She shifts in her seat, fake laughs once, and takes a sip of beer.
“Thought so,” he says. “You know what I need, though? What’s the freshest? A purple leisure suit. I’m serious. All purple, with one of those white Kangol hats and white shoes. Everything else all gold. Maybe a tie. That’s what I’m gonna buy next. After my next come-up.”
“That would be tight,” Spif says, buying more chips. I try not to think about how each week I watch him get a draw on his next pay period before the week comes, how I hear him complain about child support for his baby daughter. Because it isn’t my business. Not at all.
“Gonna get this fuck to come work for us next summer,” Jack says, nodding toward Spif.
“Straight flush,” Spif says at the end of the next game, throwing down his hand.
“Almost, man,” Jack says, laying his cards down. “Royal flush. Tough shit,” he says, pulling the pile of chips toward him. “But here, brother. Take these, and stay in the game,” he says, sliding a few chips over to Spif. “Always stay in the game.”
* * *
“We have with us today the Pain-Proof Man,” I say for the sixth time that morning, about a minute into the bed of nails act, after I’ve explained how sharp the nails are, how I’ve personally filed them to painful points. I don’t realize I’m saying anything at all, don’t even notice I’m onstage in front of an audience until a small girl, ten or eleven years old, in the front row shouts.
“Oh my god!” she says as Spif comes out. “Pain-proof?” She looks to her mom.
She has on a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt, and when I ask the audience if we should add some weight on top of Spif after he’s lain down on top of the bed of nails—a question that consistently draws cheers from the audience—the little girl screams.
“No!” she says, her hands flying to her face in case she needs to keep from witnessing the bloodshed.
I sit on him anyway, too tired to add much fanfare, and when I get to the autopilot section where I ask Spif how he feels, he answers, “Not great,” his autopilot response in a comically pained voice. I tell the audience that he says he feels great, and the little girl screams again.
She pounds one flat hand onto the stage and looks me deep in the eye.
“Not great,” she says, insistent. “He said not great.”
I wake up. It’s easy to forget, after all the groans and eye rolls from the audience, that there are those who believe. There are audience members who think the headless woman illusion really is a headless woman, who trust in our deceit. And yet, the bed of nails act isn’t deceit. Spif really does lie down on a bed of nails and I really do sit on top of him, but somehow, few people seem to think it is painful or dangerous or, really, very impressive at all.
Little brown eyes are staring me down. Here I am, the monster, hurting someone, intentionally harming a person’s body. How could I? And why?
I lower myself down onto him as I do every day, every twenty minutes, pressing into his back as his body presses into the bed of nails beneath him, and the girl, who has broken eye contact with me to look at Spif, to check on his well-being and monitor him for blood, suddenly darts her eyes back to mine.
The twenty or so other people in the audience are amused. She is not.
“You’re a jerk,” she says between my sentences.
The audience giggles.
I agree with her.
* * *
I think about the little girl later that day, how strange and delightful it was to be forced out of my stupor while performing. How odd to live inside a carnival and be here, thinking about how to do an act, but to have my brain elsewhere much of the time. Imagining what my parents are doing, or what it will be like to go back to California without them. What my brother and I will say to each other on the plane to collect them from Italy.
I enter the long, low, dimly lit buildings that house all the state fair competitions and walk slowly among the tables, repeating what I see in my head with the “Happy Birthday” melody I’d recently heard my mom hum when we talked on the phone, happy birthday a code, I was sure, for Hello, I’m thinking of you. It was nobody’s birthday.
Duct tape apparel
Lard-based cooking
Yeast breads
Fancy cakes
Pickled goods
Jams
Jellies
Spam parent
Spam child
Novelties for a man
Flower arranging
Vegetable sculpture
Butter sculpture
I want to be present. Here, in this weird world. With tractors made of butter.
I read that to enter the miniature pony show, your pony must be shorter than thirty-four inches.
A woman outside the building, wearing a jeweled kerchief, is blow-drying her pony’s tail and mane. She spritzes it with something, hairspray maybe, and then keeps blow-drying. The pony is cool and collected.
NORMALAPHOBIA
Day 88 of 150
World of Wonders
September 2013
A large and battered asphalt parking lot separates the gas pump where the van refuels from the Subway lunch destination. We’re on a jump between Kansas and Arkansas. Short E lifts himself onto a skateboard and, using one gloved hand to balance his body on the board, uses the other to push against the rocky pavement toward the sandwiches. “I was a semipro skater for a while,” he tells me, gliding atop the board with ease and speed. “I skated with Tony Hawk before the X Games made him a douche.”
Inside Subway, a kid, three or four years old, is waiting for his mom to bring his food to the table and catches sight of Short E rolling across the asphalt toward the sandwich shop. He presses his face against the glass, mouth open and smeared on the window, his eyes never leaving the approaching man. Short E glides inside. The kid stares. The mother, a large woman with embroidered flowers on her pink T-shirt and a ruddy face, reaches her hand to her son’s cheek as fast as she can get it there and turns it in another direction. She lets go, and he swivels right back around to Short E. The mom tries again, scolding her boy. Don’t stare, she says in a loud whisper. Stop staring. Short E orders a turkey sandwich. The mom has given up, and she and the kid both stare. He doesn’t get any vegetables. Extra mayo.
“Not even lettuce or something?” I ask. “Pickles?”
He shakes his head.
“How can you get all your vitamins?”
“Thanks for your concern, Mom,” he says. Then, “Back in the day, I was sponsored and everything. Back when skateboarding was fun and full of punks.”
* * *
The first famous “half boy” was Johnny Eck, who performed on the sideshow circuit for much of the twentieth century and died in 1991. Born in 1911 with a truncated torso due to sacral agenesis, Eck was walking on his hands at the age of one year, long before his twin brother could walk on his feet. As a kid, he often stood atop a small box when company was over and practiced his sermons, denouncing beer and sin. It was a big hit, until he passed around his collection plate.
Eck was an acrobat, painter, illusionist, musician, business owner, photographer, actor, and expert model-maker. He signed a management contract with a magician and went on the road with his brother. He was billed for years as the “half boy,” or “the amazing half boy,” and later as the “king of the freaks,” and then finally, “the most remarkable man alive.” For most of his career it was boy, though, not man. For many freak performers, there was a certain fear that ran alongside the audience’s curiosity, and to stabilize some of that fear, the performers were emasculated. Presented not as men, but as boys. Or as part animals—Eck was cast as a bird-man in the Tarzan films. The relationship between sexuality and perceived monstrosity is complicated, and from what I saw on the road with Short E, involved both extreme attraction and repulsion. Some people left a wider berth around him than they might another person when they passed, but for many others, for many women we met on the road, the opposite was true. Sh
ort E met a lot of women. A. Lot. Of. Women. Many nights, one of their faces appeared like a little floating ghost in the darkness once the show closed. Short E would light a cigarette, put on his cowboy hat, and sit at the top of the steps, chatting with them. Often, within a few minutes, the woman and Short E would be gone. He’d appear the next morning with the chipper grin of a good night and indoor heating/plumbing.
“How the fuck you make that work, Short E?” Spif asked one morning just after Short E rolled in.
“Ha,” Short E said. “You gotta learn some fucking lady skills, man. Plus, I can do things that you can’t do. I can do things that no other man can do. Think about it,” he said, lifting himself up on his hands and swinging his torso between his arms. He looked over at me, where I was obviously calculating some angles. “Tess, I can tell you’re thinking about it. You wanna give it a test run? Free of charge.”
“Very kind offer,” I said. “I’ll consider it.”
“No customers are disappointed.”
“That’s a bold testimony.”
“I do bold things,” he said. “And whatever, man, you get pussy sometimes. I seen it,” Short E said to Spif.
“Never as much as I could use,” Spif said.
“Amen to that,” said Short E.
* * *
In the Subway, Short E and I are sitting across from each other, eating our sandwiches. The little kid at the table next to us is sitting backward on his seat, still staring at Short E. Finally, his mom picks the kid up and they leave. Short E walks over to the soda machine and starts to reach up with one hand to refill his coke, but a teenager nearby asks if he can help.
“Nah, man, I got it,” Short E says, filling up his cup. All eyes in the restaurant watch him doing this very boring thing. Me, too. I watch him. I watch him a lot. This is the hard part. I both recognize the ridiculousness and sometimes total insult of the way Short E is ogled all the time, and yet he is fascinating to watch. It’s so simple—he’s very good at getting around in the world in a way that most folks wouldn’t know how to do.
“People treat me like they’re wearing kid gloves,” Short E says. Last season, he tells me, a man in line behind him at McDonald’s insisted on paying for Short E’s meal, then handed him a twenty-dollar bill.
“Did you take it?” I ask, thinking of the injustice.
“Shit yeah, I did,” he says. “People always hand me money. Pay for my meals in restaurants, or hand me tips. Like I’m my own charity. And I always take it. If they’re going to be jackasses enough to just hand me their money, I’m going to take it. It takes away the insult. Then it’s just another version of GTFM.”
“GTFM,” I parrot back.
“Does it bother you that you look so normal?” he asks. I ponder this, the years I spent trying to look as much like everyone around me as I could.
“Kind of.”
“It would bother the shit out of me.”
“People don’t usually believe me when I say I’m with the show. They think I’m the stagehand or something,” I say.
“You do have to do more work because of it.”
“To prove myself, you mean?”
“No. You ever notice who always gets sent in to reserve rooms at hotels, or talk to bosses, that kind of shit?”
“Oh,” I say. I hadn’t considered why it was always me.
“People are comfortable around you, because you look like their dentist or their kid’s teacher. You wear cardigans and shit. That’s why you sell so many Bibles and turn so many people on the blade box. They trust you and your weirdly normal whitey female self.”
“Shit’s not fair.”
“If only they could have seen you dumping their money out of your underwear backstage. You’re as crooked as the rest of us,” he says, giving me what I’m sure is a nod of approval.
* * *
It is evening, still an hour or two before the darkness that brings twinkling lights, still five hours until we’ll close for the night. We are backstage at the Arkansas-Oklahoma combined state fairs. Moments between acts. I am staring out the truck’s back end, pretending I’m inside a moment of peace and quiet when I hear Cassie say, “Well, Tessa’s a shitty performer anyway.”
This kind of playful teasing is usually easy to ignore, laugh away, stick my middle finger at, and move on from.
But not today. I have space for no humor inside me.
I turn from my blank stare. Look the hunter right in the eyes.
“Fuck you,” I say.
“I’m just kidding,” she says, sighing like having to explain this is exhausting. But her knife is glinting as she picks her teeth with its blade. Her sword is sheathed against her side.
“Fuck you,” I say again, not dropping her gaze. My hackles are raised.
“Chill out. Jesus,” she says. “You know I’m kidding.”
I do know, but my teeth are chiseling themselves inside my mouth. The idea is unbearable. That I am a shitty performer. That after these months, after this literal blood, sweat, and tears, I’m no good.
“Get over it, come here,” she says, standing and starting toward me with her arms out wide.
“Don’t come any closer to me,” I tell her. I am coming unhinged. My organs might explode out of my body, because I’m suddenly so filled with anger. My head is rocketing straight to outer space.
“Come on, come here, baby,” she says, stepping toward me.
“I’m serious.” I do not want her love. I cannot bear a body forcing its love on me.
“Hug me, baby.”
“Leave me alone,” I snarl, and my mouth makes blood and calls for her blood and my skin is hot with the memory of stage lights and the burning possibility that I’m no good out there. I put a hand up as a stop sign to warn her to stay back.
“I’m hugging you,” she says, and she is upon me. She is standing. I am still sitting in the chair, and her arms close around me like terrible shackles. I push them off, but she is stronger, and she leans down to bury her face in my shoulder, and I punch at her side, my eyes gone from my head, my face hot and throbbing, and she leans in even harder, grabs me tighter, trying to smother me with her love, and my mouth opens up on her shoulder. My teeth clamp into her skin. Bite down.
I feel her arms loosen. She stands up, laughing at first, and rubs at her shoulder.
“Teeth marks,” she says, rubbing the skin on her shoulder and then looking at me, still laughing a little with surprise. But then the laughing stops. “Jesus Christ, Tessa. You bit me.”
* * *
Let me start again.
Two months earlier, three fairs and four and a half weeks into the season, I turned thirty. On the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I found four different bags of Doritos on my bed. Big bags, not the kind you buy at the fair for walking tacos, but the giant air-stuffed bags, all with different flavors—Nacho, Cool Ranch, Taco, Pizza. I ripped into one immediately, first thing in the morning, tasted that salty chemical crunch and crumble in my mouth. It was the greatest luxury I could remember, something unattainable in this closed system. When I turned around, Cassie was standing in the hallway, beaming. She started jumping up and down and clapping her hands. “Do you love it? Do you love it? Do you love it?” she chanted, and I did, so deeply, hadn’t even remembered telling her my birthday tradition, which was to give myself this gift once a year: unlimited Dorito-eating. This secret self-love nobody else had ever paid attention to before.
But she had, Cassie, and procured them by some unknowably complicated means, this pile of salty love, this unexpected kindness that nearly made me weep.
The part of my mouth that had tasted those Doritos and then later had come down on her skin were the incisors, maybe a bit of the canines.
* * *
I don’t apologize. Not right at first, still flushed with anger. But later in the evening, when my adrenaline cools, I start feeling sour in my stomach. I’d punched Cassie. Bitten her. Even if she’d initiated it, even if she hadn’t stopped
when I asked her to stop, the difference in our actions was huge. I’d never physically hurt anyone before, never had an eruption of violence. I hadn’t been able to control myself. I couldn’t stop thinking about that part. Some internal animal had taken over and hurt someone else and I had not stopped it. I had not wanted to stop it. What worried me was that the bite felt good. Like I was finally able to scratch an itch that had been bothering me for a long, long time.
I try to make it up to her. Leave a dumb apology note on her pillow. Give her space. Text her sorry. Try to chat here and there. No response. She walks away. And then, as I am blathering on to her four days later about some dumb idle thing, hoping that perhaps the best thing is to pretend as if nothing has happened, to sweep the whole thing under the rug, she spins toward me.
“I will not ever be your friend,” she says. “You are an abusive person. I know about abusive people. I get to choose who I want to be around in my life, and I choose to have nothing to do with you.”
I am struck silent.
The sickness in my stomach almost spews right out of me. I am an abuser. I am as bad as they come.
* * *
A month or so before, Cassie, slumped beside our bunks after another fight with one of the other performers, had told me about her life. She was on our truck’s dirty ground in fishnets and a hoodie. We were closed for the night. She told me stories about her mother. Her ex-husband. I wasn’t sure how often she shared these stories with people in her life, but they were tough stories about people who’d hurt her and things she’d come through, and I was grateful for her trust. It was hard to imagine these histories happening to the quick-witted, loud-mouthed talker on the bally stage who was always smiling. Remembering this made what I did—hurting her—feel a thousand times worse. That she had been through pain and I’d hurt her in a way that connected me to the worst people in her life.
Story goes: she’d moved far away from her home to start school. And one night two teenagers started to mug her and, unwilling to have this new safe city taken from her, she started screaming at the top of her lungs, flailing her arms, swearing and kicking at them, and, fearing a sick animal, they fled. She couldn’t stop shaking. I’ve never felt safe again, she said.
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 31