The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(107)
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.