The Coney Island Memoirs of Sebastian Strong

By Robert Lagerstrom

It is the late fifties and early sixties, and Brooklyns Coney Island is confronting loss of former glory and the initial stages of deterioration. Here the gay protagonist pursues a journey of exploration into his sexual and emotional needs in a cheap hotel, a bingo parlor in nearby Brighton Beach, claustrophobic barrooms, an ancient roller coaster, and the prevailing sense of the Atlantic Ocean. Sebastians insistence on independence evokes challenge and conflict, leading to a visionary climax.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 18, 2004
• ISBN: 9781465333773

Robert Lagerstrom

The author wishes to state that the current work is fiction, not autobiography. While his previous novel, The Coney Island Memoirs of Sebastian Strong, along with most of the portraits in the present tales, are presented in first-person format, there is no relation to the author’s own life. All was inspired by glimpses, overheard conversations, and incidents imagined from a distance. All is contrived illusion, just as Coney Island, too, is myth, vapor, and a substratum of beckoning possibilities.

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Copyright © 2004 by Robert Lagerstrom.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

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owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

I     

II     

III     

IV     

V     

VI     

VII     

VIII     

IX     

X     

XI     

XII     

XIII     

I’m Sebastian Strong. There, the one essential that identifies

me, my singular name. With that name I materialize before you. It is my unique imprint and obsession. The reverberations of its precious sound interlock on these pages written in a room overlooking the ravaged spectacle of Coney Island.

I have installed myself in a space of ubiquitous illusions and developed capacity for intense fixation on the one precise location for which no excess of feeling is denied. Whether this infatuation originated through persistent determination, which I think very likely, or perhaps developed casually, without conscious effort, the result is what at last matters. The Island dominates my life.

In bygone years, one found here artful attractions for satisfaction of the senses. For a price, your body was secured into a train of plush seats, delivered up an incline of a hundred feet to the stars and released to race across silver tracks. For a price, you entered a perfumed theatre to view the fragile living torsos of the twin sisters without arms or legs, and the merman apathetic in a tank of foaming green ocean water. For a price, an accommodating house of mirrored rooms, for gratifying copulation with either sex, however your lust bloomed, your limbs oiled by silky, calculating hands, a meridian of pleasure swimming in rosy light, iced champagne in silver goblets, and choice naked lads and nymphs singing Vivaldi in a facsimile of Venetian lushness. Euphoria entirely achieved by manufactured trick components, all purchased in quantity for the season. Your desires temporarily satisfied. What matter the means by which such happenings thrived? Admission to the attractions was cheap, the thrills resplendent.

But, a caution, a finger to the lips. It is almost all vanished treasure. You are of course invited to the southern spit of Brooklyn to view the existing ruins of Coney. The sand bank will soon slip away forever. The grand earlier projections of the fantasy are largely vanished or disintegrating to the rot of death.

In its final guise, however, the Island laughs at me. Am I deceived into thinking the ultimate end approaches, when in fact the creature is reassembling its former impact of details, to return, energy replenished, collection of illusions more comprehensive, its seductive nature enlarging to reclaim its territory? I resign myself to waiting. I watch and listen for signals.

I     

1951

I was hardly more than a cage of slender bones in a glove of

pale ivory skin, with abundant black hair and restless black eyes that at moments suggested perspicacity. I believed I would someday attain sufficient talent to write of serious matters. I anticipated revelations.

Coney in that remote year prolonged the glow and style of World War II summers. The young men were no longer dressed in khaki, but they swaggered characteristically, in their blue dungarees that revealed much, or baggy chino pants that revealed little to nothing. The girls wore tight sweaters and long skirts, heavy wine-dark lipstick and hoop earrings. My eyes fastened on roller coasters, iron-crafted carousels, shooting galleries, whips, rockets, tilts, swings, tunnels, corn and burger stalls, dim amber bars, freak shows, baby parades, weekly fireworks, Stellman’s Amusement Park mummified in an immense glass pavilion, the Whirlwind, a dark serpentine wooden coaster sprawled above souvenir, tattoo, and archery concessions, flickering streams of colors, neon trails of blurred spinning circles, mirrors reflecting collisions of diamonds and topaz. A profusion of carousel music underscored the elaborate, chimerical view.

In the beginning, it was my high-school friend, Carl, who suggested we spend a day at the Island. Carl, my slender freckled redhead, my confidant, the boy I loved through the earliest of remembered times. There is, I aver, only the first love that is inescapably sustained through the many years following its incarnation. Though not necessarily grasped at the time it occurs, later reflection surprises the heart.

On that first day, Carl insisted on Stellman’s. For many occasions, that particular space was an inviolate destination, albeit less appealing to me than surrounding Coney streets. It projected an appearance of crumbling glory, with its gleaming glass walls, ribbed ivory-white archways and buttresses. Mechanical rides were of such design that physical contact was attained modestly, in a kind of comradely manner—with one stunning exception, the Stellman horses, to appear shortly in this account.

Families, the predominant patronage at Stellman’s, played their games in uncloyed 1950s innocence. Carl adored the park. It prolonged for him the safety of childhood, a condition I was anxious to escape. Did I ever imagine that over 35 years later I would stand in the weeds and desolation of the dead park, to ponder the sunlight that once swelled a glass ceiling overhead into an arc of transparent sapphire, when Carl and I first experienced the aggregation of attractions, with everything structured to insist this was the most likely of all possible worlds to endure?

Carl at first seemed more knowledgeable of life than me. He belonged to a genuine male gang in our provincial Jersey City in New Jersey, and those boys were well into open sexual appetites which, as Carl confidently proclaimed, was the route to maturity, meaning of course the approved heterosexual American Dream. While he spoke of such matters, the fact is I was never once extended an invitation to meet his gang members in their secret cellars or athletic-field shower rooms where they fantasized on the girls who would enter their lives and the remarkable sex to follow. I was no doubt suspected of being different and maybe even a little queer. In retrospect, this delights me, because their derogatory suspicions were absolutely correct.

The girls were of prime interest to my friend. Through Carl I learned about female anatomy, and was surprised and disappointed, having for a time envisioned male genitalia hanging on the opposite sex. I had naively constructed an androgynous image of sexuality, imagining the entire world populated by nongendered beings, who nonetheless possessed, in all cases, male apparatus. With Carl’s clarification of the actual situation, I, on the instant, and permanently, ejected any conforming interest in girls. My absorption in men as sexual objects assumed full potential. For this I must thank Carl.

Carl’s propensity to straight sex was expressed to me in a curious way, overt, but restrained. Despite his impulsive attraction to young girls walking the boardwalk or lining up for rides in Stellman’s, as he wet his lips and whispered how he would love to screw one or grab the ass of another, he never lost an underlying chord of formal respect for the objects of his lust. He often romanticized about loving a nice girl and settling with her in suburban verdure deep in Jersey, cohabiting loyally and monogamously and raising an ideal family. I listened patiently to his expressed hopes.

But I did more than listen. With an at first imperfect awareness of the unwinding penchant within me, my love for Carl increased and assumed more particularized aspects in my mind. I see him, in sharp focus, facing me on a bench on Stellman’s pier, his curly red hair lustrous in sunlight, his pale lips yet unkissed by me, his limbs supple, his sex silent under heavy denim, his blue short-sleeved shirt as blue as the sky, his white unlined neck and delicate high chin as deliciously callow as that irrecoverable year in our lives.

We made vows, but they had little to do with love. We vowed friendship, which is substantially different, and promised to return to Coney one day each summer for the remainder of our lives. The promise succeeded for a few years, which isn’t unimpressive when one realizes Carl was essentially straight and I clearly was emerging in another direction. Our promise was a pretty little talisman. It sparkles to this day.

I remember the highlights of our intermittent physical closeness. The finest was our mounting and racing the splendid Stellman horses, Carl on the front saddle of a great cast-iron steed, and I tight against him from behind with my arms circling and gripping his chest. There was no escaping intimacy on the horse. A dozen equestrian beauties and their riders were drawn up an incline, remained perched a moment at the top, then set free to race across tracks that girdled the Park’s glass façade. The riders’ cries were high and resounding, each team anxious to climax in first place. Flying across the final length of track, I raced dreamily, rapturously into the sensual. I doubt if any more thoroughly intense several minutes occurred at any other time in my life. How gratifying to conjecture, however unrealistically, that it was I who might have drawn Carl’s body to the desiring flesh of another person, his Sebastian who loved him. So propitious, too, that this fancied intercourse was realized on a steed surging through space. A fortunate convergence of parts. I raise a glass in recalling the singularity of the event.

A crew of midget Stellman clowns awaited riders in a rackety stage setting below the tracks. Designated the Crazy House, it was the only means of exit. As structured anticlimax, it effectively obliterated any giddy exhilaration acquired from flight around the race course. A dark ramp led downwards to the viewing platform.

That platform was studded with trapdoors, mirrored moving walls, and the midget clowns. These abject creatures went about their business with efficient ruthlessness, utilizing all the threatening components of their ingenious stage. Particularly, they were armed with long electric rods, maneuvered expertly to inflict momentary discomfort on the hindquarters of both sexes. The emphasis was on noticeably resilient asses.

The midgets were among my first anonymous sexual objects. Their large heads, with supernormal features, thick, expressive lips, their heavy well-rounded bottoms (as you are by now aware, I am obsessed by this endearing feature of the human anatomy) and prominent frontal bulges where their sex stamen lay sheathed, all this converged brilliantly, even as the same demons rushed at me with their grunts and electric scepters. I imagined them unclothed. I wanted very much to see one urinate. I wondered if the mocking, lascivious faces they ceaselessly exhibited in the Crazy House might be available in another setting.

A restless audience surrounded the stage. Above the crowd appeared a garish green plaster dragon, with a strange unsmiling man in suit and tie seated atop in a canopied booth. A gaudy shingle proclaimed CONTROLLER. It was he who controlled the air-holes and trapdoors. His timing at all times was quite perfect. The spectators loved him and applauded generously whenever a skirt was lifted, revealing some young woman’s violet or beige panties. For me, the lack of a phallus in that silken underclothing approximated a symphony without violins. I was in no way repelled, simply passive, and clearly one of the few in the crowd who didn’t cheer the skirts on to greater heights. But I did think how nice it would be if an occasional young man’s outer garment could be blown free, affording a look at his briefs and the extent of contents therein.

Carl was particularly uncomfortable with the Grand Guignol exit. He nervously jumped up and down, flapping his arms to distract his attackers. But they attacked him nonetheless. His jumping was an acrobatic dance to the escape gate, and suddenly he would be gone. On one occasion, alarmed at being alone and electrocuted by the flashing rods or dropped into a subchamber where something truly outrageous would take place (I now wonder what lovely torture that might have been), a motionless midget clown suddenly confronted me in my path to safety. He surveyed me, in fact stared at me with a frankness of expression that touched me in the right place, because I smiled back at him—I wanted to be his friend or something. The interchange of looks lasted no more than seconds. He bowed and gestured towards the exit. I perceived wrinkles through his cadmium-yellow makeup and the erosion of insomnia covered with black eyeliner and smears of blue eye shadow. Drops of sweat dotted his forehead. His mouth opened slightly and revealed nicotined teeth. His eyes told me he was what I sensed. He wanted me. As I rushed past, he patted me on my posterior not with a device but with his hand. Someone in the audience snickered. I glanced, with hostility, towards the snickerer and departed.

Carl motioned me to seats close to the stage. He pointed to a bevy of girls entering the drama there. He was waiting to see the skirts go up—perhaps one of the nymphets had failed to wear panties for her Crazy House adventure and he would digest every pubic hair with his large blue eyes. His hand