The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(35)
“What’d he do?”
“All I know’s he went down into carnietown last night and got involved in more trouble. Don’t want to know the details. Don’t care. Guy’s a prick.”
Snickers begins singing to himself, laughing as he grabs something from the main trailer area, close to where we sit. I try to give him a pity smile, but he just keeps laughing, shaking his head.
“What I care about is being shorthanded for teardown tomorrow night. And out a ticket guy. He fucked us over on that,” Spif says.
“Don’t worry. You saw my guns during setup. I got you,” I say, elbowing him. He snorts.
“You wanna know how you can really help me out? Give me a blow job,” he says.
“In your dreams,” I say, and wander off to the bathroom, pleased that he thinks I can handle some coarse teasing.
I feel bad for Snickers, for how heavily he wore this dream on his sleeve when he arrived, and how quickly he failed it. A man who had a hard life and finally thought he’d made it to his destiny. I’m sad for him but also nervous at how quickly a person can get thrown off the show—he’s been here ten days. The carnival takes all kinds; it is often a place for people to find work who can’t find work elsewhere—people from other countries, people with drug problems, people with criminal records, people with mental instabilities—but there are still rules, still a code to follow that can be broken, which will mean immediate removal. I don’t understand the codes yet. I’m not even sure I know them. When I ask Tommy about it later, he brushes me off. “Just keep showing up to work call on time,” he says. “And don’t believe that this will ever be easy.”
*
Sunshine and Spif spend half the year splitting the electricity bill and the other half traveling around the country as performers in the show. Both from Camarillo, California, they have been friends since they were very young. They lived close to one another, had classes together, spent time together after school. But things got hard.
Story goes: Spif was homeless. As he’s telling me, he’s twisting the silver rings on his fingers, revising and looping to make sure the details come out right. We’re sitting backstage after day eight of performing, trying to wind down. “My friends were letting me crash on their couches for a while, but then they got sick of it. I didn’t have anywhere to go. I ran out of couches, and then ran into Sunshine.” He laughs at his joke. Sunshine has walked down to the bathrooms to take a shower, but her presence as the boss backstage is never far off. “When I told Sunshine I didn’t have a place to stay, she immediately told me to come over with all my stuff.”
Later, I ask Sunshine about her and Spif’s story.
“I needed help,” Sunshine says. After a long bout in the hospital, her mom was just about to return home at the same time the landlord required everything out of their house for renovations. “I was in a panic, and completely alone,” she says. But then there was Spif. He moved into her living room and they lent each other a hand. And he never left. That was three years ago.
Spif talks about his early days in juvenile hall, his involvement with gangs. He’s twenty-three now and has been out of trouble for years. As he’s talking, he plays with a paper flower he bought earlier to give to Pipscy because she’s been feeling down. It’s hard to imagine him as a kid interested in trouble. Especially around Sunshine. They often lock arms and skip to wherever they’re headed.
*
This is Sunshine’s seventh season with the sideshow. As the stage manager, she’s in charge of behind-the-scenes operations—music cues, show order, break rotation—and also controls the loading and unloading of our semi. But the thing she’s known for, the thing the little girls outside the tent whisper about as they’re walking away, is her fire-eating act. She does tricks I’m far too scared to try—like the human candle, where she traps and then lights gas fumes in her mouth, blowing a flame out her O’ed mouth as casually as if she were blowing a bubble.
She stands onstage in five-inch heels, her stick-skinny legs in sheer black tights below a black skirt and corset, her fingers removing two long torches from a canister of gas. The torches are ignited. She carries the flame with her fingertips, blows fire, swallows torch after torch and then lights the flame from the tip of her tongue. Moments later, she returns to the stage with Spif and stands on the knife board as he throws the bouquet of metal around her body.
*
There isn’t a day they aren’t together. But it hasn’t always been that way. This is Spif’s second season, so for years he’d stay at home half the year while Sunshine was touring the country. Then last year, when she was preparing to come out for her sixth season, Sunshine began thinking about asking Spif to come along. She’d never invited anyone out to work at the sideshow before.
“You don’t bring just anyone,” Sunshine says. “You don’t actually bring anyone.” She’d watched as other performers brought friends or family out to work the season and then seen them sneak off in the night never to return just as many times. The hours are long; the work is hard. There aren’t many who can hack it, and vouching for a person who then leaves the show in a bind can be a big problem. In all her years, there was nobody in Sunshine’s life she thought could make it. Until Spif.
Spif took the leap. He joined Sunshine for the season and stayed the entire time as the ticket man. A dedicated worker who proved himself quickly, he soon earned important crew jobs for setup and teardown. The bosses also saw his potential as a performer. For this, his second season, the bosses have taught him a few acts. To lie on a bed of nails. To throw knives around a live human target—Sunshine.