The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(37)
We pack the show up through the night, a task I thought would be easy since we’d set up less than two weeks before, but I can’t remember how this dance began. I have no idea how to put anything away. Each task I’m assigned—dismantling the headless chair, folding the tent walls—require precision to ensure the objects stay in good enough shape to set up again, and physically fit in their exact space in the truck. No room for screwups. The next few spots we’ll play have shorter runs—just five days performing. I’m glad that the time between setup and teardown will be shorter; less time to forget how it all works.
I want to get my hands back on the electric chair, to feel its magic as I dismantle it, but I keep getting directed elsewhere.
Radios blare from every joint and we work straight through until 5:15 a.m.
“Get a few hours of sleep, if you can fit on your bunk,” Tommy says. “We pull out of here at nine a.m.”
*
Sunshine has a vapor cigarette clenched between her taut, bony fingers as she grips the steering wheel. The jump to Ohio is four hours, four luxurious hours where we can lay our heads against the plush headrests of the van and take in the rumble of the plastic clasps on the windows as they pound out the beat of Sublime turned to max volume.
We stop for pizza. Everyone orders cheese, I assume because it’s cheapest, but it comes out that nearly everyone is a vegetarian. All my carnies are vegetarians, I think, delighted with this little phrase I’ve just invented. I say it, quietly, to Cassie on the seat beside me once we’re back in the van.
Not all, she corrects. And not mine. And not carnies.
“We are not carnies,” Cassie says. “Well, I used to be one. But not anymore.”
“That’s right,” Sunshine says from the front seat, very matter-of-factly. “We’re showpeople. There’s a huge difference. We’re above the carnies.”
Showpeople. Has a nice ring. But so does carnie.
“There’s a very clear pecking order, and you should know it. Top line is bosses, of course. Then showpeople. Then carnies. And the big carnie rivalry is between game and ride jocks. Ride jocks have more power, because they can let pretty girls go to the front of the line and they gather bigger crowds, but game jocks make more money. Easier to swindle the marks. Foodies are at the bottom, obviously, though some of them make a killing. Don’t call a performer a carnie, okay?” Sunshine says. “Like, ever.”
“Right,” I say. “Sorry.”
I want to change the focus from my blunder.
“How long have you been a vegetarian?” I ask Spif, who is sitting behind me in the van and twisting his septum piercing with both sets of pointer fingers and thumbs.
“A while,” he says. “I can’t eat animals because I know they don’t want to be eaten.”
I nod, start to turn back around in my seat, but he continues.
“The first time I ate mushrooms, I was tripping and walking around outside and I found a bee. He was in a pool of water, kicking his legs and flailing around. I bent down to get a closer look and the bee started talking to me.”
“What did the bee say?”
“I can’t tell you. Don’t remember. But we had a whole conversation, back and forth, talking about all kinds of shit. I pulled him out of the water. I knew as soon as I finished talking to him that I could never eat another animal.”
“I only eat fish,” Sunshine adds. “And alligator. Did you hear what the pope just did, though? He proclaimed that rats were also fish so that people in South America could eat capybaras on Fridays.”
Our van was following the sun, west along highway 80 and then 90, skirting the base of Lake Erie as we passed the kind of strip mall that was indistinguishable from every other strip mall all over America. The TGI Friday’s, the China Buffets, the Starbucks popping up when we whizzed through an affluent area—never near the fairground. I’d know we were nearing the grounds when I started to see pawnshops, Quik Marts, or old factories. The carnival was not a place for the wealthy, though the cost of an evening there could quickly add up.
“You know what a group of ferrets is called?” Pipscy asks from the back seat. We shake our heads. “A business. When I get out of here, I’m going to have a business of ferrets business.”
We laugh, and keep on to Ohio. I’m trying to play it cool, but I think I might be falling for my carnies.
THE SOFTEST SKIN OF ANYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD
Two years and eight months after the stroke
June 2013
Davy gets up each morning in the dark to pay bills and schedule appointments. He researches how to visit a Venetian glass museum in a wheelchair. Tours of the David for the handicapped. The opera. Bathrooms in the cruise ship’s dining area. Size of shower in the room. He clicks and scrolls between websites, writes notes, scrolls, reads, writes notes.
When light comes in the window, he goes back into the bedroom and sits on his wife’s side of the bed. She stirs, her good leg bending and straightening. “Morning, cutie,” he says, leaning low to wrap his arms around her torso before he pulls her upright into a seated position and shifts her hips so her legs reach down off the bed.
“Na na na,” she says quietly, hoarsely. After four months with the tracheotomy, it was removed and she could make sounds again. She’d grown strong enough to swallow and cough on her own, lived with Davy except for when she had to go back to the hospital for an emergency.