Coney Island.

Lisa Martens
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read
nycgo.com photo credit

The beach was cold and filled with jellyfish. Everyone had lobster rolls. Everyone was hating themselves for eating them and vowing not to eat the next day which was, of course, ridiculous.

Everyone was taking photos and adding filters to make white people tan and dark people light and brown people orange. They created vignettes around their rolls that did not exist in real life.

People swam, people found condoms.

“Why are there so many condoms lying around? They don’t even look used.”

“Drug addicts use them as tourniquets to shoot up.”

“Really? That makes sense.”

They swam anyway.

There was a ride called the Thunderbolt, which made no sense because lightning bolts, not thunder. A cute boy was teaching a cute girl how to skateboard. A drawing of a clown with very distinctly marked teeth watched them.

“The Cyclone was underwater after that hurricane.”

Movie buffs searched for the Requiem for a Dream pier and longed for their own bushy-browed, fair drug addict to love. It was not there anymore, not since the remodel, but they swore they saw it anyway.

No one went to the aquarium.

When new swarms left the subway and headed for the beach, they first stopped to see the hot dog eating contest records. Everyone had a story about that Japanese guy who could eat more than the American eaters. Everyone agreed that it was sad that Americans couldn’t manage to eat more than Asians.

There were Tye-dye shirts, Warriors shirts, hot dog shirts. You could buy a shirt. You could buy a hot dog. You could buy clam chowder and smash some cracker cubes into it. You could buy cocaine. You could find cotton candy, or maybe a woman who had been coming to Coney Island too long. Leathery skin, fried hair, thin with meat hanging off her bones. You could find a chain-smoking middle-aged man who bragged about having sex on the beach in a tent “and no one noticed.”

Sure they hadn’t.

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