Where Did He Go? Coney Island, That's Where

The blog has been characteristically quiet the last few weeks, and not because I got married a second time. I've been keeping my head down, trying to finish rewrites on the three plays I mostly-wrote this year so that I can start work on something new. I'll update you on those plays when the rewrites are finished. Not too long on them now, hopefully. 

Theatrically, I had a bit of good news: a one act of mine will be in the Bad Theater Festival  on November 2nd. It's tentatively called "S For Slaughter," but we're thinking about changing the name, since the play has nothing to do with slaughter at all, but does have a teeny bit to do with St. Louis Cardinals great Enos Slaughter. It's misleading, I know. 

What's that, you say? You'd like to read more  about baseball? Well let me indulge you, with this nifty bit of "writing" that I did for our good friends The Classical.

You're right, Marge. Just like the time I could have met Mr. T at the mall. The entire day I kept saying, "I'll go a little later. I'll go a little later." And then when I got there, they told me he'd just left. And when I asked the mall guy if he would ever come back again, he said he didn't know.

Homer Simpson never got to meet Mr. T., and I never got to see Kid Harvey pitch. I'd wanted to as early as April, when he embarrassed Stephen Strasburg's Nationals to giddy chants of "Harvey's better!" from a giddy Citi Field assemblage. But April was a long time ago. Watch highlights from that game and you'll see David Wright, Ruben Tejada and Jordany Valdespin—players who have been felled by injuries, managerial impatience, and savage Seligian wrath.

The Mets of April are long gone, and now Matt Harvey has been sent away with them. I could have seen him beat the Nats in April, the White Sox in May, or the befuddled representatives of the American League in July, but I kept saying, I'll go a little later. I'll go a little later. And now, he's not at the ballpark any more. The Mets themselves, depleted and defeated and desultorily playing out the string in Energy Saver Mode, are barely there in general.

This happens ever summer. The first particularly miserable Citi Field day saps my early season enthusiasm, and then the Mets fall apart around the All Star break, and I decide to steer clear of the stadium until the ridiculous, end-of-season ticket incentives kick in. Suddenly it's September, football is here, and I realize I have only a few more weeks to chug as much baseball as possible, a squirrel gorging on nuts when he reads in the paper that winter is coming.

My plan two weeks ago was for a spectacular doubleheader. After months of waiting, I would go meet Mr. T., who was scheduled to pitch an afternoon game against the Phillies on Thursday, August 29. Afterwards, I would take the 7 to the F and ride it all the way to the end of the line, for sunset, surf and the surging Brooklyn Cyclones. I was just about to buy my tickets when a horrible noise—a straining sound, maybe a tearing sound—resounded through Metslandia. Matt Harvey had (partially) torn his UCL. It was just a little rip, but UCLs are like condoms—any sort of tear is some sort of catastrophe.

There's much more. Read on, and learn of the briny delights of Coney Island! Read, I tell you. Read!

For Coney Island's Mayor, A Long, Ugly Winter

Since November, I've been working on a long feature for Narratively about Dick Zigun, self-proclaimed "mayor of Coney Island," and his arts group, Coney Island USA. Best known as the man who invented the Mermaid Parade, Zigun is a charismatic, bombastic and occasionally divisive figure whose life's work was mangled by Hurricane Sandy. I was turned on to the story by Ginny Louloudes, of ART/NY, and spent the next few months hanging around the Boardwalk, interviewing artists, and devouring the unbelievably readable Coney Island: Lost And Found.

Want the lede? I'll give it to you for free. The rest of it, well, you can get that for free too.

Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the boardwalk on its way up the coast—and he was not afraid of Sandy. Rather than evacuate, he spent the night at home on West Fifteenth Street, a few blocks from the water, his pick-up parked outside in case of emergency. By the time he realized emergency was here, it was too late to run.

“When the flood came, it came fast,” says Zigun. “When I saw water pouring in under the door, over the sandbags, the water was already knee-high in the street.”

Fearing the flood might knock him over, he waded across the road to take shelter in a friend’s second-story apartment. From the second floor, they watched the water—three feet high and rising. Four. Five.

Dick Zigun, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Coney Island”

When the tide ebbed after midnight, Zigun, a grizzled fifty-nine year-old, went home to grab something he’d forgotten in his hurry: his cat. He found Buddy floating on his mattress, safe and dry, but “a little freaked out.”

“He saved my expensive goose down comforter,” Zigun says. “He had gathered it up around him, so it wasn’t soaking wet, and he was warm. I grabbed the cat, grabbed my prescription medicine, grabbed my iPhone charger—you know, the essentials of life.”

For a moment, Zigun wasn’t thinking about Coney Island USA, the arts organization, sideshow and museum he founded in 1980. Since then, he has thought of nothing else. Long one of the most visible artists in South Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “mayor of Coney Island” rules from Surf Avenue, where he has turned a ninety-five year-old restaurant building into the artistic heart of the amusement district. But since the storm, where once stood a bar, a theater and an ice cream parlor, nothing remains but “a big fucking mess.”

At 3,700 words, the resultant story is the longest journalism thing I've ever written, and I think it's turned out pretty well. (The second-longest was the time I spent two weeks pretending to know enough about the legal system to cover a very colorful court battle in Long Island. It sneaked onto the cover of the Observer because it happened to run the week the editor in chief got fired. Timing is everything!)

The pictures above don't have anything to do with the story, but I took them a couple of weeks ago, on my last day doing interviews at Coney. The one of the guy with the metal detector makes me so happy, you can't even imagine.

Have I mentioned lately how hungry I am for summer? I've been checking this website so often, it might as well be my homepage.

A Week After Sandy, I Feel The City Sprawl

Last week, I walked fifteen minutes to a friend's house in Fort Greene to drink cheap beer and watch bad football. The Titans lost. The Jets lost. In short, it was Sunday.

In a couple hours, I'm going to the same friend's house to drink cheap beer and watch bad football. The Titans will almost certainly lose. The Jets have a bye, which is good news for anyone tired of Mark "Futility" Sanchez. And meanwhile, in Staten Island, the Rockaways, Coney and elsewhere, New Yorkers are cold, hungry and mad for reasons that have nothing to do (I assume) with the Jets. 

It's not original to comment on the uncanny way that the hurricane split the city in half. For most New Yorkers, life is the same as it was last week—although we're saved the headache of charging through the grocery store buying water. For a handful, well, life has turned to shit. And save for rescue workers, utility workers and the increasing stream of volunteers, reporters and disaster area-tourists, there has been little contact between the two.

The hurricane stripped New York of mass transit, gas supplies, power and Internet—it's no surprise that it's failed to bring us together. People can only walk so far, and those who didn't need to brave bus and gas lines couldn't be blamed for staying in their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods may have come together, but the city has begun to seem very large. 

Yesterday, reading this excellent Times story about the horrifying conditions inside public housing,  I was so affected by the first two paragraphs that I asked myself, "Where was this filed from? Did the reporter make it all the way to Coney Island?" I glanced at the dateline—the bit that tells you where the reporter was when he wrote the story—and realized that, of course, it didn't have one. Articles written in New York don't need a dateline, because this is our home court. But suddenly, Coney Island feels as far away as Beirut.

New Yorkers like to identify with their block, with their neighborhood, borough and city. In an idle way, we assume we have something in common with people in the far reaches of Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Sure, I've never spent much time in any of those places, but I've driven past them in cabs. They looks like suburbs, and I know what suburbs are like. Or they look like any of the dozens of middle and working class neighborhoods that stretch across Brooklyn. I've spent time in those places. I can imagine everywhere else. 

I really have spent time in Coney Island and the Rockaways. Vacation time, but still. I know the streets. I know what trains to take to get there. This storm has underlined how shallow, how arrogant, how stupid it is to think that has given me any kind of useful knowledge. I don't know a thing about life in the Rockaways—whether or not the power is on. That's a depressing thought, though hardly a surprising one, and to cope with it I'm going to keep writing as much as I can about how the storm has affected our city's theaters. I may not know much, but I know how to write about theater, and I know how to watch the Titans lose. It's time to get back to work.