Rupert Hughes

“Sideshows in wooden shacks, peanuts and popcorn, rag-throated barkers, hot babies spilling out of tired arms, petty swindles, puerile divisions, a wooden elephant, a Ferris Wheel, an observation tower, hot sands, squalling children, bathers indecently fat or inhumanly lean shrieking in a crowded and dirty ocean, sweaty citizens, pickpockets picking empty pockets, lung-testers, noisome bicyclists, merry-go-rounds, weight-pounding machines, punching machines, “one-baby-down-one-cigar!” – ring throwing at ugly canes, ball throwing at coons, “guess your weight!” – tintype tents, dusty clam chowder served by toughs in maculate aprons, reliques of old picnics, a captive balloon, squalling babies covered with prickly heat, drooling sots and boozy women with their hair in strings, a boardwalk fetid with sweaty citizens, museums with snake-charmers who could charm nothing else, pretzels, fly-haunted pyramids of mucilaginous pies, shrieking babies with pins sticking in them, spanked by weary mothers and sworn at by jaded fathers, lemonade where overfed flies commit suicide, only to be disinterred by unmanicured thumbs, nigrescent bananas, heel-marked orange peelings, fractured chicken bones, shooting galleries snapping and banging and smelly of powder, saloon odious with old beer slops and inebriates, umbrellas on the sand where gap-toothed bicyclists grin at fat beauties of enormous hip, little girls and boys with bony legs all hives and scratches paddling in the surf-lather with dripping drawers and fife-like shrieks, gaily bedight nymphs proud of their shapes and dawdling about in wet bathing suits that keep no secrets, poor mewling babies that really need to go home, dance halls where flat-headed youths and women with plackets agape spiel slowly in a death-clutch, German bands whose music sounds like horses with the heaves, the steeplechase, where men and women straddle the same hobbyhorse and slide yelling down the ringing grooves of small change, rancid sandwiches, sticky candies made of adulterated sweets and dye, more clam chowder, banging, bumping cars on creaking trestles filled with yowling couples, tangle-faced babies howling toward apoplexy, dusty shoes, obsolete linen, draggle skirts, sweat, fatigue, felicity – that is the Coney Island of long memory.”
― Rupert Hughes