Now, to understand my interest in Coney Island, you need to understand a bit about my uber-geeky academic interests. Lauren and I had met the semester before in a class called Anthropology of Media. In the class, each person was required to undertake a research project related to media and write up a paper of approximately 15 pages. From a topic that had arisen in another class, I became really intrigued with circus freaks. And according to my professor, my background in science made me the ideal person to investigate the way science played out in the media. But, instead of focusing on current research, I harkened back to the time between the two world wars when the eugenics movement took hold of the American imagination. If you don’t know anything about eugenics, it was a concept devised by a British scientists named Sir Francis Galton. After the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics (and before Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA) Galton propagated the belief that there was a correlative, causative effect between a single gene that was passed down from parent to child and a visible trait (for instance, one gene controlled eye color). If you know anything about contemporary molecular genetics (and why the hell would you unless you were a monstrously nerdy person like myself) you know that virtually every trait expressed in humans and most other eukaryotes is controlled by a whole bunch of genes.
Galton called his theory eugenics and it caught on quick, especially with folks who weren’t in favor of blacks or poor immigrants who were having lots of kids. For my project, I became really interested in what the American Eugenics Movement defined as normal and abnormal relating to the way a human being should look. So I focused my attentions on a photographic archive that had been gathered in the 1920s at the Eugenics Record Office. Because the scientists involved in the movement had been so interested in normalcy and aberrance, and because they office was located on nearby Long Island, they took a special liking to the fairways of nearby theme parks like Luna Park located on Coney Island. By the time I actually visited the contemporary version of Coney Island, I was well versed in the locale’s history which made it all the more interesting to me. That, and of course, the quarter games of skeeball.
When we arrived at Coney Island, we spent some time walking the boardwalks, chatting with a young woman who silkscreened some really cool t-shirts and snapped some photographs. We found this old, stucco building that was trimmed with amazing detailing of ships and sea deities. Lauren and I concluded that the abandoned building would make a really awesome seaside rock club. And after eating some fish, riding the Flume, stocking up on more film, and playing skee ball for over an hour, there were only one thing we had to do to make the day complete.
The thing that I really wanted to see was America’s last remaining sideshow. Lauren knew this and agreed to attend it with me. We sauntered into the darkened performance area and grabbed a seat on one of the wooden bleachers. At the sideshow, 11 acts cycle through continuously and viewers can come and go as they please. There was a snake enchantress, and a geek (who couldn’t eat any chicken’s heads because it’s illegal, but did get sandwiched between boards of nails), an electric woman, a contortionist, and a “killer” clown (the only genetic freak, a midget).
And there was one other guy. The M.C./performer is known as Tyler Fyre and he was a Renaissance man-a sword swallower, a magician, a fire eater, and a human blockhead. Now, not only was he talented in a plethora of ways, but he was charming and, well, hot. It’s kinda strange to think of someone as attractive as he pounds a three inch long nail up his nose, but he was this young guy wearing Doc Martens with flames stitched on them and eating fire with the Cramps playing in the background. He wasn’t your average sideshow performer. He was the punk rock human blockhead. And after seeing him perform, I walked around for nearly two weeks telling friends that I had a massive crush on one of the sideshow performers at Coney Island.
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