The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

– Yes.

  – Well I’m a Frenchman by history so that about makes us equally and thoroughly bad, now don’t it?

  Cy pulled his braces down over his shoulders so they hung at his sides, he unbuttoned another fastening on his shirt and bent back in towards the sword. The drunk crab-stepped closer in. There was a smell of alcohol on him that had been passed through the skin and mixed with sweat. It was a distinctive odour, like the smell of a man not far back in Cy’s memory. Alcohol fumes in the air and the sense that he was being scrutinized sent a shiver through him. But Cyril Parks continued as he had always continued under pressure. With a steady hand. Red on the sword’s hilt. A broad border of black to keep it from spilling. He switched needles. Yellow blade, yellow blade. The hairs in the pores on the customer’s arms were blonde and dark at their tips, as if he had very recently travelled into old age. Around the delivered ink and under the wiping cloth the skin was beginning to inflame. It took ten minutes to finish, ten minutes of full concentration, slow internal time, with Cy half-believing he would, at any moment, receive a bullet or a blade in his kidney. When he looked around the strange man was sitting cross-legged on the floor sleeping with his chin touching his chest – eastern-god style. Cy leaned over and gently reached into the man’s pocket for the weapon and instead pulled out a hipflask of bourbon.

  Den Jones stuck his head round the door.

  – O Lord! That no-good kid bothering you? He don’t sleep when he gets off work so he falls asleep wherever he is through the day like a damn stray cat. Starts drinkin’ the minute he leaves the hospital, like he’d rather do that than get some proper rest! Henry! Henry Beausang, wake up and brush off your pants seat and drink some coffee. Black coffee.

  After the first winter at the barbershop they might have been considered friends. Cy took to Henry in a quiet, reserved manner, and Henry’s enthusiasm saw little restriction in the face of a tepid foreign temperament. Henry began to re-sell stolen hospital gauze and needles to Cy, at a cut-rate price that was all profit to himself. He even ‘borrowed’ an old hospital steam sterilizer, which Cy used to keep his equipment sanitary, saying it had been sitting idle in the store room for all the years he had patrolled the dull, grey umbilical corridors of the asylum, and it may as well be put to use. For his part Cy inherited Den’s role of benefactor, giving to Henry what money he could spare if his wages had been taken from him in a brawl or he had spent too much that month on liquor, lottery slop, or whatever else lit him up, leaving not enough for rent. When word got back that Henry was in trouble or badly beaten, Cy would arrive on the scene. He was well versed in the skills of salvaging drunks. He did it because, after a decade with Eliot Riley, it was second nature to him, the way a person trained in medicine will be the first one to administer aid if a passer-by falls in the street or burns their hand, the way Reeda tended her consumptives, year after year, from habit. Or maybe there was something else that made Cy do it, the idea that Henry was somehow a redeeming version of Riley, younger, hopeful, benign to others if not to himself.

  The first night of many that Cy carried Henry back to his own apartment, not yet knowing where the other lived, and put him on the floor to sleep off his stupor, he realized that his new friend was barely out of his teens. Henry was well banged-up, his cuts had begun to congeal and needed cleaning before an infection was sealed in. Cy took off the torn shirt that had grime on the collar and cuffs, removed his bloody vest and found underneath a small boyish chest, with only a few adolescent hairs on the breastbone. He had taken many more blows to the face than to his body in his life it seemed. So there was prolific damage and false years of ageing above the lines of his clothing. He put a blanket over him and a glass of water within reach. In the morning the blanket was folded neatly on a chair, the water glass was defiantly full, and Henry himself was gone.

  A routine developed on Henry’s weekends off. There was one Saturday repetition like a nightmare that kept on recurring in which Henry flirted balefully with death and danger. Somebody would come to get Cy at the barbershop or at Coney, depending on the season, to tell him Henry Beausang was sick-drunk behind the train station again, or by a bench in the park. Tipped over into the dust and haemorrhaging from a beating he had just taken by men he had tried to swindle or resemble or call the bluff of or God knew what other transgression. Cy would leave his work, a bird half flying across a bicep, and he’d go down and get his friend, hauling him back to somewhere safe. He’d put his hands on the ribs that weren’t broken and place Henry into a part balance, part lean, then he’d throw the weaker, dislocated shoulder back into joint. At this Henry would wake up enough to laugh at the sensation, making his face beautiful, desperate, and foolish. And then he’d realize what the sudden jolt against his torso actually was, and pain would arrive. He would jump back livid so Cy would have to mind his feet quickly out of the way or Henry would be tripped down in the road again. But by then the drunk was awake and upright and could stay there to be helped home, singing and rejoicing like Riley never did.

  Every Saturday that Henry did not have to work a graveyard shift it was like clockwork exploding. He was lighter than Eliot Riley, made of skin and bones only, and polite in his position of helplessness but that was all that could be said in favour of the situation. Cy would chide him, scold him, tend to him, and would end up finishing the second tattooed wing of the bird later for no cost to the annoyed, abandoned customer.

  – But why does he do it, Den?

  – Why does any drinker do it? He’s got devils in him that are too slippery to catch. Carrying around a lot of family disgrace in him too. He comes from a wealthy family, Baptists every last one. Now I know that ain’t in your understanding Cyril, but take it from me it ain’t good. Let them down bad. He was married once to the daughter of some rich cotton tycoon and did that lady a disservice so bad his mamma about threw him out of the state of Georgia. Him and his best school friend were found together embracing like husband and wife behind the bandstand at the reception. See, Henry married is like a chicken taking up with a hog. Half the time it ain’t a fight he’s looking for. No sir. Those men don’t beat him because they know what he can’t do to them, they beat him for what he’s willing to do. But I ain’t no-one to judge. We’ve all come to this city carrying suitcases full of history, and that’s the God-honest truth. That boy might have been born on third base but he sure as shit ain’t scored a triple.

  Then it was back to Coney Island after the cold damp Brooklyn winters of working on men with wet flecks of fresh cut hair on their skin. In the summer he’d unboard the dusty booth, re-dress it and work along with the sounds of hurtling coasters and carnival barkers. Henry would come by and laugh at the shows and say the hospital had nothing on this place and he’d drink in the bars on the alleys with Cy, faithful and persistent and less likely to jar, or as if he just felt happier alongside the Coney crowd.

  The artists tattooing around the parks and the avenues of Coney Island were mostly very talented, the good mechanics of their trade, inheritors of Chuck Wagner’s legacy, of bold-coloured, heavy-bordered symbols. Wagner himself came down for vacations to Coney and would stick his big plum-nose into the booths from time to time. The shyster copyists and dross merchants lasted only a season or less before fading out of the façade, before being kicked out, not being able to compete in such a skilled industry. The talented prospered; Arturas had not exaggerated the volume of work. There was something genuine about the artists amid the artificial stimulation, something older, timeless, a lasting appeal, like scrimshaw placed alongside the plastic novelties. They were at odds with the tricksters now lining the freak tents, who passed by Cy’s booth in costume at midday before the matinee shows, with glued-on ears or dyed skin, self-made freaks instead of those with genuine birth debility – the ichthyosis sufferers, the bearded women or armless children with teeth as strong as pliers who had in the past reigned supreme. The truly old-school terrible, like the Human Fountain, a man with water pipes forced under the skin
of his arms, which led down to his finger-tips from where the spray would be ejected like plasmic geysers into the air, had become lost among the mass of counterfeit sensationalists. Freakery was now the means to a quick buck, where once it had had something bizarrely disciplined and formal if brutal about it – like the mad-dog children yanked from the woods of Idaho and pitied by civilization, or the Human Fountain himself, meticulously cleaning the pipes under his raw skin each evening to prevent infection – that was professionalism at its highest. Cy had once had a strange conversation with the Human Fountain about cleaning solution outside his booth, they were curious of each other’s equipment, and he had been left full of admiration for the man, who seemed at once so normal and yet so extraordinary.

  – I used to just use salty water but if it’s not the right temperature the salt will clog up. I like less chemicals. Have you tried a tiny amount of ammonia or white spirits when you clean your gun? Vinegar may do as well, though. Obviously I don’t have the pleasure of steam or I’d cook like a wonton!

  – I find bleach will work also but it needs to sit. There is so much movement to these new pieces that the ink gets everywhere. I like to dip my quill often, so to speak. Call me old fashioned.

  – Oy. The days of old fashioned are no more, I fear. Some days I think I will have to take out my own spleen to get a cheer. Me, I have to bring fluid through my pipes every morning, regardless of a show, otherwise I’m asking for trouble, I’ll get made a mess of. An hour or more every time, and people say you have no skills, you are just a joke, you aren’t marketable! Now it’s just like eating or washing my face, I guess; I do it without thinking.

  Tattooing was the one culture at Coney that had lasted over the years, and remained credible, arresting audiences in their tracks. It was something that could be done to the watching, yawning, masses that included them, a sensation actually felt by them. That was the very nucleus of its longevity – inclusion, involvement, connection. Where other shows now missed the mark, tattoo artists struck the bullseye time and again, allowing customers to self-customize, to tailor their own ride, and they brought them the physical sensation and the realm of suffering and beauty which was sought. Reputations were hard fought for in New York City but, once achieved, they seldom were demolished. The lone female tattoo artist on the Bowery, Minny Hendry, was as admired for her hand-poked work as she was ridiculed for her anomalous gender within the profession. Cy had not a bad word to say against her, he had seen her daintily executed designs, and he imagined Reeda clipping him round the ear for it anyway. There were still prickles between those in the industry at Coney, tongue-in-cheek rivalry, to goad the crowds, but trade was good enough to support all the booth artists. Sometimes Arturas would stop by Cy’s booth in the late afternoon or evening and shadow-spar with him.

  – How many today, my friend?

  – About twenty. Twenty-five.

  – Hah! Rinky-dink, I knew it all along! Me, I work over fifty as usual. So tonight I buy the beer for you, since I am still best and richest artist at Coney.

  Cy walked in to the Island with the lucky dice of the freehander, he knew that particular skill carried anywhere, it was his best card to play, doubling the prices from the offset. He could lie on his back and paint a whole body, did not need any more than a needle, some ink and a muse. Some of the others had copied the model of Arturas and Claudia, and they had women that were decorated from head to toe, wives, girlfriends, even sisters. Other scrapers had partnerships with big, obese girls of no relation, carnival women who no longer grossed the public with mere size and needed new disfigurements, additional attractions, to remain useful in the Coney community where they now felt they belonged. Some weighed in at five hundred pounds, their glands all out of whack, and they had special boxcar transportation arranged for them to get them to the Island. Pictures got shipwrecked under the waves in the oceans of their rippling skin.

  Cy lit up his booth with colourful signs and stark bulbs and convoluted claims of brilliance, as did the others, and he wore the hair of a Renaissance master and had a pierced ear. But he did not need to go to the trouble, it was merely in keeping with the costume of the place. Riley would have scoffed at him, informed him that he was a sell-out, a bootlick and an idiot, the sheep in wolf’s clothing. But he did not care. If he wanted to he could remember that Riley was dead, even if the voice lived on in his head. Come mid-summer the crowds swarmed around the doorway of his establishment, drawn away from the screech of the Steeplechase horses on their metal tracking and the gasps inside the circus tents and the stomach-less laughter of turning upside down in the Loop-O-Plane, drawn to another kind of intrigue. They peered in between each other at wall-to-wall flash and watched him working and for once they were hushed, listening only to that notorious, serious sound – the gamma purr of the electric needle.

  Varga Oyster Bar was no Dog and Partridge, but for Cyril Parks’s habitual presence there it was a sort of equivalent. There were initial similarities; a menu that served a variety of fishy dishes, which ultimately all came out looking and tasting the same, a constant greasy smell of seafood in the air even when the kitchen fryers were not blasting clams or whelks, shrimp or oysters into crisp breaded cinders, the mismatched wooden furniture that had over the years picked up a faint slimy, sticky sheen, and it was frequented by a selection of regulars who were well-known to each other, visiting players and inevitable strangers. There was a gaming section to the bar, which had achieved a certain local infamy for its cerebral dexterity and its violence, and an outdoor beer garden mostly used for the purposes of courting, sobering or ending a dispute the quickest way. There were squabbles between punters and occasional brawls, merriment and banter, times of quietude for contemplation or the perusal of bad fortune, and the chance of a little look-see with a member of the opposite sex if the planets were in lucky alignment. And that’s where the similarities ended.

  Varga caught Coney’s off-work crowd. Brighton Beach’s weary old Russians wandered into the gaming room from time to time, strung-out drunks stumbled through the threshold, as did Brooklyn’s braver souls, or occasionally a curious city resident who had heard an odd rumour about the proprietors. During the years that Cy worked at Coney Island and for the previous six, Varga had been run by a pair of Siamese-twin sisters, Mary and Valerie, who bore as little resemblance to Paddy Broadbent as chalk did to cheese. The sisters were joined at the waist and hip, and though they shared no organs and separational surgery would have been relatively simple for them, having missed that opportunity at birth owing to poverty and rural location, they remained of one entity, moving quick and coordinated around the bar to clear dishes and glasses. Their dresses were specially made with four sleeves and one full skirt, though it was not until they lifted a hem that their condition was revealed. Until then it could have been assumed that they simply walked in an exactly matching pace butting up against each other. The bar often ran on the system of good cop, bad cop, Mary being of the softer disposition and Valerie the tougher – there was trouble for those who would court the former for they would have to go through the latter, and Valerie was not one for romance, she was intimidating at best, able to oust even the meanest element at closing time and send the bums limping from the establishment smelling of a bucket of well-aimed fish guts. The Sweet and Sour Sisters, Cy called them, and on nights of failing lucidity he had even offered to tattoo them accordingly on their bosoms. For all the sticks and stones and taunting and teasing of their youth, the shame of adults to be handling them, and the knowledge that only two decades earlier conspicuous abnormals had been kept in cages with orang-utans in the Bronx Zoo, they were remarkably well-adjusted, fearless and very enterprising ladies.

  They had worked at the Island’s freak shows back in their youth, having been brought in from a small town outside Spokane, Washington, by Gumpertz’s cronies, before retiring from circus life to a steadier profession. They took their ample money – having been paid a double rate of course and bartering only e
ver single rent at Coney’s hotels and hostels, and bought a little space which had once been a chop house on Jones Walk, near the boardwalk, where the dish of the day was never certain and the alcohol was compulsorily served over ice. They timed their exit well, only a short time before the World Circus went into an irreversible decline at the insistence of even the larger, poorer crowds that they were becoming apathetic towards freakery and acrobats, and the pin-heads and Spider Boy and Cobrina were shuffled out into the unforgiving world of unmutant humanity.

  Varga could seem like the wrong side of the looking glass. The punters were deformed or used to handling lions or too small to reach the bar counter while simultaneously boastful of their oversized ding-dongs. They had remarkable talents that they were not opposed to flouting. They could be extremely heavy drinkers and if Cy was out with Claudia and Arturas, whose simultaneous capacity to hold liquor well exceeded his own, or with Henry Beausang and his unholy sponge-like liver, he often ended the evening in a very sorry state. There were nights when everything within the sticky walls was a blur of wrong operation, like the subconscious product of a surgeon’s trickling syringe, like a laughing-gas lullaby. Life at Coney could seem surreal and endgame at the best of times, but coupled with quantities of drink the labouring brain dissolved, leaked out through an ear canal, and a world of ridiculous inner sense found its escape. There were nights of stripteases and oyster-dances, dare-devil asphyxiation and fish-hook eating contests, nights so stupid that Cy thought he might wake up the next morning in his bed in the small rooms above the Pedder Street shop having dreamed-up America like the epic hallucinations of a coma, and Varga was the candied cherry on the iced bun of it all, the red nose on the clown. Sometimes he thought he might even bolt upright in his bed in the Bayview Hotel, ten years old again, having to shake away sleep, shake off the ether-like stupor, and he’d get up and go into his mother’s room and find her sleeping in her headscarf. With a hand on her shoulder he’d wake her and tell her about the strangest of dreams he had just had, and she’d smile and say that the slumberous arms of Morpheus were curious, curious things, and that yes, America existed, and one day he might see it, though she doubted she ever would.