Coney Island is for Lovers
Part One
The water in the Atlantic is warmer than the water of the Pacific. I’ve yet to completely submerge myself here in the pacific’s waters since moving to LA. But from the little taste I got in the handful of beach time since I moved here, I’d say it’s pretty accurate.
The water at Coney Island always felt warmer, than the rest of the cleaner beaches on the Atlantic coast. In the past few years, there have been major pushes to clean up Coney. When the hipsters started moving into Brooklyn and realized they could take the train to the beach, gentrification stepped in and thought “damn we have to at least make this place look hospitable.” Generations of families in the surrounding neighborhoods have been doing just fine for years however, watching where they stepped in the sand and swam in the ocean. Those little diamonds under your feet are pieces of broken glass. Even the shells at Coney Island seemed like they had a vendetta against beachgoers, sharper than all the rest. That’s a Brooklyn beach.
I grew up just a few subway stops away on the N line. I had to be dragged to the water by my parents as a child. Kicking and screaming in my little mermaid bathing suit. I was terrified of the ocean, of the people around me, of everything. I took it for granted as I got older and grew to love the beach. Much like the tide, I’d pull away but always end up coming back again.
I would escape with friends to the Rockaways. A private beach with monstrous waves that drown people with regularity. I can’t swim. I always know my limits. How far out I can go and still come back. Rockaway did not give a fuck about my limits. There were plenty of terrifying moments of feeling the rip current pull me backward and my feet desperately scraping the ocean floor trying to hold my ground. Only to be thrown into the air and then forcefully back on the shore. As painful as that was, it was the best possible outcome.
And so I go back to Coney Island. The water is so flat it often felt more like a wading pool than the ocean. The only thing that launched me into the air at Coney Island was a large 6’3” gentleman who we called Ogre. A friend of a friend. Not my friend at all. He grabbed me as a joke, of which I did not find funny, and so I elbowed him in the face so he would loosen his grip. “Bitch!” he screamed and threw me into the air. The murky Coney Island water there to catch me as I splash landed.
You could go out way further in Coney Island than you could on any other beach. My friends and I would find a spot and often just talk and float for hours and splash around. You knew the water wasn’t the cleanest. Even the feel of the water, while you were floating in it, was different. It was as though there was a slick layer of grime on the surface. It was just something we got used to. None of us ever got sick.
Much like the sand, there were little trash treasures floating about the ocean that you did your best to stay away from. The most iconic being the “Coney Island Whitefish” or ‘Coney Island Bagfish.” How iconic? Joan Jett wrote a song about it.
Chorus:
“Scumbag, scumbag - ya don't leave well enough alone
Baby, you're a scumbag you're rotten to the core
You're the biggest fool that I ever known”
No one want’s to be a Coney Island Whitefish. Jett’s calling this person a “scumbag” is a nice way of saying the “whitefish” is a literal cum bag. Floating condoms. Clearly there were enough of them floating around in the water at one point in time that they warranted being named as it’s own species. Thankfully we never encountered too many. What we often saw going by, was “Coney Island Bagfish.” This was your standard plastic bag just floating along. If you were lucky it was empty, oftentimes it was not. An attack by a “Have a Nice Day” or “Thank You, Thank You, Thank You,” would leave you wondering if you were going to sprout some weird skin disease the next morning.
The first time a guy went down on me was on the beach at Coney Island. After senior prom. Everyone was drunk. We insisted our party bus driver take us to the beach after Webster Hall decided they would not let drunken 18-year-olds into their venue.
“Take us to the beach!”
I don’t know why I thought we would go to any other beach aside from Coney Island, but I was still surprised when we pulled up on a random block where this driver could unload our chaos for a few minutes. Coney Island at night is not ideal. Crime in the area was usually pretty high but here we were sprinting at full speed towards the ocean. I made out with my date. The beach at night was supposed to be romantic. He started to venture south and I laid out on the cold sand, once again making sure there was no glass or syringes beneath me. He started to undo my pants and I grabbed his thick curly black hair before he continued. “I just want you do know before you do this, I’m not going to return the favor. So you don’t have to.”
“I know. But I want to.” Good enough for me.
He gave an enthusiastic performance, but not as enthusiastic as mine. Mostly so that I could assure him he was doing a great job. Men like that sort of thing. Anything so that he would stop shoveling sand into my vagina with his tongue. It wasn’t his fault. Movies and television give you this great idea about beach sex and it never lives up to the hype. I had Coney Island in unwanted places for days.
