little shop of horrors: my trip to the musee mecanique

yesterday paul and i took the 38 geary bus all the way to the end of the line, where 47th street meets the ocean. the shore there is lovely, swirls of fog floating through the cypress trees, ocean crashing against rock and further down, a wide sandy beach.

there’s a small commercial strip that wants to be a boardwalk only there are no amusement rides. tucked away in a corner is the musee mecanique. it’s like the kind of evil amusement park one encounters in nightmares, where the room is hot and stuffy and filled with people, weird mechanical displays and games and robots and stuff looming in your face and jumping out to scare you, set to the discordant tunes of a sick player piano. the paint is faded and everything is a relic from the coney island of the 50s. all that was missing from the nightmare experience was the fish-eye lens. the attractions included:

‘laughing sal’ – a 10 ft tall mechanical woman in 19th century dress, with the largest red and white striped bosom imaginable. for 50 cents, she’ll rock back and forth in her plexiglass cage and laugh at you. according to the sign, laughing sal has been delighting adults and frightening children for over fifty years.

there were several types of romance meters. according to the sex meter, i’m passionate. paul scored overrated. after the kissing meter ranked our kiss as clammy, and my romance fortune told me to not to trust him, we decided to leave the romance games alone.

the machine that pleased me most was the typewriter that typed my fortune with ghost hands. here’s all about me (sic):

YOU A RE F ULL OF SY MPATHY FOR SUFFE RING OR MISFORTUNE ,

AND YOU RE SPOND WITH REA DY GE NE ROSTITY TO CHARITABLE

APPE ALS. THIS INSTINCT, OF COURSE , MAKES YOU E ASY

G AME FOR IMPOSTE RS TO TA KE A DVANTA G E OF . YOU ARE

A LSO VE RY CREATIVE, A ND WILL DO WE LL IN SUCH FIE LDS

A S MUSIC, PAINTING , POETRY OR PROSE .

paul insisted on (me) paying for the mechanical opium den; this was about as exciting as you might think. it was a big diorama of a dirty room in which men sat or lay in their opium-induced stupors. putting in a quarter made them rock slowly back and forth, and then the closet door swung open to reveal a skeleton who had been hanging on the door since he had overdosed. i could have given that quarter to a real beggar.