The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  Walmart is an American carnie mecca. It’s cheap, familiar, and the only thing open after the fair closes late at night when we have the opportunity to restock food. Tommy tells us to meet back at the van in an hour, setting us free inside the bright halogen city. “I recommend that everyone take advantage of the, uh, facilities,” Tommy says as we’re walking inside, glancing my way. “As you know by now, the fairgrounds don’t always have the cleanest bathrooms,” he says.

  “Or bathrooms at all,” Sunshine pipes in.

  “Right,” Tommy says. “And here you’ve got air-conditioning while you shit and unlimited toilet paper. It’s a shitter’s dream.”

  Our nine days on the road haven’t included any climate-controlled, toilet-papered, locking bathroom stalls, nor has there been any time to be alone, so even a few minutes by myself in a cool stall is exciting. As are the thousands of possible items to buy stacked in neat rows.

  After the bathroom, I wander. When I was packing for the sideshow, I didn’t know what to bring. I still don’t totally know what I need from this shopping trip to see me through until the next, not really, though one thing comes right to mind. I’ve been sleeping on a plastic-wrapped mattress with a leftover sheet from last season, my sweat gathering and pooling around me like I’m a package of hot dogs left out in the sun. Separating sets of bunks in the semi’s back end are wooden boards that create the suggestion of tiny double rooms, though there are no doors. My personal space for the season is the two-foot-by-six-foot bed where I sleep—which also acts as my bunkmate’s step stool for getting onto her bunk—and the small plastic drawers beside it. At least I can try to make my bed my own.

  I head over to bedding and am not surprised to see a few others from the crew.

  “Why are these so expensive?” Spif asks, walking slowly down the aisle as he eyes the price tags beneath each plastic bundle of sheets. Fifteen, twenty, thirty bucks. “It’s just a piece of cloth,” he says, not picking up any package. “Fucking capitalism. This is some bullshit.”

  “Over here,” Pipscy calls, her face free of the bandana she had veiling it all day to keep the sun off. She’s at the end of the aisle, fingering stacks of brightly colored sheets that are priced well below the others. We walk over. The sheets are stiff, the kind of material that will stand up of its own accord. They feel more like the papery sheet draped over your lap at the gynecologist, but they are less than twenty dollars.

  “Still expensive,” Pipscy says.

  “I gotta go take a draw,” Spif says.

  “Me, too,” Pipscy says.

  “Already got one,” Sunshine says, walking up behind us.

  “You need one?” Spif asks me as he starts to walk away. “Or you got money?

  I start to answer that I need one, that I don’t have money, that I’ve been in grad school for years and living on nearly nothing, but I stop. The truth is, I have a little bit of money in my bank account. A very little bit, but it’s there, enough to buy sheets and some groceries at least. This, it seems, is not the case with the other folks on my crew. This job certainly doesn’t pay much. And it’s seasonal. As a greenhorn, I make $275 a week, minus taxes, though the others who’ve been out longer likely don’t make much more than that. Still.

  “I’m good,” I say. I could probably get the jersey sheets, six dollars more, softer, more absorbent, but I don’t. I’m embarrassed to have money for jersey sheets. I pick up the cheapest, scratchiest, most miserable sheets I can find, because that’s the team I want to be on.

  I’m instructed to get myself food for the next few days—up to a week, Tommy says—plus whatever else I think I need to survive in the bunkhouse. I buy a pillow, the cheapest one I can find. I buy tiny cotton shorts for sleeping, as the bunkhouse is absurdly hot inside the metal truck’s container; a small clip-on reading light for my bed; and food: peanut butter, bananas, apples, pretzels, tuna, granola, hummus, and water.

  In the semi’s hallway, we have one tiny fridge, college-dorm-room-size, for all of us to share. But things here are not like things in a college dorm room. Not because this world isn’t full of dreams for the future or folks who like to get rowdy and fucked-up on a Friday night, but because here is “like” nowhere. This is its own universe, enclosed by chain-link fences and kept just outside cities off long dirt roads—close enough to visit but far enough to forget. I’d always assumed the fairgrounds were outside town for reasons of space, but I’m also realizing that there might be suggestions of quarantine.

  * * *

  Back from our store run, I’m walking the darkened dirt road to the bathrooms when suddenly, from nowhere, another body is walking directly beside me, as if it always had been.

  “I seen you,” the body says. “At Walmart.”

  Crevices shine from the curtained windows of trailers parked along the road. The sliver of moon does not cast much light but beneath the picnic tables causes shadows to appear as decomposing bones in a shallow grave.

  “Oh. Yeah. We just did a food run,” I say. He comes closer, and his face enters a slant of light. His cigarette smoke snakes up past a sweat-stained baseball cap. Smooth, tight skin across his cheeks makes him look like someone is holding his head closed, too tight, from behind. He pulls the cigarette out to exhale, and as he does, he smiles and worms his tongue out the side of his mouth. As we round a corner, two small lights above the bathrooms illuminate his whole face, sweaty and sunburned. I’d been warned about carnies a few times already. This one doesn’t seem especially harmful, and I have a sense that he, or any carnie, really, might be a piece in some puzzle I need to solve here.

  “How many seasons you been out?” he asks, and I want to lie to sound like a pro, but don’t.

  “This is my first,” I say. “First fair.”

  “Holy shit, a greenhorn. You won’t ever be the same after this,” he says. He has a thick southern drawl, so I ask him where he’s from. If we are friendly, maybe he’ll tell me more. Maybe he won’t do any of those vague, bad things I’ve been warned about.

  “I’m from Atlantic City, New Jersey,” he says. “But I put on this accent in order to catch these northern girls at the fair. They love the accent.” He laughs. “You know who is the most beautiful girl?” he says. “That one you were with at Walmart. Red hair. Black pants. Ass like there’s no tomorrow.” He means Pipscy. She is, indeed, beautiful, and has a Jessica Rabbit–meets–animé punk look she lives inside wholly and with confidence. She wears layers of long sleeves and jackets and wool hats in the daylight, tank tops at night. She’s desperate to keep her skin white as a geisha so she will be cast as Snow White in the dead princess version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show when she gets home.

  “I know how to spot a true lady,” he says. “My IQ is five points less than Einstein.” We’re right beside the bathrooms, and part of me is relieved to be talking to a real live carnie, a man on the inside, a roustabout, and to find that he’s no different from other strange men I’ve encountered, but another part of me is exhausted, desperate to take the three further steps that will put me in the bathroom next to running water, to wash the layers of dirt off my face and walk back down the darkened road and climb into the truck and go to sleep and try this all again tomorrow. Do better, be stronger.

  “Well, I better get going,” I say.

  “Wait,” he says, stepping closer to my face, licking the edges of his mouth with his pointy tongue. “I’m gonna tell you something.” His hand grasps my forearm. “Do you know the secret to making hair grow longer?” he asks, taking off his cap and running his fingers through the short mess of brown hair beneath. I shake my head no. “Take calcium pills. Calcium is one of the key ingredients in hair,” he says, coming closer until his mouth is pressed up close to my face. “Every chick wants longer hair,” he whispers. He fingers the tips of my hair. I can feel the thump of blood in my neck, and the hairs rise on my arms.

  “Well, I’ll be seeing you, then,” he says, and turns to walk away. I smile, unsure whether
I’ve made my first carnie friend or invited trouble. Wondering whether there’s a difference. “I’m quite sure I’ll be seeing you,” he says, his back to me, and he begins to whistle, the notes all wet in his mouth. I’m standing still as the rain begins again, and somewhere down the road, there are children warm and asleep in their beds who will come to this carnival, and all of us, even the greenhorns, even the ones who rub a stranger’s hair, will be in charge of their joy.

  I duck into the bathroom. Cassie and Sunshine are inside brushing their teeth and turn to face me immediately. “Never, never, never talk to carnies,” Sunshine says. “If you do, it’s like a free-for-all invitation for them to come to you anytime, wherever you are. They’ll try to pull some moves that I’m sure you won’t like. They will never leave you alone.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I say. “He didn’t seem that bad.”

  “You just wait,” she says, a string of foamy toothpaste stuck to her chin. “You’ll see.”

  The other carnies I’ve interacted with so far—the group I waited with for drug testing two days before the fair opened—didn’t seem so bad either.

  * * *

  There are six carnies in front of me, all of us crowded inside the back end of a big RV, waiting our turn to enter the small bedroom/office space up front for drug testing. We’ll pee into a cup in the attached bathroom.

  It’s impossible to know anyone’s age because of what hard sun does to a face year after year, plus everything in the carnival seems to be taking place outside linear time, where each day feels as though it were stuffed with a dozen days: the day of clanging metal while the Ferris wheel, which had arrived late, was being scrambled together; the day of learning to clean clothes and dishes in the bathroom sink; the day of thinking and thinking and still not knowing who from home would be there to answer a call.

  This day inside a day is a drug test, and the man right in front of me is leaning back against the wall, giving his armpits a rest from the crutches he holds in his hands. Up ahead, a carnie comes out of the bedroom, nods to the rest of the men in line, and leaves.

  The man right beside me has his foot all wrapped up in a big white bandage. On his other foot he has a regular sneaker. I keep glancing down at the big bandaged foot as he is telling me about the gator one-off where he works. One-offs, he tells me, and single-o’s are sideshow offshoots, and as opposed to the ten-in-one, where one price gives you admission to ten or more acts, single-o’s cost fifty cents or a dollar and let you see one thing: the world’s largest rat, smallest horse, fattest pig, or, in the case of the carnie with the bandaged foot, hugest gator. He likes the work, he says, because he can sit in the shade all day.

  These men in line don’t seem nervous, unlike my fellow performers, who have spent the last seventy-two hours taking midday jogs in all their clothes to try to sweat everything out. A few family-owned carnival companies had recently started drug testing all their employees, the bandage-footed man explains, in an attempt to make customers feel safer about the carnies operating the rides and to decrease the employee drama. Plus, it might help to break the stereotype that all carnies are meth heads.

  “Are they?” I asked.

  “Depends which shows you’re talking about,” he explains. “Depends which carnies.”

  The previous year at this fair, local drug dealers had lost all business for the two weeks the carnival was in town because of how hard and cheap the carnies had been pushing their own goods. In an act of retaliation, the townie dealers had called the cops on carnietown with some specific information to share. In the middle of the night, search-lights and sirens broke into each trailer as helicopters and SWAT teams rolled in from all sides. The carnie bunkhouses are inside long trailers—sixty feet or longer—filled with tiny rooms, two or three beds in each, and from the outside many of them look like portable bathrooms. In the bunkhouses, the SWAT team found a meth lab and an enormous drug supply.

  So here we are, one year later on the same fairgrounds, and more than half of the folks I’ve talked to have a Ziploc baggie of someone else’s pee tucked into their pants.

  “You get caught in a ride?” one of the carnies in line asks the man in front of me, nodding toward his bandaged foot.

  “Or your gator do that?” another asks.

  A few people snicker.

  “No, no, none of that,” the bandaged man says. “Happened before the season.”

  They all nod.

  “That girlfriend of yours?” another asks, and he laughs again.

  “Shit,” the man says. “Nah, she’s trouble, but not that much trouble.”

  They are all quiet for a moment. I think the conversation is over.

  “Y’all know I got diabetes real bad,” he continues. They nod. “Diabetes makes it so you can’t feel your hands or feet too well anymore,” he says. “One night my girlfriend was working a night shift and I was at home with the dogs. We got this big husky and this little Chihuahua of hers. Anyway, I went to sleep and the little dog had all this energy and was kinda just running in circles like he did a lot. But I fell asleep.

  “Next thing I know I wake up to screaming. My girlfriend is standing at the end of the bed and looking down, and I sit up and look down, too, and I see all this blood. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I ask her, but she’s still just screaming and she starts to lean down to pick up that little Chihuahua, but then she stops and backs away. He’s covered in blood, too.”

  The boss coughs in the next room and a child screams just outside the trailer door, but we’re all leaning toward the man, silent.

  “Anyway, I kind of sit up straighter and look down at what my girlfriend’s looking at and I start to realize. All the blood that’s everywhere is also all over my foot, and the little dog is there just gnawing and gnawing, and I look again at my foot and realize it looks real weird and I look at the dog again and that’s when I see it. In his mouth, the dog has my big toe. He’s chewed it off my foot.”

  We are all silent, staring at the man’s face to see if this can be true, staring at his bandaged foot to imagine what’s underneath, what’s not, if there are little leaks of blood on the gauze for proof if we look carefully enough.

  “Holy shit,” one of the guys says.

  “Couldn’t feel a thing, ’cause the diabetes has gotten so bad,” he says.

  “Did you shoot that dog in the face?” another asks.

  “Oh no,” the man says. “He didn’t mean it. I love that guy. Still let him sleep with me at night.”

  * * *

  The morning after Walmart, I wake up sore all over, achy, and scoot out of my bunk. I’m getting used to the soreness now, ten days into being on the road with the show. It is 8:00 a.m., work call not for another hour, and the morning air is cool. The silence at this time of day isn’t anything I can hear in the carnival at any other time. I’ve found, already, that getting up just a little bit early, if I can muster it, gives me time to walk the grounds or sit outside with a book, a slice of calm and solitude before the day’s work begins.

  I step into the trailer’s main area, our dirty, wooden backstage home, but immediately stop, a few inches short of kicking a foot. A body lies facedown on the floor. My breath catches for a second, imagining a body lying in ambush ready to turn and attack, or a murder scene. Quietly, quickly, I step over the body’s legs, my back pressing against the semi’s wall, and tiptoe around toward the face. A hat covers most of it, but just below the brim I see those dimples: Snickers.

  My panic drains and I stare down dumbly, wondering how comfortable those dirty, splintery boards are. I hear footsteps come up beside me. “Is that Snickers?” Spif asks.

  “Yep,” I say.

  “Why is he here?” he asks. I look at Spif’s face. His eyebrows are raised, hard wrinkles on his forehead like he’s just had to ask the most ridiculous question he could imagine.

  “No idea,” I say. I bend down to shake him, but Spif grabs my shoulder and shakes his head no.

&n
bsp; “This is one for the boss,” he whispers, and carefully steps over Snickers’s sleeping body as he climbs down the steps to Tommy’s trailer.

  Tommy emerges a few moments later, disarmingly uncool with messy hair plastered to one side and basketball shorts, very unlike the punk rock hero I’d come to expect, and stands beside Snickers. He says his name a few times, then reaches down and shakes his leg. Snickers stirs, blinks open one eye so slowly it looks glued shut, painful.

  “What’re you doing, man?” Tommy asks, no humor in his voice.

  “Hey, Tommy,” Snickers says, a genuine smile beginning on the side of his mouth. His face hovers an inch off the ground.

  “Why are you sleeping here?” Tommy asks.

  Snickers makes no move to peel himself off the floor, but keeps blinking up at Tommy with that smile. I notice, then, two bottles against the wall not far from his head. One bottle of beer, the other, water.

  “I didn’t want to be late for work call again,” Snickers says, still smiling, a little defiantly this time, like a child who believes he’s outsmarted his parents. “So I thought I’d sleep right where I needed to be when I woke up.”

  “Strike two,” Tommy says, turning to walk back into his trailer.

  I follow Spif back to his room.

  “Is this a baseball kind of situation? With three strikes?” I ask.

  “If you’re lucky.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’ll be fine, Goody Two-Shoes.”

  “Tommy said strike two—when was strike one?”

  “Oh, it was nonyo.”

  “Nonyo?”

  “Nonyo business.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t be late for banners,” he says, crawling back into his bunk.

  * * *

  I wander outside, feeling the morning sun on my face, smelling the dirt. There’s a peace I feel from the sun and the earth smell, something that harkens back to camping trips and hikes, a one-with-nature kind of solitude. Even though it seems like the carnival is a place where there is no nature, in some ways, it’s really nature presented at its most extreme. Beside our show, for example, is the world’s smallest pony. A sign hanging over the pen says so. The fair has a few of these. World’s largest rat. Heaviest horse. Littlest pig. The biggest and smallest always attract.