The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “Positions open now for Ride attendants/Ride operators, starting from next month! Operating your ride whilst playing the latest music and meeting lots of girls. If you like hands-on work while getting your hands dirty and want to be the most popular boy in every town, this job is for you, for sure!”

  Many of the carnies I meet have had trouble with the law. The carnival companies don’t ask lots of questions, so carnivals are full of people with histories—ex-cons—that preclude their working other kinds of jobs. Some years ago, when the law would come to the carnival looking for so-and-so, whomever they asked would plead total ignorance and word would bolt down the midway like rigged bowling pins to the ear it needed to find, to the ear that needed to hear Get lost, and that person would, usually to rejoin somewhere down the road. This place has all sorts of secret songs being sung in frequencies I can’t hear.

  “America the Beautiful” ends and I stretch out in my bed, sore, but my feet hit the wooden wall at the end of my bunk and my hands hit the wooden wall at the head and up above; opening my eyes toward the morning sun, I see a dick and balls and clown face and fuck you cunt written on the slats of the bunk above. If I reach my arm to the right, it will press against the truck’s metal wall. My left arm does not quite reach the other wall, but it’s close, almost touches, and if I stretch out my foot across the two feet of space beside our bunks, it will touch. Then I can be touching all four walls at once. Two small plastic bins with three drawers each sit at either end of the room, one for each of the bunks. One drawer I fill with food, one with costume accessories, one initially with underwear and socks until I hear that panties go missing all the time if they are visible from the doorway, clean or not, and so I bury them in my suitcase and stick T-shirts in that drawer instead.

  I walk into the main backstage area. Red is sitting back there, which is unusual. He’s sipping from his Big Gulp coffee mug and brushing his long orange hair.

  “Morning,” I say. He grunts. I try to move slowly and not keep my eyes directly on him, like I would around an eagle or fox, something rare to get close to in the wild. I don’t want him to flee.

  “I’m gonna make coffee. Want some?”

  “Won’t say no,” he says. We move near one another in our separate worlds, though I’m aware of every sound and movement he makes. This sideshow hero. This madman. This meanie.

  Each creak of his chair makes me nervous he might swat at me or, worse, leave. I have some idea that Red knows a secret about this place—about performing or illusion or magic, I don’t know exactly what—something that he has come to understand through all these years on the road. Like Yoda. Like he might be able to tell me what it is I’m actually doing here.

  “Where you from, Red?” I ask him casually.

  “Philly,” he says, the p a little stronger than the ph sound as his tongue shapes syllables against his toothless gums. Last season, he had one tooth. It was aching. He bought a bottle of vanilla Smirnoff and wiped most of the rust off his pliers. He drank the entire bottle backstage, fell off his stool, and passed out before he could pull the tooth. In the morning, hungover and about to climb up the steps to perform his first act of the day, he reached into his mouth with the metal and yanked the tooth. Blood trickled down his chin onstage.

  “619 North Highland Street,” he says, and I nod, pour the coffee. He continues: “41A Main, 3055 14th Avenue, St. Clarence Home for Boys, West Philadelphia Orphanage, Presbyterian Children’s Village, St. Vincent Home for Boys. Let’s see,” he says, gathering the hairs from his brush and balling them up in the palm of his hand. His hands are not inked, but the rest of his body, from neck to ankles, is covered in tattoos. Tigers, anatomical men swallowing swords, shields, crests, dragons, planets, and between each tattoo, small dark stars making constellations.

  “One time all the orphanages were full when another foster family sent me back, so they put a bunch of us in an institute for retarded children,” he says. “All the other kids eventually got sent somewhere else. But I stayed.” I follow his glance out the doorway to his van, where one of the kittens is coiled on the dash, her white fur nestled between a wooden statue of the Buddha and an empty McDonald’s milkshake cup.

  He opens his fist and lets the Ohio breeze take the orange nest of hair. “1401 Kensington Avenue,” he says. “A home on Cahill Road, can’t remember the number,” he says after a while. “I forget a lot of the details now.” But every address seems a stopover on some Homeric odyssey almost too perfect for the story of a grand-champion sword swallower.

  “The Millers, the Thorps, the O’Callahans,” he says. He hasn’t talked to me at all in the three and a half weeks I’ve been here, has barely even made eye contact with me. I’m amazed this ordinary question pulls out a string of answers like scarves tied to one another that a magician pulls from his mouth. I’m amazed that the addresses are tied to names, names to memories, and before I know it, he tells me that at sixteen, he opened the door of his foster house one morning and peered out at the snow piled high on the street. It was February. Very cold. He stepped outside. And then took another step. Another. Then he didn’t stop. Walking is, in its most basic form, the act of falling and catching yourself. Fall, catch. Fall, catch. It is an act of travail. Can it be a pilgrimage without a known destination? He walked for thirty-one days.

  AND THE LOW SKY OPENS

  Day 23 of 150

  World of Wonders

  July 2013

  Behind the Gravitron 3000’s crown of American flags, the sky’s looking more and more like a bruise. Even the performers from California—half of us, earthquake people—know that a sky going green and purple means tornado, and one by one Pipscy the mermaid and Spif the knife thrower and Sunshine the fire eater peek around the edge of the tent between acts to look directly onto the emptying carnival midway. The low sky opens with rain and bursts of wind that knock over a tank of Rastafarian-painted hermit crabs beside our show. Sunshine widens her eyes at Tommy. She hisses, “Thomas. Close the show.” They’ve been slamming their trailer door for days. He shakes his head no and everyone ducks back. But not Red.

  Red stands in front of the big striped circus tent in his kilt, arms crossed over his bare belly. Inside, he has just swallowed a tire iron. Here, he appraises the ceiling of clouds as a dribble of spit weaves through his red beard stubble.

  “Well,” he says, voice barely audible over the wind, “I know I’m gonna die on these stages. Today’s as good a day as any for that.” He claps his hands with false finality and turns back into the tent. I nod in agreement. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but the corsets I wore and chains I escaped and the taxidermied Icelandic Giant I glued back together all precluded danger from feeling much like danger. Or maybe it’s the bright lights. Or that it feels a little good to be reminded that there is always more that could be lost.

  Tommy and I stand in the drizzle on our bally stage. “You don’t have to wait, but you do have to hurry,” Tommy bellows, but he’s cut off by the loudspeaker announcing the pygmy goat parade again.

  My wrists throb. I’ve escaped these handcuffs thirteen times today, but that’s the job here, a little pain, a little delight, always a calculation—what will it take to woo the two teenage girls yawning as they watch our bally. Look at my danger, I urge through a squint in my eyes. Imagine yourself locked up. One of the girls starts texting.

  Red pounds the flat steel face of a gearhead tent stake farther into the dirt with a sledgehammer, the ting ting ting and occasional spark just over my right shoulder as I wink to the teenagers. I’m learning the art of distraction. Thunder cracks. Red prepares for the deluge.

  “Now watch Ms. Mimi L’Amour escape from these chains. Her world record is five seconds. Can she break it?” Tommy says, and begins the countdown. I plant my feet hip distance apart and take a deep breath. “Five!” he shouts, and I spin fast to face the tent behind me, my back to the audience, “Four!” throwing my arms down hard in front of me to loosen the chains, Red pound
ing the steel, “Three!” one and then the other wrist is out and lightning flashes and I have the chains in one hand, start my spin back to face the audience, “T—” but the loudspeaker interrupts: “Attention fairgoers. This is a tornado warning. All attendees of the Lucas County Fair must evacuate the fairgrounds immediately,” and the thunder cracks again right on cue and everyone across the fairgrounds is suddenly moving very quickly.

  “Banners!” Tommy screams back into our massive tent. I clamber down the bally stage, already drenched, as the seven other performers meet me at the front banner line. The banner bearing the two-headed Egyptian princess billows and snaps like a ship’s sail, cracking and giving in to the storm.

  I imagine the tornado splitting all the banners down the line, the boom of toppling poles like cannon fire, and the ship below suddenly tipping and sloshing as the waves crash farther onto the deck, the ship four days out to sea and unrescuable while deckhands are tossed into the waves, and then it’s not deckhands flailing as they sink below the churning sea, it’s my mom, her paralyzed body sinking like stone.

  “Banners! Go! Go! Go!” Spif screams. Hands are flying, sequins throwing off the rain. We yank the slip-tie off the metal pole, unwind the rope holding the top of the banners taut, its tail splashing to the mud below. Breathing hard, we wrap and wrench the ropes around each of the canvas rolls, muscles shaking, looping slipknots and cinching, squeezing each banner tight, squinting against the onslaught. “Tighter!” Tommy is screaming, each of these banners a few hundred bucks we can’t afford to replace.

  Ropes slap the mud puddles and spray. Mascara and eye shadow smear our faces. My fishnets are splattered and as I’m running to the next banner my heel sinks into a puddle and I stagger, my shin hitting a rusted tent stake, which grabs and rips my fishnets, cuts my leg open. Blood. “Go! Go! Go!” Tommy screams, pointing to the next banner, and I go.

  The rain falls harder and harder, sheets and buckets and daggers of it hitting me from every direction as the wind makes it impossible to hear nearly anything but the high-pitched cry of emergency coming from somewhere I can’t see. Carnies run toward the cinder-block bathrooms. On the other side of the fence, one or two fairgoers linger, a few cars speed away, but mostly they’re gone. Just as they do each night, carnival bosses shut the gates around the fairgrounds, locking our performers and hundreds of carnies inside.

  “Seek immediate shelter!” a policeman calls through a megaphone. But Big, Big Ben has the nine-foot boa constrictor across his arms and is slowly coiling her back into her box. He is in no hurry. There’s work to be done. He purses his full pink lips at the snake, kissing her on the mouth as hard rain devours him and the thunder cracks.

  The sirens bounce off the cow barn. Rain pounds. Red screams for us to untie the tent’s sidewalls, thick vinyl seventy feet across by forty feet deep. A huge gust of wind could find any opening and pick the tent up from the inside, ripping it open or carrying it into the sky. This will not happen today. We will not be afraid.

  “Are you crazy? Get to the bathrooms!” a carnie with a snarl of blond curls hollers as he runs. It’s time to go. The wind plasters our hair to our faces and then all of a sudden stops dead. A second. Two. And then it picks up again, the tree branches whipping one another as they’re stripped of their leaves, the flags on top of our tent snapping and cracking. Gold glitter smears across Pipscy’s face beside me. I catch her eye for a moment, and it’s wide and spooked but goes right back to the ropes she’s tying. It’s time to go. We live in the back of a semitruck and we won’t leave. We make less than forty bucks a day and we won’t leave. Inside the tent, we dart and dodge one another, locking the mummy cases, tying up curtains, gathering knives. We tie and twist. The wind sounds like a train. We lock and pin. The Feejee Mermaid is safe in her coffin. The headless woman’s mirrored chair is well wrapped in wet pillows. Though Queen Kong isn’t the last taxidermied gorilla in the world, her presence here, alongside her freak family, makes the extraordinary individuals a collective of ordinary love, and that, that, is reason to tie her blankets tighter despite the opening sky.

  In the end, Tommy finally yells for us to get the hell out of there, though it’s almost impossible to hear. The rest of the fairground is emptied of people and the wind is throwing hair across our faces like whips and the sky is mauve. Sunshine, Spif, Pipscy, and I all run, no longer able to dodge puddles, past small tree branches that have come down, past food tents leaning sharply away from the wind, and finally make it to the cinder-block bathroom already stuffed with carnies. We’re breathing hard, can barely see for the makeup smeared across our faces, the membrane of storm water covering our bodies. We take paper towels to wipe our eyes and laugh with the hysteria of danger, unsure what else to do. Sunshine inspects my cuts. I inspect hers.

  “Where’s Red?” she finally asks.

  We look around, but he has not made it into the bathrooms. Someone with a weather radio says the tornado has touched down a mile from our carnival. We push past the other carnies standing in the doorway and peek our heads out the bathroom’s mouth, craning our necks toward our big tent down the midway. It’s almost impossible to make out what’s what, but I’m pretty sure I see Red just outside our tent, two of the center ropes wrapped around his hands as he throws his body back against the wind, fighting that tornado himself, a battle—anyone would say—that there is no way he could actually win.

  I can see him there, openmouthed, laughing up at the sky.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, the wind has slowed and rain lightened. A few breaks in the clouds let some dim sun through, and one by one the rest of the bathroom huddlers decide the danger has passed and leave the building. One of the women has been on her cell phone much of the time. “Oh lord, oh Jesus,” she’d said to the line, “I just wanted to talk to you, honey, one last time.” Another was chewing gum with a rhythmic grind and stood at the edge of the bathroom door with her phone out in front of her as if it were a mirror, though instead she had it recording the rest of the world outside. A man stood beside her, chewing and spitting sunflower seeds onto the tiled floor.

  “I’m going to check on Thomas and Benny,” Sunshine says, shouldering her way out of the bathroom. We follow her, stepping over torn branches and wet leaves and a smattering of game prizes—soggy stuffed cats and inflatable baseball bats strewn about like forgotten toys. Though it was unlikely there was carnage back at the tent, I pictured our comrades’ bodies tossed onto an upturned tent stake, impaled in a stack of floppy flesh like speared fish. Or knocked over the head by the fallen giant. Decapitated by a plane of glass.

  When we reach our lot, Red is sitting in the front seat of his van reading Facebook. Tommy is inside the tent, whistling and sweeping water off the stage. Big, Big Ben is in the truck.

  Time stills. We are standing on a precipice between realities—the fear and drama of the last hour, which is keeping my throat tight, the top of my chest hot, and the regular, much-rehearsed motion of what we’re about to do again.

  We open the mummy cases, shaking off the leaves and rain. Spif checks the electrical. Within fifteen minutes, Tommy yells that we’re opening back up in five minutes, so for those of us with smeared makeup and blood- and mud-covered legs, we should do our best to fix it, quickly, and get back onstage. “The show must go on” trope can’t ever have felt more true.

  Once I climb the bally stage, I see the rest of the carnival squeezing itself out as well. Crazy Craig the Clown gets back on his unicycle, tries to juggle, and falls off. It’s hard to tell if his struggle is sincere or performed. A honk comes from down the midway and some of the thin crowd parts and Buffo, the World’s Strongest Clown, emerges, smooth and straight on his Segway, honking horns and ringing bells, his face clown white with a large kidney-shaped red mouth. Where had he been hidden to preserve his makeup? And who had been working out in the rain to make sure his show didn’t blow away? He leaves a small white smear against his overripe biceps after he kisses them, tho
se little pythons sticking out of his American-flag-printed denim vest. The engine in his Segway purrs its high-pitched whine.

  “Did you know the inventor of the Segway just died by accidentally riding his Segway off a cliff?” Cassie whispers over to me.

  I snortle.

  “Well, kids, this is just a reminder that Buffo’s next show is at six this evening,” Buffo says to the crowd. Crazy Craig still hasn’t managed to climb back onto his unicycle. He’s looking at Buffo with half-lidded eyes, three juggling clubs in his hands.

  “Everybody gather round and listen to the weirdos!” Buffo says into his megaphone, pointing at our stage. His style of mockery is predictable in the boring way a jock mocks an outcast in the high school cafeteria.

  And the rest of the day continues on as usual.

  * * *

  Later, I call Devin to report on the tornado and because I am scared, though not from the tornado. I mention the tornado, assure him all’s okay, and move on quickly. I am trying to remember things about my mom from before she got sick, and I keep finding long gaps in my memory.

  “I don’t remember her at all,” I tell him.

  “Sure you do,” he says. “You have to.”