The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “I’ll put in some fish sticks.”

  We sat silent and still in our victory.

  “Historical Jesus probably had fish,” Davy said to her back as she walked into the kitchen.

  Maybe fish sticks would do the magic. Maybe money would rain down on us like fish. A whole entire house filling with money fish, no, health fish, those slippery bodies pouring down from the ceiling, thwacking our foreheads and shoulders as they fell, no, a neighborhood of Italy fish, the whole California sky dumping them down, our arms wide and our heads thrown back to receive them.

  DR. FRANKENSTEIN’S HUSHED BLOOD LOVE SONG

  Day 84 of 150

  World of Wonders

  September 2013

  The stage collects droplets of blood. He is already on it, waiting for them.

  “I must concentrate absolutely,” Dr. Frankenstein says. One hand is holding the mic. He speaks softly in a low, monotone voice.

  “Now I am slowing my heart from seventy-eight to sixty beats per minute.” He is quiet. Things are slowing. The rhythm of the last drips of rain falling from the eaves. “If I don’t hit any veins or arteries, I won’t bleed much.”

  He is Dr. Frankenstein for this act alone, afterward returning to Red, our sword swallower, our blockhead, our lover of cats. But for this one act, he becomes someone else.

  “I don’t work strong,” Red had told me. “Learned the pincushion act, which I call Dr. Frankenstein, from Bill Hitch the Son of a Bitch. He always worked strong. He’d look for veins and arteries in his pincushion act and pierce right through them to make a bloody mess, to spray the audience. So they’d know it was real. Not me. I do deep muscle pierces. There’s blood sometimes, but I perform this act so often, I can’t do it strong. I’d bleed out and die.”

  Dr. Frankenstein is seated on a stool and his kilt drapes over his thighs, but his knees jut nakedly out and bend at perfect right angles, his feet braced against the stool’s lowest rung. White athletic socks reach midcalf. His Velcro sandals are brown and grainy with fairground dust.

  The audience sees the three-inch pins with the sharpened tips. Gleaming, they lie in a pile beside his stool. Can they look at that sort of instrument and not imagine it hammering into their own bodies, sliding through their skin and into the mysteries of what lies inside?

  He takes one pin in his right hand, holds it against his forearm so the sharp tip is pressing against his skin and he continues talking in slow, soft, melodic sentences. This act happens in a small tent within the larger tent. Shoulder to shoulder the crowd stands, clutching their mouths or stomachs or each other in anticipation of seeing something they don’t want to see but have just paid an extra dollar to see.

  Quiet voice, slow voice.

  “Now the other thing is the sensation of pain. That is nothing more than a simple meditation technique. I’m capable of shutting down that part of my brain by turning it off like a light switch.”

  The thick, hot air is heavy as a costume. Drip drip, lulling all the heads in the room into some partial sleep, some dream calm, some sleepy trust, and then midsentence, metal pin hovering against his forearm, the air slowing with his heart, he slaps the metal head.

  Hard.

  The pin jams into the meat of his forearm. The pin’s head is flush with his skin and the rest of the metal is inside.

  I never see this act, but I hear it every time. It has a separate PA system, which rests on its own small stage made of four rectangular pieces of steel and two pieces of wood. A separate stage, on a separate side of the tent, for a very different kind of act. Dr. Frankenstein refuses to share a stage with any “illusions,” because he doesn’t want anyone even considering that he is not doing the thing it appears he is doing.

  Before we open we take a soapy bucket and scrub the stages to release the mud and grass and blood. Mostly, we scrub to loosen the blood.

  “Are you ready to see it?” Sunshine asks me three months into the season. I nod.

  I am standing at the back of the crowd. It’s not an act we can peek through a curtain to watch, because it’s enclosed in its own tent and, more important, because Red wants nothing to break his concentration. I know that metal pieces will slide into Red’s body, that he will become a human pincushion, but I have never been able to actually imagine the act. He isn’t allowed to perform it everywhere, since not all fairs allow for dings—our extra moneymakers. But all these big fairs let us have the dings, and so every twenty minutes, his low, slow voice slides through the mic and a new kind of pain begins back there. I am nervous standing in his tent, like a child who has wandered in and doesn’t know for sure whether Dr. Frankenstein will survive this act, like I don’t know if Red, a person I see every single day, a person I have worked hard to make remember my name, a person I admire, will survive this and be able to perform it again.

  “When I was young, I had the strangest way of cleaning my teeth,” Dr. Frankenstein says. His low monotone picks up a little lilt at the end. A cue for a joke. “I liked to clean them from the outside. And I’d do that by lining this up right about here,” he says, holding a metal pin—the kind used for upholstery or corsages—perpendicularly against his cheek. He opens his mouth wide, then slowly wiggles the pin into his cheek.

  Dr. Frankenstein’s tent within our tent is small—fifteen by fifteen feet—and intimate enough that I can see the wet, pink skin on the inside of his mouth push into a small mound before the silver glint of the pin peeks through. The head is sticking two inches out from the outside of his cheek, the sharp tip an inch inside his cheek.

  This isn’t an illusion. There is no trick. It isn’t anything but exactly what it is: pain, mastered.

  My breathing becomes shallow, and I have to keep looking away from the pins. I look back to Dr. Frankenstein, to Red, this man I have watched eat hamburgers and brush his long orange hair, and he slaps another pin into his flesh, and I’m worried that this might be the one to do him in. That after his forty-plus years in sideshows, this one pin will kill him.

  I’m also jealous. This is an act the audience will never forget.

  A few in the crowd have turned away from the stage or have closed their eyes or cast them to the dirt. When I sit backstage and listen to the sound of the voice, slow and low, a local radio station occasionally crossing frequencies and filling his silences with quiet staticky country music, there is an occasional other sound. The other sound is the violent rip of the two massive Velcroed curtains containing the tent within the tent as they tear apart, and when I am not too tired to peek my face out from behind my own curtain to make sure everything is okay enough, I see a pale face rushing between the Velcro flaps, out from Dr. Frankenstein, a face wet with perspiration.

  Some barf. Some faint. Falling ovations, everyone calls them. At least one in each town. Compliments, all of them. High fives backstage sometimes, depending on the mood, depending on how much we hate each other at that hour. Sometimes high fives for everyone except the one whose fault it is that everything is bad that day, who sits alone off the back of the truck chain-smoking and typing furiously into their phone.

  Next comes the pin through a large pinch of skin on his neck. There’s a little blood. I take a deep breath, dig in. I want to watch pain happen without looking away, but I can’t. I look away. Cover my eyes with my hands like a child in a scary movie. I thought, after all this time, that I’d be tough enough to see this act without flinching, but the truth of the moment is too powerful—a man, a coworker, a friend, even, harming his body right in front of my eyes, for my pleasure.

  He leaves the pin in his neck for us to stare at. The part of a human most sensitive to hot and cold is the neck. As a fetus is developing, its heart is surrounded by a protective layer of dermis. As it grows larger, it sloughs off the dermis to the cranial/spinal connective growth area. That skin becomes a neck. Dr. Frankenstein’s neck, through which a piece of metal pierces, once protected his heart.

  In the torture arts, you are both the creator and rec
ipient of your pain.

  In most bodies, the more metal there is inside, the more the body is failing. Imagine: needles and staples and implants and knives and pins. I see the pins entering Dr. Frankenstein and think of all the medical metal that has pierced my mom these last three years. How she has taken it and taken it and taken it. How she has been the recipient of pain and then chosen to keep moving her mouth to make sound come out, to try physical therapy month after month after month, even when progress wasn’t evident, how she is always practicing and working. And now she is in Italy, posing beside restaurant owners who love to give her free dessert.

  Will this photo of her smiling above gelato be the last image I see of her alive?

  This one with flushed cheeks and an empty glass of red wine beside her?

  Dr. Frankenstein finishes his act, the sixth pin sliding into his skin, and tells the audience where they can find the exit. The air is thick and hot with more than weather. I can hear people whispering to one another, trying to pinpoint the secret. Even though he has told them, they don’t understand the secret is that he can take it and take it and take it.

  * * *

  “All right, Tess,” Spif says a few nights later. “I’m going to play poker in carnietown. You can come, if you want.”

  I jump up from the backstage chair I’d been slumped in and change into a black T-shirt and black pants, something that will make me look a bit tougher and cooler than I am. As we’re walking out of the tent, Lola sees us and asks if she can come, too.

  “Whatever, sure,” he says. “Just, don’t be offended, any of you. And keep your mouth closed if you are. These aren’t fuckers you can disagree with.”

  We agree, and march into the night.

  * * *

  “Peace, love, and titty-fucking, who says that? Ho’s a calling,” a man is chanting at a picnic table. We’ve woven our way through a few layers of trailers and are in the heart of carnietown. There are a cluster of tables with lots of men all around, and scattered chairs and open beers on the table. Next to the tables is the carnie commissary, the first I’ve encountered, which sells everything from snacks to razors to laundry services, only for the carnies.

  The man leading the chant stops when we get close and stands up to give Spif a hello handshake, then introduces himself as Jack to Lola and me. He’s in a clean, crisp basketball jersey with a backward hat, gold chains stacked around his neck, and skin sunned to the color of graham crackers. His arms are covered in tattoos, with swastikas sprinkled through the naked women lounging across his forearms. White Power runs across his biceps.

  “You look good, man,” he says to Spif as he sits down at the table and pulls money out to buy into the poker game. “You got nice shoes. Gotta have nice shoes. When I was locked up, I knew the exact right kind of shoe polish to buy to keep my shoes shiny for visits. You gotta get an old oil rag, and you gotta buff your shoes with this polish, like in little circles, and that’s how you keep them looking nice. You girls want a beer?” he asks Lola and me. “On the house.”

  “Sure,” we say, cracking open the Budweisers one of the guys behind Jack hands us. We’re the only females in sight.

  It’s hard not to stare at his swastika tattoos, because I keep thinking that they’re something else. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted them. Stars, perhaps, or Chinese characters. Or that Sanskrit symbol for luck. But, no. They are swastikas. I wonder if I should walk back. I wonder if Lola wants to walk back. I wonder if it is more rude or less rude to ask her if she is okay here, if she wants to be here. She’s twenty-two, and at twenty-two I was usually too uncomfortable to ever say I was uncomfortable. Even though I’m thirty, only eight years older, I feel oddly motherly toward her in this moment. Also, a little nervous. I lean over, quietly make small talk to try to gauge her comfort by the tone of her voice. She makes some snarky joke and takes a big lug of her beer, sits down. She’s got more spine than I do. I take this as a decision to stay.

  “Let me introduce you around,” Jack says to us. He calls the names of each of the guys at the table, and as he turns his head I watch his long, straight ponytail sway against his jersey, notice the shaved sides of his head, his gold rings, and wonder what kind of friendship Spif has with him, and why.

  “This is Beyoncé,” Jack says, pointing to a big guy with penciled-in eyebrows and a spaghetti strap tank top whom I recognize from the carnietown food truck—not for fairgoers—from the day before, when Spif had brought me here to buy a walking taco: a small bag of Doritos split open on the side with ground beef, lettuce, and cheese on top of the chips. They’re heaven. Beyoncé wriggles his fingers at Lola and me in a wave. Next we say hello to a guy who looks just like a young Dan Aykroyd, but with a smashed-in face and blond buzz cut, then a bunch of juggalos gathered beside one another with Insane Clown Posse T-shirts and hats and tattoos. Spif whoop-whoops and they whoop-whoop back. One of them is, predictably, drinking Faygo. There’s an older guy at the end of the table with wide plastic-frame glasses who says he’s leaving next weekend to go get him some pussy, pussy pussy pussy pussy pusssssssssy, he says, rubbing his chest hair beneath his orange T-shirt, and we smile politely, happy for him. There’s a Latino marine with a spiderweb tattoo running down the length of his arm and a handsome guy next to him in a Ferrari T-shirt who never opens his mouth, and beside him, one black guy sitting in a lounge chair with a beer in his lap and another open in his hand, and he’s providing a continual stream of commentary on everything that everyone says. Sitting beside Jack is a young white guy with a sweaty face who keeps sitting up and turning completely around to look at Lola and me. Staring, he starts to make some sounds, the beginnings of words, a gargle or a sort of hum, but never finishes any of the sounds, gives up, and turns back around. He has RIP LUCY written in huge cursive letters across the back of his neck, and when the conversation turns to a fair in Texas this crew plays that is just six miles from the Mexican border, this guy nods vigorously as Jack gestures with two full hands to the size of the bag of weed you can get for ten dollars, and this one special strip club where the girls don’t speak any English and call everyone Papi.

  Jack is a boss here, owns a bunch of the games, and just bought a house with his lady, he tells us. “You know why I love having kids?” he asks. “Because I get to watch cartoons and not have anybody look at me funny. Like Madagascar. It’s so good. Madagascar 2 is even better than Madagascar 1. You know why? Because it’s in the circus. You fucks should like that,” he says, offering Spif a cheers.

  They begin a new game of poker. There’s another guy at the table with a suitcase full of money. People hand him bills, and he hands them chips for the poker game. The marine with the spiderweb tattoo deals the cards, and I stay close to Lola, quietly chatting with her so it won’t look like we don’t want to talk to anyone, but keeping my ear to the conversation at all times, both fascinated and nervous about what I might hear. This is about as far from my childhood’s twirling women with armpit hair as I can get.

  Someone starts talking about a ride malfunction at the last spot they played, and the man holding the briefcase slips Jack something under the table and the guy with the wide plastic-frame glasses says, “Hey, man. I saw that. You passing cards here?”

  People get quiet.

  “No, fucko,” Jack says. “I dropped my card and he handed it back to me.”

  Another guy at the table stands up, and he’s huge and hovering above the game, and he starts pacing. A young pale guy beside him with rotting teeth and two fat pockets of eye gunk says, “This is supposed to be a clean game, don’t worry, man,” and he’s trying to pat the big pacing guy on the arm as he passes, but the arm is just past his fingertip range. “It’s cool, man,” he says, pawing at the air.

  The pile of chips in the center of the table is big. “Keep playing,” Jack says to the other guys in the game, and they do, adding their bets or dropping out as they go around the table. “Sit down, brother,” Jack says to the pacing guy. His tone is very even, but st
rong. That he is a boss here seems very, very clear.

  “He passing you cards?” the pacing man asks, and the air seems to tighten as jaws clench all around. Eyes move sharply between Jack, who does not move from his seat, and the standing guy. The young guy keeps reaching out and trying to touch the angry man, but still can’t make contact.

  “Sit. Down,” Jack says to the man. “Ante up or get out.”

  The angry man looks down at his shoes. Shakes his head. All the faces are turned toward him, Lola’s and Spif’s and mine as well, waiting to see if this will grow into a brawl we’ll need to leave quickly. He calculates.

  “All right. Fuck. Okay,” he says, sitting back down.

  “Rat crew won’t cheat their own,” Jack says, offering a shark’s grin all around the table.

  “Yeah,” the man says.

  Jack shows his hand. “See, man?” he says. “I don’t have shit. I was just bluffing. Chill out,” he says, laughing, slapping the guy on the back.

  The man in the thick-frame glasses wins and collects the pot.

  “The thing is, man,” Jack says, leaning back a bit to include us in what he’s saying, “I used to have a lot of hate for a lot of different kinds of people. Like that. If some fuck tried to call me out, I’d teach him a lesson. A lot of hate. I did some bad things to them. Y’all know about that already.” A few guys laugh. “But now I just don’t have hate for anybody anymore. I love everyone. Everybody.”

  He pulls a T-shirt from a bag beside him and puts it on, covering up his jersey, and hiding the white power tattoo, along with most of the swastikas. With some of those hidden, what becomes clear is the huge cross surrounded by wings tattooed across the back of his neck. I’m not sure how much he’s saying for our benefit—if he cares about us being there at all—but he does seem to want everyone here to have a good time.

  “I’m just a love man,” he says. “A love man trying to look good. You think I look good?” he asks, turning to face Lola.