The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(7)
“I think it would be a great adventure for you,” Chris wrote back. “Plus, we could use a little help with PR. You’re a college girl. Maybe you can write some stuff.”
*
The van picking me up at the Tampa airport holds Tommy, the road boss and talker, and Sunshine, the stage manager/fire eater. Sunshine, I immediately recognize, was the target half of the knife-throwing act I saw at the Florida State Fair. I feel a little starstruck.
“You tired?” Sunshine asks as I climb in, exhaling her vapor cigarette, “or do you wanna go to a party? Pipscy’ll be out with us this season. She’s having a going-away party tonight. There’ll be friends, family, other performers.” Her voice is slow and even. She has the round, watery eyes, coiffed hair, and disappointed pursed lips of a silent-film heroine. “Pipscy’s a mermaid.”
“I love mermaids,” I say. Tommy steers us toward the party.
The van is clean and white with plush gray seats. Blue fuzzy dice hang from the rearview mirror. Sunshine and Tommy tell me about the previous season’s thirteen-foot albino python. “I wasn’t really paying attention one day,” Sunshine says, waving her hand dismissively, “and Lemon managed to wrap herself all the way around my arms and neck, and then slid down my body, pinning me completely inside her coils. Bad Lemon, I said. Someone had to come unwrap her so I could move again. It was so funny.” She and the boss exchange nostalgic smiles. I hope they don’t notice my blanched cheeks.
Lining the road are meticulously spaced palm trees, an intrusion of order in a state with so much wild. Soon, the palm trees give way to concrete art: sculpted geese or the outline of a gator, huge against the wild brush in the background. We’re flying.
“No Lemon this year, though,” Tommy says. “All the interstate reptile regulations just changed. No pythons across state borders without permits. Pythons and a few other snakes are considered too likely to escape and make new snake colonies wherever they get out. And the permits are expensive.”
“So no snakes?” I ask, a little too eagerly.
“Oh, there will be snakes,” Tommy says. “Boa constrictors. No permits required.”
“Boa constrictors,” I parrot.
“You like snakes?” Tommy asks, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror with his steady gaze.
“I’m going to,” I manage.
Apart from the e-mail I’d sent Tommy in which I’d bluffed my skills, I didn’t know how much Chris Christ had told the crew about who I was—that I’d shown up at his trailer searching for his sideshow story and suddenly found myself inside my own. I didn’t know what they believed I could perform, if the list I’d sent Tommy had been passed around, and I was nervous to ask, to get caught in my lie. I was even more nervous to be thrown onstage with the expectation that I could do something I couldn’t—like the actor’s classic nightmare of being in a play where you don’t know your lines or even what play is being performed.
“What other acts, exactly, will I be doing?” I ask. My voice shakes a little.
“You’re our bally girl, which means you’ll stand out on the front stage with the talker, Tommy, and help him get people to buy tickets to come into the show. Bally girls handle the snakes, eat fire, escape from handcuffs, and perform magic,” Sunshine says.
“Great,” I say, gulping, racking my brain for magic tricks I knew as a kid, for some way to apologize and explain I am not an escape artist.
“You eat fire, right?” she asks.
“Yep,” I say. Since I’ve just learned, I look like a fool doing it.
“Then you’re all set. I’ll teach you some advanced fire-eating tricks, if you want. But we usually just train all the bally girls on everything when they come. You’ll learn the other acts sometime soon.”
My stomach muscles loosen their clenching just enough that I can smile and nod at Sunshine as she turns to look at me. I don’t believe her. Even if it’s true that they teach many of the performers the acts after they get here, I’m sure they all come with an arsenal of experience I’m lacking.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Performing the acts is the easy part of making it out here.”
*
The party for Pipscy is meant to infuse her with love and fun and booze, because, story goes, this will be the first time she’s ever left home and she’s terrified. She’s been performing in the Tampa nightclub circuit a few years, a little burlesque here, Rocky Horror Picture Show there, but now, at twenty-two, she’s going to try to hit the road. That’s all I know about Pipscy when I am introduced to the girl with robin-red hair who is jumping up and down just before she takes a shot of Jagermeister with her roommate, a guy at least twice her age who has just had his leg amputated above the knee. It is wrapped in white gauze, which Pipscy helps change two times a day.
“Fuck diabetes,” he says, nodding toward his leg. I agree.
“You’ll never believe what awesome goodbye presents I’m getting,” Pipscy says, pulling me over to a table. She fingers a small pile of neatly stacked bones. “Like this—it’s a choker made of armadillo vertebrae—and this,” she says, gesturing to a painting of a girl’s face hung on the wall, “portrait of me. It’s painted in blood.” She doesn’t say whose.