8 Million Stories: The Potato People of Coney Island

GREGORY AND PAUL’S had two locations on Coney Island—one on the boardwalk, where Paul worked, and one just across from the Cyclone that Greg took care of. They sold standard Coney Island fare and every item available was posted on at least one of hundreds of colorful signs that hung all throughout the stand. It was not a clean place. From the National cash registers to the manual crinkle-fry cutter, the wood-lined walk-in refrigerator to the employees, everything was very old and extremely worn. Gregory is my father’s uncle; Paul, a family friend, a fellow Greek from a generation when they were all somehow cousins. They’ve owned these stands since the ’50s, and grew against this crass and vibrant background. Greg, comfortably in his seventies now, and knowing little else but Coney Island, sold his stand and auctioned everything, all as part of the inexorable process of scrubbing Coney Island into “a 27-acre, year-round entertainment destination.”

There was something scary about going there when I was a child, but also something terribly exciting. I would see Uncle Greg working behind the counter as I approached. His skin was always a tanned olive and it hung off him loosely, delicately draping his sinewy muscles. His hair, sparse and silver, was always covered by his paper cap, and he wore a thin, almost translucent white “Gregory and Paul’s” T-shirt.Whether he was spinning cotton candy onto its paper stem, slipping funnel cake into the oven or working the register, he always had a cigarette hanging between his lips.When I was very small, Uncle Greg would pull me into his arms, hoist me over the counter, set me down on top of the coolers and give me food I never ate otherwise. As I sat on that cooler, held that little tub of fries and stabbed at them with my red plastic spork, I watched life at the stand as though it were theater.

Uncle Greg’s customers were the rough sort and he was rough with them. He gave them limited time to choose between chocolate and vanilla (no sprinkles, no swirl) before he made the choice for them. He casually used words that I didn’t hear very often. His voice was thick with Brooklyn, nicotine and frying oil. When my father explained the family to me I was shocked to learn that Uncle Greg’s sisters were those old Greek aunts who always wore black and still actually pinched my cheeks and called me “kookla” in their high, foreign voices. Uncle Greg did not fit with those aunts. Whatever produced them could not have resulted in him as well. He was from Coney Island, not Greece. He was from the same stock as the people who worked for him. Those people like old potatoes, all crinkled and burned, spotty and growthy. This is not to say that all of them were like that, some were perfectly lucid, competent, sympathetic individuals who helped keep the stand running in those final years. But they are overshadowed by the others: the squishy potato people.

Chihuahua, whose real name no one remembered, was, as one would expect, a small, wrinkly man. He had the sunken face of one missing teeth, could not link together more than three words at a time and never took more than 11 seconds to drink a cup of coffee. He would go back to his family in Puerto Rico for the off-season, and one summer he did not come back. Greg assumed Chihuahua had been killed by his brother-inlaw, but when Chihuahua did return the following year, he explained that it’s always hot in Puerto Rico, so he’d forgotten it was summer.

Jughead was another one with an appropriate name—he had a wide, round face, with oversized, haphazard features and unexpected patches of black hair bursting forth from a cheek or an ear. He explained to me and my father how, when he was 9 in 1967, or maybe it was 11 in ’64 (he couldn’t recall), he drove through Coney Island with his parents and saw Gregory and Paul’s and said, “Someday, I’m going to work there.”

“See!” Uncle Greg said. “It’s a dream come true!” “Yeah,” Jughead said. “A dream come true!” My father turned to me and said that is why I should never do drugs.

Bull, an ex-boxer, a sturdy man punched more than just one too many times, talked mostly about how he could have had a real good case against the drug companies because he was given a drug that could have resulted in a heart attack.

Nose worked around the corner. Predictably, he had a huge nose and moustache. Between the four of them, they had 13 teeth (Chihuahua contributed nothing). My father counted.

Coney Island was always gritty, unpredictable, almost organic, and these people had grown and ripened while buried in its soil.This Memorial Day the new Coney Island will open with 19 shiny rides, designed to “flip you, turn you, launch you, drop you, [and] splash you,” according to a spokesman for Central Amusement International. But I wonder if he had even been to the old Coney Island, and if he knows how, effortlessly, without milliondollar–investors, it did all that already.

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