Forgotten Brooklyn

by Kate O’Connor Morris

We calloused hands raw on rusted jungle gyms and skinned shoulders during midnight games of street hockey in the stink of July.  Stray cats poured from plywood-sealed brownstones; houses where families left lives behind in the middle of supper and those long wood tables were still set to prove it. Rotting vestiges of mashed potato mounds survived on dusty plates as part of the madness. We’d break in on a dare, scale the rotting stairways, and find those beds upstairs soggy and unmade. Framed family portraits clung relentlessly to water-stained wallpaper that was dull to begin with. The headlines on yellowing tabloids, incomplete shopping lists impaled on refrigerators, patient cereal boxes in their unhinged cabinets: all dim shrines to time perfectly preserved.

And, as we burst out of the ghostly stillness of those forgotten places, afraid and shocked to be alive, we learned a little something about our mothers.

That was the city I grew up in. An unhip Brooklyn that wasn’t for the taking. People stole our car and our fax machine and we were better for it. Sidewalks warped under the relentless roots of ancient oaks. And I reveled in the fabulous strangeness of my overlooked universe.

There was the one place that brought us all together. That coaxed us up out from the cozy segregation of our graffiti-cluttered neighborhoods. Coney Island was the bloodiest beatingest organ of our forgotten Brooklyn. The place that made the grit, gray, limbless matte photography of a bygone age come alive with fluorescent dignity. Where the Hebrew boy found enough daring in his veins to kiss a Red Hook girl, lost forever in the distorted haunted house flicker. Every soft-faced immigrant, every whimsy girl in search of adventure, every American terrestrial dream was spit back with flaming, Technicolor skepticism. The absurdity of hot faced boozers tearing ticket stubs, the blessed rumble of the ride, that heartbreakingly American peninsula!

Sometimes it’s a far off baying hound, or a beat down Buick that gets us back to the calm place of childhood because it reminds us of a bullfrog pond in Vermont or a parking lot in upper Michigan. We all return to somewhere.

Give me one-half a reason, and I’m back to that sun-bleached park. Where the Russian grandmother slung her python around my neck; its skin smoother, breathing more than I expected. White-knuckling father’s Irish arm as we top rollercoaster summit, its hand painted cars clanking down the tracks as they had since electricity, and the every time neck ache from Cyclone whiplash. Pistachio complexions staggering from the Tilt A-Whirl. Blast of sauerkraut pierogies overwhelming ocean air. Black boys perched on cinderblock breaker walls catching the only breeze in all of August. The hot dog spectators and their shimmering nylon lawn gear. Brown eyes envious of the blue blue twinkle of tawdry mermaids splintering toenails on wave-weathered boardwalk.

Coney Island, they called you Dreamland for sure.

Somewhere between the giddy buzz of underaged drinking in the crazy midday sun, and falling in love, thigh-deep in those dirty Atlantic waves, that theme park became my blinking neon expectations. If Coney Island didn’t do something to ya, man, you’d miss the point of living.

All at once everyone started paying attention. At least it felt that way. They repainted the playgrounds. Bodegas turned to sushi joints. Nameless developers scrambled in the buy-up and build-out of Coney Island.A great revival! That’s what they called it. Instead they tore it down; gutted her down to the rickety foundations and resurrected these watered-down, corporate cakeslice versions of what already existed before. Rides like anyone’s rides. They banished the raspy crowd barkers, the sideshow freaks. They boarded-up the shops and ripped up that wave-weathered boardwalk; turned those brittle planks into coffee tables that demand coasters.

That city I knew. That raw soul of everyone’s Brooklyn, is gone for now, off wandering somewhere. Some Baltimore alley, Back Bay slum, dustbowl trailerparks all across blownout America.

I left. Tumbleweeding city to city. Hunting something, demanding it exist. Slept at midnight foothills of a big wolfmoon, yelled moonshine epiphanies at desert cacti and three-legged dogs. I came back last Spring, not for long. That bursting moment of transition. Brooklyn in May, no matter the era, always alive and blooming as anywhere.

I ducked below ground that Saturday morning. Hopped a downbound Q and decided I’d watch the half-marathoners finish up in Coney Island.  It’s a great subway ride, because you end up above ground the last little bit of the way, and it’s like they planned those tracks to turn so sharp just as you’re getting up near the park, because all of a sudden the standing people in the car are jostled and you look around and then out and it’s all before you like it had been there all along. Rollercoaster frames looming like Jurassic skeletons, the rainbow web of the Wonder Wheel, and this sun illuminating every ball cap and glimmering candy apple. I stepped out onto the platform and got rustled by the breeze. The runners were out and you could see the swaying stream of bodies appearing between buildings, and I’m sure this is how it really looked in all those old shots of Industrial Age beaches packed with mustached men and their families.

All at once I found myself frozen, thinking about that inked-up sword-swallower. Wondering, where’s he gone to, and what will his mother say?

Kate O’Connor Morris is the late Barney Rossett’s cousin. She is the chief copywriter and editor of a human rights campaign / underground publishing house called Falling Whistles, which focuses on Congo and visions of a free world.