COLUMN ONE : Hard Times for Human Blockhead : Step right up to see the shocking future that may await Coney Island’s seedy sideshow. This is not for the faint of heart, folks. This crumbling calliope of gasps and ghosts could become--a McDonald’s.

Oh yes, the sideshow here has had its woes. Diabetes forced the Tattooed Man into early retirement, and the escape artist was sacked for too much booze. With fewer acts, Demonica, the snake charmer, has had to double as the Elastic Lady, contorting inside a coffin as it is jabbed every which way with blades. As always, the Ghastly Gourmet is getting plenty of roughage, but the glass-eating is finally wearing the enamel off his teeth.

On a brighter note, Miss Kiva, the fire-swallowing “queen of kerosene,” fell in love with the Human Blockhead, he who hammers those five-inch nails up his nostrils. But now the two have a baby, and child care is such a costly burden on a working couple with long hours. “After paying off the baby-sitter, I lost $50 on the Fourth of July weekend,” the “angel of arson” complains, munching a poppy-seed bagel in that mysterious crematorium of a mouth.

Dick Zigun manages Coney Island USA, this 10 1/2-year-old sideshow on America’s most famous beach, one of the few remaining structures along the glorious seediness of the storied old boardwalk. A graduate of the Yale drama school, he has been good enough at extolling his exotic acts as “populist theater” to attract a long run of public funding. But now the money is drying up, and Zigun, a sad sack of a businessman, has fallen behind on the rent.

The landlord wants to evict this lively collection of deadbeats, and a hearing in housing court is scheduled for Wednesday. While more prosperous Coney entrepreneurs have offered to rescue the sideshow and pony up the $34,000 in arrears, the owner of the decrepit theater seems determined to enlist a more conventional tenant. He has shown the property to, among others, that very standard-bearer of American gustatory conformity, McDonald’s.

The Ghastly Gourmet is aghast. “The idea of it turns my stomach,” he said in between his meals of 60-watt light bulbs.

Miss Kiva, too, is burned up over the prospect. “This country is turning into one big mall. Everything is sanitized and prepackaged and all perfectly McDonald’s.”

On stage, at the show’s conclusion, it is Miss Kiva’s job to do the “blow off,” beckoning the suckers from the rickety grandstands to a dark anteroom where they pay $1 extra to see something “so shocking and hideous and controversial” that it could not be advertised on the outside.

“Folks, don’t wait until next time,” she warns them soberly. “Next time, all you’ll find in that room is a big bag of French fries.”

*

Coney Island, a breezy spit of land at the bottom tip of Brooklyn, is one of the great haunted relics of American culture. Time’s brutal drift may have changed a once breathtaking playland into a second-rate amusement park, but something wonderful and seductive remains. The wind-swept surf reaches toward the whirling machinery of the midway, and each ride tosses back a spray of excited light. The senses turn cartwheels with the watching of it.

This is not homogenized America. It is smelly and offbeat and a little bit sleazy. The late Brooklyn historian Elliot Willensky once said: “It was the nature of Coney Island that you would encounter strangeness. You would encounter the unencounterable.” And all that is still so. Coney is steadfastly indecorous and outlandish, and the endangered boardwalk sideshow flows from the spiritual bloodlines of a hundred eccentric forerunners.

Out front, the Human Blockhead is doing the “ballyhoo,” enticing people into the theater for a mere $3. He tells them about the gyrations of the Elastic Lady--how “she’ll twitch it and she’ll twatch it and you’ll all get to watch it.” His half-lies are braided with his half-truths, and people go in a few at a time, their curiosity tickled by the feather of his tongue.

Inside, performing now, Blockhead’s voice becomes adenoidal as he twists an ice pick up his nose. Then Demonica comes out to shimmy in a loose black dress, her black fingernails big as spoons and her slim hands caressing the nine-foot python that she has draped around her shoulders. She is only 23, a bored part-time waitress with deadened eyes. But on stage she somehow makes an audience believe she possesses all the mystic secrets of the ancients.

Surreal Bafflements

The grandstands are full, about 100 people wilting in the summer heat like parched houseplants. They perk up at the best of the surreal bafflements, the swallowing of a shiny sword or the crunching of the glass on the Gourmet’s troubled molars. Spectators are not shy with comments. When Mr. Indestructible dons a straitjacket, he mentions that it is the very same kind worn by the mentally and criminally insane. “That’s half of New York!” someone shouts.

Backstage, the performers seem less other-worldly. With a dozen shows to do nonstop, they are a weary, nervous bunch. Demonica has a big, pouty face. She tries to snack between acts, eating some pasta primavera she has brought from home in a square plastic container. “You’re my baby, yes you are,” she says to Clorox, the python that is lolling along her white stem of a body.

The sideshow work is hard, the pay small. When she can, Miss Kiva tries to earn extra at weddings and bar mitzvahs, but she has to warn clients that her blasts of fire often set off a hotel’s or restaurant’s sprinkler system. As a result, her talents are mostly confined to Coney Island, this wacky place she dearly loves. “This is not Lincoln Center and this is not Disney,” she says proudly. “This is where to go to see someone pound a nail into their head.”

Tripping the Lights

Coney Island’s fame is inherited from a distant yesterday. The first shooting galleries and sideshows went up in the 1880s, and Coney’s peak arrived soon after 1900, when its three colossal amusement parks--Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland--helped America emerge from the more disciplined ways of the Victorian Age. Workers needed a great escape from the metronomes of the factories, and no one had ever devised such giddy and fetching diversions.

In a time of gas lamps, Coney’s new electric lights lit the sky like a starburst, visible out to sea for 50 miles. Visitors came to observe the gaudy spectacle from all over the world, among them students of the psyche as well as frolickers. Something deep and powerful had been unloosed with Coney. Sigmund Freud himself came to Dreamland on a late summer night in 1909.

The rides were contraptions of dogged inventiveness. Roller coasters thrilled and tortured passengers with loops and twists. The Cyclone climbed up an 85-foot hill, faced the broad Atlantic, then plunged at 60 m.p.h. Stutterers and the blind periodically made pilgrimages to the famous ride, hoping to be frightened into a cure by the coaster’s frenzied turns.

The Steeplechase was a simulated horse race--couples squeezing together aboard their wooden mounts. Other attractions transported the willing into the future or the past. There was a trip to the moon and a depiction of Creation. A thousand soldiers re-fought the Boer War in an arena every day.

Coney could be naughty and even distasteful. Elephants were shoved down water chutes, and horses were forced to dive from high perches into tanks. The sideshows seemed to have cornered the world market in the no-limbed, the many-limbed and the rubber-limbed. Bearded ladies and Siamese twins were de rigueur.

The hot dog was popularized here by a German immigrant, Charles Feltman, who sold them for 10 cents apiece and built a huge restaurant that employed 1,200 waiters. In time, he was undersold by Nathan Handwerker, whose corner stand had crowds pouring out into the street. Police could barely control the mobs that lined up for nickel frankfurters and fresh knishes.

By 1920, an extended subway line followed the sun to the famous beach, and the crowds were never bigger, sometimes a million people a day. But by then the heyday had already passed, young America’s ruthless energy having caught up with Coney and begun to pass it by. The rides were copied elsewhere and improved upon. Movies soon became the shaman of all that was illusion.

Dreamland had burned down in 1911. Flames devoured most of Luna Park in 1944. With each blaze, Sunday preachers had new reason to invoke the Lord’s wrath of brimstone against the devil-may-care. In 1964, Steeplechase Park, the last of Coney’s major playlands, closed forever, a hurdy-gurdy version of “Auld Lang Syne” drifting from the old loudspeakers and out to sea.

Collapsing Coney

Walking through Coney today, it can be hard to imagine the bewitching place it was. Steeplechase is a fallow pasture, and high-rise apartments for low-income tenants dominate the once-fanciful skyline. Used furniture stores are the mainstays of the main drag, Surf Avenue, and the leftover midway has shrunken to a mere three blocks. It is gap-toothed with shuttered spaces, and most of the remaining rides are ones common to any good fairground.

Only a few of the great monuments have endured. The Cyclone is still 110 seconds of fury. Jerry Menditto has sat at its controls for 20 years. He knows the condition of every plank and can diagnose by ear the loose bearing of a coaster car. But he has not ridden the thing since his opening season. “I lost my insides on that first drop and you won’t get me up there again.”

The Wonder Wheel still lifts its sliding cages 135 feet into the air, the lengthy spokes launching ribbons of colored light into the darkness. Nathan’s is now the cornerstone of a national hot dog chain, the old stand still garish with neon signs and green lettering, a century’s worth of grime preserved on the walls as if it had landmark status. The Parachute Jump is fenced off and riderless like a piece of modern sculpture, guy wires dangling at its side.

In the ongoing orgy of New York deal-making, there is occasional talk of bringing Coney back to the big time. The land itself is a great oddity of American real estate, with the poor having the best beachfront property. But development plans have only come and gone. Coney is hard to get to except by subway, and big spenders don’t ride the D train to the last stop in Brooklyn.

That is their loss. What they miss is an interplay of opposites: calmness and motion, the earth and the sea, the wistful, goofy past and the frenzied, goofy present. Each weekend, tens of thousands of less-wealthy New Yorkers do make it out to this poor-man’s Hamptons. The re-nourished beach is wider than ever. The wafting smell of Jamaican meat patties mingles with shish kebabs and cheese steaks. The banter of the vendors is a singsong of Spanish, Russian and Chinese. The slam and clatter of those two antique rigs, the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone, still excite their riders with all the magic of a first kiss.

The Impresario

Dick Zigun, 42, immediately felt all this chaotic magic the first time he visited Coney in 1979: “The beach, the ocean, the sky, the place was so alive with ghosts.” Five years later, he started up the nonprofit Coney Island USA. His original idea was for an avant-garde art center, with poetry readings, plays and concerts. But it was the less-serious stuff that caught on: an annual summer-welcoming Mermaid Parade, a tattoo festival, the sideshow.

An au courant impresario, Zigun was good at convincing government agencies that the loony and bizarre were a public trust. He won funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Arts Council and the city’s department of cultural affairs. But in the past few years much of that money has been chopped away by the budget-cutters. With an impetuous sleight-of-hand, Zigun began to pay his performers with the taxes he by law had withheld from their paychecks. The Internal Revenue Service was not amused.

To satisfy Uncle Sam, Zigun juggled his debts and he has now gotten into trouble with his landlord, Ralph Ricci. But the sideshow has been in terrible binds before and always managed to slip the ropes. Veteran carnival types have quit, only to be replaced by the young and hip. Miss Kiva, a pixie-slim 25-year-old Russian immigrant, showed up three years ago, eager to learn how to swallow fire. At Coney, there are tutors of such arts. She met an agreeable old carny hand named Eddie Sudan. “Oh, you must talk to Eddie,” she says.

He sits under an umbrella, around the corner from the pigeon-splattered boardwalk, collecting admissions for one of Zigun’s competitors, the Freak Museum. A ball of man, Eddie has tattoos up and down his arms and a 61-year-old face as crinkled as an unironed shirt. “Fire-eating ain’t so hard,” he says amiably. “Mostly, it’s a matter of controlling your breathing. The important thing is not to inhale, unless you don’t care about burning up your face.”

The Freak Museum is little more than a collection of newspaper clippings, and Eddie Sudan longs for the good old days when he worked with some of the greats: Slitsy the Pinhead or the 590-pound Fat Alice from Dallas. “Ruthie Mignon, the Penguin Lady, she was like a mother to me,” he says. “You know, your freaks were the best people I ever knew. Wish we still had them.”

Eddie’s boss, the smooth-talking rascal Bobby Reynolds, says in his mock-sage way, “It was those disability checks that killed the freak shows. I met a guy once with two little flippers for arms. He could have been another Seal Boy, great as that, so I offered him $200 a week and he tells me that he can do better from the government. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

These days, Reynolds’ two best attractions are his “giant killer rat,” which looks more like an oversized bunny, and his “two-headed baby,” which floats in formaldehyde in a rotating specimen jar. He actually owns two of the two-headed babies, “handed down like heirlooms from showman to showman.”

These big draws are shown in shabby tents. Reynolds watches a few of the curious put down their $1 bills and enter. “This place is scuzzy enough that they figure maybe, just maybe, there is a two-headed baby inside. See, it’s the scuzziness that sells it. If this were Disney World, you’d have 12 kids sweeping up every street corner at $10 an hour. Who needs it? Here, if people have been eating sausage, you know they’ve been eating sausage. It’s not antiseptic. It’s pure Coney Island. And it’s beautiful.”

A Shocking Sight

For the umpteenth time, Miss Kiva is doing the “blow off.” By now, she has learned how to stress certain beguiling words. Her voice oozing sincerity, she tells the crowd, “I’ve been in this business most of my life. I’ve seen two-headed people, hermaphrodites and freaks . . . Gentlemen, believe me, what’s in that room is your worst nightmare. It’s as bare as my hand.”

About half of the sweat-moistened audience shells out the extra $1. They slowly traipse toward that dark anteroom for a look, and as they get close, they can hear the forbidding sounds of a woman who is howling with pain. Once inside, they finally get to ogle this bonus attraction, a short, grainy film with a scene that is all at once eye-popping and heart-stopping and bloody.

A sucker is born every minute, and for $1 they are watching one’s birth.