The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  EMERGENCY

  Day 29 of 150

  World of Wonders

  July 2013

  Steve, the new burly working man, is holding his belly and moaning softly. It’s our third night at the Kane County Fair in Illinois, and Steve asks Tommy to come offstage between ballys to talk. Steve’s been with us for just over a week. They whisper together under the ticket awning and then Tommy comes onstage and the working man disappears.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I ask Tommy.

  “Bellyache,” Tommy says, eyes locking in on a young family vaguely looking in our direction.

  An hour later, a medic approaches our stage in the middle of a bally asking for the boss. I take over, telling the crowd about the snake in the box in front of me as Tommy hops offstage and takes the medic to the side. Sometimes the added attention of emergency workers, who also come sometimes after we get a fainter—a falling ovation—can be a draw, a suggestion of danger for a show that already looks like something might imminently, violently fail. But this time Tommy takes him aside and, after a quick chat, whispers to me from the side of the stage that he’ll be back. He follows the medic down the midway.

  Cassie pops onto the stage to continue ballying shortly thereafter, and we finish out the hour without more information. A little while later, Tommy and Steve come back, Tommy walking quickly in front with a thin-mouthed grimace and Steve dragging behind, holding his side. They pass by the stage, making no eye contact with anyone as they round the edge of the tent and turn back to our bunkhouse.

  Tommy comes back out a few minutes later alone.

  “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “We need a new working man.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “On the bus back to Ohio.”

  “What happened?”

  “Said his cannon fire stitches had burst open and he thought his guts were going to spill out. Wouldn’t stop crying.”

  “And? Were they?”

  He snorts. “’Course not. I had him lift up his shirt to show me.”

  “Oh.”

  “He bought his own bus ticket home.”

  “Well, shit,” I say.

  “Oh well. Out another guy,” Tommy says. “Couldn’t hack it.”

  “Couldn’t hack it,” I say.

  * * *

  The fair is slow.

  I crouch low from the bally stage to look through the entrance and see Pipscy inside, bouncing as she talks the bed of nails act for just one single person all alone in the audience.

  There were stretches out on that bally stage, weekdays during the daytime especially, when nobody at all would walk by for twenty minutes, thirty, an hour, the absence finally punctuated by a young mother and her two small kids waddling past who, despite our best attempts to lure them in with a snake and magic and sword swallow, continued straight on without giving us more than a glance. I wondered, of those people who would walk straight past fire going into my mouth or a sword going down Tommy’s throat, if they didn’t believe what they saw. If they were too skeptical, too sure that whatever appeared to be happening was not in fact happening at all.

  There was a tradition in the sideshow of things appearing questionable, controversial. P. T. Barnum took great pains to promote the dubiousness of his oddities’ authenticity. Instead of concentrating on the authentication of his Feejee Mermaid as a real, genuine specimen, for example, he sent letters penned as a variety of authors to newspapers with doubts about the creature’s very existence. Surely someone could discern whether the creature was cast from a mold or pulled from the sea? Whose eyes were sharp enough, whose wits quick enough? The only way to find out was to see it for yourself. It brought the audience into the act, charged each member with the role of scientific explorer, investigator.

  After a long, long stretch with nobody walking by our stage, a boy of about eleven or twelve is running past when his eye catches one of our banners. On it, a headless woman’s bloody neck is fitted with machinery. He stops running and assesses a few of the paintings.

  Tommy asks, “Do you think you can be hypnotized by a snake?” The boy shakes his head no.

  “Are these things real?” he says, pointing to the banners.

  “Oh yes, those are a hundred percent authentic banners,” Tommy says with a grave nod.

  “No,” the boy tsks, “the stuff inside. Is it real or not? This is a freak show, right?”

  Tommy bends forward a little, bringing his face closer to the boy’s as if the midway were filled with marks who didn’t deserve to know the secret he was about to reveal.

  “You be the judge,” he whispers.

  * * *

  The Laestrygonians are evil cannibalistic giants from Homer’s Odyssey. The Kappa is a Japanese water demon made up of the body of a tortoise, a beak, and the limbs of a frog. He eats disobedient children. Mermaids lure fishermen to drown. Monsters, giants, cyclops, centaurs, vampires, werewolves, griffins, minotaurs, sphinxes, satyrs. Many of our stories are made up of creatures who are partially human, who frighten us with what is both recognizably like us and different. They are us and not us.

  We’ve changed our ideas about who, and what, makes a “freak.” The medieval and early modern idea that a nonnormative body was supernatural, some kind of omen or warning from God, has been gradually replaced by a belief that all bodies come from within the order of nature, but that natural order can be internally disrupted. The range of what occurs in nature both makes the idea of natural diversity more concrete and therefore wonderful, and seems to present an example of something that must be outside it. Deformito-Mania was the term coined by the magazine Punch in 1847 to describe the contemporary fascination with so-termed human curiosities.

  Freak has been used for those who were born with, or who through an accident or illness acquired, a nonnormative body. Before adequate social services and advanced, widely available medicine, performing in a sideshow was one of the only ways for a “freak” to make a living. By contrast, a “geek,” or working act, was a person who, from a wider range of options, chose to manipulate his body to make it nonnormative. Because of medical advancements, increased services and financial support, and declining social acceptance of “freaks” within freak shows, most of the performers on the circuit today, and largely those with the World of Wonders, are geeks. But there is a real awe for traditional freaks within our show. Stories circulate about past performers who were the show’s brightest stars. There’s buzz about a performer who’d be joining us later this season.

  The language used to describe people and things within a sideshow has continually shifted. In the Victorian era, the word was curiosity, used in Charles Dickens’s freak-obsessed work, The Old Curiosity Shop. P. T. Barnum, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, called the people who performed in his shows “curiosities,” the same name he used for taxidermied oddities on display in his museums. Around this time, too, the term freak of nature was commonly applied to something that had developed “abnormally.” It is from this term that the idea of the “freak” performer is derived, and the term, while not common anymore, is still used to describe nonnormative performers. Many performers on the sideshow circuit now embrace the term, for the same reason as some in the LGBTQ community have reclaimed the term queer—to take back the word’s power.

  But freak has meant many different things in our last American century, as has other language used to describe those with different bodies. As early as 1908, freak applied to a person obsessed with something, originating with Kodak freak, a camera-obsessed person.

  Monsters and monstrosities were the standard medical labels for people with physical differences until the early twentieth century.

  In 1945, freak was used to mean “drug user.”

  In the 1960s, freak was claimed by the socially dissident hippies, who chose to participate in activities like eating LSD, which made them “freak out.” This freakiness was self-proclaimed and self-made.

  In 1990,
Digital Underground released the song “Freaks of the Industry.” Here, the rappers call themselves freaks for their sexual prowess, and the women they’re with are freaks for the same reason, and together, they’re “freakin’,” meaning, having sex. As a strange counterpoint to all that, when I looked up the words to the Digital Underground song, they scrolled across the screen on top of a still image of Schlitzie, the pinhead from the 1932 movie Freaks. In Tod Browning’s pre-Code horror movie, deemed too shocking to be released, the characters in a freak show are played by real freak-show performers, though the true monsters of the film are their foes, the norms.

  * * *

  The mermaid can’t hack it.

  I learn this on the toilet. Sunshine walks with me on the long trudge down the midway, up a hill, right beside the slushie truck, and down the next midway that runs along the goat barn, to the bathrooms. It has been a week since Steve went home, and we’re at another county fair in Illinois just a few hours from the last. Sunshine and I go inside separate bathroom stalls, and in the momentary silence, she says, “How would you like to become an inside performer?”

  As we walked into the building, I’d glimpsed myself in the mirror and noticed that my skin had taken on a purple hue. Five weeks of twelve hours a day in the Midwest summer out in the direct sun meant my body was taking and taking in the heat, skin pulling in all the sun’s offerings, the hair I’d dyed dark brown before joining the show faded first to a mousy brown with blond streaks and then blond blond, and I loved it at first, felt like a solar panel, charging myself on the sun. But the heat built fast and woozy hour after hour, the sweat pooling in my corset, my vision getting blurry. And the color of my skin, which always gets to a dark olive tan in the sun, had gone beyond that into some sorts of navy and purple and was probably a dermatologist’s nightmare. And so, at the moment, this question sounded like a dream.

  “You could learn all the acts, not just the bally acts. It would give you a chance to try out every position here. What do you think?” she says, coming out of the toilet stall.

  “I think yes,” I say. “But what happened to Pipscy?”

  “Pipscy is homesick, she misses her boyfriend, blah blah blah. We’re gonna be hiring new performers for the season’s big fairs anyway, and it’s easiest to hire bally girls, since they don’t really have to be able to do anything already, and you know the show now, how things work.”

  It was still a surprise, given how uneasy I was to begin here with almost no skills, that no skills are needed to be a bally girl. The idea of joining a show as a performer with nothing to perform is strange. And yet, it makes more sense the further along we are. How after just one day of performing, I had those acts down pat and, in the scheme of things, one mediocre day of figuring it out didn’t matter.

  Pipscy has done a very decent thing, Sunshine explains, and told the bosses of her departure in advance, a week and a half or so. The ads have just gone up on Craigslist for temporary performers to join a traveling circus sideshow. What would it be like to come across that by accident? I don’t know if I would have believed it was real.

  “I’m in,” I say, ready for the next chapter.

  There’s that one inside act I’ve had my eye on since the beginning. It sits on Red’s stage, separate from the main stage, and amazes me every time I glance inside and see Pipscy performing it. The electric chair. Red flips a switch and the electric woman, seated on the chair, is filled with electricity. She lights bulbs off her fingertips and tongue. I don’t yet know how it works.

  I’m in a sitting-in-the-electric-chair daydream onstage later that day when Cassie asks a woman emerging from the tent whether she likes our show. Cassie often asks customers what their favorite part of the show is as they walk out—as long as they don’t walk out shaking their heads or looking upset. It gives her the opportunity to repeat into the mic what they say, adding enthusiasm, offering a teaser.

  “It was boring,” the woman says.

  Boring?

  I flip through my first experience watching the show, trying to imagine if any of it was boring. A little corny, yes, not always totally believable, but never boring.

  “We were hoping for blood and guts,” the woman says, slowly walking away. She looks incensed, with a pinched expression that Sunshine calls a fart face, as if she were smelling something wretched. Sometimes you’d see those faces out in the audience, supremely unimpressed by whatever you were doing. But to be so vocal about the show being boring baffles me. Is it unclear that these are real human beings inside the show made up of actual blood, actual guts, some of which they are showing to the audience for two dollars?

  “We didn’t see anything cool, no extreme gore at all.”

  Cassie turns toward the other people gathering near the stage. “And there you are, folks,” she says into her mic. “Proof of the harmful effects of television’s desensitization. Come inside the show right now and interact with real human beings with real human blood and guts and see them perform real human feats of wonder.”

  The woman walks off.

  “What a dummy,” I say.

  * * *

  Cassie assures me that the giant state fairs we’re headed into will have fewer idiots to think our show is boring than there have been in some of these smaller fairs, but then she corrects herself and says there’ll just be too many other people for them to stick out much.

  “It’ll finally be time for this,” Sunshine says, sticking her pointer finger out at me. There are four letters tattooed along the side of her finger closest to her thumb: GTFM.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “When people outside the show ask what it means, back at home and stuff, I tell them it means Get That For Me. You know, as stage manager, I’m always pointing at things and bossing people around.”

  “But it doesn’t?”

  “GTFM is carnie code. It’s about the bottom line. About doing whatever you have to do to get by out here and make it worthwhile. GTFM: Get the fucking money.”

  * * *

  A few months after my interview at that fancy private high school, I’d received a letter letting me know I was on the waiting list. The scholarships were limited and the application pool unprecedentedly large, so I’d just need to wait.

  My mom opened the school’s most recent newsletter. “Look, their play opens Friday. Why don’t we go to it?” she said.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird if I show up since they’re still deciding if they want me?” I said.

  “I’m calling now to buy the tickets.”

  When the play was over and the lights rose above the audience, she stood me up and pointed across the crowd. “There,” she said, “is your target.”

  A man was just standing up, chatting with and smiling at those around him.

  “The headmaster,” she said. “Go.”

  “What am I supposed to say to him?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Introduce yourself. Say you’re on the waiting list. Say that you see yourself here. That this is your place.”

  I looked around the theater with its plush emerald seats, big wooden stage, and lights. It wasn’t my place, not yet, but I could just glimpse the roughest edge of a fantasy where it was. Getting there took more courage than I had.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what to say to him.” I started to turn around and walk out.

  “Tessa,” she said, slowly. I didn’t move. “Sometimes you’ve just got to do the hard thing.” She stared me down. Then, she grabbed my hand and pulled me over to the headmaster, introducing us both. She explained to him how I saw myself there.

  A week later, I received another letter. I’d been accepted, with a full scholarship. On the bottom of the letter was a handwritten note from the headmaster. It was so good to see you last week. The kind of interest and dedication you showed by coming to the play are exactly the kinds of characteristics we look for in our students. We honor perseverance. Welcome!

  FRESH MEATr />
  Day 39 of 150

  World of Wonders

  August 2013

  As unofficial alternate shuttle driver, I am tasked with heading to the airport and bus station to pick up the new performers. We are getting four at once, three who will be with us for one month and one who will stay for just two weeks. Other performers will join later in the season, as we go.

  There are three new bally girls, all of whom have some performance experience, and one new inside performer, who has an act he’s been doing for years. Francine comes in from Oakland, a beautiful pinup burlesque performer who can eat fire and has dreamed of working with our iconic show for years. She arrives with armloads of boxes and suitcases, unpacking beautiful beaded tassel bras and belly dancing skirts and different-size hot rollers and feather boas and scarves, a glamorous tattooed beauty moving into a dirty truck. She is not thrilled.

  Rachel flies in from Pennsylvania and has attended Coney Island sideshow school. She immediately demonstrates her human blockhead act, jamming a screwdriver deep into her nostril. Before she joined us, she ate glass for one of the touring nightclub shows and stays pretty quiet most of the time, though she also arrives with some amazing costume pieces.

  The third female performer is Jessie, a local girl, who will be with us for just two weeks and looks like a mad scientist drew a sexy cartoon—with fire-engine red hair and tight-fitting white tank tops over too-tight black bras. It is immediately clear she knows some tricks that I have yet to learn about how to get things from the carnies. Most nights she strolls backstage with a foot-long corn dog or giant turkey leg that some carnie has given her just because.

  The one new male performer is Brian, a lanky young guy in a bowler hat who walks out of the airport with a backpacking rucksack, a wooden board in one hand, and juggling clubs in the other. In addition to juggling acts, he also performs the rolla bolla, a balancing act where a short rectangle of wood is set on top of a cylinder, and the performer balances atop the board as it rolls around. On top of the rolla bolla he ties balloon animals or puts his body through a hoop or juggles. He walks outside first thing in the morning, hair pointing every direction, and, in his undershirt and boxer shorts, begins juggling the way another person might stretch or brush his teeth.