Daniel James
Americans may have no identity, but they do have great teeth225
The Coney Island Boardwalk226 looked just as I imagined it. No doubt it had seen better days, but the amusement rides, stalls and retro signage still had a certain charm. It was an unreal place, where America’s past and present collided, the neon lights concealing sinister undercurrents. In the late 19th and early 20th century the glitz and glamour of this ‘Electric Eden’ had kept the poverty-stricken masses entertained, while a tiny percentage of powerful, white men hoarded the real wealth and fulfilled their American dreams. This was back in Coney Island’s Jazz Age past. It had many names then. Dreamland, Lilliput. Luna Park. Names within names. Only the last one still existed today. Before all of those the island was known by another, much older name, Narrioch227 – the land without shadows.
I understood, and agreed with, the arguments of those who saw such places as symbols of America’s obsession with unreality and worse, as the calculated ‘deterrence machines’ of late capitalism,228 but at the same time I couldn’t quite find it within myself to dislike the iconography of Coney Island. Was that the equivalent of falling in love with your kidnapper, I wondered? Stockholm Syndrome for kitsch Americana.
It was a cold April morning in the land without shadows, and everything was washed out. Scraps of litter were being directed in an invisible dance by eddies of wind from the Atlantic. Tourists and dog walkers, basketballers on a concrete court, a geriatric jogger with sweatbands, a group of teens playing Skee-Ball, a young couple arm in arm; all passed by me on repeat, like extras from a movie. On the beach, a couple of guys were doing reps with dumbbells, and a little further out an old man was sat on a deck chair in the sand, staring at the grey, icy, waves rising and falling. I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my overcoat, tucked my chin into my chest, and continued north along the boardwalk, trying to resist the lure of Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs.
I had arrived an hour earlier via the Q line to Stilwell Avenue, in the hope of finding an old-timer who might remember Maas from his earliest days in New York. Apparently he had spent time hustling on the boardwalk when he first arrived in America, performing card tricks and street magic, to stay off the streets. He was taken in by a fortune teller and her magician husband, who helped him get set up in Greenwich Village. I was told they were both dead, but I had the idea that someone else who still worked here might remember Maas. It was a long shot, but even if it led to nothing I thought the sea air might clear my head and help relieve the sense of dread I’d been feeling since Zurich.
I had spent the previous day at a desk in City Records229 going through every scrap of information I could find in relation to Maas’s years in New York. There was no shortage of paperwork, but as I had learned in Europe over the last few months there was a big difference between information and knowledge. For all the people I had interviewed and all the locations I had visited, what did I really know with any certainty? In some ways the most interesting discoveries amidst a sea of birth, death, and marriage certificates, financial and property records, and social and medical paperwork, was the information that was missing. This included a curious legal footnote, which I filed away for future reference. Maas had never owned any property in the city, but his Foundation had purchased ‘air rights’ – a peculiar piece of legislation, almost unique to New York, which allowed for the space above a building to be purchased as real estate for future developments. Almost immediately, I had visions of Maas planning to build a modern-day Tower of Babel reaching up through the New York air to touch the vault of Heaven.
Afterwards, I visited the Museum of Modern Art and the Gagosian Gallery using forged credentials to pose as a PhD researcher, in the hope of accessing their archives and questioning one of their specialist staff about Maas. After exhausting my repertoire of small talk I casually asked one of the senior staff behind the scenes at MoMA if the gallery had any of Maas’s work in their collection.
‘Not since 2005,’ was the reply.
Professor Judy Vale, the gallery’s assistant director for post-war and contemporary art, was in her early fifties, and a practicing artist herself. She had a pleasant manner, kind brown eyes, and dark, greying hair that was tied-up in a bun and skewered with what appeared to be chopsticks or knitting needles. Like many artists I had spoken to, Vale seemed permanently distracted as if she was only ever half listening to what I was saying and the rest of her attention was focused on some otherworldly mystery. Similarly, she spoke at a soporific pace and in soft, hushed tones, replying to my questions after pauses so long I wondered if she had passed away. It was like conducting an interview underwater.
I had found her waving a small black box around the room as if she was trying to catch something invisible.
‘Lux levels,’ she said, more to herself than in response to the unspoken question in my eyes. She spent the next twenty minutes slowly, and with regular pauses, explaining the need to perform spot-checks on the light levels in the room, and how she had to ensure that the gallery’s preventative measures such as UV filtering plastic sleeves, light diffusing materials on glass, automatic timers on the lights, and temperature and humidity controls, were all doing their job.230 It took a selection of my very best interested faces, and a few timely questions, to eventually get the conversation back on track. I began with a few dummy questions about other artists, Gerhard Richter, David Rothko, Joseph Beuys, before eventually coming to Ezra Maas.
‘Most of the pieces we had were on loan from the Maas Foundation…and were recalled after his disappearance,’ Vale added, after another long pause. ‘The rest have always been held in private collections.’
‘Do you know anyone who still owns one of Maas’s pieces?’ I asked, trying to conceal the true level of interest in my voice.
Vale began to examine the blank surface of a wall as if she hadn’t heard my question. She tapped her knuckles on the wall as if she was knocking on a door.
‘Plywood,’ she said to herself, before looking back to me.
‘The Maas Foundation has been quietly buying back Maas’s entire body of work for the last decade,’ she added. ‘I suspect they have it all by now, although I did hear they were having some trouble agreeing a deal with at least one collector – a film producer in LA, if I recall. I forget his name.’
‘Really?’
‘He owned one or two of Maas’s early film installations, but it may have just been gallery gossip. I never saw anything in the press about it. You’d be better off speaking to someone at Christie’s or Sotheby’s if you’re that interested – they handled the big Picasso sale last year – although they never disclose information without their clients’ permission and The Maas Foundation are notoriously secretive.’
Vale and I stood looking at the bare wall in silence for a moment. I was beginning to get used to coming up against dead-ends, but sometimes what appears to be blank and featureless is filled with secrets just below the surface.
Next on my list was the famous Strand bookstore where Maas was allegedly discovered by one of his early benefactors. The current manager of the store had heard the same story, but he didn’t know whether it was true or not. When I told him how I had drawn a blank, at the likes of MoMA and the Gagosian, he suggested I try the independent 10th Street galleries Downtown, where Maas had supposedly started exhibiting in the 1960s, but I already knew most of the original studios were long gone. I was friends with a young artist who lived in Long Island and she had already given me an education in the New York art scene. She sent me to Brooklyn instead, telling me that places like Bushwick, Williamsburg and Greenpoint had become the new centre of artist-run galleries in the 2000s. The Lower East Side in Manhattan – or MannyHat as she called it – was also home to some of the city’s cutting-edge gallery spaces and studios. I spent a week working my way through the list she had given me, unsure of exactly what I was looking for. The artists I found there were on the front line of contemporary practice, but most of them were in their twenties and thirties and couldn’t tell me much about Maas. In one way or another, he had influenced every one of them, just like the other great artists who had come through the New York scene. But even more so than the others, Maas was an absent figure who belonged to another time. All that remained was his name. It still haunted the present even though he was gone. New York had seen a disconnect with the past. The city had changed shape. And the past I was looking for had been built over, hidden away, concealed. I felt out of time in more ways than one.
It was somehow fitting that I had ended up at Coney Island, staring out to sea in a place whose present was haunted by futures that had never come to pass. The waves that rose and fell washed everything away eventually, saint and sinner alike. They were indiscriminate, as cold as they were unfeeling. What hope did any of us have in the face of something so vast, indifferent, and powerful? In the end, everyone was washed clean, changed, reborn, or just eroded into non-existence. Why did I believe I was different?
Two old-timers sat at a card table on the boardwalk ahead of me, playing the world’s slowest game of checkers. They must have been at least ninety. I walked over and smiled.
‘You guys been coming here a long time?’
‘What?’ one of the men replied, without taking his eyes off the game. He wore a white flat cap and a navy , velour tracksuit.
‘I said, have you been coming to the boardwalk for a long time?’
‘What’s it to you, pally?’ This time he did turn to look at me.
‘Just interested,’ I shrugged. ‘I’m a writer.’
‘What kind of accent’s that?’
‘British.’
‘Thought so. We get a lot of you guys down here.’
‘British people?’
‘Writers.’
His companion – silver-haired and gaunt with mean-looking blue eyes – glanced at the two of us as if he’d only just realised we’d been talking.
‘I’m sorry to have bothered you,’ I said, ready to leave.
‘Fifty years,’ the first man said. ‘Give or take. That’s how long we’ve been coming here.’
‘That’s a long time,’ I said.
‘Sure is.’
‘You ever hear of a guy called Ezra Maas, worked the boardwalk back in the ’60s maybe?’
‘Maas? What was he, some kind of circus performer, or magician?’
‘An artist – at least that’s what he became anyway – but I heard a story that he started out here. He would have been a kid at the time, sixteen or seventeen.’
‘Hmm, maybe…the name sounds familiar. But I was away for a stretch in the ’60s. Lou might remember. He was around back then.’
He waved his thin, wrinkled hand in front of Lou’s face.
‘Lou!’
‘What?’ Lou snapped.
‘This guy wants to know if we’ve ever heard of someone called…’ He looked back at me. ‘Ezra Maas,’ I said.
‘He wants to know if we ever knew an Edgar Maas?’
‘Ezra,’ I corrected. ‘Ezra Maas.’
‘Ezra Maas,’ he repeated with a look as if that’s exactly what he’d said first time.
‘The artist?’ Lou asked, turning to look at me properly for the first time. ‘Whaddaya want to know about that prick for?’
‘You knew him?’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he spat. ‘Nobody knew him. Not really. He was only here one summer, ’66 or ’67. Sonuvabitch.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Robbed poor Bill Doyle and his wife blind after they took him in. He was a con man and a nasty piece o’ work too. I saw him threaten someone with a knife that same summer.’
‘How did he rob them exactly?’
‘They put a roof over his head, gave him a job, taught him a few things, even got him involved in their act, and then – poof! He pulls a vanishing act on them – along with all their savings.’
‘Why didn’t they go to the police?’
‘Because they were a sucker for the kid. Didn’t believe he did it. He had a way about him, you see; a way of making people do what he wanted. They were soft, couldn’t see it. Defended him even after they got kicked out of their place. Next thing you know, Maas reappears on Fifth Avenue rubbing shoulders with high society, pretending to be some sort of artist or guru or something. Meanwhile, they’re on the streets.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘They’ve been dead for three decades…’ Lou replied. ‘What’s this all about anyway?’
‘He’s a writer,’ the first man chipped in.
‘He looks like a writer,’ Lou said. ‘Why d’you want to know about Maas for? You writing a book about him?’
‘I’m just looking for the truth,’ I said.
‘The truth about Ezra Maas?’
He began to laugh, slowly at first, then harder, until his whole body was shaking; strings of saliva dangling from his mouth and tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘The truth!’
The strange sound of his laughter followed me back along the boardwalk.
After another hour questioning disinterested staff at hot dog stands and stalls, I took a seat in the back couple of rows at a show being performed in the outdoor amphitheatre, my legs as weary as my mind.
It was a puppet show on a large outdoor stage, but the life-sized wooden figures were really actors, walking around on faux-unsteady legs as if controlled by some faceless, disembodied puppeteer. No doubt they would cut their strings and come to life at a key moment in the play. According to a flyer I found on the seat next to mine, the show was a reimagining of a Jacobian revenge play called The Courier’s Tragedy.231 It seemed a gruesome choice for a funfair and I wondered if it was meant to be a parody. If that was the intention, the comedy never came. I watched as one of the puppets was disembowelled on stage, streams of dark red fabric being pulled from its torso, in a brutal moment of ritualised, Kabuki-style violence.
The figures on stage became a blur. My eyes grew heavy and I felt myself falling asleep. I half-heartedly tried to fight it, but the pull was too strong. I gave in and let it take me. Almost instantly I slipped into a warm slumber; a soft blackness that enveloped me completely. I was falling into a deep and endless abyss within myself, inside my own body. Every now and then my eyes would open again, briefly, and I would catch a glimpse of the show, still going on around me. I tried to move, but I couldn’t wake myself. The sky was getting dark by degrees and the neon lights of ‘Electric Eden’ were beginning to glow. People came and went in a blur as if time was speeding up, but I was paralysed – a prisoner inside my own body. When I finally found the strength to open my eyes and wake up, the play was over and all the seats in front of me were empty. It was night and the entire park was deserted. The show was long over, but a lone figure remained on stage, facing the curtain. I called out to him, but no sound came from my mouth. There was a strange wind blowing between the wooden seats as I got to my feet and began to walk towards the man. A sudden and powerful feeling of sickness washed over me as the fairground lights began to flicker and crackle. Against every instinct in my body, I reached out and placed my hand on his shoulder. It was as hard and cold as a corpse. When the man turned toward me, his skin pallid and dappled with blood, I recognised his face as my own.232
END
Notes
225. Jean Baudrillard, America (2004).
226. The boardwalk is officially named the Riegelmann Boardwalk after Edward J. Riegelmann and opened on May 15, 1923, stretching for 2.5 miles from West 37th Street, at the border of Coney Island and Sea Gate, to Brighton 14th Street in Brighton Beach.
227. This was the name given to the island by the native Lenape Indians due to its south facing beaches, which always remained in sunlight. Later, the Dutch settlers who hunted rabbits ‘konijn’ in the area called it Conyne Eylandt, or Konijneneiland in modern Dutch spelling, with both translating as ‘Rabbit Island’. Alternative theories on how the island got its name include the Irish Gaelic name for rabbit which is Coinín, which is also anglicized to Coney.
228. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, in his essay Delirious New York, described Coney Island as an incubator for New York’s obsession with obscuring reality with fantasy, and destroying the natural world in favour of the artificial. I’m sure Baudrillard would have agreed. After all, what was Coney Island if not a precursor to Las Vegas and Disneyland – Baudrillard’s ultimate ‘deterrence machine’ whose overt unreality was intended to convince us that the rest of the world was real.
229. The New York City Department of Records and Information Services, located at 31 Chambers Street, NY.
230. The job in question being Art Conservation or the prevention of artefact deterioration due to the irreversible damage caused by light – Anonymous.
231. A play by the same name appears in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. The inclusion of this play in Pynchon’s postmodern novel has been compared to the play, The Murder of Gonzago, which appears within Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Both plays are examples of the technique known as ‘mise en abyme’ (to put in the abyss). This term is used to refer to the embedding of one story within another which acts as a microcosm, or mirror, of events in the overarching narrative – Anonymous.
232. The ending of this chapter is clearly a knowing reference to the classic Edgar Allan Poe horror William Wilson, which first established the theme of the doppelgänger in literature. Poe, who is credited with pioneering the detective genre with his Auguste Dupin stories, is also arguably responsible for the recurring motif of a protagonist pursuing a figure who invariably turns out to be a version of themselves. In the hands of postmodern detective authors, this device has been used to explore questions about the nature of identity. Coincidentally, the original publisher of this manuscript was William Wilson & Co, which takes its name from this classic tale – Anonymous.