When I was a young man in high school, you believe it or not, I wanted to play football for the coach, begins the titular, closing track of Lou Reed’s sixth solo album, Coney Island Baby, released in 1975 by RCA Records. When I began putting together my book, I found myself listening to “Coney Island Baby” repeatedly—it became the song I associated most with the book’s making.
My father coached football. First at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, then at Long Beach High School, and finally at my high school, in Syosset, where he continues to coach to this day. My senior year was the year he began at Syosset, and after school, when we’d see each other in the hallway, we’d politely nod before walking in opposite directions.
I didn’t play football for the coach. Following in the footsteps of my oldest brother, I played soccer and spent much of my life thinking I wanted to be a professional soccer player. In my elementary school yearbook, in answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wrote “Goalkeeper for the US National Team.”
Lou Reed was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, about a twenty-minute drive down the Seaford-Oyster Bay from my hometown. In the version of “Coney Island Baby” on Take No Prisoners, live at the Bottom Line in 1978, Reed sings “Freeport, right? Islip Park, Massapequa Park, Rockville Center.” Towns of home. Towns of my childhood. In high school, we would lose to Massapequa in penalties in the Nassau County Class AA semi-finals—I was in goal. I’d lock myself in my room until the next morning. Jimmy Nealis would score the winning penalty. New York State Player of the Year—he’d go to Georgetown and be drafted by the Houston Dynamo.
My father loved music and had a soft spot for Reed’s “Walk on the Wildside.” We had only one computer growing up, which sat on a desk next to where my father slept. Behind me, each night, as I stared at the screen, my father laid out his outfit of black Champion sweatpants, white ankle socks. One night, from the abyss of Kazaa, came that bass-line, and I remember my father singing along from the bed, where he sat watching television, Candy came from out on the island.
When I was a young man in high school, I sang in the choir. I sang acapella: “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby,” a barbershop standard. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief. In our basement were my father’s old records, and two speaker cabinets with cane grill cloth. We had a set of black iron dumbbells and medicine balls in ascending weights. The walls were lined with plaques of my father’s coaching successes. Team photos. Coach of the Year awards.
During the summer, to keep his players employed and out of trouble, my father got the entire varsity football team—and himself—jobs at the Long Beach Sanitation Department. Each morning at 6am, they would walk the seven miles of beach, picking up trash. When I was a kid, I would join him some mornings. On the way there, we would stop for a buttered roll at the gas station. I remember rabbits darting across the Meadowbrook Parkway, and the sun obliteratingly white, and one player on the team who held a lighter to a playing card, then flipped the burning card over the tops of his fingers. After walking the beach, there would be weightlifting sessions back at the high school, which I also would join.
They said I was a little too light weight to play linebacker
So’s I’m playing right end
My father was a linebacker at Monsignor Farrell on Staten Island. Growing up, he’d say to my brother, You’d make a great linebacker. He never said this to me.
At first, I thought it was the shared biography—Long Island, football, my father the coach—that brought me to “Coney Island Baby.” And it was, and is, that. But the song came to signify something more meaningful in the context of my life, and in relationship to the book I was writing. Lou Reed’s “coach” offered a lens for me to think through my own complicated relationship to belonging, performance, and masculinity.
For a long time, I called my manuscript “God Bless You Be Happy,” and it focused more explicitly (and humorously) on my struggles with mental illness. Over the course of many years, though, the poems seemed drawn to understanding the conventions of my life as a serious athlete, and the environmental factors that not only allowed for, but encouraged, those struggles to proliferate.
When you’re all alone and lonely in your midnight hour
And you find that your soul has been up for sale
And you begin to think about all the things that you’ve done
Lou Reed’s “coach” also signifies a metaphoric representation of those most pervasive and heteronormative, patriarchal understandings of what it means to be a man. The straightest dude I ever knew was standing right for me all the time. “Coney Island Baby” offered me the language and the courage to explore that which most tormented me, but which I didn’t yet have language to understand myself. As I continued to work on the manuscript, I saw the abstract “committee” of my book embodying something too similar to what the “coach” offered Reed.
And yes, I had felt my soul up for sale. To play football for the coach, I did terrible things. I said terrible things. You gotta stand up straight unless you’re gonna fall. Then you’re going to die. And isn’t that what it was like—you either buy in, or lose everything. You’re either a part of the team, or you’re not. You either sell your soul, or find that, in their eyes, You ain’t ever going to be no human being.
Before “Coney Island Baby” was a song, it was a poem. Lou Reed attended Syracuse University, where he famously worked with Delmore Schwartz. Reed has eight poems published in the fall 1971 issue of The Harvard Advocate, including one titled “The Coach and Glory of Love.” In the poem, he repeats variations of the phrase “I wanted to play football for the coach,” eight times in the opening stanza.1
During the version of “Coney Island Baby” recorded at The Roxy for the 1976 Waiting for The Man (Live) album, Lou Reed goes:
So I was a little too light weight for linebacker
So I had to settle for right end. You know where right end is?
It’s the other side of your asshole.
I had a teammate who, on corner kicks, tried to throw off the other team’s striker by fingering him in the asshole.
I was laughed at for writing poems. I was laughed at for not being mean and cruel, even when I thought I was being mean and cruel.
In college, during a team talk on the bus to Wesleyan, a senior captain said, “Let’s kick the shit out of these fucking art fags.”
Anyone who has felt like they had to play football for the coach will hear this not only as the unoriginal, cliched, homophobic slur that it is, but as a kind of cultural doctrine. And anyone who has participated in such a culture will
start thinking again
About all those things that you’ve done
And who it was and what it was
One doesn’t need to identify as queer to embrace Reed’s queering of masculinity. In “Coney Island Baby,” what Reed offers is not merely a sense of the gendered body free from the assumptions of cultural normativity, but the possibility that love is both a salvational force and an oppositional one. Love is an antidote to “the coach.” Love stands in defiance to “the coach.”
In his 1976 review for Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson writes,“‘Coney Island Baby’ is the album’s masterpiece, an anthem about courage, loss and the high price an outsider pays for his way of living. When Lou Reed talks about ‘want[ing] to play football for the coach’ and ‘giv[ing] the whole thing up for you,’ he is expressing the profound dream of the damned.”2
I’m not the first poet to be drawn to Reed’s “profound dream of the damned.”
During a reading at the Library of Congress on February 14th, 1991, the poet Larry Levis begins “this is Valentine’s day so I’d like to read a poem called ‘Coney Island Baby’ . . . the last line is actually Lou Reed’s who was the most famous graduate of the creative writing program I went to at Syracuse.”3
I swear I’d give the whole thing up for you, the final line of Levis’s “Coney Island Baby” and of Reed’s song, is not in the poem version Reed published in The Harvard Advocate in 1971. For Levis, the “you” is “poetry,” and the admission reflects a life’s devotion to the art. For Reed though, the “you” is his partner Rachel, muse, princess on the hill, who loved you even though she knew you was wrong. In a poem for my wife towards the end of my book, it is not what I would give up for love that matters, but rather what love has offered me, which is simply my entire life.
Almost a decade ago, at the lowest moment in my life, I took the subway to Coney Island with my now-wife and the friend who would one day officiate our wedding, though at the time I did not know this.
We pose at the water’s edge for a photo. We’ve spent all day at an exhibit of Robert Rauschenberg and have ridden the Q train here. It is one of those days, in summer, that seems to exist outside of time. My future wife has a black tank top on, and jeans that fall above her ankles. I am wearing a blue shirt, the color of lint mixed with cream. In another photo I have from that night, the Boardwalk is lit up. We have walked a long way down the beach and are looking back at it. The photo is out of focus and the lights are pulled sideways, as if spilling from themselves. It is the moment before the glory of love.
***
1 Varagur, Krithika, “From the Archives: Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground,” The Harvard Advocate, https://www.theharvardadvocate.com/content/2012-11-13-from-the-archives-lou-reed-the-velvet-u
2 Nelson, Paul “Coney Island Baby,” Rolling Stone, March 25 1976, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/coney-island-baby-89119/
3 Levis, Larry “Larry Levis and Thylias Moss reading their poems,” Library of Congress, February 14, 1991, https://www.loc.gov/item/93843055
