormous was happening? Fighting wars and remembering old grudges while abroad a fairytale land was being fashioned? Who had sold the Americans those magic beans that when planted would grow a city overnight, crushing myopic imagination upwards as it grew so that visions elongated and defied limit? Or what old peasant had boarded which creaking wooden clipper with those beans in his tatty coat pocket centuries ago, stolen from the garden belonging to the last mad emperor of some tiny dying country, to create this impossible new world?

  The stretch of seaside carnival on the southern lip of Brooklyn was the biggest amusement park on earth and for several asylum-spun years Cyril Parks would be one of the cogs of its summer machinery. It dedicated itself to invention and intrigue, hedonistic indulgence, freakery. Unlike Morecambe’s pervasive tipsiness, its summer loosening of national character, the gently crude insight into gross anatomy, Coney Island offered up inebriation with startling dexterity and precision and for a time it could predict the vulgar thoughts of the masses like a mind-reader, responding with tailor-made surrealities and rides which were pure stimulant. Like Eliot Riley, who could unlock a sense of humour in a customer, and play on it to make his money, Coney could hypnotize the crowds with their own sensual fantasies and squeamishness made external. If they feared the dark they would be inserted into a pitch-black chamber and shaken. If they feared perversion some cage or dank oubliette would produce it. Specialization was everywhere, from the sculptor who carved out wax moulds of famous people and painted their wet eyeballs living then destroyed them over a fiery grill, to the variform deformities of the abnormals once imported from every nation in the world by the legendary Gumpertz, now limping about the parks and breeding with each other. Sword-swallowers guzzled blades, fire-breathers spat flaming rings, twisted females were pierced on beds of nails, shrunken heads hung from walls and adorned pikes, wrongly made people were revealed behind curtains of shame. The sick and the sinister abounded. The crowds could choose their indelicate pleasure or poison. They came, they paid, they saw, and they were entertained.

  In England there had been the sense that if a man found two sticks on the beach he could incorporate them into a magic trick, children would laugh at Shakespearean fools, jokes were repeated and eventually formulized, the striped tents on the beach grew dirtier each year and their tears flapped in the breeze, but it was what you did come summer, it was tradition. It was as if the funfair carnival business itself was a deliberate step behind the collective British humour or that humour was a happy caricature of itself, belonging best in cheap hotels and prom pavilions at the seaside. Cy’s hometown was, for the workers of the north, a harmless, farcical, if slightly uncouth associate, that was met with once a year and who could be relied upon to get merry and fall down, providing a laugh or two, but doing no lasting harm. Perversities were hinted at, nudge-nudged about with an elbow in the side. Things never went too far.

  The Island on the other hand was absolute consumer-driven modernism, it was in-vogue anthropomorphism, a swim through the guts and entrails of the world. By the start of every season the repulsive and the breathtaking had regenerated itself. New monsters were found, new tracks spiralled. Money would come from somewhere, some mysterious new location, even after rainy summers or failed business endeavours or massive fires. Paint was fresh and the sideshows were ready to excrete their freakish wares, new rides appeared annually, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and bought from the World’s Fair, to take people to the moon or to the bottom of the sea, to give them artificial magic environments. And the place revelled in near-perfect macabre entertainment, as if the juice of wacky Victorian society had been stewed up and injected into a Promethean American creation, a new world Moulin Rouge, a blaring creature that was concentrated along a two-mile strip of beachfront on the tip of the hipbone of that most fantastic city ever conceived. Coney could have outdone the rest of America’s oddest finds had she pried them out of her vast corners and put them together in a room. Cy could stand at the entrance of Luna Park and forget which direction his booth was seven years after first squeezing his business in. He could walk the corridors and never become accustomed to what he witnessed within, the boggling acts, the sickest tracts, the mucus and prolapse and fistula afflicted.

  What was the essence of Coney Island, he often wondered, sitting on the train approaching the station. What was it exactly? Horrific proof that the Victorian era could not invoke and conjure the black soul of the Gothic and eternally suppress its darker energy with mere cages of ornament and primness and order. Proof that it could not tinker around with salivating, mechanical wolf-heads, musical skulls and pictures made from human hair and not be opening a terminal crack in Pandora’s Box, a vile vessel containing utter subversion of good behaviour, bodily curiosity, the peculiar viscera of Adam, Eve and all their deformed, stump-legged children. Proof that when the Victorian age collapsed under its own weighty ideals and detail, the dark varnish peeled off and stood up on its own, ghoulishly, and that weird spectre did a clatterbone jig right into the next century.

  Cy had heard it said that twenty thousand light bulbs blew out on Coney every day – he himself lost one every month or so. In the first decade of the new century it boasted to consume more power a week than an average American city, and when Cy got there it had only added to itself after the sporadic fires that from time to time took down its magnificently housed attractions. Perhaps it was the smell that characterized the place for Cyril Parks. Not the perspiring adrenalin of its customers or the popped corn, the fry of meat and potato knishes, Nathan’s nickel hotdogs, not even the grease on the runners of the newly refurbished Steeplechase, or the salty sea air on the skins of the customers. Other seaside resorts had those qualities, Morecambe Bay had those qualities. What characterized Coney Island was the bitter, slightly sulphuric odour of lights popping, of electric energy being fundamentally used up and escaping from behind glass.

  The day that Lulu died was the day Cy knew with certainty that the place itself was also doomed to expire. Something had belly-flopped hard and was smarting. Some vital ingredient of the Island was curdling. The management was killing one of the park’s elephants. It turned out to be blasé amusement, for all its hideous effort. The beast, normally gent
le, had accidentally killed a man, backing over him while avoiding a speeding vehicle on the road so that his chest and legs were crushed, and his bones made themselves known to the world through his flesh. Lulu was usually found wearing tassels and twirling batons in the Luna circus. She had spent years carrying excited children in a woven basket on her back. Her execution was advertised in the papers and Cy did not truly know why he attended it but he did so. And he was sorry that he did, sorry with himself and his disgraceful curiosity, and sorry for Lulu, who must have known from the way the eyes of humans had changed from kind to cold when they regarded her after she felt the delicate crickle-crackle of skeleton underneath her foot, that she was no longer loved. And then Cy was sorry for Coney Island, for its maliciously disassociated behaviour and its fate. Lulu had been, at one time, a very popular attraction. She could stand up on her hind legs and balance a person on her head. She could kneel and turn tricks with balls and hula-hoops and blow peanuts into the crowd, catch them in the gripping tip of her trunk when they were thrown back. Nobody seemed to care that the twenty-year-old mascot of the circus was condemned, except for her trainer who was restrained in his house that day and eventually given a sedative by a doctor to prevent him from harming himself or anyone else in an effort to save her. Nobody else shed a tear when the switch was thrown, and maybe that was not so very surprising.