by Daniel Kraus
“Liver pads,” said Little Johnny Grandpa. “Y’know, for y’liver?”
I most certainly did not know.
His sparse white whiskers curled into a grin.
“Well, I’ll let you in on the secret, then! Folks r’worked into a tizzy over th’livers. Half what the Barker sells got the word ‘liver’ on it. ‘The Great Organ’ he calls it. ‘The Magnificent Gland.’ Y’got chills, sir? Evil lockjaw? Wretched biliousness? Wakefulness got y’spirits low? Why, it’s y’liver that’s to blame! Oh, we got pills and phosphates and snuff that’ll do y’service, but nothing so fine as Dr. Whistler’s Own Salvation of the Common Brute Liver Pads. Not convinced? Why, step up to th’platform, sir, and expose, if y’will, y’midsection. Now apply Dr. Whistler’s pad, like so, and feel th’warm bloom of rebounding health! Yes? Y’feel it?”
I felt, at that instant, many things. First was an appreciative shiver at the deception: a man’s body temperature would soften the glue and release the pepper, resulting in a short-lived burn of “health.” Second was a pang of loss: my own body, cold as marble, had relinquished all such sensations. The third realization was the most distressing: after only a week of death, egads, how lonely was I for tones of camaraderie and cabal!
I molded a grin from my facial flesh.
My stiff fingers showed more dexterity while assembling the next pad, and the next. Little Johnny Grandpa hunkered down to work on his own quota. For once, nothing about my situation felt threatening. Hoping to perpetuate the moment, I enlarged my grin. Unfortunately, it peeled open the grappling-hook wound of my neck—not quite the overture of normality I’d hoped to make.
The boy halted his work and blinked at what had to be a hallucination. I let my mouth close and the wound, like a second mouth, closed also. Little Johnny Grandpa frowned with lips pappy from lack of teeth. He then fished from his pocket a red handkerchief and hobbled his small body into position behind me. One of his arms appeared at either end of my peripheral vision. Three years operating amongst base cretins had trained me to expect strangulation. All right, thought I, let us get this over with.
Instead his swollen knuckles and tremorous fingers tied the red cloth into a jaunty triangle that neatly hid my neck-hole. I gawked at it. The color gave my faded suit the kind of snazz I’d always preferred from my fashion. The Excelsior ticked in my pocket; the kerchief was red as blood; my hands labored at a task; were these not evidence of life?
“There y’go, Mr. Stick,” panted he. “Sniff. Cough. Hack!”
That was the first time I heard Little Johnny Grandpa vocalize his choking, but it was far from the last. Though the boy suffered the infirmities of the old, he maintained the levity of the young, and by turning a cough into the word “cough,” he made light of his chronic maladies. Not a day after he taught me the assembly of liver pads, his chest began to rattle with a sickness that sounded like dice in a cup. He undertook that day’s lesson while struggling for breath.
“Morning, Mr. Stick. Hack—hack. The Barker’s asked me—here comes a hack. Cough. Another cough. Wants me t’show you th’making of . . . Spit. HACK! Th’making of worm eradicator. Makes putting together liver pads look like yanking on your pud. But y’can do it, right, Mr. Stick? I know y’can. Snort. Snort!”
The Barker, or so I gathered, was a medicine vender of sorts, and nothing quickened sales like the suggestion that a tapeworm was coiled within one’s intestines. In this endeavor, he had two chief weapons.
The first was the nostrum itself. Billed as The Infallible Indian’s Tape-Worm Disgorging Lozenges, these little nuggets were the apotheosis of the Barker’s genius and that week I constructed hundreds. The secret ingredient was not stomachic, not sassafras or aloe, but rather a gentle tissue paper that was sliced into long, thin strips and rolled into pellet shape before being dipped into a hardening syrup. Once swallowed, the syrup was digested, but the long strips of tissue were not, and showed up in feces as supposed evidence of the parasite’s demise. Repeat purchases were guaranteed.
The second weapon was every bit as effective. It was a large jar propped upon the edge of the main stage, filled with formaldehyde and the most appalling congress of giant tapeworms ever assembled. Little Johnny Grandpa assured me that these abominations were actually purchased from cattle stockyards, which, as it turned out, had carved themselves a lucrative sideline providing gastronomical monstrosities to men like the Barker.
One would be hard-pressed to look at the jar and not feel certain of impending death from within. Unless, of course, you were me. I brooded upon those tapeworms quite a lot, wondering how easy or difficult one might be to swallow. Once a tapeworm was inside of me, you see, I could pretend that it was my organs, squirming and throbbing and going about the daily business of keeping me alive.
III.
DR. WHISTLER’S, LITTLE JOHNNY GRANDPA explained, was what the Barker’s traveling show was called by those relaxed to its lectures, performances, and product, though the traveling medicine show’s full title, if you lingered upon the banner that stretched between the entry poles erected in each town, was Dr. Whistler’s Pageant of Health and Gallery of Suffering.
You understand that this was before health commissions, before laboratory trials, before warning labels. Popularity of a given drug was based upon nothing more than the unsubstantiated claims on the packaging. Medicine lecturers I’d glimpsed in Chicago had sold their serums out of the backs of wagons, which folded down into clever little stages. Dr. Whistler’s, however, required the entirety of a vacant lot and carried with it the atmosphere of a circus.
This is no surprise, given the Barker’s history. It was said that he spent his early career stamping and hollering in front of a one-ring circus sideshow (hence the sobriquet; his real name was unknown). Despite the vaudeville and blackface acts overtaking the business in 1896, the Barker still believed in the gasps-over-giggles sideshow approach.
On a good day our bally would draw several hundred simps so starved for entertainment that they’d purchase product out of sheer gratefulness. Dr. Whistler’s core company hovered around twenty, each of them pulling double or triple duty. It was not at all uncommon during periods of heavy merchandry to see a worker pitchforking horse manure throw aside his tool and leap to the stage to extol the virtues of Benjamin Franklin’s Cocaine Tooth-Drops or Dr. Basil’s Genuine Preparation of Highly Concentrated Fluid Extracts of Borneo.
Dr. Whistler’s peddled roughly fifty different panaceas at any given time, most of which were mixed on-site in a bathtub. If business was brisk, we remained in town for up to a week. There was no hurry to leave; travel was hard, weather was unpredictable, and mud mired us. After we pulled up stakes, the company formed a convoy of five bulging, top-heavy, horse-drawn wagons. This was accomplished with a maximum of irritability, for the Barker was never satisfied with the take and his upset quickly filtered down to the lowliest soul. (That would be me.)
We packed four or five to a wagon and followed the harvest, playing central states in summer before heading to cotton towns with the onset of autumn. During travel, which was, shall we say, bumpy, I lay curled in fetal position within my straw; there was no sense in suffering another injury that would never heal. In a day if we were lucky—three days if we were not—we reached the town of our next destination. “Ideally not as small as a fly on a pile of dung,” the Barker once said, “but not as large as the dung, either.”
I was too weak to assist in the setting up of stages and booths. During those first weeks my proudest accomplishments were twofold: drawing myself to a sitting position and, from my cage, tearing a hole in my tent so that I could observe the company’s activities.
Shows began at eleven in the morning, an optimal time for bringing out customers who did not want to miss out on special bargains (hah!) on limited stock (hah, hah!) and who would then be caught hungry around lunchtime and purchase our overpriced (and undercooked) food.
Every element of the show was this shrewdly designed. As townsfolk arrived, they were greeted with the sounds of four musicians tuning their instruments. Given our ensemble’s middling faculty with mandolin, lyre, and hurdy-gurdy, their tuning session was preposterously belabored, which was precisely the point. Their atonal blurts and nerve-jangling shrieks served to put customers on edge while they absorbed the horrifying advertisements painted on sackcloth and draped at regular intervals:
O, Why Shall Ye Die? When The Never-Failing Remedy For That Deadly Scourge Of Infancy And Childhood, THE CROUP, Is At Hand?
YOU! Do Not Die The Most SHAMEFUL Way: The Sure-Killing Disease Of CONSTIPATION.
Look Upon This Picture! And Imagine Your Bodily Self Rid, Like This Girl, Of Dropsy And Scrofula And Gout. See How She Is Now?
The first thing the Barker did at any show was to isolate a boy in the crowd, beckon him close, and bid him to fetch a pitcher of water before the lecture began. For this paltry errand, the Barker gave the lucky lad the staggering sum of two dollars. Sometimes it was the last two dollars the Barker had, but the offhand way in which he bestowed it produced an expectant buzz among the commoners. What a success this man’s tonics must be to earn such disposable wealth! The people were snared; the Barker straightened his suit and noticed them as if by accident. Softly, then, he began.
“Welcome, welcome all. I am Dr. Whistler, A.M., M.D., former lecturer on nervous diseases and neurasthenia at the University of the City of New York, fellow of the Boston Academy of Medicine, author of Every Man Is a Physician, author of A History of Groin Injuries, Medicinal Therapist to the Massachusetts State Women’s Hospital, and your most humble of servants. I arrive here with an esteemed assemblage of professionals eager to diagnose and prescribe.
“In the area to my right you see the Boardwalk of Chance, at which you may exercise the spirit with rousing tests of skill; to my left, the Gallery of Suffering, in which you will meet magnificent examples of those at the mercy of inexorable conditions, each of whom combats his or her affliction in a panoply of inspiring ways. It is our great pleasure to be here in Biddy Creek—” (or Sparrowville or Two-Bit Hill or Turd Town or what-have-you) “—and our great pleasure to cure every ailment that harasses you. Look this way—this way!—now!—for a medicine that you go without at great, great personal risk.”
Thus began the choreographed bedlam. The old and infirm were helped to the stage to quiver before their neighbors. Liver pads were demonstrated. The inconvenience of ingesting tapeworm lozenges was weighed against the inconvenience of tapeworms. Fizzing healant miraculously closed a bloody wound that in reality was a glob of red paint. Twice a day they trotted out a harrowing display called the Museum of Venereal Hardship, during which a pitchman sold an ointment that I’d buy too, if still alive: Mumford’s Cure-All for Youthful Mistakes. Bottles, bags, vials, packets, jars—they streamed from stage to crowd as if they were bobbing along a rushing river.
There was but a single booth that offered no jumping and shouting. There, a well-dressed attendant used only a placid smile to take money from those at death’s door. The oldest and sickest of townspeople, those past believing in cures, lined up to exchange their last few coins for cheap rosaries, poorly printed pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, flimsy wooden crosses slopped with gold paint. They clutched these talismans with palsied fingers and prayed for a bigger miracle than the easing of whooping cough or the shriveling of piles. These are the faces that haunt me to this day, so desperate were they to stave off the same Death that had already claimed Mr. Stick.
Dusk seemed to convince folk, their pockets sagging with product, to pay out just a little more to enter the Gallery of Suffering. The lectures held within were but freak shows lent veneers of respectability by vague medical overtones. Little Johnny Grandpa was the opening act, and his routine revolved around the comic disparity of a withered old man promulgating the attitudes of the young. His “spontaneous” conversations were no doubt adorable but also scripted to the final word. Pills to ward off premature aging were sold afterward.
The other performers I shall mention in brief. Vera Diana was a lissome Romanian who dressed in a snug garment on which a diagram of the inner body had been painted. She sold salves for the betterment of joint health by twisting her body into an assortment of impossible contortions. The Soothing Foursome came next, a quartet of Negro brothers who helped sell throat and chest solutions with effervescent, four-part madrigals of minor-key melancholy. (Incidentally, they were well-muscled and adorned only in loincloths.)
The closing spot went to Pullman Larry, a loathsome devil who by day acted as our on-site dentist and by night put on a show of bullet-firing wizardry to help sell elixirs purporting to quell anxieties, spasms, and nervous afflictions. Little Johnny Granda shuddered when this man mussed the boy’s wisps of hair. Mr. Hobby, the show’s stalwart accountant, pushed his bespectacled nose into his ledger to deflect any dialogue. Professor Bach, the wild-haired cook/chemist who mixed our elixirs in his crusty cauldron, feigned chemical burn if the man wandered too close. Even the Barker ground his jaw when cornered for conversation.
Pullman Larry, they said, was a former Texas millionaire and world traveler who abandoned a life of luxury to perfect his skill at sharpshooting and master the art of dentistry. (Odd bedfellows, these enterprises.) Country folk traumatized at the hands of the local barber-dentist would try almost anything, and Pullman did brisk business. When the flow of patients abated, he drummed up more by pacing the grounds clad in Western regalia: a cowboy hat festooned with shark’s teeth, a yellow-and-pink-dyed frilled leather coat, and gold-mounted .44 cufflinks.
For sure he cut a dashing figure with a long handlebar mustache serving as stage curtain to thirty-two impossibly white teeth. Lashed to his belt were two guns, which he liked to draw in tandem, spinning them this way and that before popping open the handles to reveal two sets of gold forceps. Presuming that he was as handy with teeth as he was guns, sufferers followed him to take their place in his adjustable chair. Musicians were always present and struck up a bombastic march as Pullman cranked open a patient’s jaws.
The music was to cover the screams. For all his brilliance with a sidearm, Pullman Larry never mastered the dental arts, and this failure, according to Johnny, turned the ex-millionaire into a self-loathing Grendel who instead of admitting defeat chose to mask it with sleight of hand.
After swabbing a patient’s mouth with his patented Gød of Pain, billed as the world’s greatest numbing agent, Pullman took the patient’s head in a grip that secretly constricted the vocal cords. The offending tooth was plucked quickly if bloodily and then an oversized wad of cotton was jammed in its place. It was only at this point that Pullman asked the patient how he felt. From behind the cotton came dazed, indistinct mumbles, which Pullman generously translated to onlookers as breathless praise.
So you see why I regarded the dark folds of the Gallery tent as a dirgeful last stop for mankind’s most forlorn of specimens. Nightly I watched how the formation of the six o’clock queue sapped all energy from Little Johnny Grandpa. With resignation he would gather his cane and begin hobbling away so as not to be late for his performance, often forcing a grin and a parting quip: “Y’wrappin’ those worm pills like y’stranglin’ someone, Mr. Stick.”
It was true. I was. As occupied as I was with my own horrific condition, I knew that there were some dens a boy should not be forced to enter, some lions he should not be forced to face. Particularly a child as bighearted as this one, whose doleful smile, I soon found, came not for his own sorry fate inside the Gallery of Suffering, but for mine.
There was a slot between the Soothing Foursome and Pullman Larry that had my name on it.
It was several months after my abominable act began that Little Johnny Grandpa crept into my tent and snuggled up alongside my cage. It was late and I was in the withdrawn state that typically followed one of my perfo
rmances. The boy gripped the bars with sclerotic fingers while tears rode the canals of his aged skin. Under risk of being caught out past his curfew by the Barker, the boy whispered with haste.
“Beg y’pardon, Mr. Stick, but I have me a question. Are y’really dead like some of them say? Are ya? And if y’are, does that mean you’re an angel? Would y’tell me if y’were? Because I figure I’m a person in need of one, Mr. Stick. Y’hear what I’m saying? Can’t y’find the energy to speak? Can’t y’show all them bastards what y’really are?”
He made a valiant effort to muffle the inevitable hack!, cough!, and spit! that followed. Yet I refused to respond. We were colleagues, yes, and as colleagues we exchanged periodic commiserations. Anything beyond that could not be permitted; Wilma Sue’s disappearance had taught me the pitfalls of emotional involvement. I turned away so that the lad could feel the brunt of my disregard. I was a sack of rotting beef, could he not tell? The cheap tears and bucolic fantasies of a sick child would not distract me from the misery I so deserved!
After a good long stretch of this silence, Little Johnny Grandpa swallowed his sniffles, brought himself to leg and cane, and hobbled from the tent. To hell with him, thought I. I did not require a boy’s weepy reminders of the heartlessness that made me a hateful being. Johnny had no idea that my teenage life had been spent doling out pain, lots of it, again and again and again.
Why the deuce should my death be any different?
IV.