The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(6)

The knife-throwing pair was performing on a stage inside the World of Wonders, a sideshow at the Florida State Fair. The World of Wonders, the talker outside had said, was the very last traveling sideshow of its kind. I’d never seen anything like it—the Bay Area, where I grew up, was far too PC for a sideshow. But recently I’d learned that there was a town called Gibsonton that was famous for its sideshow performers, and that there was a sideshow performing at the fair just down the road from Gibsonton. I headed for Florida.

*

I watched the acts twice through. I smiled and rolled my eyes with the rest of the crowd as a human-headed spider told us she’s just hanging out, covered my eyes as a man hammered nails up into his nostrils. Other performers manipulated their bodies, harming them—or seeming to, or avoiding the harm at just the last moment, when it still felt like things might go very wrong.

But nothing went wrong. They survived.

And I witnessed these miracles they were performing. I was not sitting in hospital rooms, or helping with a physical therapy transfer. I was not talking through options for surgeries.

Instead, I was keeping my eye on the blade as the knife thrower landed the final piercing tip just beside his assistant’s head. He turned to the audience, gently nodded, and walked toward the board to gather his instruments. The knife, somehow, always missed the flesh.

*

The trailer was dark and musty. There was a three-foot-long shaggy spider leg on the floor beside a torn canvas banner. Painted there, a man swung heavy chains from his eyelids.

“The work is very hard. Dangerous,” Chris Christ said right away. He co-owned the World of Wonders with his partner, both in business and in life, Ward Hall. They’ve been together since 1967.

“Putting up and taking down the tent every few days, moving towns. For twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, every day, without stopping. You’re always working,” Chris said. Each word comes out of his mouth wet and heavy, loud enough to be onstage. Which is where he usually is. He’d been a sideshow talker for years, and chimp trainer, knife performer, inventor of new acts. He seemed twice as big as a regular man, like he stayed in the womb for double the allotted time. His ears stood out wide from his head and dark tobacco snuff trails ran down from the corners of his mouth.

“How’d you get in the business?” I asked him. I pretended to look over his shoulder at the wall as he thought but concentrated all my peripheral vision on his face. This was the face of the sideshow. Creases. Grease. This was a body that chose to take in fire and swords.

“Where are you from?” I asked him.

“Did you always want to be a performer?”

“What does it feel like to eat fire?”

“Does anyone ever get really hurt?”

“Have you always felt like the sideshow was a place you fit in?”

I asked and asked, question after question, until an hour turned into three or four and then he was finally silent. He stared at me across the table where we’d moved once evening light gave way to the pitch-black of late night. He had answered each question I threw at him, asked some of them back to me—surprised, he said, by a young person taking interest in this world. Most people believed it was dying.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Chris finally said. “Have you learned everything you wanted?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I looked around the trailer, locked my eyes on the giant spider leg. There was more I wanted to know. I wanted to know how to make sense of my attraction to this world of illusions and danger. Where the work was physically grueling, where the task was to transform into someone else, someone who could transcend a fragile human body. Someone who was and was not herself onstage.

“You really want to know what it’s like inside a sideshow?” he asked. There was a tone in his voice of, what—annoyance? Amusement? I started to pack my notes.

“Then come play with us,” he said.

I met his eyes, sure he was joking. He held my gaze. Raised his eyebrows, expecting my response.

“Really?”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well…” I imagined telling my mom that I’d been invited to join a sideshow. That I’d said no.

I nodded at him. “Okay,” I said.

*

Four months later, I arrive in Tampa with a suitcase full of family-friendly stripper costumes, selected per my future coworker/stage manager Sunshine’s instructions, which I heave into the fifteen-person passenger van that picks me up at the airport. The World of Wonders Sideshow winters in Gibsonton, known to locals as Gibtown, ten miles from Tampa. We’re meeting there before we load up and head north. We will follow a semi packed with our show all the way to Pennsylvania and the first fair. The 2013 carnival season opens in eight days, and for the next five months, we’ll travel all over the country performing in state and county fairs, living in the semi.

Chris Christ will stay in Florida for most of the season, managing the show from afar, while Tommy will be in charge of on-the-road operations. Tommy is also the show’s primary talker, not barker—a term that will immediately expose you as an outsider, I learn—and has been with the World of Wonders for nine years.

After I left Florida with Chris Christ’s invitation to join the show, I began doubting that it was real. Thought maybe I’d misunderstood. I e-mailed him to ask if it was a joke. Nope, he said, come along. There were a few months left before the season started, so as I finished up at school and prepared to graduate, I sent another e-mail to Chris, checking again. Making sure he remembered it was me, not a real performer.