This photo was taken in 1988. By the very early 1990s, the graffiti was gone, and the trains were upgraded to the silver style trains that are still running on some lines. I used to take the B train from 20th Avenue in Brooklyn to Grand Street in Manhattan for elementary school. The ride took about 35 minutes door-to-door, and I would sleep with my legs dangling, and with my head on my mom's purse on her lap. The poles on the train were more elaborate then, and there were actual swiveling handles above the seats onto which passengers can hold. One detached from its pole one day and fell on my mother's thigh. The handles didn't look heavy, but the weight of it coupled with gravity gave my mother a nasty bruise. She always told me that if my head had been there, I would have died from the head trauma.
The trains frequently were rerouted on the weekends, so in order to go into Manhattan, or to get home from Manhattan, we would have to go all the way to the last stop, Stillwell Avenue/Coney Island, before we were on our way to the destination. Most of the train would empty out during the summer when all the families exited to go the the beach. Generally, I was more freaked out than not by the station, because the trains always had to release pressure with a huge WHOOSH!, and because the people looked sketchy/dirty/violent/drunk. There were always cops around, though.
My dad had surgery to retrieve a large kidney stone when I was 7. He spent a month recuperating, and we hung out a lot after I came home from school and on the weekends when my mom had to work. We went to the Coney Island beach one weekend, and as we were walking on the sand, he dared me to outrun him. He told me he still felt weak from the surgery, but wanted to prove to himself that he can sprint like a perfectly healthy man. I ran off on the sand, but he soon caught up with me. I stopped, grinning at his victory, when he suddenly keeled over and dropped down to the sand groaning. I thought I had played a part in killing my dad, and started to panic. He then looked up at me and smiled. He looked so proud. I started bawling, of course.
I remember another time at Coney Island when he took me to the aquarium. My dad got up one day and told me he felt really bored, let's do something. We ended up staring at the penguins, breathing in the fishy aquarium smell all afternoon. I translated the info plaques next to all the tanks for him, and we traipsed around the rooms looking at species of fish even Chinese people would not eat willingly. He didn't let me touch the stingrays, though, because he said that the tank water was too dirty. To this day, my one and only stingray-fondle was at the Mote Marine Aquarium in Sarasota, to which Ian took me only a few years ago. I mean, this wasn't just a random day with dad. This was something seemingly casual, but which was actually rife with significance, because it was something I did with him on some off-chance, not knowing that I would retain the memories of that day until I die. Such is the story with my dad. And with Coney Island.
Junior High was really hard for me. I didn't know what sarcasm was, and had the hardest time trying to get my classmates to explain what "alternative" music meant to a girl who's only listened to Canto-pop for the last 11 years of her life. I went from being one the brightest, most outgoing kids in my elementary school to being one of the shyest, most awkward kids in Junior High. In retrospect, it wasn't easy for many people, but when I was mired in it, I only looked for a way to avoid it, or to get through it unscathed.
I played hooky several times, mostly on days when I didn't want to see any of the kids, or deal with any of the teachers. I always did my homework, but shunned "collaborative efforts" with other students, because I was just too unsure of what they thought of me, and because deep down, I knew I liked few of them. It mattered so much that I was liked, that it didn't matter who the person doing the liking was. "Being liked" was an entity unto itself; the doer was meaningless to me; the quality of being popular was the drug. But I didn't ever DO anything to make myself more likeable. I never spoke to the kids who seemed to have it easy, never dressed or acted any differently. I was some strange hybrid of a child who was all egoism and insecurity. It frightens and amuses me now to look back on how myopic I was about everything. If I can name even five people I give two shits about today from Junior High, I would be floored. But back to the hooky: I would take the train all the way into the Bronx, wait at the last stop there, and then ride the train all the way back to Coney Island. No one questioned my presence on the train, even though I was an 11 year-old huddled in the corner reading my book at 10am on a schoolday. I finished Through the Looking Glass on one of those hooky, train-riding days. At Coney Island, I would wander around the platforms for awhile, and then I would board another train, the F most of the time, and ride that to the last stop going uptown, before taking it all the way back to Coney Island again. By the third train switch, it was almost time to go home. I also finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and To Kill a Mockingbird on those hooky days.
In some meta way, I watched "Requiem for a Dream" the year I took off from college, and saw Coney Island through the eyes of all the lurking, addicted souls I tried to ignore when I went there during the light of day. I also saw remnants of my then-boyfriend in those characters. There was that same hopeful, unrealistic look of the addict who didn't know he was in deeper than he wants to believe. The American Dream was quickly disintegrating, and I no longer saw Coney Island as the gaudy, harmless place of my childhood. It became the place where a hit could be taken under the unlit boardwalk, where dealers met with druggies outside Astroland, where the elderly pawned their belongings on Mermaid Avenue to feed their grandchildren's addictions. No good came of it, and from that period, I realized that just love was not enough to hold anything together.
There are stories about Coney Island for a lot of people. It's tough to look into the future and to try to envision that whatever tacky crap Thor Equities thinks up, there will still be that magic of history and faded glory.
Riiight.
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