Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

And Arturas loved her, loved her deeply and truly, that much was abundantly clear, since they first met at the local market and he watched as she hoisted home a calf on her shoulders. Arturas was a strongman who lifted weights above his head in a circus that had come to town, he wooed Claudia, convinced her family to let her accompany him as his bride — the money was good, his love was noble — and for a while they billed themselves as the only husband and wife strongman and strongwoman team in the whole of Europe. Within a year Arturas had popped the cartilage out of his left knee and torn several ligaments on a poorly executed clean-and-press manoeuvre, so badly in fact that the joint remained herniated and he would never be able to hoist barbells professionally again. With his leg packed in plaster he was doodling with his wife’s lipstick on his cast and wondering what to do next — he did not want to leave the circus — when he struck on the idea of body art Claudia was all for it and said she would become his living canvas. He tattooed her top to toe and together the two of them travelled about, awing the crowds in Europe and America. Carnival life was suited to them both — they were restless people, prideful and expressive. When the circus dissolved they stayed on in America and went to the one place where people of their ilk were more than welcome. That throbbing, pustulous, inflamed amusement-industry boil on the backside of Brooklyn.

They had been at Coney Island for eight years now, the longest either had lived in one place since they left the village in Germany. When she was not lifting her petticoats outside his parlour on Stillwell Avenue to show the self-portrait of her husband on her thigh, or displaying her form in the human picture gallery of Luna Park, Claudia was hoisting pewter balls in her outstretched hands, or turning over vehicles like a tornado, or hurling ingots and faggots and scaffolding over twelve prostrate men to the gasps of the enthralled public.

Cy opened his eyes to see the enormous pair smiling kindly at him. The thing he had to understand about Arturas Overas, he was told by the subject himself, was that he was not one for all the competitive tussling and ruffianry with others in the same profession. It gave him bad indigestion and a spastic colon, a griping of the guts such as bad clams will provide. He worked in a place that was a tattooist’s paradise. There was more work there than an additional ten artists could manage. And if more artists came, more customers would follow. The more cows, the more milk produced and the more milk produced the more people would drink the milk, said Arturas. It was good for business to have more cows in the herd. When one was milking, all were milking. This was Arturas’s interpretation and philosophy regarding the tattoo trade and, after the thorough, huff-duff style of warfare to the industry in Morecambe, it was a bold new concept to Cy. The man placed a big hand on Cy’s knee.

— But are you good, my friend? Or are you, what is it they say, are you rinky-dink?

Cy’s heartbeat was still erratic. His shoulders ached from the constrictor arm.

— I work freehand. I have for over ten years. I apprenticed with the greatest artist in the north of England.

— Excellent! Then I was right. I am always right about such matters. We were meant to meet, my friend, do you not agree? And what is your name?

— Cyril Parks. Cy.

— No, your other name.

— Oh. The Electric Michelangelo.

It was the first time he had spoken of his new identity, the first time he had rechristened himself out loud.

— Aah! It is good! It is very good! Not as good as mine. I am the Black Baron. You like it?

How had Arturas known what kind of man he was, Cy asked, back in the warehouse when he had tried his best to conceal himself. Claudia was the one who replied. She had a beautiful soft, basso voice when it came to speaking of her husband.

— Turo is a very sensitive man. He will watch the spider in the bathtub for an hour to know if it is poisonous or harmless rather than squashing it without asking. He has a sense of life, of joy and pain. He is my bear with a thorn in his paw and his tongue in the honey pot.

They told Cy about Coney Island. There were booths that could be rented seasonally and upwards of one million visitors swarmed through the fairgrounds and parks every weekend in summer. One million people, could he imagine such a thing? Sometimes you could not find the boardwalk for all the people on it — you just had to assume that it was there, said Arturas. It was the chosen place for the likes of them, full of the wonders of the world, the ingenuity and curiosity of man, and hotdogs, delicious hotdogs.

— Ah, yes. With the onion and ketchup along the top, just enough for tasting each bite. Geschmackvoll! And, my friend, wait until you see, there is the fourteen-inch frank made for two people to share.

He leaned over and kissed his wife and she patted his cheek. There were good friendships that could start with almighty confrontation or terrible prejudice, Cy would learn.

Coney Island, as it turned out, was Morecambe’s richer, zany American relative. A fat, expensively dressed in-law with a wicked smile and the tendency, once caught up in the mood, to take things too far. The family resemblance was there for displaced Lancashire folk to see upon arrival if they cared to. Both were made up of a multitude of interdependent entertainment cells designed to remove a person from the dimension of ordinary life. Both sat sublimely and noisomely next to water, defining themselves in relation to the sea. Had anyone with latitudinal skills measured the direction of their gaze, the two resorts probably faced each other across that vast and busy piece of ocean water — give or take a small land mass positioned in between, Manx and Irish populated — like a pair of gargoyles, one smiling cheerfully, the other laughing maniacally. Both purveyed a bawdy sense of humour when it came to the indelicate human body, with its gases and growths and ganglions, and both acknowledged the desire of its inquisitive mind to be shocked and appalled and entertained and mystified. Cy had never heard of the place until he arrived in the country, until he got into the slipstream of immigrants flushing through the massive borough city of Brooklyn, but when he got there it seemed like fulfilling a prophecy. Within weeks, he had secured a rental tattoo booth on Oceanic Walk, one of the honky-tonk alleys that ran through the catacombs of amusement facilities at the Island, only three hops, skips and jumps from Coney’s boardwalk and beach. It was a good tip from Arturas and Claudia, and a natural progression for Cy. He went where the work was, because he had been born of that peculiar seaside-growing odd-fruit-bearing family tree, because he was sired from that dynasty. Looking back it was as simple as that. Go to America, make up a name, aim for the ringing, singing, screaming, teeming water’s edge. There was a sense of graduation to his life now, as if he had found the doorway to another level of the same happy, haunted hotel, the same colourful house of torture, the same quarantined wonderland, where the insanity of the population was just brighter and more intense and extended, because it had the freedom to be so, because this was America. The Electric Michelangelo belonged, Cy sensed it. Because Coney itself was like the work of his moniker’s original, towards the end of his life, when something went vain and vivid in his brain and the result was a painted world that was past real, surreal, mannered from psychosis and all the more poignant for it.