Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

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?