Yom Kippur Swim

The last two Sundays I swam out at Coney Island, I ended up at the sideshow after. The first of these mornings was rainy and unseasonably cold for early September. The water was a sooty green and the tugs and container ships out in Ambrose Channel were sharply etched against the low clouds, like in one of those early gelatinous prints where everything looks both dark and illuminated. I swam alone and each stroke felt like punishment and atonement. Yom Kippur was in a couple of days and on my mind, I guess.

Afterwards, I wandered up the boardwalk, past the aquarium and the Cyclone, over to Ruby’s. I meant to warm up, but the warmer I felt, the more I resented it and wished I could keep the ocean as long as possible. Maybe this is why, hungry and cold, instead of a proper after-swim lunch, I washed down with a cold beer a dozen clams on the half shell.

There were no more than a dozen of us in the whole place, and what with the salvaged pre-Sandy boardwalk suspended from the ceiling over our heads, it felt like we were all refugees from some cataclysm, us and the driftwood all that remained.

In the back I found a sign for Stauch's Baths I thought was authentic but turned out to be a prop from Woody Allen's 2017 movie Wonder Wheel. The colors, though, looked well-researched, the pale gold and tomato red evoking the art deco palette of the Parachute Jump. Stauch’s Baths was between the Bowery and the boardwalk just west of Stillwell Ave., one of dozens of bathhouses that lined the beach from Seagate to Manhattan Beach (you can read Sergey Kadinsky’s fascinating article about one of them, McLochlin's Baths). According to Coney Island historian Charles Denson, Ruby Jacobs and his wife owned Stauch’s (as well as Clarets, Cook’s, and Bushman baths) from the 1960s until they closed in the early 80s. Ruby’s restaurant, which he opened right around then, must’ve been his consolation, and so a direct heir, in a way, to the lost bathhouses.

Then I cut up 12th Ave to Coney Island USA, where the Texas Talker was doing the bally out on the sidewalk and the sideshow performers were hanging out at the Freak Bar between sets. I ordered a Mermaid Pilsner and sat there with the other freaks and felt something I rarely do—a sense of belonging. Open water swimmer, athlete, sideshow performer, fire eater, what's the difference? We're all doing things with our bodies we maybe weren't meant to do, but that bring us such pain and such joy, we keep coming back.