The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(73)
“Nine a.m. to midnight weekdays, nine a.m. to two a.m. weekends, plus work call an hour and a half before opening and the work after closing. For two weeks.”
“Oh shit.”
“Exactly.”
*
“I was a Navy SEAL,” Red says. He’s sitting in the front seat of the van. He bought new bright lights for the tent, but they’re the wrong wattage, and Tommy has sent us to Lowe’s to exchange them.
Aside from that morning backstage, this is the first time I’ve been alone with Red, and my heart is pounding. I don’t have much chance to interact with him aside from when he directs action during setup or teardown, much of which I flub since I can’t remember exactly how each different piece of vinyl siding is folded, for example. And we don’t interact during performances, since he has his own stage—on which also sits that glorious, gleaming electric chair—and his own code of conduct he’s developed after enough years on the road.
“The thing is,” Sunshine had told me, “he’s been doing this for so many years, and seen so many people come and go, that it’s sort of pointless for him to remember names. Especially at the beginning. If as the season goes on he sees that you’re gonna make it, that you can hack it, the likelihood of him knowing you drastically increases.”
If he knew who I was, if he—dare I dream it—respected me as a performer, then I’d be a real part of what was happening here, a GTFM showperson earning her keep. And if I understood who he was, maybe some secret of the show, of life on the road, of bravery, would be unlocked.
When I ask Red about how he started performing, he begins with his time as a Navy SEAL.
“In Vietnam, I was on a team that snuck in to rescue people. Generals and POWs. I always either headed up the platoon or was in the very back. One day, my commander was up front, leading, and I was bringing up the rear. We hit a field of land mines. Booby traps.”
He pauses, takes a sip of coffee from the plastic Big Gulp coffee cup he holds between his legs. In the tight confines of the car, it’s impossible not to smell him. He smells like an old, important costume piece. Not a new, fresh sweat, but an older, deeper smell that has settled permanently into fabric or wood or air. It is the kind of smell that never lets you forget how long he has been working hard, and how hard, which all makes you think about why. Why has he done this for so long?
“My commander stepped right on a land mine. He knew it. We knew it. He didn’t move. Held it down with his foot while the rest of us passed by. We were just a little ways past him, and I was in the very back, when he thought he could get away in time. He thought he could leap off it. He tried, but he didn’t move fast enough. The bottom half of his body flew into the air and landed right on top of me. His knees knocked me to the ground.
“When I came to, I realized my mouth was open and I was screaming. I couldn’t stop. The other guys from the platoon were yelling at me to shut the fuck up. There were gooks all around, and they thought I might give away our position. I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t. They dragged the commander’s legs off me, but I just kept screaming and screaming. I’d cracked.
“Someone in the platoon pinned me down and held his hand over my mouth. Then they got tape. They taped my mouth shut to mute the sound of the screaming, and then when that wouldn’t work anymore, they knocked me out.
“I got sent home not long after that. And I decided to kill myself. What else was there to do? But I thought that I’d do one last thing before I offed myself, and that was go to Woodstock.
“There, I met people who had a way of explaining things about the world like I’d never heard before. They gave me some peace.
“So I went home to the carnival. I’d been there before, from when I was fourteen on to when I joined the SEALs. When I went back, I learned to be an electrician, light up the midway. Did that for a while, then worked as an electrician on the Lakota Indian reservation. Learned about things in the spirit world I’d never even dreamed about. And from there, I went back into sideshow work. Performance. I met a fakir I studied with who taught me to control my breath and heart rate, to slow it down almost completely. To control pain. Those things are all related—the people at Woodstock and the Lakota Indians and the fakir. It’s all about your mind. And your mind’s control over your body. Once you achieve that, you are free.”
*
“When I was in my early twenties and living in Carmel,” my mom began in my memory of the telling, the first line of a story I had often begged to hear. We were sitting in the bathroom as she combed my hair after a bout with lice. It was late at night.
Sometimes a story suddenly changes. It was one story, meant one thing. And then, boom. The story becomes newly clear.
I had stories I held on to about my mom, but the longer it had been since I’d talked to her, the more the ground shifted from beneath those foundational ways I thought I knew her. Or, really, how I thought I’d lost her.
“I shared a house with my friend Tweedy. She worked a nighttime waitressing job, and I worked a daytime shift for a travel agency. When I was alone in the house, I started hearing strange sounds. Doors and windows would close on their own, and something that sounded like footsteps in the attic. I thought we had raccoons or possums living up there, even though I knew the weight of the steps meant something heavier. I ignored what I could, afraid to think too much about these kinds of things. But the sounds kept happening. Finally one day, I asked Tweedy if she’d ever noticed anything strange in the house when I wasn’t there, and she eventually told me she’d heard a lot of creaks as well, and that the cabinets in the kitchen would sometimes slam. She heard the same footsteps, too.”