She can’t work a regular job, she says, but she’s gotten really good at Dance Dance Revolution and she has been practicing her bally talking all off-season. What she really wants, though, is to be filled up with a baby.
“Tommy!” she calls to him often. “Please, just put a little baby right in here,” pointing to her stomach and winking at him.
* * *
Three days after the bite, H-Town Hank—so named because as far as they could remember, nobody had seen him, in his thirty-five years in the business, not nodding off from heroin—appears at my side on the midway toward closing time. He and Cassie are friends.
“I heard you’re crazy, lady,” he says, laughing his deep, wet laugh, laughing hard, almost hysterically. He pats me on the shoulder. “I hear you’re not one to mess with,” he says, then is suddenly quiet. He raises his well-plucked eyebrows at me and walks away. I wish I could feel proud and tough, like I’d finally made a name for myself here as a person who shouldn’t be screwed with. But the only thing I feel is shame.
* * *
There is no great moment of clarity arriving, by the way. No good answer to why or how it would be okay that I did this. When I think of her, of betraying her trust, of the days and then weeks afterward, sharing a bunk with her when she wouldn’t make eye contact with me, of how sad that made me, and then mad, and then embarrassed, I want to barf. Who am I? Who am I? I had a chance to de-escalate the situation, and I rejected it. Went, instead, for blood. Couldn’t make blood happen. Just tooth marks.
I couldn’t hack it.
* * *
A few days after the bite, in the van, Rash and I are alone while the rest of the crew runs a late-night errand. He turns to me from where he sits on the seat in front of me, still in full clown makeup, wearing his spiky dog-collar choker and big dirty matted red wig.
“The way you handled Cassie,” he says, and the blood drains from my whole body. “That’s how you get respect here. It was necessary. And great. You were being a pussy before. A pushover. Now you have asserted yourself. They’ll respect you more.”
“She hates me,” I say.
“Maybe, but at least she notices you now. Before you were nobody. Now you are somebody. You pushed back.”
“I hate me.”
“Fine by me,” he says, turning back around. “But I don’t think you’re so bad. Just needed some balls, that’s all.”
I cover my face with both hands, bury it against the seat.
“Sorry. Ovaries. You just needed stronger ovaries.”
INVISIBILIA
Two years and eleven months after the stroke
Day 51 of The Trip
September 2013
I stumbled onto a place which was invisible. It was a space where there seemed to be no space, Davy wrote from Italy. It was a story I’d heard before, a story he’d tell when he wanted to explain the pleasure of secret places, and his absolute devotion to the idea of traveling narrow and deep, as opposed to wide and quick.
I mean it was there, of course, but one’s attention was taken elsewhere as you passed by.
My parents are in Rome. They’ve rented a little apartment and are staying for a few weeks. My brother and I get a few lines about the Vatican, a few about the fountain of Trevi. In one e-mail, the featured photo is a close-up on a Nutella and crepes advertisement, with a short paragraph about how deeply Davy loves Nutella, how he could eat a jar with a spoon without pausing for breath, how it takes all his restraint not to dive naked into a fountain of Nutella. Sorry, he writes. I’m sure that’s not an image you want in your head.
This update begins with some photographs of the Spanish Steps, then quickly moves elsewhere.
45 years ago, Davy writes, in 1968, my family visited Rome and in the evenings I would sometimes wander off from the hotel to do a little exploring. One night while strolling above the Spanish Steps, he found a place where two roads diverged, leaving a little wedge of land in between. I followed the wall back to the street which headed down the hill. I found myself under some arches with vines or something hanging down.
There, he writes, he lit up a joint and sat in the shadows, watching the city pass by. Nobody could see him. Being in a swirl of people and not being seen. I always remembered that little place. It was my secret in an ancient city.
There’s a photograph of my mom, hand shielding her eyes as she looks down a little strip of grassy land flanked by old, crumbling bricks and a few flaking pillars. She’s in Bubbles, the wheelchair with the off-roading tires, and in the next photograph she’s beside an old, dried fountain, assessing the ruin. Bulges of stone protrude from the fountain’s central pillar. After forty-five years, Davy had not only remembered this place, but was able to recall where it was, and how to get there. He’d been talking about it as they were planning their trip because he wanted to share his secret place with his wife.
Why was this fountain here? Davy writes. Had it played an important role in someone’s life? Who designed it? Was he coerced into building it? What were those growths on the side of the fountain?
His questions continue, a whole list, a translation of an inner monologue I almost never saw anymore, this kind of focus on something other than my mom, or emergency, pills, wounds, pain.
But they were in a different kind of life right now. The life that was dictated by emergencies, pills, wounds, and pain was there, but it was the internal architecture of their day instead of the external. Their eyes were directed outside.
There they were, far away, wandering some old, forgotten road and finding a place that was entirely theirs, something that felt like a secret, a place that allowed them to invent stories about other lives and the marks other people left on the world. And what might theirs be?
Even with the story Davy writes about finding this special place years later, and wondering about the history, and remembering his teenage trip, and seeing the photos, even with all that, the pictures and the descriptions are glimpses into a world my mom and Davy have found that my brother and I are not a part of. For the first time, I imagine what it would be like to have a child going off into the world, making her own life with her own experiences, and how I would feel happy for her, and excited, and also quite sad that I was no longer a necessary part of it.
BLOODLUST
Day 97 of 150
World of Wonders
September 2013
“His eyeball was sinking,” Dale says, “so the socket’s probably smashed. Both his cheekbones are shattered, that’s for sure.” Dale is a massive game jock with thick hoops sagging from his ears.
I wrap my mouth around a giant turkey leg and peel off a chunk of meat. Nod.
“Fucker,” he says. “I mean, I stay out of it.”
“What happened?” I ask, wiping grease from my lips with the back of my hand. The midway’s asphalt is growing hot beneath our feet. Dale unfurls his game’s canvas awning, pins a few stuffed bulldogs, whose brown cigars sag limp from their felt teeth, to the corners. The fair will open in forty minutes, and by then Dale will be calling marks into his game, I will be in fishnets with no head, and the high school band now rehearsing the national anthem in the rodeo ring will figure out how to hit those high notes.
“You know, same dumb shit,” he says, and I nod, but I do not know, not much. It’s what I’m hoping I’ll learn tonight. Tonight there’s a carnie jamboree.
What I know so far is that the carnie with the sinking eyeball was a game jock, and after some minor conflict exploded, the ongoing ride vs. game jock rivalry unfolded in a brutal beatdown. This was the way of the carnival. A manic buzz always broiling that could be neither created nor destroyed, but spun on in little hurricanes of violence and excess. I’d finally seen it erupt in me, and was ready to witness it elsewhere.
“I’m gonna buy a ranch after this season,” Dale says. “Get some sheep, steer. Nothing too big.” The September sun shines off his bald head, heat as consistent as the always-humming milk factory across the street.<
br />
“Maybe Wyoming,” he says, rubbing the cuts across his knuckles.
The stereotype of the American carnie as rough and lawless, toothless and tweaking, had proved both true and untrue, as stereotypes go. We were showpeople, a category I was often reminded was separate from carnies, but I’d heard people on all sides call themselves freaks. The carnival is a kingdom of self-identified outsiders. But what beat on everywhere, unwavering, was the threat of violence, a heavy breath on the back of the neck. Teeth ready to clamp. Which is why events like what would be taking place tonight were scheduled—an opportunity to blow off steam, or, as I’d heard someone joke, a chance for a contained explosion. It had just been our bad luck, Sunshine had told me, that none of the carnivals we’d been performing with had held a jamboree while we were with them. Well, bad luck and good luck, she explained. They could be fun, and wild, but it’s also often where things got out of hand, where the hundreds of carnies with a collective excuse to get drunk and high inside the fairgrounds boiled over into violence. Where women should walk with not one but two men back to their bunks, where drinks were cheap and expectations high.
And here, tonight, our luck, good or bad, is about to change: a jamboree looms.
* * *
The party begins once the front gates are locked.
Rides across the midway that usually hold a few workers repairing a bucket seat or scrubbing barf are empty, though the bunkhouses behind our tent are full of carnies laughing and whooping, draping one another in togas. Usually this manic energy pulsed through the kids with mouthfuls of cotton candy, wisps hardening in little red crystals around their mouths as they flailed off the scrambler, but not tonight. Tonight, that buzz broils everywhere. I will be on the front lines of unbridled wildness.
The good attitude I’d arrived with, my smiley willingness to help, was fading over time. Or toughening. Adapting. Dale yells, “Marry me, Ms. Hollywood,” every time I pass by.
“I would, but I think your wife would be mad,” I say, pointing to John, the wiry carnie in the balloon dart game beside him whose hand, I’d just heard, had been rebroken the night before.
This, our ninth fair in the three months we’ve been on the road, is a combined state fair for both Oklahoma and Arkansas, and the corn dogs and funnel cakes and frozen bananas are now all too familiar, but because this is the season’s first carnie jamboree, I’m primed for chaos. Imagining an orgy with face splintering, circling meth pipes, destruction. Now that I’m an insider, I’m ready to come face-to-face with the blood and bones.
What does not occur to me at the moment of this bloodlust, will not occur to me until later, is that I am actively seeking the violence. I want to witness the worst. Why? For the story I’ll tell about it later, sure, but there’s something else. Something uglier.
* * *
Earlier in the evening, a few of the lot men closed one of the bumper car rides early and carried the cars one by one out of the pen. The detached cars formed a long row behind the ride, glittering red and green and gold ovals ringed with rubber. The bumper pen was filled instead with tables holding huge trays of ribs, chicken, potato salad, green beans, and macaroni. Up front were auction items: leather work gloves, tool sets, an electric kettle, and ten or fifteen different kinds of liquor in decorative bottles with attached shot glasses. Red donated one of the swords he frequently deep-throats.
In the bathroom, women spritz cotton-candy body spray across their chests, vanilla surprise into their hair. About 20 percent of the carnies are women. “Want some?” one asks as I pass.
“Yes, please,” I say, grateful, and hoping to cover some of what sweating through the Arkansas heat in full costume smells like.
* * *
Our sideshow crew rolls into the jamboree, and immediately Short E returns from some dark corner with a baggie of Jell-O shots dangling from his teeth.
“It’s time,” he says, passing me a plastic cup. I start to squeeze it, but he grabs the shot out of my hand.
“Not like that,” he sighs. “Watch this.” He wedges the tip of his tongue between the Jell-O and the plastic, then wriggles the tip and twists the cup in a full circle.
“Did the strippers teach you that?” I ask.
He raises his eyebrows, gives me a thin smile, and begins tonguing another. “They taught me a whole lot more than that,” he says, swallowing and then twerking against my leg before heading off in search of more.
I sit down and wait for something to happen. Something nasty. All around, people are talking and laughing and sipping, but I stay put. I have an idea that if I can get my face right up against one of the tent-pole beatdowns I’ve heard about, or directly beside John’s rebroken hand—now full of sores and boils from wrapping it in dirty pieces of cloth for so many months—then maybe I will have some way of measuring the vague darkness of this place.
Here’s the worst thing that happened, I’ll be able to report. This is how close I was to it.
Of course, what I actually see are carnies sipping Budweisers and grinding and occasionally disappearing past the reach of the lights.
A man with clean clothes and a tucked-in shirt sits beside me. He has a full set of teeth and not much of a tan. Clearly a boss. Without looking up from his plate of food, he asks if I know why Red used to be called Lizard Red.
I do not.
“For years, Lizard Red ran our reptile show,” he says. “One night, I woke up to a pounding on my door at three a.m. The rain was pouring and thunder was booming. ‘Get up,’ Lizard Red yelled. ‘The storm broke our sixteen-foot python’s cage and she’s somewhere down the midway.’” The boss chuckles as he bites into his BBQ sandwich, a lightness in his voice like he’s telling his favorite joke. “I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” he says, “and my first thought was—what do you put on to chase a giant python in the middle of a huge storm? I panicked and put on all the clothes I could find. By the time I waddled out of my trailer, Lizard Red was walking down the center of the midway in the pouring rain with the giant snake wrapped around his body.”
“What did you do?” I ask the boss.
“Nothing,” he says. “We put the snake in its cage and opened for business the next morning.”
“I thought that story was going to end with something terrible happening,” I say.
“That’s our business. Steering clear of disaster.”
* * *
All week, the thick smell of BBQ smoke has wafted over the Mirror Maze and Alpine Bob’s from carnietown, where Merlin, whose job it is to dispose of all the carnival tickets at the end of each day, lit them on fire and cooked ribs.
“Had to find something to do with the tickets,” he said, holding a plate of ribs inside our big red-and-blue circus tent earlier that day, grease pooling in small orange rivulets across the Styrofoam. With more than 135,000 visitors to this fair each year, thousands of tickets pass from tellers to riders each day and make their way into the sweaty palms of kids in line for the Crazy Mouse roller coaster they’re finally tall enough to ride. And then they make meat. Merlin keeps coming to our tent because he likes Cassie, and he brings her plates of ticket meat.
He stands across the bumper car ring and I smile, wave. He glares back.
* * *
The auction, which funds some carnie charity, is jovial, so I duck out toward the bathrooms on the far side of the fairground to see if teeth are snarling elsewhere. The carnival is empty, dark. The boats bob silently in their pool, a half-moon reflected on the water. Carousel horses stall midprance. Though I can still hear shouts from the jamboree, there is also now the soft chirp of cicadas in the low trees around the fair, the factory whirring and motoring on through the night, and a baby inside a trailer, crying.
I avoid the upturned pile of funnel cake beside the pickle on a stick. The carnival buzzes on elsewhere, somewhere. Here I am in the center of it, but somehow always outside of it, too.
You’ll never believe what I saw, I start composing in my head, my eyes searchi
ng wildly across the grounds. They land on a mirror outside the Mirror Maze that shrinks my head, doubles my feet. Too obvious. And yet, I feel like a distorted version of myself, the kind of person who bites a friend. A vulnerable friend. And likes it.
The country-rap remix of the summer blares from the bumper car’s speakers. A toothless, bone-skinny woman charges me from head on, then apologizes profusely and walks off. Take me with you, I want to say. Instead, I see Dale.
Dale’s silver hoops jiggle as he laughs and slaps the back of the carnie he’s talking to. I begin to walk over, a snarky joke readied, but he joins another group and they all turn to walk off into the fairgrounds.
“Dale!” I call, and he spins back to me.
“What about horses on the ranch?” I ask him.
“Sure,” he says. “Hell yeah.”
“When the season’s over?”
“Yeah,” he says. Then, “Well, if I can save up enough. If not, then next year. Definitely next year.”
“Next year,” I echo.
“Night, Hollywood,” he says, walking toward the low moon.
* * *
The two honky-tonk bars down the road are closed and, despite Fort Smith being the town where Elvis received his first military haircut, no rock ’n’ roll music blares from anywhere off the fairground. A few carnies form a semicircle around Short E and ask him how he shits and if he can fuck. Same questions he gets everywhere. I want to say here that a fire starts or a massive fight breaks out, something to commemorate the end of the night, but the jamboree just trails off into a tray of leftover ribs being scraped into a garbage bag for someone to take back to their bunkhouse.
Two people remain. Despite a booming dubstep remix, the couple sways slowly, gently, a hint of vanilla mist as I pass.
The whoops and hollers continue in the distance, the night’s electricity, true to the second law, neither created nor destroyed but still glowing somewhere farther away than I know how to reach. The couple wraps their arms around each other’s shoulders and walks into the darkness.
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 32