Take the Subway to Meet the Mermaids (an excerpt)

by Melissa Whalen Haertsch

The boardwalk is brief, an abstract of all the boardwalks on the New Jersey coast, a microcosmos of fried food and beer, t-shirts and gee gaws, gentle young freaks selling handmade jewelry, less gentle, older and more conventionally decorated entrepreneurs selling jewelry stamped out in a Chinese factory. A man and his assistant displayed exotic animals-a toucan, a surreally yellow boa, a normal, snake-colored boa, a komodo dragon who made a break for it every 20 seconds-and allowed people, for only $1, to touch the wildlife. When a man from the crowd crouched low and pointed his SLR toward a big macaw stealing things from the assistant's gearbag, the man with the snake-colored snake and the toucan on a chain on his arm delicately placed his leg across the camera's field of vision, and without dropping the conversation he was having with someone else, or losing that conversational tone, said, "Hey, Marlin, no pictures. What am I? A photoshoot?" I thought of the returning army displaying blue painted Celtic slaves on the streets of Rome...

Read "Take the Subway to Meet the Mermaids" in its entirety at the gallery.