The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(56)

“Is she okay? Is she alive?”

“No. She’s not okay. She’s stuck in your hair. I mean, she’s fine, but there’s a lot of hair wound around her body,” he says, and I’m thinking of a spindle and then a hot dog in a hairball and a host of other inappropriate images, because it’s really hard to picture a giant snake wrapped in human hair. “Hi, beauty,” he says to the snake.

“Just get her out, Ben. Whatever you have to do,” I say.

He glances around for something to help, but there’s nothing close, no scissors or knife as far as we can see, and so he begins trying to wriggle her out. Both of my hands are behind my head, a few hairs being pulled out as he loosens tiny portions of her at a time.

“This is probably gonna hurt,” he says, eyeing me.

“I don’t care,” I say. “Just please get her out.”

He reaches both hands back again and I feel a series of small tugs and then one giant rip and sting and he grunts and my head is throbbing, but in his hands is the beautiful brown girl, eyes milky blue and unblinking, a sleeping bag of blond hairs circling her body. I reach back to touch my head, surprised that a large portion of skin isn’t gone, surprised I’m not half-bald. In the stinging area, the hair feels thinner, but it doesn’t matter.

Ben is still laughing to himself as he holds the snake, gently peeling the hairs off her body as she slowly climbs across his arms.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I say, welling up with relief.

“That was funny,” he says, and I set Pandora down in her box to cool off, run backstage for a hair tie, put my hair in an ugly half bun without care for showmanship, wipe off the rest of my makeup with a baby wipe, come back onstage, and, not knowing what else to do, open my arms again to the snake.





EMERGENCY

Day 29 of 150

World of Wonders

July 2013

Steve, the new burly working man, is holding his belly and moaning softly. It’s our third night at the Kane County Fair in Illinois, and Steve asks Tommy to come offstage between ballys to talk. Steve’s been with us for just over a week. They whisper together under the ticket awning and then Tommy comes onstage and the working man disappears.

“What’s wrong with him?” I ask Tommy.

“Bellyache,” Tommy says, eyes locking in on a young family vaguely looking in our direction.

An hour later, a medic approaches our stage in the middle of a bally asking for the boss. I take over, telling the crowd about the snake in the box in front of me as Tommy hops offstage and takes the medic to the side. Sometimes the added attention of emergency workers, who also come sometimes after we get a fainter—a falling ovation—can be a draw, a suggestion of danger for a show that already looks like something might imminently, violently fail. But this time Tommy takes him aside and, after a quick chat, whispers to me from the side of the stage that he’ll be back. He follows the medic down the midway.

Cassie pops onto the stage to continue ballying shortly thereafter, and we finish out the hour without more information. A little while later, Tommy and Steve come back, Tommy walking quickly in front with a thin-mouthed grimace and Steve dragging behind, holding his side. They pass by the stage, making no eye contact with anyone as they round the edge of the tent and turn back to our bunkhouse.

Tommy comes back out a few minutes later alone.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

“We need a new working man.”

“Where is he going?”

“On the bus back to Ohio.”

“What happened?”

“Said his cannon fire stitches had burst open and he thought his guts were going to spill out. Wouldn’t stop crying.”

“And? Were they?”

He snorts. “’Course not. I had him lift up his shirt to show me.”

“Oh.”

“He bought his own bus ticket home.”

“Well, shit,” I say.

“Oh well. Out another guy,” Tommy says. “Couldn’t hack it.”

“Couldn’t hack it,” I say.

*

The fair is slow.

I crouch low from the bally stage to look through the entrance and see Pipscy inside, bouncing as she talks the bed of nails act for just one single person all alone in the audience.

There were stretches out on that bally stage, weekdays during the daytime especially, when nobody at all would walk by for twenty minutes, thirty, an hour, the absence finally punctuated by a young mother and her two small kids waddling past who, despite our best attempts to lure them in with a snake and magic and sword swallow, continued straight on without giving us more than a glance. I wondered, of those people who would walk straight past fire going into my mouth or a sword going down Tommy’s throat, if they didn’t believe what they saw. If they were too skeptical, too sure that whatever appeared to be happening was not in fact happening at all.

There was a tradition in the sideshow of things appearing questionable, controversial. P. T. Barnum took great pains to promote the dubiousness of his oddities’ authenticity. Instead of concentrating on the authentication of his Feejee Mermaid as a real, genuine specimen, for example, he sent letters penned as a variety of authors to newspapers with doubts about the creature’s very existence. Surely someone could discern whether the creature was cast from a mold or pulled from the sea? Whose eyes were sharp enough, whose wits quick enough? The only way to find out was to see it for yourself. It brought the audience into the act, charged each member with the role of scientific explorer, investigator.