Writer's Table
My novel, NOISE. Posting Chapters soon……..I lived it 30 years ago. I wrote it ten years ago. A novel I call NOISE about a singular Brooklyn adventure when I was a Coney Island sign painter on weekends and Geraldine Ferraro’s Congressional press secretary during the week.
I fell in love with a Louisiana wildcatter who came to Coney for uproar after isolated months on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A month later I quit Congress.
GoKart Track
I moved into his tiny shiny trailer, smack on the Go Kart track for a summer of murder, mayhem, drugs, sex, and rock and roll. It’s a love story. Sort of. More Americana humankind. We are NOISE.
I call him Bijou. Raised by his half Cajun grandma, showing extraordinary powers of healing as a 5 year old she gets him on a backwoods gospel tent circuit and he’s on his way to stardom. People follow him like they’re being pulled up by a whirlwind.
Empty Coney Island
20 years later there’s Bijou in a cold early spring on an empty Coney Island lot. The sky is late in the day black gray, 4 pm still NY winter. I’m looking for sign work, then I see him. He’s dark tan, sun-blanched blond, piercing light blue eyes. He’s got on white linen pants, zebra striped ballroom shoes, and he’s rippling barechested under a white tuxedo shirt blowing in the wind all hurricane wrapped. He grabs my hand, pulls me into the Haunted House and while he’s telling me what signs he wants painted he leans into me like a wingless bird with the entire solar system under his skin and kisses me.
Bijou is electric, all piss and vinegar wildman, obliterating a past he can’t figure with anything he can get his hands on. He finds himself and leaves me when the park closes in September, heads back to Louisiana to track down grandma and confront her.
NOISE is a fabulous story. I tried to get in touch with Kevin Bacon who could’ve done a spang-up career changing job of Bijou. I had a NY agent and a contract. That was August 2001, just after I got back from 2 weeks of being a cameraman’s assistant for Survivor-Africa. I’ve lived a peculiar life. One month later the world changed.
I lost my wildcatter in the fall of 1979, got a job writing news at CBS and ABC, and still snuck out to Coney Island on weekends to paint haunted houses, carousels, and steamy hot dogs. I’ve painted a portrait of Bijou, it’s all Fellini and Dr Calligari’s Cabinet.
LOOKING FOR A MOVIE DIRECTOR.
Bijou, Coney Island, Brooklyn
Cover jacket
