I had a mystical experience at the shoreline of Coney Island yesterday.
I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures or movie clips for you. But when you’re in the midst of an experience like that, you can only break it by trying too hard to remember it. My choice was to record it or be in it, and I chose to be in it.
For the record, my general spiritual beliefs can best be described as “heretic”. Enough to make my religious friends worry about my soul, while at the same time making my irreligious friends worry about my reason. In my mind, traditional religions can’t bear the weight of their own history and sins. Even so, I’ve felt power and truth in a lot of places, like an empty chapel in the silence of the night, a room full of Irish people praying the rosary at my grandfather’s wake…and what I experienced yesterday.
I should back up. For 36 years, Coney Island USA (careful, that link is borderline NSFW), a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving – no, keeping alive – the carnie art and culture of Coney Island, has sponsored the Mermaid Parade, Coney Island’s official start of summer. It takes place every June, on the last Saturday before the Summer Solstice (check the website for actual dates!), and it’s New York’s equivalent of Mardi Gras: elaborate floats, costumes, makeup, body paints, and Coney Island at its sexiest.
(I’m serious. Don’t bring the kids unless you’re okay with them seeing bare breasts. While most women wear some kind of support, there’s always a few – some wear pasties, some wear paint, some just wear the sunshine.)
Each Mermaid Parade has a King Neptune and a Queen Mermaid, and this year’s Parade Court was particularly exciting for me. As you can see from the poster above, King Neptune was Neil Gaiman, who I first discovered through his famous comic book series Sandman, and whose writing I love. Queen Mermaid was Amanda Palmer, a singer who…I mostly know through this one song (video also borderline NSFW). Sorry.
Yesterday was perfect for the parade. There have been years where it was roasting hot and years where it was rainy (like last year), but this year was sunny and low eighties. Freakin’ ideal.
Here’s the thing, though: I actually spent most of the day walking around the beach. I’m not really good with crowds. Not that the beach wasn’t crowded; like I said, the weather was ideal. But the streets and the boardwalk were downright packed, as they always are, even last year. Still, I did stop in for a bit. After all: elaborate floats, costumes, makeup, body paints, and Coney Island at its sexiest.
What I was actually interested in came shortly after the parade, around 4 PM, on the West side of the Steeplechase Pier, as it seems to every year: the Opening of the Ocean.
I said that the Mermaid Parade is Coney Island’s official start of summer, but that’s not entirely accurate. The Opening of the Ocean is, a tradition as old as the Mermaid Parade. It was the Opening of the Ocean that was the mystical experience I mentioned in the first line…and that brings us full circle.
Red tape was stretched across the beach at three places. At one stood a volunteer with a sign that said “Winter”. At the next, the volunteer’s sign said “Spring”. At the last, the sign said “Summer”.
A crowd gathered at the top of the beach with Mr. Gaiman, Ms. Palmer, and Dick Zigun, the unofficial mayor of Coney island. A band waited at the shoreline, and another crowd waited with them. I was in that crowd.
At some signal I didn’t hear or see, Mr. Zigun and the Parade Royalty and the whole crowd with them started forward. At each strip of tape, the person with the sign would raise it in the air, Mr. Zigun would give a speech that I don’t think anyone heard, and the tape would be cut.
At the last tape, Ms. Palmer took the Key to Coney Island (I forget if she was holding it before, or Mr. Gaiman or Mr. Zigun – it’s one of his trademarks)…
…and cleared a hole through the crowd down to the water. Pushed to the edge of the crowd on the beach, I hurried down to stand in the water. It was chilly, but no one cared. Not me, not the people who did the same as I did, and not the people who had been playing in the water before the ceremony even started. It was the first day of summer at Coney Island.
The last tape was cut, and the band started to play, and the crowd marched forward into surf.
Among the crowd, very much part of the planned ceremony, was a houngan dressed in white, shaking his asson – the calabash rattle that is his symbol of office. There were also two baskets filled with flowers, fruit, pennies, and rum. As we all marched into the water, the celebrants began to throw the flowers and fruit and pennies out into the waves, while the houngan took the rum into his mouth and sprayed it on the water. I couldn’t hear what the houngan was saying, but I assume he was asking the blessing of Agwe, the Loa of the sea on Coney Island for the season.
I had trouble hearing him because the party was on. The band was playing, and we were all dancing on the shoreline and in the water. Ms. Palmer, acting very much like the outrageous, bold spirit I would expect from that one video, had stripped off her Queen Mermaid kit – another pair of bare breasts, which, if Agwe’s attention was on us at that moment and he’s anything like many other male Loa I know of, he probably appreciated – dove into the chilly water in her underpants, and began frolicking with the rest of us. Large crowds watched from the pier, but we didn’t care. If anything, they were participants in their way, cheering us on. I know I was when I was one of them a few years ago. You don’t come to Coney Island, especially not during the Mermaid Parade, if you want to laugh at the freaks. You come because you love them.
I’ve seen a lot of things living in New York City, but this may be one of the greatest rituals of Bright Magic I’ve ever seen, let alone taken part in. I regret entering into that ceremony when I wasn’t in what my old Catholic religious ed teachers might have called a state of grace (a little scuffle on the Boardwalk that had left me in a lingering bad mood. Maybe it was even my fault), but the joy of that moment helped bring me into one. It was something holy, but it was more than that. It was the throbbing energy of life and sex as the band played and we danced in the chill water and threw flowers. All the everyday bullshit and bad karma was purged and there was just that energy, the sacred debauchery.
A wise man once said one should always be open to the regenerative influences. The magic of lust might get you through the night.
I wonder how Neil Gaiman enjoyed participating in something mythic.
***
Sometimes being a writer is a curse. Whenever I have a transcendent experience of any kind, I want to capture it in words and share it with the world, at which point it’s no longer transcendent. It’s…spent, somehow. Codified and defined. But I can’t be anything other than what I am. All I can do is go back next year, and probably every year going forward that I’m able, and try to lose myself in it again. Maybe it would help me attune myself better if I wore a top hat and had a few glasses of rum ahead of time…