Here we have our introduction to the titular Dreams of the Boardwalk, and our first glimpse of the dangers beneath the surface.
*
It was after dark when I woke up on a bench at the West End of Coney Island.
It took me a moment to remember what had happened: I’d been taken out of my groove by 1985, so I’d tried to reclaim it. I’d played all the songs that usually put me in that old dream: Night Moves, Lou Gramm’s Midnight Blue, Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young from the soundtrack to Streets of Fire – no luck.
So I walked my circuit again.
You see, I had a circuit that I walked every time I came to Coney: get on the Boardwalk at Stillwell, walk East to Brighton Beach, go down to the water, walk all the way to the jetty at the West End. If the tide is high, wade into the gently eddying tide pool that forms against the jetty, let the salt water and the soft sand massage my aching legs and feet as I look out across the harbor toward Jersey and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
(The jetty had been half torn up that spring – where once the massive slabs had reached out almost all the way to the warning buoy, they now went only half as far. For a while, I had been heartbroken, thinking my tide pool was gone. But then I came back one day in June, and all the torn-up slabs had been hauled off the beach, and I saw that my tide pool was back, and I actually wept with relief.)
After that, head back up to the Boardwalk, then head back to Stillwell to get back on the train and head home, sometimes – usually – with a stop out on the Steeplechase pier to catch the breeze and look out at the sea without so much as a glimpse of the land to remind you that the ocean is anything but infinite.
(Just look out for flying fishhooks. Damn fishermen think they own the place.)
Having failed to properly lose myself in my myth-fantasy on the first cycle, I walked my circuit again. And failed again.
The third time was just to exhaust myself enough so that I didn’t lie awake that night, staring at the ceiling, wondering just where and when and how my life had gone so wrong. I had every reason to believe it would work; the Boardwalk alone is 2.5 miles long, so walking it just end to end and back was five. Cross the beach and walk along the shoreline, then add in the pier, and it’s closer to seven or eight. And I walked it three times.
In the end, I guess it worked too well. I sat down on a bench at the West End to rest up after the third circuit, and when I woke up, it was dark.
It was surprisingly quiet and deserted, too. Granted, all the lights and noise and fun stuff are about a mile up the Boardwalk from the West End, but still…it’s weird for it to be completely empty. For a moment, I was worried about just how long I’d slept and how late it really was, but the moment passed – to my great relief – when I realized that the music and other sounds of the midway were still faintly audible in the distance.
The next thing I did was check my pockets. Coney might be a lot nicer than it once was, but it’s still Coney and Coney is still New York. Everything was still there, and my phone confirmed that it wasn’t that late yet. Just ten o’clock. Still going to be around midnight by the time I got home. If I was lucky.
Oh, good. My boots were still there, too. After I’d rinsed the sand off my feet at the outdoor faucet at a “comfort station”, I’d sat down at the bench to let them dry and set my boots down beside me, and that must’ve been when I conked out. Good thing I’d unrolled the cuffs of my jeans first, or they might still be wet.
I shrugged into my leather jacket (I didn’t really need it, it was a hot summer night, but at least there was enough of a sea breeze that I was still comfortable. I should have left the damn thing at home instead of carrying it around all day.) and shook out my hair, then started walking. I took a quick glance down at the beach first, looked at the moonlight shining on the water and the jetty stretching almost out to the warning buoy, and considered going down and dipping my feet in the tide pool one last time. It looked like a pool of moonlight there beside the black rocks. But I decided against it. It was a mile up the Boardwalk to Stillwell, and who knew how long I’d have to wait for a train. Better get moving.
As I approached the amusement area around Stillwell, I began to notice that things were…different.
There was space between the Boardwalk and the sand, for one thing. That was new…no, actually, that was old. That space had been there from the time the Boardwalk was built until the Army Corps of Engineers pumped sand into it in the Nineties. Half of South Brooklyn owed their existence to trysts under that Boardwalk.
What was more, it occurred to me that significant sections of the Boardwalk that had been concrete when I had walked my circuits that afternoon – concrete poured within the last few years, especially since Sandy – were Boardwalk again.
I reached the amusement area sooner than I expected, and I quickly realized why: it extended farther down the Boardwalk than I remembered. Empty lots that I had walked past that afternoon were now filled in with arcades and rides and food stands and souvenir shops and games of skill and chance. The Childs Building was open, but instead of being an amphitheatre, it was a bustling restaurant, just like it had been long before I’d been born, let alone seen Coney Island. MCU Park was gone, and in its place was the old Steeplechase Park as it might have been if it had been allowed to exist and upgrade into the present day.
Then I spotted him, standing at a Nathan’s Famous stand on the Boardwalk and eating a bacon cheese dog: my boyfriend.
Yes. He was my boyfriend. I knew that. Simple fact. Maybe we were in love, or maybe we were far from it, just gettin’ our share. Either way, he saw me coming and he smiled, and it sent a powerful pulse to both my heart and my gonads.
He was my boyfriend. And I’d never seen him before in my life.
He looked like he could have stepped live and breathing out of a certain kind of rock video that they didn’t show on MTV anymore: a bad boy throwback with a black leather jacket, tight jeans, and motorcycle boots, but crowned with a hair-metal mane instead of a greaser’s ducktail. Dirty blond, just like I’d usually imagined it.
On impulse, I glanced at the nearest reflective surface – a bar window, as it happened – and saw myself as I’d always imagined in my old wish-dreams, complete with skintight jeans, high-heeled boots, spiky leather jacket, and my fiery red hair in a perfect Eighties mane of my own, the kind that was almost impossible to achieve without professional help, but it was perfect anyway. More than perfect. Instead of being hard and rigid with hairspray, it was soft and wild and voluminous, the ideal that everyone strived for but no one ever really achieved.
(Also, my tits were perky and my ass was smooth and round and tight like they hadn’t been for decades, if ever.)
I looked like Tawny Kitaen in Here I Go Again.
I also looked eighteen.
Now I knew what was going on.
“Is this a dream?” I asked Dream Boyfriend.
“Something like that,” he answered as he smiled and took my hand.
So we went on a Dream Date. Why not? Tomorrow morning doesn’t exist in dreams.
First, he got me a bacon cheese dog from Nathan’s, and oh, it was so good. Before my life had gone down the crapper, a visit to Coney just wasn’t complete without a stop at Nathan’s Famous. Still wasn’t. I’d missed them terribly.
After that, we wandered the amusement parks and The Bowery. We ate ice cream and cotton candy (a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips, but not in a dream!), rode the Wonder Wheel and The Thunderbolt (not the new one, the old one, the one that should never have been torn down, that was here too!), and played games. He was about to win a huge teddy bear for me at the Shooting Gallery when I grabbed his ass and spoiled his aim, then I won it for him. We ended up giving the thing to some kid anyway – some little girl who was only slightly bigger than it was. The thrill was in the winning so why lug it around? And everywhere we went, there were crowds of cheering, laughing people, but there were never any lines.
After a while, we left the lights and the noise of the midway behind and passed into the quiet, private darkness of the Boardwalk. There were other couples out there with us. Some were kissing under the streetlights; some were doing things in the pools of deep shadow that sent soft cries of passion and pleasure out into the night.
We walked hand in hand out to the end of the pier – which was its modern self, complete with wavy wooden couch-recliner-sunbathing surface things and that thing that rises up near the end like the prow of a ship. It was also completely deserted, not a fisherman or another couple in sight, which is what really confirmed to me that this was a dream.
Oh, well. All the more reason to make the most of it.
We stood at the end of the pier for a timeless moment, looking out at the endless glittering black of the ocean, the distant lights of Breezy Point and Jersey, the full Moon turning a broad swath of the black to silver.
Then he turned toward me, and I turned toward him. He took my face in his hands, leaned down, and kissed me.
It was magic. Everything I’d ever dreamed of, in those long-ago teenage fantasies.
I wanted to lay him down on the sunbathing bench and get him out of those tight jeans, or maybe drop mine, bend over and grab the railing.
After all, I’m not the girl I was when I first had these fantasies: a virgin, with a virgin’s fear and unrealistic imaginings of sex, focusing my frightening desires into safe dreams of romance. I can admit to myself what I really want to do with a boy like this.
But that would be wrong. This was just the first reel of the teen summer romance movie. We could lie down together on the benches, but it would only be to look at the stars – so clear and bright above us, much more than the light pollution should allow – but even that should really wait for the next reel. This was the chance meeting, the first sweet moments of discovery. Exploration was for later.
*
After a while, Dream Boy walked me to the train station, and we kissed one last time before I passed through the turnstile. I raced up the stairs, more energetic and lightfooted than I’d been in twenty years, then turned and waved just before I left his field of vision. He was still waiting at the turnstiles for me to do just that. Of course he was. He was the Dream Boy.
He waved, blew a kiss, and then turned and stalked out into the Coney Island night like a young lion.
No waiting on the platform, of course – the train was sitting there with its doors open, as if it was waiting for me. And just to reinforce that impression, the doors slid closed and the train pulled out of the station almost as soon as I sat down.
To get home from Coney, I usually took the F line to Jay Street/Metrotech, where I could switch to the A line and ride all the way home. But tonight, it didn’t seem like there was any such thing. There was just The Train: a gleaming silver streamlined thing like something off an old album or sci-fi book cover.
That trip home was like traveling through my brightest dream of New York: the train was uncrowded (that might have been because it was so late, but there were none of those who usually haunted the late-night subways either: no rambunctious teens, noisy drunks, or scary homeless people), the stations were clean and bright and decorated with a lot more art than I’d seen on the way out. As the train roared through the tunnels under the city, I caught glimpses of more art in the stations we expressed past and even in the tunnels – some of it apparently “official”, some of it beautiful graffiti murals.
(For a moment, just a moment, I thought I caught a glimpse of something running parallel to us, on a track that didn’t seem to have any stops – something huge, something that filled its tunnel from wall to wall and stretched further than the train I was riding, something that glittered more obsidian-black than the tunnel-darkness around us – and for a moment my breath caught, and the perfection of the dream seemed to catch in place, like a beautiful piece of delicate glass in the fraction of a second before it shatters, but then the dark thing took a turn and peeled away, rushing off into the darkness below Brooklyn. It moved so fast, but it still took so long…but then it was gone.)
My route home usually takes me under the East River, not over it. But somehow tonight, my train ended up crossing over the…I don’t know if it was the Manhattan Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge, but it gave me a gorgeous view of the harbor: Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the financial district all laid out before me.
I like looking at cities from a distance at night. Any city. Always have. All you see is lights, and you can make yourself believe that the city really is made of bright lights and gleaming crystal towers like you always imagined it was back in Ohio…like it should be.
But tonight…it was. The dingy tenements in the pockets of poverty that still survived on the Lower East Side looked like luxury condos; the office buildings looked like…something different. Something magical.
For a moment, I was truly caught between the moon and New York City.
And then the train plunged back under the ground.
*
When I got off the train at 175th street, I was still dancing on air. That never happened. Even on my happiest day – even on the day Justin had said he loved me for the first time, or the day he proposed – my buzz could never fully survive the train trip home. The boredom and the discomfort and the million tiny annoyances and the fact that it had to be somewhere around four in the morning and I should be totally exhausted should have killed it at least a little, but no. I was still singing Boston’s Hollyann to myself and doing little pirouettes on the platform as I walked for the stairs to the street:
“And I still hear guitars in the air as we sat in the sand, oh, Holly – “
Then I froze. What was that?
I’d heard something.
I held stock-still for a long moment, straining to hear.
Then I heard it again.
It was coming from the tunnel: chittering voices and shuffling movement. Then, suddenly, there was a laugh – high and howling and shockingly loud and utterly mad. It might have been human or it might have been hyena or it might have been…something else. I don’t know. I didn’t hang around to find out. I sprinted the rest of the way home.
*
If that piques your interest, head on over to Amazon and pick up your own copy of Dreams of the Boardwalk. And while you’re there, check out the rest of the library!