Go to Coney Island

Go to Coney Island. Go when it’s so hot you want to fight strangers taking too long at turnstiles, when you have contemplated the hygienic consequences of sleeping with a bag of frozen corn in your armpits. Go when your life is a nightmare; go when your life is so good you want to forgive your enemies. Go when your life is neither of these things, when each day is just in dull slow-motion and only the grease-shined sun-drunk mayhem of a carnival laid along the ocean can hot-wire you. Go when it’s Wednesday. Go for no good reason. Go in March, when after dark not one soul is there besides two meaty old men moving along the boardwalk with a triumphant bounce, dragging fishing poles behind them, the hooks swinging in the wind.

Go in mid-July. Take the train the whole way, with the man who gets on at 33rd street, pushing through the doors with a rhinoceros grunt a shopping cart filled with bottles of water dripping in the heat with fat bulbs of condensation. “I’m a lone wolf. I’m an entrepreneur. I play the game. One bottle two dollars, three bottles five dollars. You want headphones, you want an iWatch, I’ll work with you, I’ll get you an iWatch. I got Starbursts, too. You like Starbursts?”

The train goes underground and everyone looks at their reflections in the windows, fixing their hair, checking their texts, giving up on their hair, giving up on their texts. The kids smearing their faces against the glass, cupping their hands around their eyes and searching for rats.  Men wearing socks with sandals, men with crumpled posture, men digging in plastic bags for nasal spray. Men on their way to work with puffy eyes, eating sliced mango from ziplocs, turning them inside out and holding them upside down and over their heads like someone shipwrecked trying to drink rainwater off a leaf. Women with noisy earrings getting on at Atlantic, falling asleep by Prospect Park, riding the Manhattan Bridge high above the grey-green funk of the East River.

Fall asleep yourself, wake up by Kings Highway with the car mostly empty, coasting through long grass and mattresses tilted on their sides and cut open with the stuffing spewing out, past castle-wall-thick concrete barriers covered with graffiti, aluminum cans stomped flat everywhere, the beach waiting for you somewhere right after the horizon breaks off.

It is a place that almost should not exist. It was discovered by accident by Henry Hudson in 1609, and for the next 400 years it was nearly erased by fires and economic disasters and by hurricanes. By the crusty scoundrel Robert Moses, who tried to shut...