The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(40)
The gendered divisions of this work were explained to me my first full day with the World of Wonders, when we went to pick up our show from where it had wintered in Gibtown. Our van pulled into a junk storage lot, several acres of wild Florida vines and trees where carnies park big rigs and half-broken Ferris wheels in the off-season. The rust of a once-yellow bus peeked out from years of moss and low-hanging kudzu and I heard there was a man who lived somewhere in the middle of it all, watching over the big machines that were brought here to rest. There was no way to see the edges of the place.
Though the yard was full of rides and a few old circus cars, no other sideshows winter there because there are no other traveling sideshows. Traveling sideshows are a cultural fragment stomped out by science and social progress. Public perception began shifting at the end of the nineteenth century, as more information about the medical conditions freak shows displayed became known, then even further with disability-rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s, as restrictions were established on who and what and how a person could be displayed onstage. Nowadays a few nightclub shows include sideshow performers and travel an adult circuit. There are still two stationary sideshows—one at Coney Island and one at Venice Beach, though the Venice show was just booted from their home on the boardwalk.
But the World of Wonders is the last traditional traveling sideshow. It only survives because the people who are part of it will not let it die.
Through palm fronds and the folded masts of a pirate ship in the Gibtown lot, I saw the carcass of our show for the first time. Giant red-paint lettering with a gold shadow covered the side of the truck; gold curlicue embellishments decorated the corners. The entire side of the semitruck read:
World of Wonders
The Amazement Show
About a third of the way down the semi’s container stood a door with a large red star and the printed words Show Personnel Only. A big dumb grin spread across my face that I tried to hide—to the rest of these performers, this was nothing to get excited about—but I couldn’t conceal my merriment. Just a few months ago, I had stood in the audience and gawked at dangerous beauties living a life worthy of this truck. At one moment in that first show, during the bed of nails act, the backstage curtain had blown open and I’d caught a glimpse of a performer backstage. She was sitting on a folding chair, hunched over a cup of instant soup. Noodles dangled from her mouth. There were empty chairs on either side of her and some trash on the ground and everything looked dingy but was flooded with natural afternoon light. The extraordinary ordinariness of it was mesmerizing.
And now here was the history and the great vagabond life contained in this painted semitruck in a junky storage lot, and all we had to do was clear away the kudzu and we’d be off.
It wasn’t quick.
There were critters inside. Rusted fastenings. Sunshine chain-smoked while Spif and Tommy did the heavy grunting, and I was told to sit on the side and watch. Pipscy practiced a burlesque act.
“Used to be the girls sat in the shade while the boys did all the physical work on the show,” Sunshine said after I offered to help Tommy and he refused.
“But it took forever. We sat there for hours watching the guys struggle, wasting time, because the bosses—Chris and Ward—didn’t want us getting hurt. Precious flowers, that kind of thing. But one season five years or so ago we had a really tight jump and it didn’t look like we were going to make it to the next fair in time, so we girls just got up and just started helping. And Chris and Ward realized there was some stuff we could do. Some. So we got jobs. There will be plenty of time where we’ll be doing those jobs. They’re not easy. They’re just not these jobs.”
“It seems like there’s at least something we could do here to help,” I said.
“No.”
“Okay,” I said, not really believing her.
“Chris and Ward still want us in showgirl costumes with feathers in our hair. They’re traditionalists. So we’ve just gotta take what we can and not push it sometimes,” she said.
*
An hour or so later, the boys had the trailer and cab hitched and we were set to go—less than twenty-four hours after I’d landed in Florida, it seemed we were ready to hit the road.
“We’ve got to go pick up our indentured servant,” Sunshine said with a straight face.
We pulled up to a mobile home with a huge canvas duffel bag sitting outside.
“Big, Big Ben, our working man,” Tommy said. “He’s our muscle.”
“He’s the sweetest guy in the world,” Sunshine said, “but when he tries to kiss you, yell loudly in his face and smack him. He’ll learn.”
The cicadas’ heavy chirps pressed into the van as we swung the door open for Big, Big Ben, who lumbered out of the mobile home without looking at the van ahead or calling back to anybody inside. He popped his bag onto his back as if it were empty and loaded it into the trunk. He said nothing. He was in his late twenties, had pink cheeks and a mouth full of crisscrossed teeth.
“Benny!” Sunshine yelled, and he stifled a smile as he shifted in his seat. He sighed.
“You ready, Benny?” Tommy asked.
“I guess,” Ben answered. “I told myself I wasn’t gonna do this again, but here I am,” he said to nobody in particular. He had the thick arms of a gladiator.
Story goes: he had been working for another carnival company for a few years and had a contract that would have kept him there for a few more, but our bosses bought the contract off the other owner, releasing Ben from his obligation to one company and beginning it with another. As the story was told, Ben smirked, looking out the window. I couldn’t tell how much of the story was real—I didn’t think people used those kinds of contracts for manual labor anymore.