The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  Because the place was going down the tubes. Because it had begun to stink. Because there had been a reduction of reactivity to stimulus lately, for it seemed even in the new world with its distant limits to freedoms, you could only go so far before nothing worthwhile and appealing was left. The people had become unimpressed, like devilish abusers who were filled with ennui, they had molested entertainment, consumed it and driven up their tolerance for being entertained, they wanted bigger, they wanted better, more muck, more magic, and they were not getting it. Cy could see it in the glassy, unblinking eyes of onlookers when Madame Electra took to her mains-fed chair and hit the button, and he knew just what they were thinking.

  – So the broad likes to sizzle, so what else is new?

  And when Swiss Cheese Man threaded metal hooks through holes in his body and was hoisted up on cables into the roof of the tent where he performed, the applause was staccato, bored. There was a disinclination to ride the chutes more than once, children used to run back for another go, and another, and another, now they whined to their parents for candy instead. Things changed accordingly and rapidly. If a ride didn’t appeal and make money it was dismantled. It was out with the old, in with the new, and nobody wanted to put a hand to a brow and squint down the road to the future to see where the artificial replacement would end, at what point there would be nothing left to consume. It seemed that every day when Cy came to work there was something being packed away in crates and something else being unloaded and bolted together. The Island’s thrill was diminishing year after year. Movies were now in vogue and cheap and a step further out into an abstract world where fantasy was less touchable, less refutable, wires were less visible when people flew.

  As a reward for their dissatisfaction, the public had been given new and more shocking shows, spineless children in wicker baskets, human beings born as if through a washingmangler, things Cyril Parks, with his moderate sensibilities, had trouble reconciling. But the worst had already been seen and there was not the strange anthropology of Nature’s Mistakes any more, which had once educated and delighted New York’s citizens, it was simply perpetual titillation, sickness for its own sake, the search for a high. Dreamland itself had burned years earlier and the original dreams of the place were still being eaten by the flames. Gone was the noble entertainment model. The crowds had become hooked on the salacious, that feeling in the stomach, that rush. The once-great inventors and builders of the Island had died or were bankrupt, now the place was reduced to the mere business of fake-freakery and fast metal, the give-them-what-they-want theory. And the crowds knew it. And the workers knew it, and they knew the crest of the wave could not last. It was why everyone talked quickly and at cross-purposes to each other about work, not answering questions about new routines or costumes. It was why the dwarfs in Midget Land grew suddenly concerned with their bank accounts and their retirement plans.

  Coney now had all the desperation of a mistress high on some cheap substance, eager to please her lover, terrified and motivated by the knowledge that he was becoming less interested in her charms and she could no longer instinctively guess his fetish or cavort to his wishes. So there was a sense that, although things continued at an alarmingly intense level of savage entertainment and consumer demand, the full-steam-ahead status quo could not go on. If Coney was the city’s whore, the city’s narcotic escape, the desperation of her sexual effort was climaxing in some unimaginable and deviant and tragic way.

  And so Lulu’s death became more of a thrill than her life. And it disappointed. The circus management charged ten cents entry to see her demise. She was led into the ring she had been led into so many times before and though it was not the man she was used to having lead her, she still went. She was about to kneel and begin her act when she felt unfamiliar copper coils placed around her two front legs but she was a trusting animal and she did not protest. She lifted her trunk and showed her crinkled lips to the audience, expecting a cheer. Cy looked around. People were chewing on roast nuts they had bought from a vendor, picking sticky pieces out of their back teeth with their fingernails. After a few seconds of massive voltage Lulu’s hide began to smoulder and her eyes rolled back. After years of service, one wrong back-step over a passing pedestrian and she was no better than glue, or four hollow umbrella stands, no better than the profit she represented. She made no sound, not even the bleat of a smaller animal, her mouth was paralysed and unable to vocalize what she felt. But Cyril Parks knew what she felt, or at least he knew in part what she felt. That rigid, disempowering energy that makes every fibre in the thing it touches a slave to its command, that white-hot possession. He knew from Mrs Preston’s electro-therapy head-gear. Except that Lulu had no friend to knock off the switch when she had taken her fill of electricity, the courtesy that Jonty and Morris had once paid him. Her quivers seemed not to match her size, and to Cy that marked the tragedy of the event, the pathos of it – that muted quality, which ultimately failed to please the audience, for their gladiatorial thumbs remained down. Her death throes were just subtle ripples in her great grey body, small ruffles on the vast surface of skin and along her ears. Her trunk straightened a fraction, her softer parts began to blacken. She must have died before the power was knocked off, for she did not stagger and sway before slumping to the side when it was finished. Her life popped. She dropped. She went out immediately like another of Coney’s bulbs.

  There were a few ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, a cough or two at the unpleasant odour produced by the execution. Then a grumble swelled through the big top, as multiple unkind comments about the show were made.

  – I expected her to explode! Brought a hat in case of a mess. You ever see a squirrel catch a stray current? Those things ‘splode like firecrackers!

  – I rode her when I was a child, you know. If I’da known she was a killer elephant I never woulda let my Pappy lift me up on her. When I think how close I musta come to … well, it don’t bear thinkin’ about.

  – Phew-ee! Smells kinda like liver-mush frying.

  Cyril Parks put his head in his hands and rubbed h eyes. Then he softly addressed himself and the grizzling crowds.

  – Lancashire or Yorkshire, sir? Meat or fat?

  Perhaps only the final show, the death of the Island itself, would give the public a fix large enough to sate their habit, so that the dome of whitish light consuming the horizon on the edge of Brooklyn one night or week or month or decade in the future would once again and for one last time have meaning to it, validity. And until then the desperate carnival would continue its spluttering, groaning wind down. And Cy would just have to choose his moment to bow out.

  The booth on Oceanic Walk was tiny, and looked more like a cupboard for fishing equipment or brooms than a place of business. It had something reminiscent of that section of the Pedder Street shop behind the curtain that separated browsing customers from the union of artist and canvas, a private enclosed realm. It was located at the scaffolding base of the bobsled ride so the wooden walls rattled and shook when the carriage whooshed past and occasionally flash fell down and had to be re-mounted. Cy usually arrived in the mid-morning and unboarded the booth, stacking sections of wood against the outer wall. He had overlaid as many pictures on the inside as possible and there was room for only himself and one other person to sit or lie down. There was a power outlet, a bright overhead light, and a drawer for extra equipment. And that was all. But he needed no more. On busier days he would try to have his customers line up along the alley, past the hotdog vendor and the shooting range, so that they were kept busy with frankfurters and targets while they waited, past the dental practice with the huge, floating, long-rooted molar on its sign and down to the cigar shop at the end of the Walk. But the crowd would inevitably curl round the booth’s

  doorway, breaking up its queue to watch the proceedings and he’d have to instruct them not to push in.

  – Back up there. Watch out sir, if you spoil this gentleman’s work he’ll no doubt want to spoil your face.
Back up now, ladies and gents. Mind the door. I must have some room.

  And again an orderly line would form, and again it would disassemble. Some of the other parlours and booths had hired a bouncer to keep the crowds organized. It made only a temporary difference. Customers were curious to watch the work being done, they wanted to see the proceedings as they got to see every other marvel in the fair. So they came and they pushed and they looked around the heads of others and tried to fit into the booth itself. If someone had rolled back the roof of the booth on a turn-twist key they would have seen them all jammed together, like sardines in a tin.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, every budding tattoo artist worth his salt on the upper East Coast gravitated to the Island or to the Bowery to get apprenticed or to get ideas or to gain notoriety. At Coney tattooing was the fine art of the place. Like a portrait painter recording noble faces and mansions for posterity’s drawing room, the tattooer was a cheap, modern-day equivalent. Arturas had explained it thus, on the wall outside the Gravesend warehouse.

  – We are the poor man’s illustrator. We bring art to the working-man and he has a picture gallery of his own, like the mansion house or castle is his body. It’s beautiful, yes? We do good.

  Cy would rent his summer booth for several years and through the winters, when Coney quietened down and became foggy and forlorn and empty, he’d work from the back room of a barbershop in his neighbourhood owned by Den Jones, an old black man transplanted from the America South. Den Jones would have him when trade was slower and the rides were unplugged and the parks shut, when only the maddest of the mad and the indestructible members of the Polar Bear Club took to the sea, but hair still grew in Brooklyn and people still bought tattoos. The off-season work was pleasant, a tidy arrangement. A kid named Joe ran a shoe-shine pedestal outside the store, so they could charge two-dollars all round for a cut, a shine, and a tattoo. The smell of citrus pomade and foam and wet gamey hair was comforting and Jonesy always had the radio tuned to a station with good old-fashioned tunes, or sometimes the Yiddish station if the waiting room was full of old Jewish men. Things slowed down. Customers sat around and chatted about the ponies and their dreadful families and second-storey guys flummoxing the authorities. The frenzied pace of the summer froze like ice on the sidewalks. In the barbershop there was no need for the incessant patter and haggling and tense brokerage for the benefit of the customer, like with Coney’s masses. In terms of professional barkery the year was peaks and troughs, feast and famine. In any case Cy was used to turning it on and off, and used to seasonal work, he had grown up with that structure to his life, and to him it was as natural a change as the weather. Come October he transferred his pictures to the walls of the backroom in the barber shop. Asiatic eyes, hourglass girls, dragons erupting from nowhere, the new pieces with all that New York style and colour – there was a now a trend for heavy black bordering that gave new designs, variations of the standard, a sharp, comic-book, cartoon feel. Cy would wander through into the shaving parlour when he was not busy and listen to the stories told by Den Jones, good-humouredly resisting the man when he tried to coax him into the chair to trim his unkempt locks up off his collar. He got the sense that old Jonesy liked him just for the ambition of wanting to take away his long hair.

  – Look at that crazy mess on your head, no wonder no lady ever steps up to greet you. You look like some damn nineteenth-century throwback, do you know that? Well, it about gives me the ju-jus, truth be told.

  Occasionally the police would come round and make their presence known. Cy had not the strength of numbers to defend what was seen as slightly wrong and slightly freakish here as he had at the Island, which was left to its own devices, or maybe the barbershop set-up was still too controversial an enterprise, mixed raced and cross religioned, it was never made clear. The cops did not seem to want anything other than to stride around the place examining things. Once they removed his equipment and did not bring it back, saying something about a sanitation check, blood diseases and infection control. Rumours had been flying around New York since Cy’s arrival on the scene about a total ban on the trade that was coming, though nothing had been publicly announced. It did not matter, in New York what was outlawed was often still as available as what was legal, he had quickly found. He apologized to Jonesy for the inconvenience, offered to leave, but Den just laughed and shook his head and told him to cut his hair. Cy got hold of new parts, a drive shaft with a trapdoor mechanism, which made cleaning easier, there was a network in the city which provided most everything a person could want for, and he continued decorating bodies.

  So the cops came back, and they fiddled and they stared. The younger ones seemed to fixate on the equipment Cy kept in the back room, staring at the vials of ink and the needle head as if intrigued that some people would allow others to stick them in a way that was not medical, as if there was a perverse sexual aspect to it and he was not right in the head. One or two would sneak back later and have work done, usually flags, military symbols and motifs, with names fixed accordingly to them. There was never anything theoretical like justice, nor the essence of an idea. But they seemed calm under the grating needle, as if enjoying the thirty-minute trip into the underworld and the brief freedom from authority, even as its trappings were printed on their arms. The older police never came back. They were tired overweight types, with swollen ankles and tarry coughs. They did not need to bunt confederacy or discipline or any other system of control. They had it under their skins already.

  It was at the barbershop that Cy met Henry Beausang, another Southerner. Henry was a talker and something of a nuisance to Den Jones, frequently unable to pay for haircuts, and taking up the revolving chairs for an excessive amount of time while he slept. By some fluke of charm or chancery he managed to wheedle his way into Den’s affections and was able to fast-talk him into a line of credit no other customer was permitted. It could have been that they were born in the same state, Georgia, not fifteen miles from one another, and they could reminisce about local dishes and gossip about old scandals. Or it could have been that here, in New York, a friendship was possible that might still otherwise, south of the Mason-Dixon line, have been disallowed. They bickered and they squabbled but ultimately they got on. Henry worked nights at the psychiatric hospital on the Avenue as an orderly. He was small and handsome and quick about the eyes. He was also a merciless, dedicated, unrepentant drunk.

  Henry’s mild curiosity about the tattoo artist in the back room soon got the better of him and one day he slipped through the door, which was off-limits to anyone not undergoing work, and he went unnoticed for fully five minutes while Cy concentrated on the handle of a sword. The customer noticed him first.

  – Your apprentice, I presume? He’s a shabby fella, huh? Needs a trip to the steam room.

  The hum of the machinery stopped.

  – Excuse me? What apprentice?

  Cy turned to look behind him. At the back of the room was a stretched bow of a man, leaning too far to one side as if he had run hard and had a keen pain in his ribs. He had a vaunting smile and hooded eyes.

  – Why, there’s nothing to it. A chile could paint as very well.

  – Excuse me?

  Cy had been squatting across a chair and now he stood, gained some height, not in a truly threatening manner, but the intruder flexed upwards himself like a startled cat or as if in mock response. Usually nobody slipped in past Jonesy but he must have been using the restroom or had gone out on a quick errand. Cy put down the equipment he was holding, carefully. The stranger stepped untidily towards him, waving a hand in front of him like a cop directing traffic.

  – Whoa there. I don’t wanna hafta kill you. Jus’ came in to see, to see. Tha’s all.

  The smile doubled in size. There were scars on the man’s face, like those of a boxer, fat paunches of tissue and thin-cut lunulated marks along the bone. Cy realized the man was drunk and jumpy – a strange combination, usually there was a slurred, diffuse aggre
ssion to the anger of drunks, not focus, so perhaps another narcotic was acting as an energetic bedfellow with the booze – and he was quite possibly very dangerous. There was something about American confrontation Cy did not yet know how to navigate, not in the way that he could comprehend the butch inebriated combat, the smut, and the easily classified sober quarrels of his compatriots. It often had qualities of recklessness, wildness and inexplicability that made him nervous and uncertain of his ability to handle the protagonist. This man had an imagined capacity to fight that went well beyond the borders of his physical form, a vainglory, that much was obvious. Something in the foreground of his eyes revealed that a message had been sent down from his brain informing him that he was completely invincible, and therefore fearlessness was the natural order of things. He kept touching his breast pocket as if tapping a weapon stashed within. Cy suddenly got the urge to finish the sword, he wanted to finish it if he was going to fight or perish, he didn’t want to leave an unfinished piece of work. He sat slowly and took up his needle.

  – Do you want work done?

  – Naw. Not me, sir. Not on mamma bird’s baby. Haha, you’re an Englishman.