Once again this summer, two Coney Island freak shows will compete side-by-side for ticket sales – going shrunken head to shrunken head, and pitting Fiji Mermaid against Fiji Mermaid.
But unlike in past years, this season the owners of these opposing Outposts of Odd are sharing Surf Avenue with all the grace and civility of Siamese twins in a fistfight.
It’s an outright war of the freak shows, waged mostly through gripes and insults, but also featuring a fair amount of price-gouging, freak-poaching and backdoor rumor-mongering.
“When he moved his two-headed baby right into my building and started charging admission, that was the shot across the bow,” complains one of the combatants, Dick Zigun of Sideshows by the Seashore.
“I’m not afraid of him,” Zigun’s adversary, sideshow old-timer Bobby Reynolds, counters from his Reynolds’ Believe It You’re Nuts museum across 12th Street.
“My human blockhead taught his human blockhead everything he knows.”
Zigun and Reynolds are the Hatfields and McCoys of Coney Island freak shows.
In the summers of ’95 and ’96, the two battled noisily at the corner of Surf Avenue and 12th Street, each side trying to blast its sales pitch loudest onto the sidewalk – to drown out the competition – in a very public war of wills and loudspeakers.
There were the occasional questions of propriety – like when Reynolds began displaying a Killer Albino Burmese Python within a month of Zigun getting his own, or the time Reynolds’ loudspeaker wires were mysteriously snipped in the night.
But back then, the two impresarios only seethed against each other in private – and at least went through the motions of neighborliness.
“One time I traded him a spare bed of nails for a sideshow banner,” Zigun remembers. “Another time, he let me borrow from him a spare part for an electric chair.”
There are none of those niceties now.
After three years touring his collection of oddities outside Coney Island, leaving Zigun with a freak-show monopoly, Reynolds came back to town three weeks ago.
The gloves came off immediately.
First, Reynolds installed a two-headed baby in a jar – at 50 cents a peep – on Zigun’s western flank, in an empty Surf Avenue storefront in the very building where Zigun rents the space for his 10-in-1 sideshow.
Soon after, Reynolds’ two-story red-and-yellow tent rose on Zigun’s eastern flank, amid colorful giant banners touting, among other things, a set of female Siamese twins, a miniature frog band, and a fire-eater.
The trouble is, the Siamese twins are a mannequin, the miniature frogs are toys, and there is no fire-eater – or any other live acts, unlike in Reynolds’ previous museum.
“He has a better banner line than I do, which makes it look like he does the same thing I do – run a sideshow with live performers,” Zigun complains. “Only he charges $1, and I charge $5.”
Nonsense, says Reynolds, who dismisses Zigun as “artsy-craftsy” – because Zigun has a drama master’s degree from Yale and relies on arts grants and his nonprofit status to survive.
Reynolds points out that nowhere among his banners does he advertise live performers. And as for the frogs and twins, “Any idiot can read my sign: Reynolds’ Believe It You’re Nuts.”
Zigun has some satisfaction in having hired away Reynolds’ own nephew, Frank Hartman Brown, 28 – a combination human blockhead, sword-swallower and fire-eater who freely admits, “I went with whoever gave me the most money.”
But this is a war waged on more than one front. For instance, both impresarios claim to have the single, authentic “Fiji Mermaid” to survive an 1860s fire in P.T. Barnum’s Broadway museum. Barnum’s “mermaid” was a two-foot combination fish-monkey displayed to the shock and horror of 19th century freak-show audiences.
Zigun’s mermaid is more authentic looking – although the curator at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Conn., says no Barnum Fiji Mermaids have survived, and the Coney Island versions are both hoaxes.
Zigun is also the heavier hitter in a vicious, behind-doors whispering campaign.
Didn’t Reynolds’ “Giant Killer Rat” get hauled away for ill health by the ASPCA? insinuated one Zigun adherent. (The ASPCA confirms the creature, a 40-pound South American rodent called a capybara, was rescued and put to sleep in 1993.)
And didn’t Reynolds’ security gate come crashing down just the other week, sending a little girl to Coney Island Hospital? (It did, confirms Community Board 13 head Chuck Reichenthal, but she was treated quickly and released.)
Trapped between his competitor’s two-headed baby and bogus frog band, Zigun is doing what he can to fight back.
He has rejuvenated the old loudspeaker wars, with a new pitch for his outside barker, Tyler Fyre, who stands on 12th Street in a seersucker suit promising customers, “Real people live on stage! No pictures, no wax figures, and no papier mache!”
But Reynolds warns he is about to unleash a secret weapon – one that will tip the war of the Coney Island freak shows irrevocably in his favor.
“In the next few weeks, I will premiere an actual space alien,” Reynolds promises. “It’s full-grown, about three-and-a-half feet tall.
“I bought it from the government. I’m not sure of the origin,” he adds. “But it must have been from a crashed spacecraft. How else would the damn thing get here?”