* * *
After months of negotiation, Tommy agrees to let me leave for three days. This, I was reminded, was unprecedented. People don’t leave. Or, people don’t leave and then come back.
“My grandfather died two seasons ago,” Tommy says in the van to Walmart. We’re in Georgia. Honey Boo Boo saw the show earlier that day. “I didn’t go home for the funeral.”
“I didn’t leave when one of my best friends died,” Sunshine says.
“I wouldn’t leave for anything,” Spif says. “When you’re here, you’re here. The rest of the world is dead.”
I watch Tommy in front of me, one hand loosely on the steering wheel. He has a metal bar as thick as a finger pierced through the back of his neck and a puzzle-piece tattoo on the inside of his wrist that I can see when he turns the wheel. The silence in the van is just as full of meaning as the words had been. There are the kinds of people for whom the rest of the world is dead while they are here, and there are the other kinds. The kinds who probably can’t hack it.
The puzzle piece is just an outline of a puzzle piece, connected to nothing.
* * *
Truth is, I was nervous about leaving. Very, very nervous. I’d been around this crew for four months, day and night, and I couldn’t imagine being away. But there was my other life, dangling just past the edge of my vision. A good friend of mine was getting married out in California, an old friend, and she’d asked me to be in the wedding, and I’d accepted, thrilled, months before I’d decided to join the show. It was at a fancy vineyard south of San Francisco, and fancy college friends of mine who had jobs in things like finance and PR and veterinary medicine would be there, and they’d have that bland skin smell of living indoors with plumbing, the smell of whatever nice perfume they’d wear and not this deep dirt stink from so many months in the truck.
I couldn’t sleep the night before I left, I was so buzzed with excitement. And when I caught the bus to the airport, my legs wouldn’t stop jiggling and my heart was racing. I was thrilled. I was thrilled and something else. Something hard to place.
I took a plane all the way back west. It was the first time I was in California when my parents weren’t. But there wasn’t much time to think about that. There was time only to drive down to the wedding rehearsal, to pull up to a giant chateau on top of a hillside, I mean straight up fairy-tale castle, and lather myself in deodorant. I thought about wiping it on my neck and the backs of my knees, but the bride pulled up. I gave her hugs. And the bridesmaids piled out of the car and I gave them hugs, too, and I thought, See? I’m just like them, and we’re all here and we have nice enough hair and I can laugh just like everybody else can.
We practiced walking the aisle, and then we moved on to drinking. And eating, too, a little later. That’s when the trouble began.
“So what are you doing these days?” one of my college friends asked.
“Well, I know this sounds a little weird, but I’m performing with a traveling sideshow.”
“Ha ha ha,” he said.
“I know. But, actually, I am.”
“Wait, what? Doing what?”
“Depends on the day. Fire eating, snake charming. Talking a contortion act.”
“Holy shit. Why?”
We were eating shrimp and drinking some nice white, I mean, we had little pink tails in our hands, and while I didn’t have an immediate answer ready, the long-winded story I’d use to talk around the question was one I was sure he didn’t want to hear.
“I don’t know, really. For fun?”
“Is it fun?”
“Sometimes.”
“Weren’t you, like, the student speaker at college graduation or something like that?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“And now you’re eating fire.”
“Now I’m eating fire.”
* * *
The night went on, and then the next day with the hair and makeup and wedding and dancing and toasts and it all was fine, lovely, I mean, but a little like something I was spying on from another room. Even though I’d scrubbed and scrubbed in the shower, I still thought I smelled different, I had cuts and calluses on my hands, my shoulders were the deep brown of outside labor, and I don’t mean to say I was somehow suddenly tough and nobody there was, but I couldn’t stop thinking about all my showpeople friends, working and working and working. I hated it. I thought about them and thought about them and chided myself for thinking about them, reminded myself not to text them pictures of flowers woven into hearts because I was here and having so much fun so how could I be thinking about them, and besides, the sideshow was tiring, so exhausting, and I’d turned into a beast out there, an aggressor, something so far outside of the kind of person I thought I was, and then I thought about them more. I wondered how the show was going. How big the audience was. If the person who had been pooping in the shared bathroom’s shower stall had stopped.
But I danced around, doing my best to fake it. That, I was very good at. Playing my part. Well, pretty good at. Though not the dancing part so much. I was limping my whole trip, my hip throbbing with each step from something I’d done to it in setup a week or two before. I’d tweaked it pretty badly on top of the ladder as I’d been hanging lights. So I was limp-dancing and keeping a smile on my face and reapplying deodorant every time I went to the bathroom just to be sure—by the end of the night I had a white crust under there—and feeling more sure each moment that I didn’t belong here.
I was to fly out the next night. I had a few hours to spend roaming the city with Devin, and when he rounded the corner to meet me at a café, I almost lost it. I wasn’t sure he’d be able to recognize me, if how I was changing internally could be seen externally as well.
“Jesus, kid,” he said once we started walking. He was concerned. My arm was hooked into the crook of his elbow to help with my limp, and my skin was still very tan and I was cussing like a sailor. I did not talk about the sideshow, because it seemed like any words I could say about it would be too small, too insignificant.
I bought candies for the performers I’d return to, sweets and cookies and chips and toys and little gifts that I felt I needed to give them in order to atone for leaving.
I didn’t look around and think about the fact that this city might not see my parents again. I did touch the jar of kimchi in the market, thinking a little wish-prayer for my mom.
“You don’t have to go back,” Devin said as I was getting ready to head to the airport. “You can stay on my couch for as long as you need, you can find a job here, you can let this hip heal, whatever.”
I thought about that, letting my body feel for a moment the sensations of living indoors, of walking through cities alone, my city, of erasing who I’d become out there. My loyal, lovely friend, trying to help.
“I know that’s a possibility,” I said.
“So? Do it.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I can’t let them down.”
“Tessa. The show will go on without you.”
“Yeah,” I said, and it was true. They’d be fine. The show would go on. They’d finish the season and be no worse off, except that for a little while they’d be a person short and would each have to pick up a little bit of the slack. Except that I’d leave the show without having learned every single act, without having an act that I know wows each person watching each time: the electric chair. And except for the fact that someone would take that permanent marker and write on the inside of the truck, TESSA: Couldn’t hack it.
The only way through it is through it. There is no trick.
“I gotta go,” I said, hugging Devin.
“All right,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t kill yourself out there.”
So I went back to the show.
* * *
Nobody will look me in the eye.
Tommy picks me up from the airport, sweet, sweet Tommy, and says he missed me, says the show wasn’t the same
without me, and I want to cry in gratitude for his white lies. When we arrive at the lot where setup has begun at the Pensacola Interstate Fair in Florida, I climb out of the van, pull on my work gloves, and am ready for a stream of hellos, how was your trip, how we’ve missed yous. But there is work to be done. And we are the workers. Nobody even really notices me. So I weave myself back in the best I know how, feeling like an alien, like a deserter, limping between tent poles, trying to work doubly hard to win some affection.
It doesn’t feel good, exactly, to be back, but it doesn’t feel bad either. I feel tired, immediately, and dirty, and guilty for having left. My bunk is still here, having housed the temporary performer—someone I’d recruited from Alabama with promise of adventure for a few days—who kindly replaced me while I was gone, and it looks the same. The snakes still coil around each other for warmth in their box. The banner-line crew, setting up the lights and flags that attach to the very top of the tallest poles out front, are managing just fine on their own, it seems, though when I offer help, Spif silently climbs off the ladder and motions for me to climb to the top. That’s my job. That’s what I know how to do. I mount the ladder, ascend to the top so my feet are near the highest rung, and I lean from there to attach items to the poles, slide in the flags, plug in the flashers, I do exactly what I know a person should not do for ladder safety, I reach farther out than I usually do during setup, work a little bit faster, because somehow I know, with the feeling of a rock in my stomach, that I don’t want to be here, and I do want to be here, and I didn’t miss it at all, and I missed it like crazy. I know that this place is inevitably, inexorably, but oh so temporarily, my home.
THE HEROES
Day 126 of 150
World of Wonders
October 2013
We are at the Pensacola Interstate Fair, and summer is ending. Even the leaves in Florida, the land of perpetual flip-flops, are turning gold and orange. The front-of-the-store Walmart displays have gone from Fourth of July to summer BBQs to back-to-school to Halloween, and the Halloween items will soon be discounted.
Marking a day when the boundary between the worlds of the living and dead is especially blurry, Halloween for us Americans in our costumes is a moment to become someone else. I feel like I’ve been doing some iteration of this for the entirety of the sideshow season, but this is a night to make that slippery identity explicit for everyone.
The fair bosses decide to throw a Halloween Jamboree. Halloween proper is still a few days away, but it’s a great excuse for a party. The last jamboree, thrown by another carnival company, was only a few weeks ago, but now we’re practiced in the art of Jell-O shots. We already have costumes, of course, but none of them seem like costumes anymore, since they are just our daily work clothes. Yet our fellow performers’ costumes are still costumes, and so we trade around. Cassie takes my bumblebee costume, I take her sailor suit. She’s become tolerant of me, though distanced, and I take whatever I can get. Big, Big Ben wears a sequined suit coat, and Spif found a sailor costume at some thrift shop nearby. The rest of the crew already have costumes, and once the gates close jamboree night, the marks locked out and us locked inside, the party begins.
It starts off like the other one. Drinks. An auction. Trays of food. But this time, almost everyone is in disguise. There are fake policemen and monsters and men in business suits with two-foot-long inflatable dicks sticking out of their pants and superheroes and pirates and naughty nurses and serial killers, and something about costumes changes the rules. Who can touch whom, and when, and how much. And the amount of booze that should go inside a person in order to make them feel a little bit better about the ostrich they are riding.
You did what you had to do.
That’s what everyone said after I told them the story of the Halloween jamboree night.
You did what anyone would have done.
That’s what everyone said after I told them the story of the last few years of my life, about how much I wanted to move back to help, about how I kept not doing it.
But none of us have to do anything. We make choices. I made choices.
* * *
We pass a trailer full of skeletons.
It is three or four in the morning, the auction is over, and Captain America asks Spif and me if we want to head back to his bunk where the other Avengers are having beers and passing some joints around. We do. We wave goodnight to the skeletons, to a man in a bear suit curling up under the Octopus. The Hulk is pouring ice on a cooler of beers outside their trailer, and Thor is smashing his hammer into the ground, yelling something about ultimate power. I settle into a camp chair between Spif and Captain America, and the other heroes throw a few of their trailer’s pillows into a small fire, and all is fine in costumed idle chitchat until a new group of faces emerges from the darkness.
“Hey,” a man’s voice says. “You work at Geoffrey’s pizza joint?”
“Yep,” Captain America says. “Who wants to know?”
“Your boss has been fucking with my girl,” the voice says.
“What the fuck?”
“He’s a piece of shit.”
“Who the fuck are you?” the Hulk says.
“Tell your boss—” the voice starts, but the rest of the sentence never arrives, because Captain America, who had been sitting beside me, throws a punch that travels right beside my face and lands on the nose of the stranger, who had walked up behind me. The stranger’s face takes the punch, but it hadn’t landed all that well, and he immediately cocks his fist to return the blow, and suddenly my head is being jerked but it isn’t by the force of a fist, which is a force I had tensed for, since I am seated between the two punchers, but instead I am being pulled by my hair. I have two braids beneath my sailor cap, and one is in a hand that is throwing me down to the ground and then yanking me out of the dog pile of superheroes and strangers forming where I had just been, as if their bodies were required to fill up the vacuum of space like water rushing in. There is the hard echo of a head hitting concrete, Thor’s head, and the superheroes might be wishing they could really split the earth in half and shoot lightning from the ground back up into the sky.
Spif eventually lets go of my hair and grabs me by the hand instead, and off we go, rounding the corner of the bunkhouse and running on. I ask him what’s going on, if he understands what is happening and he half laughs, half snorts. “Just two dumb groups of dudes needing to work out their feelings,” he says. And I ask if we should tell someone, or find help, and he says no, that everything’s fine, that it’s two seemingly evenly matched groups and those things always work out naturally and settle what needs to be settled, and we are running still, holding hands, past the other bunkhouses with carnies here and there still outside in their costumes and past the Zipper and funhouse and other darkened rides, and we finally round a corner closer to our tent and that’s when we see it.
A circle of men.
I have to stare.
Some are bent over. There are things in their hands. I am staring, because I’m afraid that what I’m seeing is too tinted with what we’d just run from.
The things in their hands are long and thin. Metal. Metal pipes.
In the middle of the circle is a man. He is on the ground. He is on his knees with his head down on the ground in front of him, his hands wrapping his head, and then he is on the ground on his side. This is the moment. I take a step forward, toward them, the great carnie hero that I am, and Spif, who has just done so much work to drag me by the hair from the last fight, grabs my shoulder and throws me back into the Honey Bucket we are standing beside.
“Are you fucking nuts?” Spif says.
“Are they killing that man?” I ask, my chest heaving, breathing jagged.
“Maybe,” he says.
“We have to stop them,” I say.
“Yeah?” he says. “You want to be in the middle of that?”
We are in the shadows of our tent, but the men who make up the circle can certainly see us. Nobody
seems to care. There’s nothing to hide. There are rules here and I don’t know them and I probably never will. But there is a human on the ground. Getting beaten. Badly.
“We could call the cops,” I say. My brain is rattling, desperate.
“Ha. You think they’d come?”
“They might.”
He swings his face over to me.
“The reason the guy is probably getting the shit kicked out of him is for calling the cops,” he says. “It’s not our business.”
“But—”
“No.”
“Spif—”
“Do you want to get us killed?”
I close my mouth. Watch the man on the ground.
“What do you think he did?” I ask quietly.
“Who knows,” Spif says. “But he probably deserves it.”
I lean against the Porta-Potty and watch the metal come down on the bones and organs and hair and unrecognizable black costume of the man on the ground, for five, ten more seconds. It’s their business.
“This isn’t safe,” Spif says. “Go get in our tent, now, and don’t come out until tomorrow.”
And I do. Just like that.
* * *
I never knew if the man lived or died.
I stood there, watching. And then I left.
The next morning, I walk over to the spot to check the grass for evidence, but the grass has already moved on. There is a tight squeeze around my throat, a hot guilt, a shame, like I am searching for the spot where I’d let a man die.
When I get back to our tent, Captain America is there with an apology slice of pepperoni pizza.
“Sorry you had to see our fight,” he says, handing me the pizza and a Coke.
“You guys okay?” I ask.
“Everyone’s fine. Was just some drunk bullshit. It’s all sorted out now. But we didn’t mean for you guys to be in the middle of that. Didn’t want you getting hurt. You didn’t, did you?”
“No, we ran away pretty quickly,” I say, “and ran right into another fight. An uglier fight. I didn’t stop it.”
The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts Page 33