“Excuse me,” I said.
The conductor looked up. He was about fifty, skinny, and startled. Then he smiled a smile like a newly whitewashed fence. I felt the rain retreating and rainbows scaling the sky. Maybe this was irrational. New Yorkers, though, weren’t known for their smiles, particularly not at strangers. I felt like I’d found a kindred spirit.
“Hey, girl,” he said, as though he’d known me for five hundred years.
“Hi!” I said. “How’d you get so happy?”
“What’s not to be happy about?” he said. Even though he had an iguana, even though he wore a sweater vest, I liked him immediately.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Maria.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Joseph.”
I’d watched a lot of Mister Rogers as a child. The train to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe had been one of the primary objects of my fantasy. I envisioned myself stepping aboard, donning a conductor’s cap, and shortly thereafter arriving in a glorious place where there was not one, but two talking cats. There was a definite soft spot in my heart for trains. So, when the Conductor asked me if I wanted to take a little trip with him that Saturday, I was very excited. I had visions of a little trip to heaven. Or, at least, to some make-believe sector of New York City, one with sparklingly clean sidewalks and maybe a few nice elves. I thought maybe it was a secret place that only conductors knew, especially because the Conductor refused to tell me where we were going, and would only say that I needed to bring a bathing suit. It was October. Wherever we were going, it was somewhere warm. Somewhere tropical. Somewhere deep in Brooklyn that I’d never heard of before. We were taking the F train.
As we took it, though, it became clear that we were not going to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. We were going to Coney Island.
Coney Island was about the last place on earth I wanted to go. It was cold, cold enough that hot dogs would be frozen on the spit, cotton candy would crack into spun sugar shards, and neon lights would split into splinters of color if they lit. It would be Siberia, but painted with toxically bright lead paint. It would be like one of those nightmares of juxtapositions that couldn’t exist, similar to the one that had plagued me as a child: the evil Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters stomping down my driveway, his teeth bared to consume me. I would have deserved it, too, as I’d regularly killed his kin in campfire s’mores. Worse, I’d enjoyed it. I might as well have been a Nazi, as far as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was concerned. In the dream I cowered, watching his white head bobbing above the tree-line, marking his inexorable progress toward my house. He often waved cheerily at me, a bloodied parent in each paw. Periodically, he’d nibble at their skulls, and grin at me with dripping red teeth.
“It’s cold,” I told the Conductor, speaking with all the authority I didn’t have. “I think the freak show’s closed. And the rides aren’t running.”
“Avoid the crowds, that’s my motto. I only go in the fall. Summer, you got crazies there, swimming in that ocean. Nobody need swim in that ocean in the summer. Nasty. This is the last day they’re open, and it’s perfect weather for it.”
The train came above ground, and I looked out. Gray. Stormclouds, like giant rhinoceroses butting each other across the sky. And what was that? Oooh. A little spear of lightning! Yeah, perfect for a day at an outdoor amusement park.
I had a bad history with parks. I was scared of roller coasters, Ferris wheels, tippy things of all kinds, darts, and clowns. The last time I’d been to an amusement park, I’d been about eight, and a peacock had dive-bombed in from nowhere and taken an epic shit on my shoulder. Thinking that the cool trickle I’d felt was my dangling earring, I’d proceeded to rub my face across my shoulder, smearing peacock excrement from forehead to chin. Or perhaps an earlier memory: the time an off-kilter great-aunt had taken my siblings and me for a jaunt to Barnum & Bailey. Sometime during the acrobats, when one of us was vomiting cotton candy, she’d decided that she was done with us and had driven away. Or: the county fair when I was a teenager, at which my preternaturally developed friend won a Pink Floyd T-shirt and the ongoing stalker admiration of the vendor by flashing her tits for him and all of his twenty-something vagrant employees. I’d never been to Disneyland as a kid, because my family had never had enough money. As a result, I’d developed a deep scorn for all things Disney. Kids would come back after summer vacation, show-and-telling, proudly wearing their Mickey Mouse ears, and I would jealously inform them that mice carried the black plague and that they’d soon be breaking out in swellings beneath their armpits. The only animated Disney movie I’d really liked was Fantasia, specifically the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence, and that was only because I took pride in being the only kid in the room who could watch it without wetting her pants.
“What video do you want, Maria?” the poor, deluded mommies would ask.
“Fantasia,” I’d reply, handing over my own illegally dubbed copy. I’d hotly await the moment when the red devil guy would appear onscreen, and then I’d tell the story of the time I saw him come through the screen at a slumber party. I was not an A-list guest at slumber parties, because I had developed an early reputation for either puking or leading the other girls in somersaults through the house. I didn’t care to sleep. This problem had, obviously, rippled into my present life, except that now my red devil guys were much more corporeal, and they had nothing as cultured as “Night on Bald Mountain” to accompany them. “Night with Bald Head” was where I’d ended up most of the time. God help me. At least it hadn’t been “Night on Bald Mountie.” Yet. I could just see it, though. Falling foolishly into bed with a Canadian. Being carried off on the back of a very slow horse. The little red jacket. The hat covering the shiny head. In bed, my Mountie would cry, “Eh? Eh?”
Apparently, some portion of my traumatic thought trajectory was visible.
“Why the long face?” asked the Conductor. “It’s going to be fun. You have no idea until you try it. Coney Island, baby, at the end of the season, is the best place in the world.”
All my knowledge of Coney Island was courtesy of A Coney Island of the Mind, a book of not terribly fascinating Beat-era poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the publisher of Howl. I’d read it, along with a bunch of Richard Brautigan, during that high school hobo period. The real Coney Island had little to do with the book. Brighton Beach was a myth to me. I had never ventured this far on the train.
Stan the Iguana poked his prehistoric head out of the Conductor’s jacket. There were strands of green yarn impaled on his spines, part of the shredded scarf that the Conductor had informed me was Stan’s winter garb. Being cold-blooded, Stan required careful dressing for outdoor appearances. The Conductor gave him a Swedish Fish. Stan took it and disappeared again into the jacket, smacking his little lizard lips.
“Won’t that hurt him?”
“He loves ‘em. What can I say?”
What did I know about animal desire?
“That’s nothing. You know what I give him in breeding season?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, either. But this was what I’d signed on for. A date with a herpetophile. Which was not what it sounded like, but was instead a person who loved lizards. “Tell me.”
It seemed that Stan’s green scarf was part-time his muffler, and part-time his mistress. No wonder the muffler was so dilapidated. Stan had big teeth and claws. It couldn’t have been fun to fuck him. The Conductor told me that he had to watch out if he wore anything green, because Stan would immediately decide that green meant girl.
“Stan is easily fooled by placebo pussy,” the Conductor told me.
I’d been treated like an inanimate object occasionally, even in the mammal world. Sometimes I felt like the blue velvet chair that Taylor had once told me had been his first love. Sometimes I suspected I was just being used as something to rub against.
“From time to time,” the Conductor told me, “I put him in a little hat. He has a collectio
n. Sombrero. Stetson. Shit, Stan even has a yarmulke.”
Every iguana owner I’d ever known had been weird. The Conductor, at least, was a joyful kind of weird. He was the happiest person I’d ever met. We sat on that train, sharing Swedish Fish with Stan, and it rocked us up high above the city, careening all the way to the Ferris wheel and the Atlantic Ocean, to the hot dog and knish stands getting boarded up for the winter. Coney Island from above was a sad-looking thing, all its bright colors stark against the sky, everything strangely tiny compared to the modern-day amusement parks in my mind’s eye. Coney Island had its Wonder Wheel towering over everything, 150 feet tall, and in position since 1920. The park’s old rides still stood, skeletal, the newer rides nestled like toadstools in their shadows. Or so the Conductor, a Coney Island buff, told me.
“The Cyclone,” he said, reverently, pointing at the most decrepit roller coaster I’d ever seen. It was made of wood, and there’d been no attempt to hide its age. It was weathered. It was battered. It was ancient. It was still fucking running. It was so New York: a city of the most stubborn people on earth. This part of the city was especially stubborn, given that it was full of Russian immigrants, and was the home base of the Polar Bear Club, a group of elderly men who went swimming in the Atlantic year round, most notably on New Year’s Day. They’d been doing this since 1903. They were skinny-chested guys in Speedos and sunglasses, for the most part. And they didn’t just dash in and out. They immersed. From the beach, their long-suffering wives applauded them, and then they scampered inside for black Russian bread and soup. I assumed. I knew nothing of the Polar Bear Club, really, only what I’d seen referenced. I thought they were crazy. Who would swim in the water at Coney Island? Particularly in the winter. Only freaks. By which I didn’t mean the sideshow kind. I didn’t think even sideshow performers would be loopy enough to jump into ice water. Who’d do such a crazy thing?
CONEY ISLAND ON THE LAST DAY of the summer season was not the most populated place. Some renegade parents and children, some college kids, some women in saris pushing strollers. We got off the elevated train, walked down some rickety steps, and made for the freak show, housed in a windbeaten building with old-fashioned posters of attractions—the Tattooed Man, Zenobia: the Bearded Lady, the Great Fredini, Koko the Killer Clown. Nobody outside. Too rainy. There was a small stand-up bar inside the doors, where you could get a beer and wait for the freaks to come out. Apparently, they’d stand on a plywood platform and do their crowd-catching maneuvers outside for a couple of minutes, between shifts. Sadly, by the time we got there the show was closing and everyone was going home. The Conductor and I sat on barstools and watched the Tattooed Man, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, pass us. Then the Bearded Lady, swathed in a raincoat. Finally, a couple of serpentine skin-and-bones performers that the Conductor identified as contortionists.
“Weren’t we here to see the freak show?” I asked. “Not just watch them leave?”
“Girl, I see the freak show all day long. Hell no. I like to see them turn back into normal people and go home,” said the Conductor. “Makes me happy to see them get on a train. I love New York,” he suddenly whooped. “How can anyone not love this city?”
The tattooed guy gave the Conductor a look as he passed. A stunning, curvaceous Latina woman carrying a boa constrictor eyed the Conductor, too. Stan was scaling the Conductor’s neck, and looking curiously around.
“That’s my favorite part,” said the Conductor. “They never ride my train. I want the F. If I had the F, I’d be more entertained. The G, the incredible folks on the G are more discreet about it. I had an opera singer on my train the other day. She started singing in the tunnel, and everybody on my train could hear it, but I never saw her face. Nobody’s normal, baby, whether it’s on the outside or on the inside. That’s the thing.”
That statement could be looked at two ways. Either it was a great thing, and I felt right at home, or it was evidence that I was destined to date weirdos until the end of time, because there was nothing else out there. The Conductor was definitely part of the weirdo category. In a good way, though. He was like a little kid, grinning and nodding at people, eating his cotton candy and spouting bits of Coney Island history between bites. The Spook-A-Rama, for example, the park’s “dark ride” (a long tunnel full of thrills and chills, transited via open train cars), had been there since 1955. Charles Lindbergh had ridden the Cyclone, and had been quoted as saying that this two-minute roller-coaster journey was much more exciting than his famous flight across the Atlantic.
We watched the sideshow freaks leaving Coney Island. They melded into the people outside—the shifting mass of parents and their children, the Coney Island devotees, the Hasidic Jews and the Puerto Ricans, the Russians and the junkies—and made their way to the trains, scarcely noticed among the ice-cream clamors and the umbrellas. A stray dog skittered over the sidewalk. A guy sat cowboy-booted on the boardwalk and sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” accompanied by his accordion.
We walked out into the sand. I was surprised to see that it really was sand. I’d been expecting some sort of false beach. I’d seen too many movies. The city felt like a soundstage. I’d thought the sand would be plastic pebbles.
It started to rain. It started to pour. The Conductor unfurled a candy-striped golf umbrella and a garbage bag. He pitched the umbrella in the sand and spread the garbage sack like a blanket. We sat down, and looked out over the rain and sea.
“Picnic?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. As far as I was concerned, the Conductor was the coolest person I’d ever met. He made me feel like we were in some sort of alternate New York, one that was both gritty and romantic. Never mind that the grit was partially due to the sand that coated the Nathan’s Famous hot dog the Conductor bought me. I ate the bun with everything on it. I gave the hot dog itself to the Conductor, who gave it to Stan to lick.
“A treat,” he said. I was skeptical, but Stan relished only the relish.
“Does that count as a vegetable?”
“He thinks so.”
I used the toe of my shoe to scratch a message in the sand. MARIA WAS HERE. I felt strangely compelled to make sand angels, despite the rain. I took off my shoes and wriggled my toes in the cold sand. They looked exactly like earthworms, which led me to ideas of earthworm decapitations, and made me want to put my shoes back on.
“What now? Do we go home?”
“Hell no,” the Conductor said, and motioned toward the ocean in front of us.
“What does that mean?”
“Girl, we’re going swimming. It’s a beach, right? Got your suit?”
It was a beach only in the most generous sense of the word. I was wearing a bathing suit, yes. Under my sweater. And wool pants. And coat. And scarf. The Conductor was stripping down to psychedelic floral swim trunks. He folded his clothing neatly on the garbage sack. I could see goose bumps.
“Come on. You’re joking. It’s too cold to go swimming.”
“Nah. I do this every year on the last day of the season. It’s like New Year’s Eve, you know? You make a wish, so that the next year will be good. You have to eat the last hot dog sold, swim the last swim, and watch the last tattoo go by.”
He seemed to be combining several traditions into one.
Nevertheless, I started unbuttoning my coat. Something about the Conductor made me trust him. He was quirky, but, just as he’d said, nobody was normal. Not me. And he happened to be standing next to me, grinning, and hopping up and down in the wind. I couldn’t let him do that all alone. I could see Stan eyeing me from the pile of clothes. My bikini was green. I shoved him surreptitiously with my foot and made sure that he couldn’t climb anything to get to me. I had no intention of being molested by an iguana.
Pretty speedily, the Conductor and I were both standing there, like psychos, on the beach of Coney Island in the wind and the rain, getting ready to run into the ocean. I could see some people watching us from the relative shelter of the hot dog s
tands and teacup ride. Way down the beach, an old lady in a black dress lifted a pair of binoculars.
“Okay, girl,” yelled the Conductor. “Here we go!” He grabbed my hand, and we ran into the water.
ICE, ICE, ICE. ONCE YOU throw your whole body into ice water, you feel pretty cool. Both in the metaphoric sense, and in the actual sense. I felt ballsy. But I also felt those balls shrinking. I concluded that this was, hands down, the stupidest thing I’d ever done. In a life of stupid things, that was saying something. Visions of pneumonia crossed with stomach cramps raced through my head. But somehow, I didn’t care.
I’d always been secretly scared of so many things, and the months of yes had changed me. Maybe I’d been scared of falling in love, just as I’d been scared of roller coasters and sweater vests, of leaping before I looked. From the outside, I knew that I looked devil-may-care, but on the inside, I cared like crazy. Part of me was always preserving myself, making sure that I didn’t get hurt, making sure that I didn’t get lost. Not today. I let go of the last things I’d been clinging to. I was ready for love to come for me.
We ducked underwater and came up, gasping. The Conductor laughed his ass off.
“Dream on, Stan,” he called.
I looked back onto the beach, and saw Stan crawling away from our pile of clothes.
“Don’t worry,” said the Conductor. “He won’t go far. I have his woman.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant me or the muffler, but it didn’t really matter. I was willing to be an iguana’s woman at that point. I was fucking freezing. Reptile though he was, at least Stan had a wooly scarf he was willing to share with me. I’d done worse.
“Why’d you bring me here?” I asked the Conductor as we were leaving the water. “You don’t even know me.”
“I took one look at you, and I knew this was your kind of thing,” he said.
“How could you tell?”