My Watery Self: Memoirs of a Marine Scientist by Stephen Spotte

Author:Stephen Spotte
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

Coney Island

I KNEW AS SOON AS we got to the parking lot and saw the back window of our car busted out and all our stuff gone that moving to Brooklyn might not have been one of my best decisions.

I’d accepted the job as curator of the New York Aquarium and Osborn Laboratories of Marine Sciences at Coney Island. This was in January of ’71, I think. My second wife, Carol, and I had driven up from Key Largo, Florida, where we’d lived for several months while I took a breather from actual work and helped run a boat taking scuba divers out to the reefs at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. It had felt right, getting back in the water several times a day to watch fishes, and the sun had felt good too. Now I needed to put my career back on track, which meant getting a real job.

We’d found a cheap motel in Coney Island. It seemed to have rooms you could rent by the night instead of by the hour. In front was an illuminated sign advertising secure parking. I remember asking the clerk if the lot really was secure. He’d shrugged and said it was secure as things got around here. He’d said it without actually lifting his head and looking at me. So we took the room and the next morning everything we owned not packed in the suitcases we took inside was gone.

A cop from the 60th precinct came by to take our statement. He yawned frequently. “What’d youse lose?” I told him: a stereo, dive equipment, clothes, books, the usual stuff people take along when they move. He tapped his pen on his clipboard and sucked his teeth. “Junkies,” he said. “Fuhgetaboutit.”

We drove to Queens and stayed with a guy we knew and started looking for a place to live. The guy was a pilot with Eastern Airlines based out of LaGuardia. We had the place pretty much to ourselves. Our host spent his off days with his wife and son at their house in New Hampshire and was hardly ever in Queens except to shower and change into his uniform and maybe flop on the couch for a night.

My new associates at work advised living on Staten Island or Long Island, saying that Coney Island was too dangerous, for kids especially, neighborhoods near the beach in particular. I wanted to be close to work and disliked the thought of commuting. Carol and I didn’t have children together, and my two kids were living with my first wife and her second husband in Newberg, New York, on the Hudson River.

Carol started checking out rentals in Coney Island. There was a high-rise at Brighton First Road and Boardwalk a few blocks from the aquarium and labs, but the rental agent said she had a dozen people or more waiting for the single vacancy, a nice corner two-bedroom unit on the seventh floor with a balcony and full view of Coney Island Beach.

Carol had been a flight attendant and knew how to talk to people.

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