Coneyisland Writing

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• NOISE (c), a novel by Barbara Sparhawk, Chapter 3
  by Barbara Sparhawk

  NOISE © 3 – CONEY HEATS UP The unpredictability of life may be the best part. Except for one thing. If angels walk among us, they s…

  SYNOPSIS:SYNOPSIS – NOISE©: / Lucien didn’t know it before she tried it but she found out. Real life wan’t anywhere near the halls of Congress, and it wasn’t in a New York City newsroom. Sometimes it was on a reporter’s pad and got as far as print, but not often enough. It tumbled, however, off the tongues and out of the guts of real people. Lucien might be some fallen Brooklyn angel, but she wanted salvation and she’d listen for those tongues and search for those guts and man she needed some genuine humanity in her or she’d wither and die. / She trekked out to the Brooklyn badlands of Coney Island that April 1979, disconsolate and angry. The old amusement park was rebuilt make-shift over too many burndowns and unsalvaged dreams. She’d found plenty of reality there before in years of sign painting for Jazz and Sporty and Captain Nemo. Mary was real. And Satelite Bob, and Metoo. Real and creepy and marvelous and no pretense otherwise. / On that quiet cold spring day, a Louisiana kid who wildcatted in the Gulf of Mexico showed up, ready to scope out the ride manager’s job he signed up for. Sensual, physcially gorgeous, soft southern drawl puntuated by Cajun French, the guy electrified Lucien. His name was B.J.Ten years before, he’d been a child preacher. His name was Bijou then. A healer in the backwoods of southern bayous, raised by his grandma, he grew up in torch-lit revival tent Sundays where he brought hope and redemption to sickly outlanders. When he hit fourteen, his grandma tried to murder him. That three minutes of fighting for life in an old empty Baptist church permanently altered the boy. B.J. ran and didn’t stop running, learning to live on his own in a life that had gone from gentle to deadly. Dangerous, wild, all piss and vinegar, on a tightrope between life and death and not remembering enough of who he used to be, to jump himself off. / B.J. held the secrets of the universe under that greasy t-shirt and dimpled grin. He knew things. Lucien said Take me I’m yours. Something was there for her that was going to make it worth the scare. The man made her feet leave the ground. / The preacher turned wild-catter was way too used to women, mostly ones who burrowed his soul, emptied his pockets, and left him wretched. Lucien looked for adventures, excess was her favorite dish and dangerous men moved her, but she wouldn’t be tied down and she wouldn’t cause pain. B.J. introduces Lucien to a new wide-open playing field in a machine driven maniacal neon summer. They live twenty feet off the GoKart track in an old tin trailer, sawed-off double barrelled shotgun on the top bunk, howling murderous Brooklyn just outside the door. NOISE starts off all rock’n’roll, eighteen hour days, frenzy, passion, and pure Coney peculiar. / Human complexities start to get in the way. B.J. keeps his past untouched with as much noise, danger, recklessness, and Jack Daniels as he can get in him. Lucien’s falling in love, but for B.J. she’s one more handy device toward oblivion. / But it turns against him. For the first time in years somebody touches him. He starts talking and he can’t stop. Lucien helps him open up but now he’s in trouble with his memories. Even as some part of him gets excited by his rediscovered past, B.J. holds fast, determined to stay big on action, small on reason, and hell bent on dying young. / For Lucien, B.J. is sexually liberating. She lets go of every reserve she’d ever installed, ready to throw herself into whatever lies ahead. Unexpected answers to those prayers is a man in transformation as the underlying compassion that marked his childhood starts to re-surface in the grown man. It deeply affects Lucien, the tough Brooklyn survivor. She never expected much for herself in the past, but her ideas of love had always been dead wrong. Maybe she wouldn’t have to put up with the poverty of feeling that was all she’d ever known before B.J. showed up. / By summer’s end in the slowed down park, B.J. is beset by his unresolved past. He leaves Coney Island in a ferocious goodbye that devastates Lucien. He heads out to find his grandma in Louisiana. At the last minute he can’t face her, tries to kill himself, and accidentally lives. He forces himself to confront the woman who raised him, who tried to murder him years before. And as that starts unfolding, B.J. hears the truth about his parents. He sees grandma for who she really is.Then life really opens up! Maybe he wasn’t born with all he might have needed but he can find it now. Motherly women appear in diners, roadmaps point to untried territory. It’s all new. / Lucien was the first to show him love without knowing she had it in her. B.J. didn’t expect epiphany in an amusement park or that he’d be changing every idea he ever had about life. Now the pounding noise he always used to obliterate life, he no longer needs. The sudden quiet forces his hand. The story begins in Bijou’s Louisiana childhood. He is six years old. At a tent revival meeting with his grandmother he prepares to set his healing hands on strangers. It will be two decades before he discovers how to do it for himself. None of the copyrighted work on this website including chapters from NOISE© may be sold, copied, or used in any manner whatsoever without direct written consent by the author/artist BD Sparhawk. / Protected by International Copyright Law. 2001 – 8