Father had mumbled something about her never being able to stand the sight of a full glass.
Now, I realize, the grown-ups stopped drinking beer when they hung out, about a week before Mother disappeared. Nobody drank after she returned either, even though Mother often prompted them, following her encouragement with the disclaimer “I’m fine,” in which she dragged out the i sound in the word “fine.”
“Here’s the pizza,” squeaked our adolescent waiter in his violet-coloured hat and shirt. He plunked it onto the table before wiping his hands on the seat of his pants.
It had taken two shows to get here. Two rounds of jerky mouths opening and closing out of sync with the voices on the loud speakers, two recitations of the same jokes. The machines went through the same dialogues, same script, and the same awkward motions, as they would twenty-four times today, working away in the dark.
“Dig in boys.” Father smiled at me and Leonard.
“Thanks, Father,” I replied, smiling hollowly as well. I grabbed a piece of pizza. It was cold but good.
Leonard watched me for a minute before grabbing a slice. We sat there chewing, looking at each other. He was getting too old for this; he was too cool for this. Everything about him said that he didn’t want to be there.
“Happy Birthday, Richard,” Auntie Maggie glowed. She always seemed to glow.
“Yeah, here you go buddy.” Uncle Tony leaned across the table holding a present he had pulled from the seat beside him. “This is from Auntie Maggie, me and Leonard.”
I put the box on the table and tore apart the wrapping paper, saying thank-yous before even seeing what it was. I was so grateful they were there; otherwise, it would have been just me and Father and the overhanging accusations of being a loser because nobody showed up at my birthday party. I had one friend close to my age and I was related to him.
“Hey, Rocky.” The spotlights flared up on the stage and the animatronics Bullwinkle ground into action. “Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.”
I looked at the box. It was a picture of a kid standing on something that looked like a plastic Saturn but the rings were so tight it squeezed the planet enough to make it bulge on either side of its equator.
A girlie squawk came from the floppy flying squirrel. “But that trick never works.”
“It’s a Pogo Ball,” Auntie Maggie said excitedly. “You inflate it, stand on the platform, pinch the top part of the ball between your ankles and off you go, hopping.”
I smiled with equal enthusiasm.
Nobody could ever see me use this thing.
“Like a pogo stick but a rubber ball,” Auntie Maggie said. “Leonard loves his.”
Bullwinkle pulled a bear’s head up from his top hat. A static roar played over the sound system. One kid laughed.
The Pogo Ball was neon pink with a fluorescent green ring.
Nobody could ever know I had this.
“I don’t have one,” Leonard said.
“And now for something we hope you’ll really like,” Rocky flopped precariously to one side of the stage.
“Let’s go to the arcade,” Leonard said to me.
“Can we go to the arcade?” I asked.
“Go to the arcade,” Father sighed and started cleaning up around the table, stacking plates and cutlery, crumpling wrapping paper and boxing the remaining pizza from our plates.
As Leonard and I walked past the stage and into the next room, there was a scream and bells started ringing. The room was full of video games, mini basketball games and mini bowling games where you earned tickets for sinking a ball in the right hole. You could redeem your tickets at a booth manned by the adolescent server’s clone. In exchange, there were things like a whistle or a toy car, a small plastic army man with a parachute or a plastic dinosaur in a top hat.
Leonard and I worked our way through the crowds and sidled up to the group of kids around the Rampage video game. Some kid was playing as the Godzilla-inspired character, Lizzie, and had made it to the Tokyo level. The pixellated lizard jerked her way up the side of a building, punched a window and ate a woman.
I glanced around the crowd of kids and wondered quickly if any of them would have come to my birthday party if they knew me. Were they here for someone else’s party? I wondered what the other boy had said or done to get so many friends to show up at his party.
In the meantime, I decided, they were all at my party. That thought brought a smile to my face, a smile that was returned by a girl standing close to me. She looked familiar.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hi,” I replied, stealing a quick glance at Leonard. He was busy watching the screen.
“He’s doing really good,” she said, tossing a quick glance and a raised eyebrow at the boy playing.
“It’s my birthday,” I said.
“Happy birthday.” She smiled. “What’s wrong?”
“Only one person came.” I pointed at Leonard. “And he’s my cousin.”
The girl gave me a sad look and reached out for my arm. We stood awkwardly, her hand on my arm, and watched the boy tear buildings down, swipe helicopters out of the sky and throw a city into chaos. She kept her hand on my forearm while the city collapsed; people were dying. The giant lizard hammered away at a tank, people ran screaming in every direction and her touch calmed me. Her arm resting on my forearm was all I could focus on. I stole the occasional sidelong glance at her calm face, flashing yellow and blue in the arcade-lit fires of Tokyo burning to the ground. I also stole the occasional glance at Leonard, not sure what I would have to endure having wilfully let a girl touch me but, at the same time, something kept me from moving away from her.
There was a collective groan from the group of kids. Lizzie had been shot off the side of a building. The electronic lizard’s expression was a mix of pain and sorrow, as if it wasn’t ready for death, it still had things it wanted to do and death had come too soon. There were still so many people to eat and buildings to smash up. Add to that the pain of falling ten storeys after being shot off of a building—it was unfair.
The crowd started to disperse. Leonard looked my way and gave an almost imperceptible frown, catching the girl’s hand on my arm a second before she said goodbye and wandered off to a clutch of girls at a bowling game. Before Leonard could say anything, Auntie Maggie was on us.
“Let’s get a picture of you guys,” she said and dragged us toward a photo booth.
“I want to play Rampage, though.” For all his newfound toughness, Leonard sounded very close to whining.
“Come on, you’ll look back at this picture in twenty years and laugh,” Auntie Maggie said. “Trust me on this.”
I didn’t have that much time. I would fall one year and four limbs short of Auntie Maggie’s prediction. Not knowing this then, I trusted her.
I went along, my feelings torn between Auntie Maggie and Leonard, wanting to get a picture but wanting to be cool too. The cooler I could be, the more kids would come to my eleventh birthday.
Just as I finished that thought, Leonard and I were stuffed into the photo booth.
I could hear Auntie Maggie dropping coins in a slot. Two dollars for four photos. The booth was cramped. The backdrop was red and white vertically striped fabric.
“There, now you boys smile,” Auntie Maggie told us, reaching up and dropping the booth’s curtain behind us with a wet sound. The flashbulb fired.
It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dim tent interior. I stood there dumbly next to Leonard. I could hear the carnie breathing close behind us, the rusty nail scraping quietly against his teeth as he shifted it slowly in his mouth. There were other people in the tent—some big, adult bodies moving around in the shadows. Their murmurings were hushed and seemed to pause for a moment when we entered, as if we were expected but had arrived an hour early. Outside, the noises of the midway were muted to the point of being distant screams in the darkness.
Somewhere in the dark came the tinny sound of an organ grind
er churning out a variable speed version of “The Entertainer.” The air was thick with a distinctly male smell, the musty smell emanating from the straw-covered ground, cigarette smoke, body odour and a sharp tinge from booze-soaked breath.
As my eyes adjusted, they were drawn to a series of dim cones of light, areas spotlit by weak overhead lamps. The milling shadows of people crowded the perimeter of each area. The crowd moved slowly, in a predatorial circle.
“Feel free to take a look around, boys,” the carnie growled from close behind us. If a voice could leer, his did. “I’ll be around if’n you want to be talkin’ to me about anythin’, but, in the span, take in these marvels of nature.”
“Come on.” Leonard grabbed my hand and led me to one of the spotlit areas.
We wove our way through the bodies to the crowd gathered around the base of one watery pool of yellow light. We worked our way through the cluster of towering people. There was a constant stream of mumbling and the occasional subdued laugh and snicker.
We stopped at a sign that read: The Mighty Mite. The World’s Smallest Man.
Beneath the light, behind a low, handprint-smeared Plexiglas wall, was the Mighty Mite. He was about half as tall as me. He was shirtless. His tiny torso was top-lit by the spotlight, accentuating the frail fingers of ribs wrapped around his chest.
The Might Mite, a primordial dwarf, one of a hundred in the world, was two feet tall and weighed twenty-one pounds. He had a severe overbite, a cone-shaped face ending in the point of his nose and a presence that likely instigated every pixie legend in the world.
He sat at a tiny table playing solitaire, his bird bones manipulating a deck of cards which seemed as big as a book in his stunted fingers. A cigarette smouldered in an ashtray on the table, giving a blue haze to the air in the enclosure. A small black-and-white television set sat at one end of the table, playing a fuzzy soap opera.
Occasionally, the Mighty Mite glanced at the television set, then focused on his card game again.
“Ugly little thing,” someone in the crowd said.
“Like a real person,” came a reply, “only smaller.”
There was some snickering.
The Mighty Mite must have been able to hear the comments but gave no indication. He glanced at the television, reached out with his stubby fingers and took the cigarette from the ashtray. He brought the cigarette to his lips and took a long drag. He coughed a high squeaky noise.
“Weird,” Leonard said breathlessly, sounding amazed.
A creeping, uncomfortable feeling overcame me. It was the sense of voyeurism, the crowd of people gawking. It was the Mighty Mite, seemingly oblivious, doing his job just by being stared at. It was how hard I found it not to stare at him. It was the apparent dignity with which he did his job, the apparent strength with which he ignored all the eyes and the derogatory comments. It was almost as if we, the gathered crowd, didn’t belong here, like we were invisible and watching him go about his life, alone in his home. It was a complex mixture of shame, empathy and wonder. We were the ones who were out of place here, not the little man. The Plexiglas acted to keep us out more than it did to keep him in. It was almost as if we, the crowd, were caged. We were the intruders, the freaks.
I glanced at the towering shadows around me. Eyes glistened in the weak light, intent upon the Mighty Mite. Even as whispers were exchanged, fascinated eyes did not stray from the Mite. This was a human zoo.
“That’s the teeniest freak I have ever seen.”
“Is all of him small?”
“Does he get ID’ed when he buys his smokes?”
The Mighty Mite looked at his wristwatch, stretched and put down his cards. He reached under the table and pulled out a sign to place on the top: Back in 15 minutes.
The Mighty Mite stood, grabbed his cigarettes and wandered out of the circle of light. As he left, someone took a picture. The flash fired, almost audibly, blinding me in the dark.
“Hey, I tell you clowns, no pictures.” It was the carnie.
There was a scuffle in the crowd. The carnie snatched the camera from the shadow, opened the back hatch and pulled the film out.
“What the hell?” the shadow said and shoved the carnie.
“Let’s move.” Leonard pulled me out of the intensifying scuffle centred on the shadowed man and the carnie.
The voices grew loud and angry behind us. Once we were clear of the fray, we wandered, pausing once at a wax figure, the top half a naked woman and the bottom half a big fish.
Leonard read the sign aloud, “Mermaid: this specimen was caught in a fishing net off the coast of Montserrat.” Leonard tilted his head. “She died three hours after being caught. She suffocated to death out of the water.”
“She doesn’t look real,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s real.” Leonard gave me a strained look before taking off toward another group of people crowded around a spotlight.
We worked our way through a forest of legs ornamented with belt buckles topped by cowboy shirts with pearly snap buttons. When we arrived at the front of the crowd, we were confronted with the most confusing mound of flesh I had ever seen: overstuffed, billowing pillows of skin, segmented by deep folds and creases, bruises on the flesh, crusted sores and sprouts of seemingly random, greasy hair. My eyes, wide in wonder, roamed the mound trying to make sense of the expanse of skin. The mound was on a slowly rotating pallet and in half a turn, it was obvious I had been staring at the ass end of the fattest man in the world. The pallet was set on an industrial weigh scale that displayed a red, illuminated, 1,021 lbs.
The fat man had a boyish face, large as a pumpkin, set in one side of his body. He smiled as he spun by slowly. It may have been a grimace, I couldn’t be sure.
As his side slid by, someone reached across the rope barricade and slipped a pen in between some folds. Someone giggled. The fat man squealed with surprise and began to jiggle. His arm emerged and flailed back to extract the pen, but it was too short to work its way around all of the flesh. A few people laughed. A few, with haunted looks in their eyes, broke from the group and wandered off to other corners of the tent.
I felt revulsion at the fat man but also pity for him. It was an instinctual clenching of my stomach at the smell of unwashed flesh, the sight of the sores and bruises, and the innocent smile that spun by.
How did a human come to this? I wondered. To care so little that he wound up a mountain of flesh, crippled and immobilized by his own weight, trapped on an industrial weigh scale by the size of his own body. The strength of the trauma to the psyche to get the fat man here, whatever caused it, would have been immense, and would have hurt worse than anything I had ever experienced. Then to be on display day after day, the jeers and pen pokings would have perpetuated that trauma. This fat man would die early and poorly. I couldn’t escape the idea that I was watching a dead man flail on that pallet, in a freak show, covered in bruises and sores born from obesity, surrounded by prying eyes and poorly checked snickers, people looking in wonder at his death.
Not being able to extract a pen from your own fat folds is not a good place to be.
I glanced at Leonard. He was smiling, his eyes fixed on the quivering, squealing invalid on the pallet.
I pushed under the rope, put one hand on the fat man and leaned into his bulk to extract the pen.
The man stopped squealing.
I stood, instinctively wiping the hand I had touched him with on my pants, the pen in the other hand.
The spotlight blinded me to the audience so I couldn’t see who said, “Stupid kid.”
“Thank you,” a muffled voice came from the fat man. His head was on the other side of the pallet. His voice was high-pitched, faraway and lonely.
The light flashed from bright to dark as I ducked back under the rope into the crowd.
“You touched him,” Leonard winced.
“I had to,” I replied, thinking Leonard was looking for an explanation. “I couldn’t reach otherwise.”
&nb
sp; “What did he feel like?” He asked.
I wiped my hand on my pant-leg again. “Like a big turkey,” I said, “before it’s put in the oven.”
Leonard pursed his lips.
We wandered past a display case that was not unlike Mother’s china cabinet. Instead of shelves packed with trinkets and cups, these housed jars. There was a two-headed fetus. A snake with a scorpion in its mouth swirled in a cloudy yellow fluid.
“Look close,” Leonard said, his nose pushed up against the glass. “The two-headed thing moved.”
“It did not.” I didn’t want to put my face close to it.
“I guess not,” Leonard said and then he stood on his toes and pointed. “Look. You can see where someone stitched the other head on.”
“Really?”
I had questions like…
Where would someone find a spare foetus head?
Who would think to stitch it to the body of another?
“It’s so fake,” Leonard said.
Apparently he didn’t think about the things I did.
“The fat guy was real,” I said.
“Look, over there. Come on.” Leonard was off.
I caught a glimpse of the carnie with the rusty nail in his mouth out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be watching us. Then a few dark figures broke my view. For a moment, I feared I lost Leonard in the shadowy crowd. Then I saw him, waving me forward. The crowd around this spotlight was not as thick as the Mighty Mite or the fat man.
“Look,” Leonard said, “Teen Wolf.” He pointed.
I looked. My stomach seized.
Mother’s voice: “He’s not going to turn into one of those Mexican wolf-men, is he?”
Standing in the light was a boy my age. He was wearing only a pair of white boxer shorts and what looked like a fur suit. Head to toe, he was covered with shag-length hair. His eyes seemed particularly bright, framed by dark hair; they stood out in sharp contrast. The black dots of his irises scanned the boundary of the spotlight. His eyes did not betray feelings of shame or fear; they were very lonely. When he saw Leonard and me among the gawkers, his eyes lit up. He smiled and waved.
Imperfections Page 6