The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(47)
I walk into the main backstage area. Red is sitting back there, which is unusual. He’s sipping from his Big Gulp coffee mug and brushing his long orange hair.
“Morning,” I say. He grunts. I try to move slowly and not keep my eyes directly on him, like I would around an eagle or fox, something rare to get close to in the wild. I don’t want him to flee.
“I’m gonna make coffee. Want some?”
“Won’t say no,” he says. We move near one another in our separate worlds, though I’m aware of every sound and movement he makes. This sideshow hero. This madman. This meanie.
Each creak of his chair makes me nervous he might swat at me or, worse, leave. I have some idea that Red knows a secret about this place—about performing or illusion or magic, I don’t know exactly what—something that he has come to understand through all these years on the road. Like Yoda. Like he might be able to tell me what it is I’m actually doing here.
“Where you from, Red?” I ask him casually.
“Philly,” he says, the p a little stronger than the ph sound as his tongue shapes syllables against his toothless gums. Last season, he had one tooth. It was aching. He bought a bottle of vanilla Smirnoff and wiped most of the rust off his pliers. He drank the entire bottle backstage, fell off his stool, and passed out before he could pull the tooth. In the morning, hungover and about to climb up the steps to perform his first act of the day, he reached into his mouth with the metal and yanked the tooth. Blood trickled down his chin onstage.
“619 North Highland Street,” he says, and I nod, pour the coffee. He continues: “41A Main, 3055 14th Avenue, St. Clarence Home for Boys, West Philadelphia Orphanage, Presbyterian Children’s Village, St. Vincent Home for Boys. Let’s see,” he says, gathering the hairs from his brush and balling them up in the palm of his hand. His hands are not inked, but the rest of his body, from neck to ankles, is covered in tattoos. Tigers, anatomical men swallowing swords, shields, crests, dragons, planets, and between each tattoo, small dark stars making constellations.
“One time all the orphanages were full when another foster family sent me back, so they put a bunch of us in an institute for retarded children,” he says. “All the other kids eventually got sent somewhere else. But I stayed.” I follow his glance out the doorway to his van, where one of the kittens is coiled on the dash, her white fur nestled between a wooden statue of the Buddha and an empty McDonald’s milkshake cup.
He opens his fist and lets the Ohio breeze take the orange nest of hair. “1401 Kensington Avenue,” he says. “A home on Cahill Road, can’t remember the number,” he says after a while. “I forget a lot of the details now.” But every address seems a stopover on some Homeric odyssey almost too perfect for the story of a grand-champion sword swallower.
“The Millers, the Thorps, the O’Callahans,” he says. He hasn’t talked to me at all in the three and a half weeks I’ve been here, has barely even made eye contact with me. I’m amazed this ordinary question pulls out a string of answers like scarves tied to one another that a magician pulls from his mouth. I’m amazed that the addresses are tied to names, names to memories, and before I know it, he tells me that at sixteen, he opened the door of his foster house one morning and peered out at the snow piled high on the street. It was February. Very cold. He stepped outside. And then took another step. Another. Then he didn’t stop. Walking is, in its most basic form, the act of falling and catching yourself. Fall, catch. Fall, catch. It is an act of travail. Can it be a pilgrimage without a known destination? He walked for thirty-one days.
AND THE LOW SKY OPENS
Day 23 of 150
World of Wonders
July 2013
Behind the Gravitron 3000’s crown of American flags, the sky’s looking more and more like a bruise. Even the performers from California—half of us, earthquake people—know that a sky going green and purple means tornado, and one by one Pipscy the mermaid and Spif the knife thrower and Sunshine the fire eater peek around the edge of the tent between acts to look directly onto the emptying carnival midway. The low sky opens with rain and bursts of wind that knock over a tank of Rastafarian-painted hermit crabs beside our show. Sunshine widens her eyes at Tommy. She hisses, “Thomas. Close the show.” They’ve been slamming their trailer door for days. He shakes his head no and everyone ducks back. But not Red.
Red stands in front of the big striped circus tent in his kilt, arms crossed over his bare belly. Inside, he has just swallowed a tire iron. Here, he appraises the ceiling of clouds as a dribble of spit weaves through his red beard stubble.
“Well,” he says, voice barely audible over the wind, “I know I’m gonna die on these stages. Today’s as good a day as any for that.” He claps his hands with false finality and turns back into the tent. I nod in agreement. I know this doesn’t make much sense, but the corsets I wore and chains I escaped and the taxidermied Icelandic Giant I glued back together all precluded danger from feeling much like danger. Or maybe it’s the bright lights. Or that it feels a little good to be reminded that there is always more that could be lost.
Tommy and I stand in the drizzle on our bally stage. “You don’t have to wait, but you do have to hurry,” Tommy bellows, but he’s cut off by the loudspeaker announcing the pygmy goat parade again.