The picture above is he latest draft of my novel-in-progress, City of Dreams. What do you think? The young woman above is Aislin Rourke, heroine of City of Dreams, but I’m afraid you’re not going to meet her in today’s passage.
Today’s passage is the second half of the story of George Fuller and his accidental journey into the Dream of Coney Island, begun in this post last week.
George’s story is an illustration of the classic advice to writers: “Murder your darlings”. George’s story is intended to be an interlude in City of Dreams, but it’s more than forty pages long. You can’t have an “interlude” that’s 10% of the total length of the book. That means that you, the readers of this blog, are getting to read an uncut version of this story that will not and cannot make it to the final book.
So join me for the story George Fuller, Sally, and their last day at Coney Island.
Beware. NC-17.
***
He never saw her again after that summer. After Labor Day, his family left the rented bungalow and returned to their house in central Brooklyn. He and Sally exchanged letters for a few months, but soon her letters stopped coming and his letters started being returned. He never knew what happened to her, but he could make some guesses. It was the Thirties, and the whole world was still down on its luck. It would be a few years yet before World War II provided the greatest jobs program in the history of the world. The family had come to New York looking for work. And while there was definitely work to be had in Coney Island in the summer, it tended to go away after Labor Day. The family had probably hung on for a few months, looking for more work until they were on the edge of eviction, then piled into the family car and headed south, where at least they would be warm if they were going to be broke.
And Coney…as Coney did, as New York did…had moved on. The grand hotels were torn down and replaced with housing projects. The amusement parks that had been the playground of America were replaced by cheap and dingy places no better than a traveling carnie. Steeplechase Park itself was torn down by Fred Trump. The bungalow colonies were replaced by Seagate Gated Community. In the Nineties, the Army Corps of Engineers filled in under the boardwalk with sand, the lovers and happy boozers and pot smokers of years past having been replaced by crackheads. The bath houses went out of business. In the end, there were only a few relics of old Coney left: the Wonder Wheel, the Comet, the Childs Building, and of course Nathan’s. George had a strange idea that Nathan’s was somehow bound to the soul of Coney itself, and when Nathan’s went, that would mean Coney was truly gone.
But then the wheel had turned again. Childs and Luna Park were restored to their full glory, and there was a Thunderbolt roller coaster again, even if it wasn’t the same. Maybe something had been lost along the way – a certain scrappy, artistic vitality, just like the rest of New York. But the Mermaid Parade still marched, and the sideshow still ran, and people were coming back. For an old man who loved Coney, that was enough.
And what had happened to Sally herself? He had even less of a clue about that. Had she joined the WACs during the War, or had she been a Rosie the Riveter? Was she already married by then? It wouldn’t have been unusual at the time. Did she love her husband, like he’d loved Marjorie? Did she have a whole passel of kids, just like he had? Had any of them gone off to Vietnam? Had they come back? Did she end up living in a farmhouse back out in the Midwest, or a tract house in some suburb?
Had she been prosperous? Had she been happy?
Where was she now?
All his life it had haunted him. The memory of that magic summer back when the world was new and his heart was unscarred and he was too damn young and blinkered and in love to even notice that the whole world was down on its luck and the shadows of war were already growing long over Europe.
Not that he’d spent his whole life mooning over his Lost Lenore. He’d been far too busy for that. Besides, Marjorie wouldn’t have put up with seventy years of that nonsense, and Sally would have kicked his ass. Still. Every so often, especially when it was high summer and he was walking the beach alone, it would come back to him, and he would wonder.
And he would dream.
And as he sat there, remembering and wondering and dreaming, Sally walked up to him and said “Hi, Slim.”
She…didn’t look exactly like he remembered her. Her hips and breasts were a little rounder and fuller than he remembered; her face had a few more freckles and her limbs a bit more muscle.
She was a year older. This was Sally as she would have been if she’d been there the next summer. That was how he knew…
“This isn’t a dream, is it?” In his dreams, she had always been exactly the same as the last time he saw her.
“It is,” she said. “But it’s not yours. Now c’mon.”
She held out her hand. He eagerly reached out to take it, then hesitated. His hand was bony and gnarled, big-knuckled with arthritis and liver-spotted.
“Sally…” He said. “I’m so…so old. I’m so old and you’re still so perfect.”
Sally just laughed, loud and unashamed, just like he remembered. “Me? Perfect? I was never perfect, Slim. And I got old too. What do you expect? Eighty years have been and gone. I worked as a maid, I worked in a factory, and then I worked on a farm. And along the way, I had nine kids. Those things make ‘perfect’ go away pretty damn quick.”
“But how…”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a dream. Maybe you are. Maybe we’ve both been given a chance to share just one more dream before the lights go out. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Slim. Now are you coming or not?”
She held out her hand again, and this time he took it.
For the first hundred yards or so, they must have looked like a doting great-granddaughter taking her great-granddad for a little walk during a visit to the nursing home, a fact he couldn’t stop thinking about. He hated that she was seeing him like this. He hated that anyone was seeing him like this. But at the end of that hundred yards of boardwalk, something else caught his attention.
He’d expected to be exhausted long before he got that far, but he wasn’t. He felt like he could go a little farther. What was more, the endless aches and pains that had been his lot in life for who knew how long now – just the price of growing old – were less than they should have been. His knees and hips should have felt like they were packed with ground glass and his back like it had fused into an iron rod, but no. Of course, all of that could have been the power of suggestion, or the excitement of walking the boardwalk with Sally again after all these years. But his hands…his hands had been crooked and knobby-knuckled with arthritis, and now…well, they were still wrinkled and liver-spotted, but the knobs were gone and his fingers flexed without pain for the first time in decades.
When he realized that, he stopped and stared at his hand, then at Sally.
He was at least ten years younger.
Sally just grinned at him. “It’s only gonna get better, Slim. C’mon.”
As they walked on, George began to realize what Sally had meant about them being in a dream, but not his dream. They weren’t walking through Coney Island as it really was, nor his memory of it. It was like they were walking through the dream of Coney Island itself. Coney Island as it was supposed to be. The bath houses were back, and the boardwalk was up off the sand as God intended, but the Childs Building was still an amphitheater and charmingly retro restaurant, just as it had become in the last few years. The empty lots had become arcades, restaurants, rides, and in one case a bazaar. The housing projects had become art deco skyscraper-palaces.
The day was hot, but it was the kind of hot that made swimming in the ocean a pleasure, not the kind of hot that left the young exhausted and old men in faints. The sea breeze was fresh and clean, but not strong enough to blow stinging sand before it.
The people were a cross-section of merrymakers from all of Coney’s summers past. Bathing costumes from 1900 splashed in the surf beside string bikinis. A man from the Thirties in a white suit and a straw boater hat strolled hand in hand with a black woman from the Seventies in a tube top, bell bottoms, and an afro. A young soldier from the Forties – oh, how George remembered that uniform! – won at a shooting gallery game and handed a stuffed bear to a colorfully-dressed and coiffed lad from the Eighties, who hugged it tight and squealed. And over there, a hippie from the Sixties in her tie-dye and a hippie from the Nineties in her earth tones sat beside each other on a park bench and ate fried shrimp.
But the greatest wonder of all was that Sally had been telling the impossible truth: the farther they walked, the younger he got. He could feel his back straightening, his skin smoothing, his fat melting away, the aches in his joints fading, and his strength returning. By the time they reached the Childs Building, he was retirement age, and the pretty young girl was walking with her grandfather – or just maybe her father, who had sired her late in life, either by a younger wife or a wife in the twilight of her fertility. By the time they reached where Keyspan Park usually was – but where Steeplechase Park was, as it always should have been, forever and ever Amen, and damn Old Man Trump – he was fifty, and either her father or a dirty old man stepping out with a girl far too young for him. Also, the Parachute Drop was in operation, as it hadn’t been for decades.
By the time they got to Stillwell Avenue, he was forty. His hair was thick on his head again, and back to the rich chestnut it had once been, with just the first few strands of gray starting to appear. By now, it was only just possible for her to be his daughter if he had married young, and she didn’t look much like him anyway. But no one was looking at them like…well, like he was a middle-aged man taking advantage of a young girl. Maybe they knew the truth somehow. It wouldn’t be that hard, really; the youthening was accelerating. It seemed like every step was a month now. Especially when they turned off the boardwalk and headed up Stillwell toward Nathan’s. How did he know they were headed toward Nathan’s and not, say, to the subway, even though Sally had said nothing about it? Because of course they were. What was a visit to Coney Island without a visit to Nathan’s?
And as they walked, he could feel himself racing down toward thirty, toward twenty, chasing that magical summer so long ago, just like every man who’s ever lived long enough to feel the cold settle in his bones. But unlike every one of those men, George Fuller caught it. By the time they reached Nathan’s, he was seventeen and Sally was grinning.
“There’s my man,” she said. “You may not be ‘perfect’, but you are damn fine.”
He was. He was six inches taller than she’d ever seen him, and fifteen pounds heavier, all muscle. He remembered now how he’d drowned his sorrows in sports and exercise that long-ago winter, spending hours in the gym or on the court.
(And away from home; he never admitted it, not even to himself, and he wouldn’t even at the rapidly-approaching moment of his death, but he couldn’t face his mother for more than a year after Sally had disappeared. Some part of him blamed her for wishing Sally away.)
More important than the looks, at least to him, was the fact that he felt good in a way that he hadn’t felt in so long that he’d forgotten it existed. There was no ache in his muscles, no pain in his joints. He felt like…well, like he was seventeen and had gotten out of bed on a bright summer morning after being awakened by the Sun coming in his window. He felt well-rested and filled with endless, boundless energy. At the other end of the boardwalk, he’d been surprised he wasn’t exhausted after walking a hundred yards. Now, he had no doubt that he could turn around and race back up Stillwell to the boardwalk and then just keep running and running and running. After being so encumbered by his own failing body for so long, it would feel like flying.
Oh. And looking at Sally, at her fresh face and fuller bosom, he had a hard-on harder than any hard-on he’d had in decades.
She noticed and grinned at him slyly, but then his stomach growled loud enough to be heard over the crowd, and they both started laughing.
What followed was the perfect day at Coney, the kind of day he’d been dreaming about when he’d sat down on that bench this morning.
It started with a feast at Nathan’s, and it was a feast. They ate bacon cheese dogs and bacon cheese fries, fried shrimp and fried clams, and he gloried in the knowledge that the meal wouldn’t send him running for one of the public bathrooms half an hour later. His guts could handle the grease again, and he hadn’t had an appetite like this since his early twenties.
(And unlike most days when he was seventeen, a table was easy to get and he had more than enough money…or did they take any money at all? He couldn’t remember, it hadn’t seemed important. It was like the day was going out of its way to be perfect.)
After Nathan’s, they hit the amusement parks. They rode the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone, and both Thunderbolts. They ate ice cream and cotton candy and funnel cakes and lobster rolls. They drank frozen lemonade. She won him a gigantic teddy bear at the shooting gallery, which they quickly gave to a fairground urchin who was smaller than the bear itself. He didn’t do quite as well throwing baseballs at bottles (whatever magic was making today happen apparently wasn’t willing to cheat that much, but at least he was really sure the games were fair for the first time since he’d started coming to Coney), but she wore the little plastic ring proudly.
When it got hot, they went to the municipal bathhouse and changed into their bathing suits. The municipal bath house that Robert Moses had torn down in the Fifties.
(And where did they get “their” swimsuits, given that he hadn’t owned one in years, and they hadn’t been carrying anything with them? He couldn’t have said. He just went into the locker room, found a locker that he somehow knew to be “his” – had he rented it for the day? – and opened it.)
Wherever they came from, his trunks were fairly standard red trunks. Men’s swimming fashion hadn’t changed much in the last fifty years or so. But women’s…! Oh, he’d forgotten about that. Forgotten to brace himself. So when Sally came out of the women’s locker room in a modern blue bikini, you’d better believe that teenage hard-on was back.
She grinned to see it – or maybe she was grinning to see him in his trunks, all that lean teenage muscle there for the world to see, or maybe both – but just said “Looks like we better get down to the water, Slim.”
He couldn’t help but agree. He’d forgotten how these teenage hard-ons refused to go down unless they were used.
He expected the boardwalk and the sand to be burning hot, but he should have known better. Everything about this day was perfect. They still ran across it, though. And when they splashed into the surf, the water was warmer than he could ever remember it being at Coney. It was more like what he remembered of the Caribbean from the trip he and Marjorie had made to Jamaica for their fortieth wedding anniversary.
He dove in – get all wet as quick as you can, just tear off the Band-aid, that was his philosophy, usually more of an issue when the water was colder – and when he came up, he couldn’t see Sally anywhere.
“Sally?” He called, looking all around. “Sally, where’d ya go?”
Then she pounced.
She grabbed him from behind, wrapping her arms around his chest and her legs around his thighs. He laughed and started to shake her off, but she clasped him tight and whispered something in his ear that froze him in place:
“I don’t want you to think I’m teasing you, Slim,” she said. “I’m not some blushing virgin anymore, and haven’t been for almost eighty years. And I want you just as much as you want me.”
He was suddenly very aware of the soft pressure of her breasts against his back, and…were her hips thrusting against him?
Dammit. His pecker had been going down – even Caribbean-warm water was cool enough to help with that – but now it was back to full attention.
“But we only have one day,” she continued. “The one perfect day we were always supposed to have. And it would be so easy to spend it in a cheap hotel somewhere in the back streets. But I don’t want to miss a single thing. There’s time for this – “ She reached down and cupped his throbbing member, drawing a gasp and another, stronger throb. He was about to stain this suit. “ – tonight. Under the boardwalk.”
Of course. Under the boardwalk. Where else? There was only one right time and place for them.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, grinning. “And in the meantime…” He threw himself backward, dumping her in the water and unleashing a shrieking, splashing wrestling match that quickly turned into an excuse to grope. Not that they needed one.
They spent the afternoon on the beach and in the water, then as the shadows started to grow long and the lights started to come on, they changed back into their street clothes and went to the Childs Building for dinner. What was the name of the restaurant that occupied it now? Kitchen 21, something like that? It didn’t matter. It was the last of the boardwalk palaces (or was it? It seemed like there were others, wavering on the edge of sight like mirages. If they became real, or at least real in this dream, would they be the old boardwalk palaces come again, or new ones?), and there was no other place they wanted to go for dinner on their perfect day.
(If they’d had a second day, they would have gone to Ruby’s.)
And of course there was a concert in the amphitheatre next door as the Sun went down. Of course there was. The music was a medley of all his hot summer nights at Coney, and so was the dancing (oh yes, the dancing – no one was sitting down, and the crowd was spilling out onto the boardwalk and into the little park beside the amphitheatre). Jazz, swing, rock and roll, disco, even that hip-hop stuff that he usually didn’t like. The Foxtrot, swing dancing, the jitterbug, the Twist, the Stroll, the bop…all those dances whose names he’d never learned because he was too busy to pay attention to what the youth was doing anymore. Before long, it all blended together into a seamless mass of pounding feet and waving hands and swinging heads and swaying hips anyway.
(And of course, the people were a medley of all those hot summer nights as well. Everything from zoot suits to bell bottoms to those low-hanging pants that had somehow managed to stay in style since the Eighties; the girls in everything from saddle shoes and poodle skirts to shoulder pads and spandex, big hair bows to scrunchies. There were afros and DA’s and buzzcuts, tight ponytails and beehives and huge hairsprayed manes. Every color of beauty and every combination of passion. And somehow…George caught glimpses in the flicker of the strobe lights that hinted that he and Sally weren’t the only oldsters here for one last turn about the dance floor on young legs.)
Then, as full dark came down (full dark for Coney on a full moon night, anyway), fireworks started to explode overhead. Was it the Fourth of July? Friday night fireworks? He didn’t know. It was a perfect night at Coney. Of course there were fireworks.
As the fireworks began, people paused in their dancing and looked up to ooh and ahh. George wasn’t surprised when Sally took his hand. But then, a moment later, she tugged it, and he looked at her. She nodded toward the (relative) darkness and quiet of the West End.
It was time.
They slipped away while everyone else was watching the fireworks, and George doubted that they were the only ones. Not that they really needed to sneak; a crowd like this would have just cheered them on, even in the world that wasn’t a dream. He’d seen it happen.
Still, they scampered away, hand-in-hand, as if the dance’s non-existent chaperones might look their way any second. They didn’t stop until they were well down the boardwalk, where all anyone would see was two more shadows walking hand-in-hand beneath the streetlamps. And there they stopped and puffed and panted and wiped the sweat off their faces and laughed themselves silly.
When they finally stopped laughing and started walking again, they walked in silence. They had spent all day talking about their lives: his wife, her husband (both were pleased with the other’s choice; both were widowed); his time in the Navy, her time in a Higgins boat factory, building landing craft for D-Day; his years at the firm, hers on the farm; their children and grandchildren (both of them having far more than was fashionable these days).
They had even talked, briefly, of their tragedies: the brother who had never come back from Normandy, the daughter who died in a car accident, the sister who died of cancer far too young, the son who took decades to put his life together after Vietnam.
So now, as they turned off the boardwalk and onto the stairs down to the sand, there was only one thing left to say.
George said it first: “I dreamed about you,” he said. “For eighty years, I dreamed about you.”
“I dreamed about you, too,” she said. “I think that’s why we’re here.” Then she laughed. “My husband and your wife…they were better than we deserved, to put up with us all these years.”
George laughed too. “Maybe you. I was an angel.”
“Of course you were.”
“Never anything less than the perfect husband.”
They laughed some more, but it trailed off into uncomfortable silence.
“You don’t have to feel guilty about it, you know, Slim,” she said after a moment. “If your wife was anything like my husband, and your stories definitely make it sound like she was, they’re nothing but happy that we’re having one more good day on Earth before we join them.”
That was a weight off his mind.
“Now c’mon…” She led him under the boardwalk. Unlike the last time they’d been here – unlike every time he’d been under the boardwalk, really – it was clean under there. Just sand and sea grass.
There were other couples under the boardwalk. There would always be other couples under the boardwalk. That was Coney. What was more, he thought he might recognize some of the couples. Over there, the soldier from the Forties was kneeling in front of the dandy from the Eighties, who was leaning against a pylon with his head thrown back. Over there, the woman from the Seventies was bent over with her bell bottoms around her knees, supporting herself against another pylon as the man from the Thirties sawed away at her from behind. The hippies from the Sixties and the Nineties were spread out on a blanket over there, with their hands up under each other’s skirts. The smells of sex were rich in his nostrils, the sounds almost drowning out the sounds of the concert and the sea. He’d been excited before, but now his heart pounded and his cock throbbed against the inside of his trousers. Then Sally nonchalantly reached over and started rubbing it, and he groaned.
“There’s one last thing I should tell you, Slim,” She said.
“What…what’s that?” He asked, struggling to focus his mind enough to form words.
She leaned in to whisper in his ear: “For a long time after that night, I used to play with myself thinking about you…thinking about this.” She squeezed his hard-on gently, and he groaned again. Then he grinned.
“Still so ladylike,” he chuckled.
“I’ll show you ‘ladylike’, Skinny,” she growled. With that, she spun him around, pulled him into a hard kiss, and then pushed him down on a sand dune.
“Want to know why my ‘sainted husband’ put up with me all those years?” She asked as she popped open her blouse and yanked her bra down, freeing those milk-white, pink-tipped breasts he’d dreamed of for so many years, now fuller and heavier than he remembered them (though still not as big as the dark woman’s from that long-ago picture). Then her hands were working beneath her skirt, and she was sliding her panties down, and kicking them off and away into the darkness. “Want to know why?” She asked again, challenging him. Then she was standing over him, tits and ass to the wind. “Because I was great in the sack.”
“I’ll bet you were,” he growled. “Now get down here.”
After a few minutes of kissing, groping and general rolling around, they somehow found themselves in the old sixty-nine. Which was rather funny, actually: of all the dreams and romantic fantasies he’d had over the years, George had never imagined that he’d end up with his first love straddling his head, her beautiful butt in his face and her face in his crotch. Now that it was happening, though, it seemed completely appropriate: they would have been failing the honor of old Brooklyn if they couldn’t be at least as dirty as this bunch of newcomers and whippersnappers.
And of course, he certainly wasn’t complaining about the view. Better yet, Sally was doing things with her mouth that proved she hadn’t just been whistling Dixie about being good in the sack. One advantage to being an old man in a young man’s body: if he’d actually been a teenager, he would have come in her mouth after a mere few seconds of such treatment.
As it was, he just took it as his cue to prove that he’d learned a few things in all that time, too. As in, he grabbed that magnificent ass, pulled her snatch down to his mouth, and started eating.
Delicious.
After a few minutes of licking, sucking and occasionally nibbling, both of them were more than ready. Sally swung around until they were face-to-face, reached down between them, and fitted his tip to her now-sopping opening, but her stopped her before she could push down: “Wait! Should we use a condom? I would have used a condom if we’d really done this back then…or at least I would have pulled out. Condoms were a lot harder to get back then.”
She smiled down at him, and it was affectionate, amused…and just a little sad. He didn’t understand the sadness until she said:
“One way or another, sweetie, I don’t think that’s going to make a difference.”
Then she slid down on him, and he grabbed that magnificent ass again, and they both started pumping, and rational concerns were blown away.
It was perfect. Everything he’d dreamed it would be for eighty years…which, ironically, it definitely wouldn’t have been if they’d actually done this back then.
As they rode on, he experienced a weird doubling of his consciousness. He was totally here, totally now, experiencing every stroke and touch, every kiss and cry. But at the same time, he was also fading into a vision. A dream. Another life. The life they could have had, and maybe should have had, if the dream of Coney Island had come true:
Seeing each other again the next summer, picking up where they left off. The shadows of war were growing long over the world by then, but they didn’t care. As a song written much later would put it, they were getting their share. Working on their night moves. Still, it took them a whole summer of sneaking into alleys and under the boardwalk and doing Everything Else But to work up the nerve to go all the way.
(A lot more than sand and sea grass under there that time, boy. And he did in fact end up pulling out – condoms were hard to get back then – and leaving a pool of jizzum on her belly. He took it as a good sign that she wasn’t disgusted. Rather amused, actually.)
By then, his family had adjusted to the idea that he was liable to marry this girl someday. Her family had known for a while, and were pretty happy about it, actually. Still, everyone urged them to hold off until after he graduated college.
Then the War came, and he married her at City Hall just before he shipped out, for the same reason so many of them did: because girlfriends didn’t get military benefits if you died.
World War II went pretty much the same – the same horrors, the same nightmares, the same best friend burning. Sally was a Rosie The Riveter, just like Marjorie had been. Maybe they were even co-workers. In the end, the biggest difference was that, since he was a married man instead of a virgin, he didn’t hire any hookers on any sweaty South Pacific islands.
Then he came home, and they got started on the family sooner than he and Marjorie had. Able to hit the ground running, you see.
They had a good, long life together. Hard work – different triumphs, different tragedies, different kids. In the end, Sally stayed a little longer than Marjorie had, and they both ended up staying at that assisted-living facility on the boardwalk together, until the day they both took a walk down the boardwalk, a walk where they grew younger with every step, for one last perfect day at Coney.
The vision caught up with reality, memory of the world as it had happened and the world as it could have happened caught up with the present, and then there was just ecstasy, no time or memory at all.
Sally was riding him hard, crying “Oh God, George! Oh God, George!” so loud that they probably heard her above the concert, but neither of them cared.
He could feel the familiar pressure building in his balls, and as it built up and up and up he started repeating her name over and over and over.
Suddenly, she grabbed his face in her hands, and made him look her in the eyes.
Both of them fell silent, except for their panting. This was the last moment, and they knew it.
They both had just enough time to whisper “I love you” before that rising pressure burst, hot and wet. She threw back her head, wailing like a banshee, he crushed her to him tight as he bellowed out, and then they were out the other side of the Dream and into the white light.
*
Hours later, George was found sitting on the bench by the nursing home orderlies, dead of what appeared to be heart failure. They weren’t surprised to find him that way – the man had been closing in on a hundred after all – but they were surprised by how he looked. Death is usually an ugly thing, even peaceful death, but George Fuller really did look like he was peacefully asleep, with the ghost of a smile on his face.
They were just lucky that Sarah Brannigan had found his body in the Dream and not only returned it to the Waking World (all the while fretting about the fact that it should have been possible for something like this to happen to someone like George Fuller), but had seen to his dignity by putting his clothes back in place.
Joy could kill, too.