If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go

by Judy Chicurel

  FOUR

  adventures in zombie land

  Elephant Beach was sinking; it had been for years. In 1928, Dolphus Rugby, the millionaire, commissioned circus elephants to build the boardwalk for Sally Stewart, his child bride, who wanted to live by the ocean. He built her Moonlight Manor, a sparkling palace with one hundred rooms facing the water; even the servants’ quarters had seaside views. There were ballrooms for dining and dancing and a rooftop garden with an orchestra, and at night, boats filled with liquor would pull up to the shoreline, and soon the town was filled with bootleggers and film stars and Broadway producers who came down from the city to savor the sea air. Before dinner, everyone would promenade the boardwalk, dressed in Mainbocher and Schiaparelli, sipping from their sterling silver flasks as they gazed restively at the sunset, waiting for the night to begin. Those were the days when the grand old hotels like the Prince Albert and the Sea Lion were filled to capacity. Florenz Ziegfeld and his Folly girls would come down after their show for a late supper; Fanny Brice held dinner parties in her rented mansion on the bay. Cab Calloway, the famed bandleader, built a house in the Dunes, where all the rich people lived, and each morning tipped the boy who delivered his newspapers five dollars for bringing them right up to his front door.

  Nobody promenaded the boardwalk anymore because you could trip on a rotting board and break your leg during an after-dinner stroll. The wonderful old hotels were now crumbling castles, left to dust after the film stars and bootleggers discovered air travel. Elephant Beach might have been only fifty-two minutes from the city by car or rail, but if you could fly to Santa Barbara or Cuba or the French Riviera, why would you spend your summers here? The hotels and the great mansions by the bay, with their glorious floor-to-ceiling windows broken and boarded up, went on the market at severely reduced prices. But the taxes were monstrous and nobody could afford the upkeep of so many rooms; they were taken over by squatters or converted into housing for welfare recipients.

  After everyone deserted Elephant Beach, stores went out of business and the once prosperous Buoy Boulevard became shabby and mean. People blamed the Negroes who’d come up from Georgia and Alabama to work as chambermaids and butlers and drivers at the hotels and now had nothing to do but loaf in front of Brown’s Liquor Store, right across the street from the railroad station. People said it didn’t look good, black faces the first thing you saw when coming off the train or driving in from the Meadowbrook Parkway, and the town’s seedy glamour faded even further.

  Just when we were running out of people to blame for Elephant Beach’s slide from a playland paradise to just another seaside town on the skids, the County Asylum let all the patients out for some kind of experiment in community living and it was decided that the abandoned hotels on the boardwalk would make wonderful communal residencies. There would be on-site psychiatrists and doctors and medical workers, and medicine and jobs, and families who lived nearby to help take care of the mental patients and streamline them back into society. But whoever was in charge of the experiment dumped them in Elephant Beach before figuring out schedules and staffing and meals and all the things that might make the experiment a success. What followed caused an uproar that lasted through the fall and winter until the spring thaw, when the sweet scent of melting snow sifted through the air and the streets filled with water and rainbows.

  At first, it seemed that a lot of the mental patients ran out of medication or simply stopped taking it, to the bafflement of everyone we hung around with. (“Free drugs, man! Free drugs and they’re turning them down? Shit, they really must be crazy.”) Or they forgot where the clinic was where they were supposed to refill their prescriptions. Or they couldn’t remember the names of the medications. Or the whole thing about family proximity had been greatly exaggerated and there were no family members living close enough to help take care of them. Or the family members got fed up and didn’t want to deal with them. Or there wasn’t sufficient on-site medical staff at the new residencies to supervise them or see to their well-being. Or the staff that was there didn’t really want to be, and instead of taking care of the patients, they got drunk or ran card games out of the residencies in rooms with the doors locked, playing loud music to drown out any requests and outright pleas for assistance. Or it was all of the above combined, and so, not getting any cooperation or compassion or any of the things they should have received under the circumstances, the ghost people took to the streets.

  We called them the ghost people because their eyes always looked haunted. They wandered into traffic, dazed and confused, smiling or sobbing hysterically, or laughing maniacally at the top of their lungs. Or they sat in Leo’s Luncheonette mumbling over cups of tea, stuffing packets of Sweet’N Low into their pockets, spilling them onto the tables. Sometimes Leo himself would come out from behind the counter and say sternly, “Okay, all right now, move it along, you can’t just sit here all day playing with the sugar, go, go,” and they’d just look up at him and ask numbly, “Where?” as if they really wanted to know. Then Leo would sigh and shake his head and go back behind the counter, muttering. When they forgot where they lived, they’d stop us on the street and ask, or they’d spend the night on the beach, or in empty swimming pools, or in back of Jackson’s Lumber Yard, down by the bay. Suddenly, the town seemed overrun with stray, scary strangers, and it wasn’t as if these were our own local lunatics, like the ones who lived in The Starlight Hotel and were as harmless and familiar as the children who ran laughing through puddles after the rain. Adults tried to avoid the ghost people whenever possible, and when children looked up into their faces, they began crying. It seemed you couldn’t turn a corner in town without running up against their great haunted eyes.

  Raven loved it; he thought the ghost people were the coolest thing on earth. “Man, it’s like living in a Fellini movie,” he marveled. He wanted to make them his portfolio project at the Photography Institute in the city, where he was taking classes. He wanted to call the project “Adventures in Zombie Land,” and thought it could win an award or at least a scholarship to cover his next year’s tuition. He tried hanging out with some of them, but it was difficult. He spoke to a man wearing a crown made of newspapers who said the crown kept his thoughts inside his head. “I wouldn’t want them getting out and about,” he told Raven gravely. He tried speaking to a small woman with a button mouth and pearl-gray eyes, who scolded him, “Quiet! I’m listening.” When Raven asked if she was hearing voices, the woman threw back her head and barked a laugh. But then she turned wistful. “I wish,” she said, gazing out toward the ocean. He watched a man burning dollar bills, frantically lighting match after match as the wind blew them out. “Burn, baby, burn,” the man cried ecstatically when a bill caught fire, his eyes rolling upward. He told Raven burning the money made him feel prosperous. But mostly, the ghost people shielded their faces and ran away when they saw Raven coming, frightened by his camera. He begged his girlfriend, Rita, who got along with everyone and could talk to anybody, to come with him and help crack the ice, but she said no, shaking her head so hard that her long, blond curls bounced off her shoulders. “I got enough of that in the city, man,” she told him. “We moved down here to escape the nut jobs, remember?” He tried enlisting Mitch, because some of the ghost people were war veterans who had flipped out in the jungle. But when he asked, Mitch’s eyes turned cold, and his voice sounded the way it must have when he was barking orders at the men in his platoon as they stumbled over minefields and bodies. “Give it a rest, hippie boy,” he said. “This ain’t no fucking freak show. It’s their lives, man. Their lives.”

  Still, Raven kept trying. He ate his entire stash of black beauties and started hanging around the boardwalk at night, watching the residencies. He kept his pockets full of Jolly Ranchers and miniature Chunky chocolates but the ghost people never came close enough to take anything from his outstretched hand. “It’s like they think I’m the crazy one,” he said. “They sit out on those big porches unde
r those tattered awnings or drape themselves over the stone lions at the old Sea Lion Inn, and sometimes nobody says a word for hours. And then when it starts getting dark, the workers or whoever they are come out and kind of corral them all in at the same time, and you see the lights go on in their rooms and this, like, moan goes up, right, this, like, raging, righteous moan. Man, I wish I could photograph it. I wish I could get a picture of that moan.” The words danced out of his mouth as though they were jitterbugging. “Shit, I wish I could afford a new flash, the one where the light doesn’t burst so much and wouldn’t scare them away. I bet I could get them on the cover of Life magazine.”

  But the ghost people were already famous. They were regulars on the front page of the Elephant Beach Gazette, and had been in Newsday and even The New York Times. Words like “outrage” and “unsightly” and “Goddamned dumping ground” were used to describe the situation; you couldn’t go anywhere in town without hearing people talk about it. At Nanny’s house, her mother would be screaming into the phone, “I spent my honeymoon at the Prince Albert, and now look; you can’t even go up there between the spics and the psychos.” Our neighbor Mr. Zinc almost ran one of them down on his way home from buying milk at the Dairy Barn. “Goddamned zombies, go back where you came from!” he yelled out the window.

  Once, after I got my license, my brother and I were driving aimlessly through the side streets, listening to Cousin Brucie, when we stopped at a light on Filmore Avenue. An elderly man with stringy white hair began crossing the street, then suddenly dropped his pants, squatted down and began defecating. When he couldn’t get up again, he began weeping, his face crumpling like a wrinkled magazine. He knelt in the middle of the street, naked from the waist down, huge tears making dirty tracks down his weathered face. My brother jumped out of the car, helped him pull up his trousers, and walked him across the street. The man insisted on shaking my brother’s hand, and when he got back in the car, my brother rode the rest of the way with his arms stretched straight out in front of him, careful not to touch anything until he got home and was able to wash.

  “If you could have seen this town when we first moved here,” my mother said, sighing and staring out the car window at a young woman twirling on the corner of Buoy Boulevard as though she were on top of a music box. My parents had our house appraised because everyone on our block was looking to sell and flee Elephant Beach, even the McIvers, who had a grape arbor and nineteen grandchildren and had been there forever. The appraisal hadn’t gone well; after the real estate lady left, my mother locked herself in the bathroom and cried. I was happy, though; I didn’t want to move away, to an anonymous town with malls and split-level houses and no beach, no Comanche Street.

  But everyone else was freaking out. They felt that Elephant Beach had been invaded and that it wasn’t fair, really, the best ocean views in town going to mental patients who were too crazy to know their value or appreciate them. The people who lived farther uptown, near the residencies, started complaining about the sound of that same moan Raven had described, saying that it swelled and carried out over the water and across town toward the bay. They said it was unbearable, keeping them up at night, like a foghorn that just wouldn’t quit. The cops tried locking some of the ghost people up for disturbing the peace, but once they put them in cells, Sergeant Ray Duffy told my father, the moan was an awful, terrible thing to hear. “Like they have the D.T.’s and someone’s eating them alive at the same time,” he said, shuddering. “Hell with disturbing the peace; I had to let ’em go before I went on a bender and got the D.T.’s myself.” At town meetings, our parents and their friends and the few merchants left raved on about plummeting property values and safety, but so far the most dangerous thing that happened was that a woman wearing a shawl made of wet panty-hose jumped into Bertha Levine the librarian’s car when she forgot to lock the doors and wouldn’t leave, just sat there with her arms folded across her chest, staring out the window and speaking in a wheedling tone that drove Bertha nuts. “Just take me for a little spin, someplace nice,” she begged Bertha, who drove straight to the police station and honked her horn for someone to come out and take the woman away. During a slight scuffle, the woman’s panty-hose shawl fell on the floor of Bertha’s Toyota, where Bertha said it looked like a nest of dead snakes. She kicked the coiled mess out of the car, locked all the doors, then laid her head down on the steering wheel and wept.

  Just when things were reaching a fever pitch and people seemed ready to storm the boardwalk with blazing torches, something happened. One of the ghost people died. He was a young man, believed to be in his twenties, dressed in an overcoat that was too big and didn’t keep him warm enough because he froze to death under the boardwalk one bitter night, beneath the icicles that hung down from the splintered wood. His body was frozen in the shape of a human question mark, and his eyes were open wide, as if focused on some distant dream. He carried no identification and, after the police asked around, it was determined that his name might have been Chuck.

  Hunker Moran, editor of the Elephant Beach Gazette, wrote an editorial about it. He said that Chuck’s death put a face to the whole issue of criminalizing craziness. “Lock them away! Out of our sight!” he wrote in the paper. “Until one of them dies on a cold night in February, alone, thrown into an anonymous grave in Potter’s Field, unmarked because nobody knows his real name. Where is our compassion? Buried beneath fear and worry over property values? What about the real values, the ones that matter?” The Nassau County Press and the Long Island Reader picked up the story, as well as Newsday and the Times. People turned it over in their minds and decided that Hunker was right. After all, it wasn’t the fault of the ghost people that they were too crazy to fend for themselves; the politicians and professionals who released them should have known better. And property values had been in the toilet long before they’d come to town; why take it out on them? In fact, you could even say they were the real victims of the whole situation but were too messed up to know it. Or maybe they did, and that was what all the crying and singing and moaning were about.

  So they became ours, the way the stray dogs and cats became ours after the summer people left them behind and moved back to the city. Now when the man wearing the safari helmet stood in front of the Episcopal church, screaming, “Jesus didn’t tell you dick, motherfucker,” over and over, instead of calling the cops, Reverend Denton led him inside the rectory and had the housekeeper serve him hot chocolate and Entenmann’s donuts. When our neighbor Mr. Zinc passed one of them crying in the rain, he offered her a ride and brought her right inside the old Prince Albert Hotel to make sure she was in the right place. When the woman with jelly rolls of fat dripping from her body performed a frenzied frug in front of Leo’s Luncheonette, instead of pointing and laughing, people applauded. And when Raven and Rita found a young guy wandering down Starfish Avenue, crying, they brought him back to Comanche Street, where they made him smoke a joint to calm down, then fed him scrambled eggs with Wonder Bread toast. They put him to sleep on the enclosed porch, and in the morning he left a note on a paper napkin that read “What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” and signed it Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  Because of Hunker Moran’s editorial, things began improving at the residencies as well. They were quickly staffed with shrinks and doctors and health aides who made sure the ghost people took their medication and ate regular meals and went to sleep on time. There was less mumbling, less weeping, less of them wandering around town looking lost and bewildered. The drugs took the great haunted staring out of their eyes so that now, if you passed them on the street, you’d think they were just like everyone else. Oh, there were still some standouts among them, but they were harmless, like the characters you find in fading small towns everywhere: the wizened old woman in the sky-blue ski hat, who sailed down Buoy Boulevard telling anyone who would listen, “Anita D’Arcy is my name, perhaps you’ve heard of me? I was a star of the stage and screen, you know”
; the tall, distinguished-looking black man with salt-and-pepper hair who stood in front of the Elephant Beach Savings and Loan, tipping his chauffeur’s cap and saying, “Where to, Captain?” while opening an imaginary car door; the coffee-colored woman with the most startling sea-green eyes who met all the trains at the railroad station, asking passengers, “Are you from New York? Do you know my husband?” And there was Ruby, who wasn’t really crazy, just old and down on her luck.

  Ruby was short and wide and wore lavender lipstick and rouge to match, and would come into the A&P where I worked, every Saturday night before closing, the hem of her flowered housedress dragging beneath her long wool coat, her stockings sagging around her ankles. She took forever to pay for her groceries, because she always had a hundred coupons and her money was hidden all over her body: a dollar in her coat pocket. Fifty cents in a change purse pinned to her brassiere. A half-dollar in the heel of her stout, stubby shoe. “Please, Ruby, can’t you see there’s a line behind you,” we’d beg her, watching the big clock above the glass windows, knowing it would be past closing when we finally cashed out. Sometimes we were sharp with her, sometimes downright rude, but how rude could you be to a woman who was like your grandmother would be if your mother and aunts weren’t around to look after her? Nothing rattled her; no matter what we said, she just kept smiling, digging, turning herself inside out until she found every last cent. Then she’d sigh and say brightly, “There! That’s done. Darling, give me double bags, will you, so they don’t break on my way home?” And she’d put the bags in her old lady cart and go sit on the ledge by the windows facing the street, with her old lady scarf tied in a knot under her chin, take a blurry compact from her handbag and freshen her lipstick, lean her head against the glass and rest until the bus came. At Christmas time, she’d come in with a brand-new roll of freshly minted pennies from the Elephant Beach Savings and Loan and hand them out to all the checkout girls and stock boys and managers. “Please, darling, take it,” she’d say, curling our fingers around the shiny new pennies with her own. You’d think her hands would be gnarled and rough and covered with spots, but they were soft and smooth, as if she applied lotion every night from a bottle she kept on the windowsill of her room at the Moonlight Manor. “Take it,” she’d urge us, “because you never know. You never know.”