The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(72)
“Me, too,” we all agree, and march over to buy tickets. Everything smells of chlorine and packed dirt from the fake stream and planter boxes used to make the place feel like a real, wild, out-of-doors carnival somewhere.
“Are you all in a band?” a young guy asks Spif as we wait in line.
“Nah, man. We’re a freak show,” Spif says.
We hand over our tickets and climb into the plastic bucket seats like we are weary travelers finally come home. We’re off. Rattle up a hill, whip down it, all of us riding together like some normal group of friends delighted by the uncommon pleasure of a roller coaster. We scream. Throw our hands up when we want to seem brave. Our direction, our speed, our pleasure—out of our hands.
*
We drive from the great gleaming mall across the highway overpass and into a giant parking garage outside the airport. Tommy parks the van, kills the engine, and turns back to us.
“Sunshine, you’re with me. The rest of you, don’t move.”
Like most times, I have no idea what’s going on. I know, vaguely, that we are getting a new performer soon, but I didn’t know it was now, today, if it is. I know as we head into the next meat-grinder, more performers means more bodies to fill in acts onstage, which means a slightly longer show, which means slightly longer breaks between acts, potentially, like four minutes instead of two, and so I’m delighted. Nearly two million people come through the Minnesota State Fair. On our last Walmart trip, Tommy instructed each of us to buy a plastic container with a screw-on top that we could use as a pee jar in our bunks for the times we wouldn’t be able to make it to the Porta-Potties between acts. I choose an extra-large plastic jug of trail mix.
We wait in the van for ten minutes, twenty, thirty. Finally, about an hour later, Tommy and Sunshine emerge from the elevator area pushing a luggage cart, atop which sit several pieces of luggage and a man.
“What’s up, everybody?” the new guy says as he opens the van door. His arms are tan, muscled, and he reaches both of them into the van, grasps onto a lever beneath the seat with one hand, a handle inside the van with another, and pulls himself inside. He is wearing a black cowboy hat and black T-shirt, and his body ends there.
“Everyone, this is Short E Dangerously, the world’s shortest daredevil. Short E, this is everyone,” Tommy says. Short E uses his hand to throw a death metal devil horns into the air but does not turn around to look at any of us.
I’d met Short E briefly at the Florida fair the evening I’d spent lurking around the tent and trailers, trying to get in with Chris Christ. He was smoking on the backstage steps and made the mistake of making eye contact with me. I barreled over. He watched me approach, squinting his eyes like an old cowboy though he was no older than his early thirties, and as soon as I could see his face clearly enough under the shadow of his hat, I blushed a little. He was very handsome.
He obliged me in some of my questions about life on the road, and his acts, and when it was time for him to go onstage again, the Big Boss Chris came back out.
“Watch out for him,” he said, nodding at Short E as he retreated through the stage curtains and onto the stage. “He’s a merciless flirt.”
On the van ride back to our show from the airport, Short E chats with Sunshine and Tommy up front about the last few months of his life and his international tour with a magician, in which he took part in the grand finale act. The magician saws a man in half, clearly pulling the blade all the way through the man. Not a new act. Where Short E and the magician brought the act to a new level was that at this point, the top half of the man, Short E, jumps down from the table and is able to walk on the floor with his hands, breaching all possible explanations for hidden limbs or contortion or mirrors. He swings his torso back and forth while holding himself up with his arms, and there is no way, it is not possible, for legs to be hidden anywhere, and it never occurs to the audience, because why would it, that the man onstage didn’t have any legs to begin with.
“You perform one, maybe two shows a day. Don’t have to be anywhere until evening. You can party hard all night. People loved us in every town we came to, wanted to chill. I had a lot of long, long nights with those Brazilian women,” Short E says, smiling.
The idea is almost too much to bear: one performance a day. I’m not sure I am going to know what to do with myself when the season is over, and the momentary daydream of free time almost sends me into a panic.
*
The next morning, a car pulls up behind our tent and Chris Christ, the Big Boss and World of Wonders owner, climbs out. He still has the two dark trails of snuff running from the corners of his mouth, and the few patches of hair still on his head are wild and wiry like those of a mad scientist. He approaches our crew with a hunch, a shuffle, and a subtle smile as we are cleaning some of the freakatorium pieces.
The seasoned performers—Tommy, Sunshine, Red, Cassie, and Short E—take turns giving him hugs and hellos, and then he gives a wave to the greenhorns. A truck pulls up hauling another small trailer, which it drops next to Tommy’s trailer, where Chris will stay for the next two weeks with our show while we are in the heat of this meat-grinder.
“I’ll work the bally sometimes,” he says. “So Tommy and Cassie don’t blow their voices.” I can’t wait to see the legend play.
“What are the hours at this fair?” I ask Tommy later that night.