They had been at Coney Island for eight years now, the longest either had lived in one place since they left the village in Germany. When she was not lifting her petticoats outside his parlour on Stillwell Avenue to show the self-portrait of her husband on her thigh, or displaying her form in the human picture gallery of Luna Park, Claudia was hoisting pewter balls in her outstretched hands, or turning over vehicles like a tornado, or hurling ingots and faggots and scaffolding over twelve prostrate men to the gasps of the enthralled public.
Cy opened his eyes to see the enormous pair smiling kindly at him. The thing he had to understand about Arturas Overas, he was told by the subject himself, was that he was not one for all the competitive tussling and ruffianry with others in the same profession. It gave him bad indigestion and a spastic colon, a griping of the guts such as bad clams will provide. He worked in a place that was a tattooist’s paradise. There was more work there than an additional ten artists could manage. And if more artists came, more customers would follow. The more cows, the more milk produced and the more milk produced the more people would drink the milk, said Arturas. It was good for business to have more cows in the herd. When one was milking, all were milking. This was Arturas’s interpretation and philosophy regarding the tattoo trade and, after the thorough, huff-duff style of warfare to the industry in Morecambe, it was a bold new concept to Cy. The man placed a big hand on Cy’s knee.
— But are you good, my friend? Or are you, what is it they say, are you rinky-dink?
Cy’s heartbeat was still erratic. His shoulders ached from the constrictor arm.
— I work freehand. I have for over ten years. I apprenticed with the greatest artist in the north of England.
— Excellent! Then I was right. I am always right about such matters. We were meant to meet, my friend, do you not agree? And what is your name?
— Cyril Parks. Cy.
— No, your other name.
— Oh. The Electric Michelangelo.
It was the first time he had spoken of his new identity, the first time he had rechristened himself out loud.
— Aah! It is good! It is very good! Not as good as mine. I am the Black Baron. You like it?
How had Arturas known what kind of man he was, Cy asked, back in the warehouse when he had tried his best to conceal himself. Claudia was the one who replied. She had a beautiful soft, basso voice when it came to speaking of her husband.
— Turo is a very sensitive man. He will watch the spider in the bathtub for an hour to know if it is poisonous or harmless rather than squashing it without asking. He has a sense of life, of joy and pain. He is my bear with a thorn in his paw and his tongue in the honey pot.
They told Cy about Coney Island. There were booths that could be rented seasonally and upwards of one million visitors swarmed through the fairgrounds and parks every weekend in summer. One million people, could he imagine such a thing? Sometimes you could not find the boardwalk for all the people on it — you just had to assume that it was there, said Arturas. It was the chosen place for the likes of them, full of the wonders of the world, the ingenuity and curiosity of man, and hotdogs, delicious hotdogs.
— Ah, yes. With the onion and ketchup along the top, just enough for tasting each bite. Geschmackvoll! And, my friend, wait until you see, there is the fourteen-inch frank made for two people to share.
He leaned over and kissed his wife and she patted his cheek. There were good friendships that could start with almighty confrontation or terrible prejudice, Cy would learn.
Coney Island, as it turned out, was Morecambe’s richer, zany American relative. A fat, expensively dressed in-law with a wicked smile and the tendency, once caught up in the mood, to take things too far. The family resemblance was there for displaced Lancashire folk to see upon arrival if they cared to. Both were made up of a multitude of interdependent entertainment cells designed to remove a person from the dimension of ordinary life. Both sat sublimely and noisomely next to water, defining themselves in relation to the sea. Had anyone with latitudinal skills measured the direction of their gaze, the two resorts probably faced each other across that vast and busy piece of ocean water — give or take a small land mass positioned in between, Manx and Irish populated — like a pair of gargoyles, one smiling cheerfully, the other laughing maniacally. Both purveyed a bawdy sense of humour when it came to the indelicate human body, with its gases and growths and ganglions, and both acknowledged the desire of its inquisitive mind to be shocked and appalled and entertained and mystified. Cy had never heard of the place until he arrived in the country, until he got into the slipstream of immigrants flushing through the massive borough city of Brooklyn, but when he got there it seemed like fulfilling a prophecy. Within weeks, he had secured a rental tattoo booth on Oceanic Walk, one of the honky-tonk alleys that ran through the catacombs of amusement facilities at the Island, only three hops, skips and jumps from Coney’s boardwalk and beach. It was a good tip from Arturas and Claudia, and a natural progression for Cy. He went where the work was, because he had been born of that peculiar seaside-growing odd-fruit-bearing family tree, because he was sired from that dynasty. Looking back it was as simple as that. Go to America, make up a name, aim for the ringing, singing, screaming, teeming water’s edge. There was a sense of graduation to his life now, as if he had found the doorway to another level of the same happy, haunted hotel, the same colourful house of torture, the same quarantined wonderland, where the insanity of the population was just brighter and more intense and extended, because it had the freedom to be so, because this was America. The Electric Michelangelo belonged, Cy sensed it. Because Coney itself was like the work of his moniker’s original, towards the end of his life, when something went vain and vivid in his brain and the result was a painted world that was past real, surreal, mannered from psychosis and all the more poignant for it.
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.