The Electric Michelangelo (30 page)

– I find bleach will work also but it needs to sit. There is so much movement to these new pieces that the ink gets everywhere. I like to dip my quill often, so to speak. Call me old fashioned.

– Oy. The days of old fashioned are no more, I fear. Some days I think I will have to take out my own spleen to get a cheer. Me, I have to bring fluid through my pipes every morning, regardless of a show, otherwise I’m asking for trouble, I’ll get made a mess of. An hour or more every time, and people say you have no skills, you are just a joke, you aren’t marketable! Now it’s just like eating or washing my face, I guess; I do it without thinking.

Tattooing was the one culture at Coney that had lasted over the years, and remained credible, arresting audiences in their tracks. It was something that could be done to the watching, yawning, masses that included them, a sensation actually felt by them. That was the very nucleus of its longevity – inclusion, involvement, connection. Where other shows now missed the mark, tattoo artists struck the bullseye time and again, allowing customers to self-customize, to tailor their own ride, and they brought them the physical sensation and the realm of suffering and beauty which was sought. Reputations were hard fought for in New York City but, once achieved, they seldom were demolished. The lone female tattoo artist on the Bowery, Minny Hendry, was as admired for her hand-poked work as she was ridiculed for her anomalous gender within the profession. Cy had not a bad word to say against her, he had seen her daintily executed designs, and he imagined Reeda clipping him round the ear for it anyway. There were still prickles between those in the industry at Coney, tongue-in-cheek rivalry, to goad the crowds, but trade was good enough to support all the booth artists. Sometimes Arturas would stop by Cy’s booth in the late afternoon or evening and shadow-spar with him.

– How many today, my friend?

– About twenty. Twenty-five.

– Hah! Rinky-dink, I knew it all along! Me, I work over fifty as usual. So tonight I buy the beer for you, since I am still best and richest artist at Coney.

Cy walked in to the Island with the lucky dice of the freehander, he knew that particular skill carried anywhere, it was his best card to play, doubling the prices from the offset. He could lie on his back and paint a whole body, did not need any more than a needle, some ink and a muse. Some of the others had copied the model of Arturas and Claudia, and they had women that were decorated from head to toe, wives, girlfriends, even sisters. Other scrapers had partnerships with big, obese girls of no relation, carnival women who no longer grossed the public with mere size and needed new disfigurements, additional attractions, to remain useful in the Coney community where they now felt they belonged. Some weighed in at five hundred pounds, their glands all out of whack, and they had special boxcar transportation arranged for them to get them to the Island. Pictures got shipwrecked under the waves in the oceans of their rippling skin.

Cy lit up his booth with colourful signs and stark bulbs and convoluted claims of brilliance, as did the others, and he wore the hair of a Renaissance master and had a pierced ear. But he did not need to go to the trouble, it was merely in keeping with the costume of the place. Riley would have scoffed at him, informed him that he was a sell-out, a bootlick and an idiot, the sheep in wolf’s clothing. But he did not care. If he wanted to he could remember that Riley was dead, even if the voice lived on in his head. Come mid-summer the crowds swarmed around the doorway of his establishment, drawn away from the screech of the Steeplechase horses on their metal tracking and the gasps inside the circus tents and the stomach-less laughter of turning upside down in the Loop-O-Plane, drawn to another kind of intrigue. They peered in between each other at wall-to-wall flash and watched him working and for once they were hushed, listening only to that notorious, serious sound – the gamma purr of the electric needle.

Varga Oyster Bar was no Dog and Partridge, but for Cyril Parks’s habitual presence there it was a sort of equivalent. There were initial similarities; a menu that served a variety of fishy dishes, which ultimately all came out looking and tasting the same, a constant greasy smell of seafood in the air even when the kitchen fryers were not blasting clams or whelks, shrimp or oysters into crisp breaded cinders, the mismatched wooden furniture that had over the years picked up a faint slimy, sticky sheen, and it was frequented by a selection of regulars who were well-known to each other, visiting players and inevitable strangers. There was a gaming section to the bar, which had achieved a certain local infamy for its cerebral dexterity and its violence, and an outdoor beer garden mostly used for the purposes of courting, sobering or ending a dispute the quickest way. There were squabbles between punters and occasional brawls, merriment and banter, times of quietude for contemplation or the perusal of bad fortune, and the chance of a little look-see with a member of the opposite sex if the planets were in lucky alignment. And that’s where the similarities ended.

Varga caught Coney’s off-work crowd. Brighton Beach’s weary old Russians wandered into the gaming room from time to time, strung-out drunks stumbled through the threshold, as did Brooklyn’s braver souls, or occasionally a curious city resident who had heard an odd rumour about the proprietors. During the years that Cy worked at Coney Island and for the previous six, Varga had been run by a pair of Siamese-twin sisters, Mary and Valerie, who bore as little resemblance to Paddy Broadbent as chalk did to cheese. The sisters were joined at the waist and hip, and though they shared no organs and separational surgery would have been relatively simple for them, having missed that opportunity at birth owing to poverty and rural location, they remained of one entity, moving quick and coordinated around the bar to clear dishes and glasses. Their dresses were specially made with four sleeves and one full skirt, though it was not until they lifted a hem that their condition was revealed. Until then it could have been assumed that they simply walked in an exactly matching pace butting up against each other. The bar often ran on the system of good cop, bad cop, Mary being of the softer disposition and Valerie the tougher – there was trouble for those who would court the former for they would have to go through the latter, and Valerie was not one for romance, she was intimidating at best, able to oust even the meanest element at closing time and send the bums limping from the establishment smelling of a bucket of well-aimed fish guts. The Sweet and Sour Sisters, Cy called them, and on nights of failing lucidity he had even offered to tattoo them accordingly on their bosoms. For all the sticks and stones and taunting and teasing of their youth, the shame of adults to be handling them, and the knowledge that only two decades earlier conspicuous abnormals had been kept in cages with orang-utans in the Bronx Zoo, they were remarkably well-adjusted, fearless and very enterprising ladies.

They had worked at the Island’s freak shows back in their youth, having been brought in from a small town outside Spokane, Washington, by Gumpertz’s cronies, before retiring from circus life to a steadier profession. They took their ample money – having been paid a double rate of course and bartering only ever single rent at Coney’s hotels and hostels, and bought a little space which had once been a chop house on Jones Walk, near the boardwalk, where the dish of the day was never certain and the alcohol was compulsorily served over ice. They timed their exit well, only a short time before the World Circus went into an irreversible decline at the insistence of even the larger, poorer crowds that they were becoming apathetic towards freakery and acrobats, and the pin-heads and Spider Boy and Cobrina were shuffled out into the unforgiving world of unmutant humanity.

Varga could seem like the wrong side of the looking glass. The punters were deformed or used to handling lions or too small to reach the bar counter while simultaneously boastful of their oversized ding-dongs. They had remarkable talents that they were not opposed to flouting. They could be extremely heavy drinkers and if Cy was out with Claudia and Arturas, whose simultaneous capacity to hold liquor well exceeded his own, or with Henry Beausang and his unholy sponge-like liver, he often ended the evening in a very sorry state. There were nights when everything within the sticky walls was a blur of wrong operation, like the subconscious product of a surgeon’s trickling syringe, like a laughing-gas lullaby. Life at Coney could seem surreal and endgame at the best of times, but coupled with quantities of drink the labouring brain dissolved, leaked out through an ear canal, and a world of ridiculous inner sense found its escape. There were nights of stripteases and oyster-dances, dare-devil asphyxiation and fish-hook eating contests, nights so stupid that Cy thought he might wake up the next morning in his bed in the small rooms above the Pedder Street shop having dreamed-up America like the epic hallucinations of a coma, and Varga was the candied cherry on the iced bun of it all, the red nose on the clown. Sometimes he thought he might even bolt upright in his bed in the Bayview Hotel, ten years old again, having to shake away sleep, shake off the ether-like stupor, and he’d get up and go into his mother’s room and find her sleeping in her headscarf. With a hand on her shoulder he’d wake her and tell her about the strangest of dreams he had just had, and she’d smile and say that the slumberous arms of Morpheus were curious, curious things, and that yes, America existed, and one day he might see it, though she doubted she ever would.

Chess was Varga’s passion. The bar ran midweek tournaments that were dangerous, florid affairs. Tuesday and Wednesday was the topsy-turvy weekend for the workers at Coney who were otherwise kept busy Saturday and Sunday with their shows and professional roles when the rest of New York wanted relaxation and fun. On these uneventful days they took their break from the jaunty, vulgar entertainment world, shut down their bodies and their rides, and became just normal folk with leisure time. Some went into the city for their own entertainment, the art of the museums, the excitement and invisibility of walking amid the thronging masses in Manhattan. Brooklyn absorbed many of the workers back into its massive corners where they sat out on stoops and gossiped about the Island, scrubbed costumes clean and hung breeches with tail-sleeves out to dry. Corporeal deformity and mystery were packed away. Ordinary speech was made, and love; sleep was enjoyed, vigs and bills were paid.

It was never clear how the chess tournaments got started, it was simply understood that that’s where they were held. Mary and Valerie themselves did not play the game, and the tournaments had been running before they took over the establishment. Since Cy had first started coming to Varga there had been chess gatherings. The game was not played as he had always imagined it to be played, in the drawing rooms of nice houses between fathers and sons, in the expansive high-ceilinged rooms of European manors and estates, to polite, white-gloved applause. It was played viciously and inconsiderately. With expletives and bets. Legend had it a player had been stabbed in the gaming room of Varga over a debate about the origin of the game itself. One man had said China, his opponent maintained India, tempers frayed, a knife appeared and things got crazy. The fight was barely a fight at all, just one sharp stroke that punctured a lung, and Mr China was carted out feet first only two theoretical moves away from the first check of the game. It seemed that intellect and bohemian temper were not exclusive features in Varga. No watches or sand-timers were employed to keep the proceedings moving along – though if a player was taking too long to make a move the opponent was permitted to use psychological tactics as encouragement. Inciting comments, provocative gestures, cigarette smoke blown casually in a face. Frequently the tournaments went on until the early hours of the morning, or into the next day. Riley would have said that it was a canny contravention, the game of princes and goddesses had been well and truly bastardized by a proletariat rabble. Those who did not play often observed the games, catching their breath when a rook swept away a bishop, clearing an open weft-ward path to the unprotected king, and adding to the already flinty tension. If the noise of the audience increased, or news of a queen’s gambit broke, it passed along the rows of spectators, and new onlookers would be drawn from the other rooms, squeezing in to the smoky gaming arena. It was said more games ended in an argument or a skirmish in Varga than with capitulation or a victory move. That was just the way things went.