Bad Time for a Corndog: A Too-Friendly Guy at a Coney Island Bar

"There's no self-consciousness down here," Morgan observed as we made our way back across the blister-aggravating sand toward the Boardwalk. We'd just passed a woman in her late 60s wearing a minuscule (and much-too-revealing) bikini. She looked like the scary, cackling old woman from The Shining.

"Yeah, well, maybe there should be," I replied.

We'd been drifting around Coney for a few hours at that point. Up the beach and down the Boardwalk, in and out of Ruby's, past the closed and gated fronts of the Russian flea markets along Surf Ave. that had been raided and shut down a few weeks earlier. In and around the parks and the rides and out on the pier, where a few people were fishing, but not too many. Given our schedules, there was a good chance we wouldn't be able to get down there again for a while at least, so we figured we better do it while we could, if only to avoid the onset of any deeper madness.

Despite the empty lot where the Thunderbolt used to stand, and all those empty flea markets, and that Minor League baseball stadium, Coney was still Coney. That's all we needed to know.

Unsurprisingly, while trudging across the seemingly endless sands, we realized we were thirsty again. That happens an awful lot, so we headed back to the bar. Morgan positioned me in an open spot to place the order, then excused herself for a moment. I waited patiently.

Earlier in the day-during the very first beer, actually-a pushy, snippy, middle-aged woman stepped up to the bar and demanded a white wine to go.

"Can't do that," the bartender told her, shaking his head.

"Whaddya mean you can't do that? Just put it in a cup-with ice, a lot of ice-and I'll take it away."

"Can't do it-it's against the law."

"Oh just do it. Come on, that's crazy."

Crazy or not, she didn't have to be so damn snotty. He was doing what he had to do. From that point on, however, in this woman's eyes at least, nothing he could do was right.

"I said white wine! And lots of ice!" She turned and yelled over to her waiting friends about the awful trouble she was having.

Oh, she needed a pop.

Finally, in frustration, I must imagine, the bartender said, "Okay, I'm doing you a favor lady, see?" He set a cup down on the bar, which she snapped up in her claws, marching away down the Boardwalk. The bartender stared after her for a bit, then turned to us and shook his head. It's one of those basic rules-never be rude to a bartender.

It was several hours later now, and a new bartender was working. When he made his way over to me (by 3 o'clock, the bar was a hell of a lot more crowded than it had been at 11), I told him what we wanted.

"You like that stuff, huh?" he asked, referring to the non-domestic beers he was slowly pouring into the large paper cups the law now required them to use.

"Yeah, I guess," I replied. Fats Domino was on the jukebox, and the old man two stools down from me was swinging his legs and snapping his fingers sort of in time with the music.

"We don't sell too much of this here."

"Really."

"Yeah-you like it?"

"Mmph." Nothing at all against the domesticated brands, and no comment on my part concerning the accepted taste of the regular crowd. Far be it from me. But they were offering-it was up there on the board-so I ordered it. It wasn't like he'd have to chop up any limes or anything.

"Normally, the only people who order this are people who come in from the city."

"I'm from Brooklyn," I clarified, but nicely. "I've never lived in Manhattan." Having offered that, however, I figured it might be best not to mention where in Brooklyn I'm from.

"Yeah, they come down from the Village, this is all they want. Apart from that, we never sell it."

"Uh-huh." He eventually gave me my beers and I, accepting them with overwhelming shame, gave him money. I don't know if he was making conversation or if he intended to make me feel bad. I would accept the first, and ignore the latter. However much I loved that bar, I knew I was still a stranger there, and could deal with my position as such.

"Who was that who sang that last song?" the old man asked excitedly, his legs still swinging under his barstool, once Fats Domino had stopped singing.

"Fats Domino," I told him.

"Yeah, Fats Domino," he said. "That's it." He snapped his fingers a few more times. "Man!"

"Yeah," I said, as I looked around for Morgan.

"Hey, you ever been to New Orleans?" he asked.

"Nosir, I haven't."

"They got a lot of music down there. Who's that guy they got down there?"

"I'm... I'm...not-"

"You know-that guy-who plays the music?"

"I really don't... There are a lot of, uh..."

"You been to the beach yet?" he asked, in an abrupt, even startling turn. He was a small man with glasses and a round, smiling face.

"We were just down there, yeah."

"Yeah, but you been to the beach?"

"Well, I, uh...suppose we might go back down there again. You, uhh...never know."

"Then why don't you try?" he swept his arm out, gesturing toward the bar's couch a few feet away. Only then did I realize that he'd been saying "bench" all along, not "beach."

"Yeah, I think I will, thanks."

I lifted the beers and started to shuffle across the floor with them, when I found the old man standing in my way.

"You got real pretty hair," he said.

Oh God no. "Well, I... I..." I started looking for an escape route, but was finding nothing.

"Oh, my!-and the dimples to go with it!"

Oh Christ just kill me now.

Just then, Morgan came around the corner, and I thought I was saved.

"Hey!" I said. We moved over to the couch, and she sat me down.

"You want something to eat?" she asked.

I took a quick internal inventory. "Naah, I think I'm okay."

"Corndog, anything?"

"Yeah, what the hell. Get me a corndog." She headed toward the hotdog stand, and my new friend was suddenly beside me again.

"What was that guy's name again? Did that song?"

"Ferlin Husky?" I offered.

"Naw, naw...you know-that song-" He started snapping his fingers again.

Oh my.

Morgan returned and sat down, and the old man went back to his barstool. I leaned over and whispered the story of the past couple minutes to her. When I mentioned the hair business, she realized that he was more than a simple music lover with a momentary lapse of memory.

"Bad time for a corndog," she said, as I stared down at the phallic, deep-fried wonder in front of me, knowing full well that I was being watched. I turned my back to him as best as I could, cleaned off the stick in two asphyxiating bites, then turned back around, wondering what was going to happen to my stomach two hours from now.

As we worked on the beer, the old man wandered to and fro about the bar, always, somehow, ending up next to our couch to gesticulate in some odd way. We'd known plenty of folks like him in other bars. Not every bar has one, but a good percentage of them do. In spite of everything else, this one was at least more coherent than most. At least we could understand what he was saying. And in spite of what nefarious ideas might have been churning around in his foul, overburdened heart, he seemed harmless enough.

He sure liked his music, though.

Eddie Cantor, Del Shannon-and of course the great Fats Domino-on the jukebox, these people made him happy. When Morgan played some Dean Martin and Rosemary Clooney, that made him happy too. Kept him snapping and swinging.

But when two other young men began playing a series of contemporary salsa hits, it was both my salvation and damnation. I don't care much for the contemporary salsa, but it did divert the old man's attention. He moved down the bar and cornered these two young men (this is what I got from Morgan-by this time he was well out of my range of sight) to give them an earful concerning the nature of good music.

Considering the fact that they were also, well...young men, I suspect he was giving them an earful concerning other things as well. Whatever it was, it was enough to drive them from the bar long before the songs they'd paid for had finished playing.

Before he had a chance to get his bearings again and redirect his attention toward us, we gathered our things together and returned to the Boardwalk.

Twenty minutes later, we were thirsty again, and figured it was worth the risk.