Soul Patch

PROLOGUE

1972

Nothing is so sad as an empty amusement park. And no amusement park is so sad as Coney Island. Once the world’s playground, it is no longer the world’s anything: not even important enough to be forgotten. Coney Island is the metal basket at the bottom of Brooklyn’s sink. So it is that when the County of Kings is stood on end, Coney Island will trap all the detritus, human and otherwise, before it pours into the Atlantic.

Coney Island’s demise would be easy to blame on the urban planners, especially Robert Moses, who thought it best to warehouse the niggers, spics, and white trash far away from the crown jewel of Manhattan in distant outposts like Rockaway and Coney Island. If they could have built their ugly shoe-box housing projects on the moon, they would have. It is no accident that the subway rides from Coney Island and Rockaway to Manhattan are two of the longest in the system. But Coney Island’s decay is as much a product of its birth as anything else.

Coney Island, the rusted remnants of its antiquated rides rising out of the ocean like the fossils of beached dinosaurs, clings to a comatose existence. Like the senile genius, Coney Island has lived just long enough to mock itself. And nothing epitomizes its ironic folly better than the Parachute Jump. A ploughman’s Eiffel Tower, its skeleton soars two hundred and fifty feet straight up off the grounds of what had once been Steeplechase Park. But the parachutes are long gone and now only the looming superstructure remains, the sea air feasting on its impotent bones.

It was under the Parachute Jump’s moon shadow that the four men ambled across the boardwalk toward the beach. No one paid them any mind. No reason to. There was a flurry of activity along the boardwalk and in the woeful vestiges of the amusement park during the window between Easter Sunday and Memorial Day. False hope bloomed like weeds as city administration after city administration promised a return to the glory days of Coney Island. But by the advent of summer, hope would be gone, another silent funeral held for a still-born renaissance.

At the steps that led down to the beach, one of the four men decided he was having second thoughts. Maybe he didn’t want to get sand in his shoes. No one likes sand in his shoes. The man standing to his immediate right waited for the rumble of the Cyclone-several girls screaming at the top of their lungs as the roller coaster cars plunged down its steep first drop-before slamming his leather-covered sap just above the balking man’s left knee. His scream was swallowed up by the roar of the ocean and the second plunge of the Cyclone. He crumpled, but was caught by the other men.

Once their shoes hit the sand, they receded under cover of the boardwalk itself. Above their heads bicycles clickety-clacked along the splintering wooden planks, old Jewish men played chess, teenage boys proved their worth by hurdling wire garbage baskets. Out on the beach, couples sat in vacant lifeguard chairs. Some contemplated the vastness of the ocean or calculated their insignificance in relation to the stars. Some boys kissed their first girlfriends. Some girls placed their heads into their boyfriends’ laps.

It was much cooler under the boardwalk, even at night. The sea air was different here somehow, smelling of pot smoke and urine. Ambient light leaking through the spaces between the planks imposed a shadowy grid upon the sand. The sand hid broken bottles, pop tops, used condoms, and horseshoe crab shells. Something snapped, and it wasn’t the sound of someone stepping on a shell.