The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(11)
“What’s your stage name?” Tommy asks.
“I haven’t exactly decided yet,” I admit.
“All right,” he says. “Should I just call you Tess?”
“Sure,” I say. But no. I’m not here for that. “Or maybe if you think of a good name, you could just call me it? If you have any ideas?”
“Hmm,” he says, tapping his fingers along his mouth, beneath the thin black mustache he drew on that morning. “Today, you will see Tex Fontaine eat the fire and escape from these chains right in front of your eyes,” he says into the mic. And then, to me, “Yeah, Tex?”
“Sure,” I say.
“I’ll come up with more,” he says. “Better names.”
A family with two strollers is approaching from down the midway, and beyond them, a few other people are trickling this way, so Tommy starts grinding into the mic, listing the acts we have inside with flourish, a warm-up he calls it, and I practice breaking out of the chains one more time before they’re close enough to be able to tell what’s going on.
“Ready?” Tommy whispers over to me when a few other people are within earshot. I nod.
“You don’t have to wait, but you do have to hurry, they’re in there, they’re waiting for you,” Tommy begins into the mic. I try to stand onstage like I have a purpose for standing onstage aside from wearing skimpy clothes. What pose is right? I put my hands on my hips with one knee bent and feel like I’m posing for a swimsuit ad from the eighties. I cross my arms over my chest and lean back a little bit, but now I’m a teen rebel from the early nineties. Every way I move seems to be a reference to something else. Before I have time to overthink it further, Tommy has gathered a small crowd in front of the stage.
“That’s right, we’re putting on a free show right here, right now,” Tommy says, “you’re going to watch Ms. Mimi L’Amour change a one-dollar bill into a five, I’m going to swallow this sword for you right here, while Hercules, our massive man-eating boa constrictor, lies hypnotized around my neck,” and we’re off. The crowd grows from ten people to fifteen. “Inside you’re going to see Spidora the Spidergirl, born with the head of a beautiful woman and the body of a terrifying spider.” Tommy’s eyes sparkle and taunt, like he both believes in all the things he’s saying and is letting the crowd in on the game.
The crowd grows to twenty. I watch people a little ways down the midway follow the sound of the voice on the microphone like a beacon.
Tommy hands a teenage girl in the audience a dollar bill so she can make sure it’s real. “Go ahead and smell it,” he says. “Do you smell the mint? That’s government. And it stinks.” Small chuckle from the crowd. “Hand that bill back to Ms. L’Amour,” Tommy says, and I take the dollar from the girl’s hand, lay it flat in my palm so it looks like I’m readying to convince them that they aren’t being fooled. Tommy keeps ballying, listing the acts, introducing amazing stories that he interrupts with other amazements and promises of astonishment, becoming his own Scheherazade.
With dramatic turns of my wrist I smooth the dollar bill in front of me—the audience’s eyes following my fingers as I fold the bill into a flat line. Tommy is pitching our medical mystery. I fold the bill into a long strip and wind it around my finger. Many of the eyes in the audience never leave my hands, sure that if they watch hard enough, pay close enough attention, they’ll catch the trick, the moment of the inevitable switcheroo, and beat the game. They watch and watch, and I eat it up, the attention, that belief that enough focus will reveal some secret truth. I’m smiling and just a little unsure I’m doing the act right, but it feels good, very, very good, to be onstage.
Though I have the five ready before it’s time, I ramp up the drama, blowing on it in my hand, shaking my closed fist to keep them watching, to make their eyes work extra hard to find the moment of slip and switch. When I finally hold one hand, palm facing me, out to the crowd, Tommy looks over, nods, and says, “Now watch Ms. Mimi L’Amour turn a one-dollar bill into a five,” and I flip my hand around, revealing the bill folded into the shape of the number five in the palm of my hand, and a few people smile and shake their heads, a few others groan, a few crane their necks to get a better view as if they are missing the joke, as if there must be more to it.
“And now,” Tommy says, clanging his sword on the metal pole above his head to get their attention and show that the sword is, indeed, metal, “the sword swallower will swallow a sword.” He readjusts the snake, asks for a volunteer from the audience. A teenage girl raises her hand. “Down the hatch without a scratch,” he says, and straightens all the way up, puffs his chest out, and slides the sword down his throat. Half the metal blade disappears inside him. I’m as transfixed as the rest of the audience, not having seen sword swallowing up close before. What a beautiful act, the grace, the danger, the seeming impossibility of it even though it’s happening an arm’s length away. Tommy bends over with the sword down his throat, lets the audience see the metal disappearing into the darkness of his mouth, lets them imagine the tip pressing its point against the sac of his stomach, almost breaking him open, his arms out wide beside him, his eyebrows raised. He leans close to the teenager and, with a gesture, invites her to grasp the sword’s handle and she does, nearly brushing his cheeks with her hands. He doesn’t gag as it slides out. His lips remain stiff. He watches the girl intently as she cringes while pulling the sword from his mouth. Her father, standing just behind her, has a wide, amused frown, and her mother is snapping photos.