Revivals

Over the course of 31 days in March I managed to both maim myself and contract a virus (not COVID) that led to me being house-bound for more days than I care to remember. While I passed most of the time with movie musicals from the 1950s which I loved, I would have much preferred to be gallivanting around my beloved five boroughs with a beautiful cup of shitty bodega coffee, feasting my eyes on my city.

After falling down some stairs in my apartment building, I had managed to recover and make my way out on the town for Ben’s birthday. It was my first evening out like this in what felt like millennia. While a spicy strawberry margarita in the back room at Juke Bar certainly helped, I didn’t need the tequila to feel that certain aliveness from dancing with your boys in a bar to Lady Gaga, the Spice Girls, and Britney Spears. My boots clicked on the wooden floor in twists and spins, hands framing the face extending into Charlie’s Angels-style finger guns. Oh, this is what it felt like two and a half years ago. Wearing statement eyeshadow and tight black pants. Not caring about the rain while waiting for friends to get Artichoke Pizza. Braving the crowds at Beauty Bar on a Saturday night.

I have to remind myself of this time frame often, these two years, when I wonder to myself where I’ve been. How I used to go to festivals and parades and cultural conferences or events every weekend. Then I remember that there hasn’t been any place to go for a while. As we slowly trickle out of the woods, I am back up to my old tricks again.

But then a severely hobbling case of RSV, Respiratory syncytial virus, mashed me into my bedsheets for several days, sinuses ballooning and face contorted in swells. GagaVirus, my friend Dusty calls it. I laugh even though it makes my face throb. I resent the sunlight pouring into my window, adding the insult of good weather to the injury of being too pained to leave my apartment. But then, slowly but surely, with the addition of Sudafed and a whole lot of Vicks VapoRub, the sinuses calm. The nose stops running. The medication ceases. And I take up my city explorations once more.

I remember when I started this blog nearly 12 years ago how much I loved exploring the neighborhoods that were so new to me at the time, a sense of wonder I’m happy to say I never really lost. Revisiting these places I once found so bewitching revives those senses dulled by the pandemic. When I am out exploring this past weekend, I am seeing with not just new eyes, but new senses.

At Coney Island on Saturday, it’s the Congress of Curious Peoples, an annual celebration of all things sideshow and misfit at the Coney Island USA headquarters on Surf Avenue. Getting off the Q train, it feels like coming home. A Nathan’s sign flashing even on a clear blue day. An oddities art market of vendors sharing everything from spike rings shaped like donuts to taxidermy foxes to steeplechase earrings to books of Vampira ephemera. I buy a sticker of a leopard printed mermaid smoking a pipe of bubbles. Shortly after, I treat myself to a snappy hotdog with sauerkraut and the world’s largest medium Diet Coke. At the Freak Bar, a jukebox offers Naughty by Nature’s O.P.P., The Ronettes’ Be My Baby, and the Ramones’ Sheena is a Punk Rocker. On the wall are skulls and stars and ferris wheels, collages of pulp cover girls, two headed dolls, spines and neon signs. Upstairs at the Coney Island Museum, a roomful of the beach’s historical ephemera and a panel on women in sideshow performance, from bearded ladies to contortionists to pain-proof rubber girls and professional daredevils. There has always been in this place a beautiful marriage of history and misfitry, an embrace of existences so simultaneously rooted in joy and self-awarely strange that they have a glamour all their own. A place I have always felt like I belonged. Later, I munch on saltwater taffy and gummy worms as I walk up to the boardwalk, murals and technicolor metals of amusement park rides dotting my path. I contemplate buying a Nathan’s t-shirt and wearing it with neon green platform shoes and a healthy sense of irony. The air is crisp and the colors vibrant, a visual buffet from which I never reach my limit.

On Sunday it’s raining, and the F train ride to Dumbo feels interminable. Arriving, I remember the first time I visited, when the Galapagos Art Space still existed and there weren’t quite so many luxury condos. Coffee in hand, I visit the new location of Brooklyn Flea–at an earlier iteration in Fort Greene, I bought a giant shortening tin I still use as a side table in my living room, a purchase I then carried on the train all the way back from Brooklyn to Manhattan because Lyft was not yet a thing. It’s dark here in this new location under the archway, but I’m grateful for the structure on this day that keeps intermittently spitting rain and wind. There’s a vintage Ramones shirt waiting for me upon my arrival, followed by two green glass 7-Up goblets that make me laugh. Everything is wrapped up in my bag as I trot around Dumbo, remembering the earlier location of PowerHouse Books, my first ride on Jane’s Carousel, and that day in some early spring when Andrew and I sat on the rocks taking pictures of quinceaneras. I love the brick buildings converted into apartments from factories and decide that if I were ever a rich asshole I would certainly consider living there. But today I am not a rich asshole, at least not as far as I know, and the wind is sweeping through my jacket, so I get back on the train. The train ride back is also interminable, but what wouldn’t I do for a little adventure?