Excursion

Yesterday I went out to the southeast part of my borough, where the sea meets the boardwalk. I was with a friend who grew up in the New York suburbs, and has lived in Manhattan, but never Brooklyn, and who has lived away from New York for the last few years. So it was an adventure for him to travel out to Brighton Beach, the neighborhood, where the signs are all in Russian, and then to walk on the boardwalk to Coney Island, where even on a gray chilly day out of season, the soon-to-be demolished amusement park is still attracting tourists, New York families, lonely people, and curiosity-seekers of all sorts.

I grew up in this part of Brooklyn, so when I was younger I took the beach for granted, but yesterday, after the longish subway ride from where I live now, passing all the subway stops named in this poem, and after walking a couple of blocks on the congested commercial main street in Brighton Beach under the elevated train, I felt that shock of pure pleasure at seeing open space at the end of the street, and then ascending the steps to the boardwalk, and look, there it is, the ocean, the sand, miles and miles of open air.

Although the population of Brighton Beach has changed over the years, the people on the boardwalk were very much as I remembered: old ladies in shapeless coats walking arm and arm, slowly, or sitting on benches in the watery sunlight, turned towards each other, their canes not far out of reach. As ever, the boards below your feet stretch out in a grid that gets lost in infinity as you gaze in one direction or the other. The railing along the side, dividing the boardwalk from the beach, also stretches out, sternly.

In Coney Island, we walked among the rides and took pictures. We got our fortunes told by a scary-looking life-size dummy imprisoned in a plastic booth. The words, "What Does Grandma Say?" were painted on the outside of the booth. Grandma has a white blouse with a lace collar buttoned up to her neck and a white shawl of some sort over it. When you put a quarter in the box, her long mechanical fingers move searchingly over the cards in front of her. Most scarily, her thin, white-blouse covered bosom inflates and deflates, just slightly, to show that she is breathing. A little card drops out of the box with admonitions on it: don't take that trip a friend has been advising you to take, don't be so quick to help out your friends, don't talk so much.

The amusement park is as un-Disneyfied as it could be--all the rides are garish colors, the Wonder Wheel is magnificent and huge and solid against the sky, the decor dates perhaps from the 1920s. The horses in the carousel look as if they are straining to take off, shake off their bondage. Most of the kiddie rides are spinning around with perhaps one car, or horse, or boat, occupied--because it is off-season and cloudy, or because the heyday of Coney Island has long passed.

As I tell my friend, I feel like I'm in a Ray Bradbury story.

I marvel at how this place, this park, can contain both the innocence of a child, perhaps eight, who, in this age of sophisticated digital amusements, seems pleased enough with his ride in an old-style train car, brightly painted and perhaps labeled "conductor," and the more tawdry experience promised by the sideshow featuring "real live people on stage," including the elastic lady and Electra, a "real live person" who is electrocuted but then comes back to life. At the side show, a little man, perhaps 3 feet tall, in clown makeup, tells us earnestly about the attractions within, stressing again that the people are "alive," and also, in a remnant of circus patter that predates the global age, telling us, as if this were impressive, what state each of the live attractions is from: Billy the ten-foot-tall man is from Texas, another performer is from right here in the New York area, another one is from California.

My friend seems as if he might want to go in and see the side show; he asks the little man how much it costs. I think that I will probably wait outside if he goes in, but in the end he decides against it.