Freak Show

by James St. James

  Then base. Glowing nicely.

  Eyelashes: seven pairs of Mondo Feathery 214s.

  Eyebrows: pencil-thin, with a look of surprise and transformation.

  Pink glitter lipstick, just because.

  THE WIG

  The wig is bog-water green mixed with livid, vivid pink, two feet high at least, curled up here and twirled down there and swirled over there, with many rare and fragrant plastic flowers pinned in. All of it has been sculpted into a sexy sort of bulb that EXPLODES with the biggest tiger lily blossom you’ve ever seen, pushing out from the top. Honestly, it’s almost two feet tall on its own!

  PUT IT ALL TOGETHER: DRESS, MAKEUP, WIG

  And . . .

  Oh, wow!

  Well, it’s not drag. I don’t know what it is. But it’s a statement. With attitude.

  And this is NOT a dress, it’s an ecosystem. And I transcend the whole boy-dressing-as-girl paradigm in this . . .

  I guess if hard-pressed, I would say I’m a Radioactive Swamp Zombie (with tentacles) Who Becomes One with the Glittering Vegetation That Swirls About Her.

  Oh! Hey! This will be my first time outside in drag!

  Go me!

  I looked in the mirror, slightly in awe of the gravity of my appearance. You can’t ignore THIS, by God.

  “BEHOLD THE GLORY OF THE SWAMP! Puny humans—look upon me with wonder and awe! You shall soon know the power of my drag! Bow down before me, for I am TONDALAYO POTATO-HEAD!”

  I left for the bus.

  (And as I walked out I heard the thud of Flossie hitting the floor.)

  XXXI

  ON CAMPUS

  My movements were robot-smooth, my expression otherworldly and serene, frozen in a glowing porcelain mask.

  I couldn’t see a thing. Between the seven pairs of lashes and the tendrils of wig and vine swinging all about, it was a wonder I could maneuver at all.

  But I glided like a parade float, hither and yon. Wherever I went, I simply stopped time. People just froze. Yes, yes, we’ve been through that before. They don’t stay frozen, I know.

  But judging from my responses, I might have struck some fear into their hearts. Maybe they saw depths they didn’t see before. Or maybe they just knew to stay away from the crazy guy.

  “This time he’s gone too far!”

  “That’s just disturbing.”

  And, “Dude’s creeping me out.”

  I floated into biology exactly one minute late, for full effect.

  I opened the door. There was a collective gasp, and two screams.

  As if on wheels, I glided to my seat, but turned and curtseyed to the class before sitting.

  I couldn’t quite see, as my vision was getting worse, but I could hear the buzz my entrance had caused.

  It was hard to hold my eyelashes up, they were so heavy. And I had been up all night, sewing and beading and such.

  (I just closed them for a hot second.)

  I woke up to hear, “So everybody continue reading, and I’ll be right back,” then the slam of a door.

  What? I can’t quite see what’s happening.

  Oh dear God.

  Does that shut door means that I am alone? In biology? Without a teacher? And just when I’m temporarily blind? In my looniest drag ever? Remind me again why I PURPOSELY turned my worst nightmare into reality?

  The murmurs were rising to a roar behind me. Danger pitch. I felt the ugliness, of course, but my lashes prevented me from seeing anything. What was going on? Was I suddenly surrounded by savages? Hadn’t these feebleminded goons ever seen a girl with a green face and tentacles before?

  There was a sudden surge in the energy level. My teeth began vibrating. The hairs on my arm stood up. Outside, the always-present, ever-steady swamp sounds went quiet. Every bug and viper and jackaloupe was leaning forward, tensely, listening and waiting for something bad to happen.

  Then something did.

  I heard Bernie Balch say, “Get him!” and that’s when the walls came tumbling down. That’s when I met my Waterloo. The fall of Billy Bloom came with just two words, hissed quietly and confidently, as if planned all along.

  Suddenly, I was thrust into a great mash of people, pushing, pulling, falling, and dragging everyone down. Somebody in the crowd—was it me?—started screaming, and that set off another avalanche of movement.

  I seemed to be surrounded by a solid wall of whooping warriors intent on inflicting some serious bodily damage. I was in the process of falling while, in their unorganized eagerness, they were both pushing and pulling me, up and down. The unintentional result was a welcome bit of bobbing and weaving on my part. And due to the enormity of my gown, and the various tendrils and vines and floating panels of fabric, they were having a hard time getting at me. So far, they had only succeeded in slapping my bustle, yanking my pretty wig, and ripping great chunks off of my pretty new dress.

  But they organized quickly. Say hello to the grim army of killing machines. With a giant WHUMPH a dozen arms pushed me to the floor, where a dozen boots stomped on my face. STOMPED ON MY FACE!

  They punched and kicked, and kicked and punched, like they had been built specifically for just that job. Their jabs were neat. Efficient. With a breathtaking economy of movement. Consistent impact force. POW! POW! POW! Quick and painful hammerblows. I was bleeding, but from where? And did they just break a rib? And what was that giant crunch? What would crunch instead of crack? Teeth? Knuckles? Spine?

  Funny that I felt so removed, and yet, what was the point?

  I just give up.

  Flossie would probably have to identify the body. Father would never break up a golf game to claim responsibility for a dead homo swamp zombie. “GET THAT THING OUT!” he would bellow to Flossie if it came to that. “JUST PUT IT IN A BOX AND SHIP IT TO HIS MOTHER.”

  Such a shame—funerals are what Southerners do best.

  I thought of my mother. It would be just horrible for her when the package arrived. She’ll assume it’s her monthly shipment of Oklahoma Kobe steaks. SURPRISE! Out falls my battered and bloody green body instead, with its tentacled face all smashed up. She’ll scream and cry, of course. Well, SOMEBODY needs to cry for me.

  Oh, that poor woman, always in a crisis, always at the end of her rope . . . and now her baby was squashed like a bug. And we never got the chance to make up after our big blowup . . .

  As the pummeling continued, I curled up into a little ball and started singing “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”

  Minute bled into minute, and still they kept on, never breaking rhythm. POW. POW. POW. More cracking sounds. Little sobbing grunts, made reflexively as they now targeted my lungs and kidneys.

  I closed my eyes and began drifting toward the light.

  Good-bye to all that. There were no final thoughts, no profound last-minute revelations. The universe did not decode itself to me, no great mysteries were revealed, my life did not suddenly make perfect sense. If anything, I was leaving more confused and knowing less about humanity than when I started out.

  Then, out of nowhere, swinging on a rope, I swear to God, was Flip! Flip had come to save me. Just like in my dreams.

  “Leave him alone!” he screamed.

  And from the Skycam above, we see the shock waves those words caused, rippling out in wider and wider circles, flattening everybody and everything in their path.

  And they did. Strangely enough, they DID leave me alone.

  “Everybody up against the wall!” Flip shouted, and again, everybody backed up against the wall. This was uncharted territory. Nobody had ever seen Flip this angry before. Or this powerful. And while nobody was quite sure what would happen next, they sure as hell didn’t like the turn this had taken.

  Flip came over to me, still lying on the floor, and lifted my head up. He felt my pulse, then wiped the blood from my nose and mouth.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. “You saved my life.”

  Flip Kelly scooped me up in his arms.

  ONE MORE TIME . . .
/>   Flip Kelly scooped me up in his arms.

  I looked up. He looked down. “We’re getting out of here,” he said.

  And the music swelled as he carried me out of the biology room, down the halls of the Eisenhower Academy, past crowds of slack-jawed students, and out the doors, into the world.

  It was a hell of an exit, to be sure, the stuff of legend. I wish I remembered it, but I was unconscious by that point, and fading fast. . . .

  Strange Interlude

  COMA THOUGHTS

  I

  Atfirst I was just blood and guts, tissues and arteries. Not a whole person, just separate body parts that needed attention and time to heal.

  There was no pain, no suffering, no trauma at all. My brain just stopped taking my body’s messages. Yep! Just up and closed shop! Abandoned ship!

  “WRONG NUMBER,” it said.

  “GONE FISHIN’,” it said.

  “SEE YA, WOULDN’T WANT TO BE YA.”

  And kidneys don’t think.

  Bones don’t feel.

  So without a conscious mind to acknowledge their problems, the various body parts were on their own. They simply knew they were damaged and set about repairing themselves. Because that’s what the body does.

  Magnificent thing, the body.

  Separate pieces of LIFE—just blood and meat and skin and bones—incredibly strung together, forming a system, a machine, now working together, now helping one another, no longer alone, anticipating each other’s needs. Too fantastic!

  So I was rebuilding myself. From the bottom up.

  Pretty kick-ass, huh?

  II

  In my head, though, there was only darkness. And silence. And nothing else.

  For how long? Who knows. Turns out, my mind stretches to eternity, in all directions. (Jealous?) And as time has no meaning in the void, of course, I could have been in there a minute or a million years.

  III

  Then one day, a dawning thought. A looming realization.

  One day: PING! “I am.”

  That’s it. That’s all. “I am.”

  Not: “I am Billy,” or “I am in pain,” or “I am Queen of the May-pole.”

  Just a declaration of of life.

  I AM.

  So I was alive, yes, and aware of my existence. But completely without a sense of self or identity. What I imagine it’s like inside a cow’s head.

  MOO.

  In the Billyverse I was both Nothing and Everything all at once—a nifty Zen mashup that is positively prenatal in its narcissism.

  ME ME ME ME.

  Wheeeeeee.

  Free-falling into my frontal lobe.

  Somersaulting into space.

  Swimming in the Billyverse.

  La la la.

  IV

  Then another day, another leap.

  Suddenly, thinking thoughts! Yes! Tiny thoughts, little thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless! Thoughts containing information!

  Puzzle pieces from the waking world!

  Simple. Random. Snippets of the past.

  Without context, without meaning.

  Not quite memories, just bits and pieces of this and that. For example:

  Wilmington is the capital of Delaware!

  Bounty is the quicker picker-upper!

  Discretion is the better part of valor!

  An ostrich egg can make eleven-and-a-half omelets!

  We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl!

  The onion is a lily, botanically speaking!

  These mysterious pieces of ME, these missing links, just suddenly appear in the darkness, TA-DA!—standing, spinning, flashing on their own—“Thank you! We’ll be here all week!”

  V

  QUICKLY, NOW. QUICKLY.

  NEXT UP: RECOGNITION.

  A voice.

  Not just any voice.

  Why, that’s Mother’s voice! Yes, of course! I’d recognize that husky coo, that throaty cigarette-whisper, from the grave.

  “DARLING!” she cries. “IT’S YOUR MUV!”

  And suddenly, there she is.

  PLOP!

  VI

  It’s SO TYPICAL that she would precede all other memories. Typical that SHE would be the first thing I would focus on in my coma-sleep.

  Details trickle in slowly, then pour forth in a steady stream. I couldn’t stop them if I wanted to.

  Here we go. Here’s mother.

  Muv.

  Yes, yes. I call her Muv. She calls me Junebug. No, I don’t know why. That’s just her. She’s a PIP, that’s all, and I love her like nothing else.

  I am five. She smells of Youth Dew—her signature scent. I remember IT before I remember ME. “Bathe in it, darling!” she would proclaim. “Really make a stink of it! Always let them know you’re coming!”

  She needn’t worry. She is nothing if not noticeable.

  Today she is wearing a black leotard, black tights, a black cape, and a black turban with a single, soaring egret feather. It’s all just TOO, TOO DIVINE of course. BEYOND THE BEYOND. She is the most beautiful woman at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. Well, obviously.

  It’s our weekly “gourmet” luncheon date. We are both enjoying a relaxing Tab, oblivious to the stares of the GODDAMN ABORIGINES that have absolutely RUINED the place for the both of us. We’ve just eaten grilled Velveeta cheese sandwiches cut into squares and “frosted” with Hellmann’s Light mayonnaise—“PENSACOLA PETIT FOURS,” she calls them, and absolutely ROARS every time she says it. I do, too—JUST ROAR—although I’m not sure why.

  Suddenly, she grabs my face in her heavily jeweled hands, looms closer, then closer still, choking me with her hot, cheesy, mayonnaise and nicotine breath. “Always remember this, Junie,” she whispers, “DAM-NAN QUOD NON INTELLIGUNT. That’s Latin, dear: THEY CONDEMN WHAT THEY DO NOT UNDERSTAND.”

  She is referring, of course, to the growing crowd of GODDAMNED RUFFIANS that are pointing and staring at us. Of course.

  VII

  So. There you go. There it is.

  It was just ME and HER. Muv and June. Together forever. Circle of two.

  Other people are “Mongols” and “Huns” and “Visigoths.” They are “unruly Hessians” and “bloodthirsty savages.” Connecticut is full of them. It’s true! Don’t let their country club manners fool you.

  “Blackhearted fiends!” she cries, and shakes her fists. ”Out to loot and pillage us all! Never forget it, darling. They’ll plunder your goddamn SOUL if you let them!”

  It was an odd thing to tell a child, especially a child as delicate and impressionable as I was. There were bound to be repercussions, and there were: bedtime hives, cold sweats, creeping paranoia, self-mutilation. The usual.

  VIII

  MORE DETAILS

  We live in the town of Darien, Connecticut—pronounced Dar-i-ENNE! Yes! With ZING! Muv loves that about the city. I think it’s the only reason we moved there. “Oh, you gotta dress things up, babe! Gotta polish that apple!”

  She has a theory that if Florida called itself Flor-i-DOO! it might not be such an armpit, and we’d still be there. Or FLAIR-a-day! Who wouldn’t want to live THERE?

  “Create your own glamour, Baby Boy. Grab it where you find it.”

  “Ever let your fancy roam!” she says with a flourish. And oh, we do.

  Her Monday night meat loaves, shaped like hearts or bunny rabbits and frosted with mashed potatoes dyed pink or blue, were certainly fancy. “Pretend it’s cake instead of meat loaf! Pretend it’s a party for you! This world is hard enough, Junebug. It’s not all canapés and cuddles, I’ll tell you THAT. It’s full of ugliness and fear. Suffering and misery! Get your frosting where you can!”

  Sometimes we wear boas and brooches and enormous hats, and talk in fake British accents. LA DEE DAH we say, and OH, MY DEAH! We do each other’s nails, drink our tea from the forbidden Limoges, and toast to the good life. “Cheers, Big Ears!” she says.

  And it WAS a good life.

  But then. Well. N
othing stays the same. Things change. She changed.

  She started drinking. A LOT. Nasty, complicated drinks with names like Bloody Guatemalans. Cranberry Clots. Peek-a-boo Plops. “Darling, be a lamb and make your muv another Gassy Gin Cramp.” (And I DO make a mean Gin Cramp, if I say so myself.)

  So she was often drunk. Knee-walking drunk. “Muv has a case of the dropsys,” she’d say, and I’d carry her to her room, which was no easy thing. I was only eight years old, and small for my age.

  “Life is hard!” she’d say.

  And I’d smooth her hair and say, “I know.”

  “If it’s not chickens, it’s feathers” she’d say, and I’d agree, CLUCK, CLUCK, CLUCK.

  “I’m just a chrysanthemum in a coal mine,” she’d moan—and I would wipe away the falling tears.

  “I know, Muv!” I’d agree. “Me too,” even though, of course, as usual, I HAD NO IDEA what she was talking about. It all just sounded tragic and glamorous, and I wanted in.