Snake Girl VS the KKK

by Peter Joseph Swanson

  Tony took a step back, also. “Do you always do carnivals then?”

  “Hell no, not anymore. Maybe when I get old and toothless I can go back. A job is a job and what else can I do?” Michael laughed nervously and then asked him. “You’re still in high school. Right?”

  “Yeah.” Tony gave a nod. “And my dad teaches there. It’s so embarrassing. But it’ll be a help when I go on to college. Once I have my Associates I can transfer anywhere I want.”

  Michael was impressed. “What do you want to study?”

  “No idea.”

  “Sure.” Michael wished he’d gone to college to study theatre but then he’d have to get his GED first. “What does your dad teach?”

  Tony looked at Michael’s cheeks and asked how old he was.

  “I’m… twenty-one!”

  “Oh…”

  “That’s not old! My cheekbones make me look ageless.” Michael pulled up the front of his shirt to flash Tony his skinny belly. “Not old at all! What does your dad teach?”

  “History.”

  “Oh, I love history! Really. It takes me away… like… like a time machine! I love Camelot. Did you catch it on Channel 3 last Christmas? I was invited to a friend’s house who had a nice color TV and we drank wine. I really love history when it has songs. Say, don’t you think this place is a bore?”

  Tony looked around. He shrugged indifference. “It’s okay.”

  Michael looked at the milling crowd. “These people are all scary. You wanna get the hell out of here?”

  “Where could we go? This is it.”

  “Ummm…” Michael pretended to think. “We could go to my place. I have beer and records.” Then he realized a faux pas. “My manners have never been so bad. My name is Michael, after an archangel of some prestige. Pretty nice, huh? Are you wowed?”

  “I remember. I’m Tony.”

  “Yeah, I remembered yours. Tony. What a manly name.”

  Tony gave a manly nod. “S’pose so.”

  “Let’s go.”

  As they took off together down an alley towards his apartment, Michael kept his eyes peeled for any abandoned furniture he might want. He noticed a wood dresser but it lacked all its drawers so it didn’t tempt him.

  Up the stairs and inside the apartment above a shop, Tony looked around in amazement. The overhead bulb was hidden behind an opened white parachute that blossomed across the ceiling like an incredible attacking flower. Two red stepladders served as shelves for plaster figurines of saints and satyrs, nymphs and goddesses, choice jewelry, fingernail polish, a new plastic action figure of Sting from Dune, and other special objets d’ art— like his mod silver bottle of Booby Mama Booty Lube. On the built-in buffet, two model skulls on long candle rods grinned next to three wig stands. A pink plastic palm plant was draped in red Christmas lights. In a corner under hanging drying flowers was a plastic Halloween lawn ornament of a witch. Behind it was a movie poster of the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

  “Wow, what a strange house.”

  “Thanks. I got most at an alley sale—free stuff people throw away. Hey, how about a Schlitz? I’m always thirsty for bubbly swamp water after a grueling performance.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I just don’t feel like myself without a beer in my hand.” Michael picked up a cigarette lighter and lit several candles that were sunk in an array of flowerpots that once contained herbs now dead. Then he bounced off to the kitchen. He returned with a small platter of M&M cookies. “My favorite! S&M! It says on the wrapper they’re baked fresh by a grandma. I bet.” He held out the plate.

  Tony thanked him.

  “We could order a pizza if you’re hungry. I adore the Spinach Florentines at Pin Wheel. This is an important enough occasion for such a splurge!”

  “Oh, no, no, this is fine.” Tony took a gulp of his beer and wiped his chin. He looked at the red-painted stepladder shelves. “Cool silver bottle! So science fiction like.”

  Michael grinned and turned it around so he wouldn’t see “Booby Mama Booty Lube” printed on it. He joked, “It was a prop in 2001: A Space Odyssey. They needed special lotions on the spaceship. Long ride.”

  Tony noticed a guitar in the corner. “You play guitar?”

  “It’s not mine. I’m borrowing it to learn it. I’m borrowing it from somebody who gave up on learning it.” Michael gasped. “I should get glasses for this beer. I’m such a shitty host.”

  “The can’s fine. Sit down. Shut up.”

  “Yeah, this beer’s too cheap for glasses. What am I thinking?”

  “You play that thing at that bar?” Tony asked about the guitar. “You make lots of money?”

  “Hell no. I make more when I bartend. The tips are pretty good then—enough to keep me in cheap rent, cheap beer, cheap jokes.”

  “Sing something for me?”

  He took a gulp. “What? Here and now?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, okay.” Michael coughed to clear his throat. “Excuse me a moment, though, I need to go pee.” Michael left.

  Tony stretched his arms and looked around the room. On the coffee table, which was an artily painted wood door propped up on milk crates, was a large black book. In worn, gold letters it read, Art and the Occult. He flipped through it and recognized some of the plates—a Rembrandt, a Van Gogh, a Monet. Under the table was a milk crate filled with more books; anthologies of Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath, a book on the lost cities of Africa. There were worn paperback biographies on Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, and Marlene Dietrich.

  Michael came back. “So you found the library of Alexandria. I love used bookstores.”

  Tony nodded toward a picture of Nancy Reagan. “Why she here?”

  “She was a movie star. Now look at her.”

  “You voted for Reagan?”

  “Oh god no I don’t vote for anybody. They’re all Washington. No matter from what angle you look at Washington it’s still all Washington.”

  “So who do you want to run the country?”

  “The carnivals. The libraries. The donut shops. The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

  “Huh?” Tony dropped a book about God once being a woman. “You read all these?”

  “I’m a closet intellectual. Or I tried. I thought if I put something in my brain I wouldn’t be so horny all the time. It didn’t work. It just adds to the fantasies.” Michael picked up the guitar and strummed it. “I flunked all my math classes in school. Is that important?”

  Tony nodded and then shrugged.

  “Never mind.” He sat on the arm of the couch at Tony’s side. Tony tipped his can back. Michael violently strummed and sang, “Camp Shoshini, land of bed so stony, let me ride my pony, to the macaroni!” Then he laughed and said, “Just kidding. Just an old camp song from when I was a kid. Sometimes we all pretended we were Indians.”

  Tony frowned. “I never went to a camp that was actually out in the woods. Did you really live like Indians?”

  “No. Slept in cabins.” Michael smirked as if he’d just told a dirty joke.

  “What.”

  “Oh nothing.” Michael had an old memory of visiting another kid’s sleeping bag but being too young and stupid to know what to really do about it. Michael smiled. “I should do the song at the bar. Put it to drums in a way that’ll make it sound dirty… and sound holy. All drums sound dirty and holy if they follow the rhythm of the pulse. That’s the sound of life. If you’ve got a pulse you’re horny and it’s amazing how quickly the pulse can start pounding like a drum. Yeah, that’s it! I should add a groovy drumbeat to the song then people can dance and they won’t care what it’s really about… my innocent childhood at Camp Shoshini… a Baptist church camp.”

  Tony shrugged, looking around the room at the irreverent use of religious icons. “It seems a thing with you. The way you look and this place looks… like you’re a Satanist now.”

  “Oh, that!” He pooh-poohed the eccentric decor. “Just fashion.” M
ichael laughed. “I don’t believe in either.”

  Tony looked puzzled. “Either? Huh?”

  “I believe in fashion. I don’t believe in either Satan or worship.”

  “Okay. You believe in God?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of people seem to think I should… but I don’t know. It seems rather self-indulgent to me.”

  “Self-indulgent?”

  “All you do when you have religion is think about what your god thinks of you. It keeps you thinking about yourself. Not that I don’t do that anyway. I like religion though for the music when the music is cool. I have an album here somewhere of monks singing really ancient stuff. It makes me so horny, it’s so beautiful… you want me to put it on?”

  “No don’t put it on.” Tony looked around the room at all the odd stuff. He spotted a small photo of a carnival sideshow trailer. It was a bad photo, faded, folded and blurry. Snake Girl was painted on the side of the trailer. “Snake Girl. Is that you?” Tony smirked as if it couldn’t be.

  Michael nodded. “There’s something about me that you don’t know. But everybody else who really knows me does.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s the most exciting story of my life.”

  “Your life isn’t over.”

  “Nothing will top when I was Snake Girl at the carnival. Half girl, half snake. It all looked so real.”

  “What?” Tony smirked. “No way.”

  Michael passionately assured him it was true.

  “What was that?”

  “I haven’t told you about it before? I tell everybody. It’s such stardom and I have to impress everybody. I have to impress you.”

  “I haven’t heard about it. I’m sure I’d have remembered something like that.”

  “Yes. People remember stardom.” Michael smiled proudly and flipped his hair back as if he was Cher. “It was all very grand so that it didn’t matter if you believed the illusion or not, you were most impressed no matter what. I was very young and looked just like a girl. People mistook me for a girl all the time anyway, those days, with the way girls were starting to dress so boyish and boys were growing their hair long because of the hippies, or whatever. It was the ‘70s. Anyway. And by the time I joined the carnival my hair had grown way past my shoulders. I hadn’t had a hair cut in over a year.”

  “Your mom didn’t make you?”

  “I was far from her scissors.”

  “Okay. Tell me how you were a snake.”

  “I had a trailer all to me. I was the star. I sat on a chair under the floor under a table. My head popped up through a hole in the table. And there was a flat pillow with a hole in it that my head also went through, to look like my head was sitting on the pillow on the table. It was a really flat pillow because behind my head was placed the chopped off part of a big fat stuffed snake… so it would look like that was my body. It curled around behind me on the table and just sat there. The effect was uncanny.”

  “People believed that? That doesn’t seem very good.”

  Michael nodded seriously. “It sounds stupid to just explain it but it looked really cool. Seeing is believing. My hair went back over where the front part of the snake had been chopped off so you couldn’t see where it was put up against the back of my head. The snake was so big and fat. It must have been only the last part of the real thing. A real snake that fat must have been much longer but the table was only so big. It was an impressive piece of taxidermy glued down to the table. It was stuck to the table for good to help keep it from ripping from when we moved it, from when the carnival went from town to town to town. It looked damn cool. And people want to be fooled. And those who weren’t fooled were just still so tickled that it was so ballsy and done up so well. There was even a tilted mirror under the table so you thought you could see the carpet going under the table more than it did, so you had to wonder where my real body really was. You would walk up into the trailer and just see me from the front. There was a big window looking into my room. It had nice curtains. Well, they were weird polyester curtains. Carnival curtains. But it was done up just posh in a carnival trailer sort of way. Five people could have looked through that window at once, but mostly just couples came up, at a time.” Michael laughed. “Nobody thought to think that I was a fake. Nobody ever accused me of not being a girl. I was Snake Girl!”

  “That is unbelievable.”

  “It is. It was the best days of my life. I was a star. I was safe there. But I have a boy body now again, now a man’s body, and I’ve gotten into that. I learned special stuff about the body since then, professionally. I can see your tense muscles from here. See right there on your shoulder above your collarbone? I can see it by the way you’re sitting.”

  Tony changed his position on the couch. Michael reached over and pressed the spot. Tony felt his neck tingle.

  “Ooooh. That feels weird!”

  “Good, it feels good.”

  “Sure.”

  Michael slowly screwed his thumb in the spot. “There’s a big, fat muscle there.” He snatched Tony’s arm loosely at the wrist and wildly shook it out.

  Tony was surprised at Michael’s sudden grabbiness but feigned indifference. “How do you know about anatomy?” His shoulder felt warm now where Michael had touched it.

  “Oh, well,” Michael began, “After I was Snake Girl I went nuts about having a man’s body. As I said, I’d grown up more and that’s what happens, anyway. We grow up and get real horny. So I got into a different line of work, one that made a lot more money, and I did massages for cash. Not real massages, mind you… not at first anyway. Then I met this guy who studied therapeutic massage in Denver.”

  “You were in Denver? How’s it?”

  “No, I met him at the bar in Chicago and we exchanged techniques… his nice ones for my naughty ones. It was very educational.” He grabbed Tony’s arm again and held it out, aligned. “See? I learned where all the muscles are and how they all stream towards the heart in a very orderly circuit.” He opened Tony’s hand in his and soundly pinched a few spots.

  “Ouch! What was that for?” Tony made a fist.

  “Give me your palm again. You’re tense… it’s written all over your anatomy.” Michael shook Tony’s arm out again then lifted his shirt past his chest. “Oooh! A man! How exquisite!”

  “I don’t know if I like this. You’re being weird.”

  Michael nodded. “Yeah, you noticed that I’m weird. Join the club.”

  “I’ve had too much beer. I’ve got to go!” He pushed Michael away, jumped up and ran out the door.

  Michael felt as though he’d just been slapped. “Hey!”

  Tony’s steps clomped heavily down the stairs then the street door slammed.

  Michael wondered if Tony was creeped out by the idea of gay sex or if Tony was freaked out that he’d been Snake Girl. He thought about how he’d tried so hard to be cool and he now didn’t feel that at all. He thought about when he was in junior high school and one morning he walked down the road to catch the bus but then decided to keep walking. It was completely spontaneous. He didn’t even think about it much other than he felt pitiful. His older brother hated having a sissy for a brother so always hit and bad-mouthed him, his parents seemed bummed-out to have spawned something so pretty, so he wanted to be found starved to death in a ditch or just taken bodily up into heaven. All he felt was woe is me. A perverted pederast truck driver picked him up and he learned about gay sex at 70 miles an hour, telling him to pretend they were Batman and Robin.

  Half a year later Michael got the carnival job as Snake Girl until he was old enough to work in a Chicago seafood restaurant for a year, dressed as a pirate. Then he became a baroque punk rocker type trying to be cool, reaching his pinnacle of tacky-but-cute, with a lousy Renaissance Faire British accent, wearing arty make-up like Adam Ant. To make his money he became a glam punk gogo boy in a gay bar in Chicago. That led to his joining a gay motorcycle gang called The Rumbling Anuses; but always drunk he kept falling off. Th
en he figured out that he could make good money doing strip at a very exclusive underground discothèque. They always wanted somebody new and within months he was too old. He moved on again. He kept moving on until he landed back in the town near where he grew up and ran away from. Milldam.

  “I’m going in circles. I’m trapped. I’m trapped in witches circles! Witches circles round and round. No matter where you go, you’re bound. The curse you’re in is all your own. You cannot leave until you’re grown. Now grow up! Now grow up! Now grow up!” He decided to write that down to make it into a song but he got another beer instead and forgot it.

  Chapter three

  The next day the phone rang. Michael lunged for it. “Alaaan! You woke me up. Damn you!”

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Who else calls me at this hour? Who else calls me at all?”

  “Sorry,” Alex said, not sounding sorry. “I thought you’d be up by now, sandblasting your face for the day. Or packing it in baking soda. Or taping it up. Or whatever you do. Spackle?”

  Michael said, “The secret to my celebrity smile is hydrogen peroxide. But I’m not up yet so I smell a dead rat in there right now. I think he’s been drinking cheap beer. Why did you call? And please tell me it’s because you got a good job because we all need some good news every now and again. And then please pay my phone bill so you can always call me.”

  “Having a phone does not give you a personality.”

  “Why did you call?”

  Alex said, “Haircut house-calls are doing okay. But not today. A lady cancelled. My sister’s best friend, Annie Bea. She says she has a cold. She lives in a trailer home by the river…”

  “Oh the one who is a thousand pounds and wants a perm you can never give her, and never goes out so I don’t why she needs a haircut ever again, anyway.”

  “Yeah, her. Annie Bea. What are we going to do today? Let’s go play.”

  Michael moaned. “I was going to sleep till noon and then take a nap and then it would be time to go to bed again. I just don’t feel like me unless I’ve had a lot of time with myself.”