The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(76)

While I go out to perform, Short E drives a race car on his phone, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. “I love the cheering here. All these people are cheering for me,” he says when I return. I raise my eyebrows at him. The cigarette ember matches the hue of the flames tattooed around his arm. “When I was born, my dad didn’t even think I would be able to ride the Ferris wheel, and here I am,” he says, gesturing out the open door to the whirling lights, the screaming teenagers grabbing one another as they shoot toward the sky.

Born without the lower half of his spine, Short E’s atrophied legs were amputated when he was two and a half years old. In elementary school, he was strapped into a big bucket with Velcro straps over the shoulders and prosthetic legs attached to the base. He used crutches. Then he moved into a wheelchair.

“But I’m stuck in a wheelchair with these goddamned fake legs and everyone else is outside having fun,” he says. “I got rid of them.” He’s been walking on his hands ever since.

Propped in his DJ booth at the strip club one night, he met his girlfriend. “She was onstage and did this move where she kicked her leg behind her head. I looked over at the owner and said, ‘I think I’m in love.’” She moved in right away. Her two boys did, too. “They respect me,” he says, after telling a story about when they found his gun and shot a hole through the wall, about when they shoved the air conditioner out the window. Drank his bong water.

Short E’s mom, a Lutheran minister, died eight years ago. “She tried to raise me to have a normal life,” he says. He pays his bills, rent. Vacuums his apartment. “The only thing I wish I had legs for was to drive a stick shift.”

Short E’s act ends and Chris drops the curtain. Short E comes backstage.

“That’s good stuff,” Chris says. “Real good stuff. Come with me into my trailer. I have an idea.”

“See?” Sunshine says. “Chris had the curtain open for like three minutes watching Short E, and it gave him an idea for something that I’m sure will be crazy and very Chris-like. And it doesn’t matter about the audience that one time around.”

“Because they still had a good time,” I say.

“They did or they didn’t. But we tried.”

*

Do you know what feels good? Dollar bills in your underpants.

*

“Do you have a script for the blade box I could look at?” I ask Tommy. I am to be the new inside talker for the blade box. This means the person with the mic who brings the crowd closer to the act, tells the story of the rubber girl or Gypsy magic or whatever tale I come up with while the audience watches sixteen blades slide into a rectangular box a bit smaller than a phone booth. The performer is locked inside, contorting her body around the blades. The talker tries to get the audience to pay an extra dollar to go around back and see her inside the box. It’s called a ding, and it’s a big extra moneymaker for the show.

“Say whatever you want,” Tommy says, and of course I know this is the answer he’ll give, the answer for everything, but I wish for something else. He must see some panic in my eyes. “All right. If you want to watch me do the first couple when we open so you can hear what I say, that’d be fine.”

When I visited the sideshow for the first time, I remember the talker telling the story of a poor Romanian woman, Sunshine, with a young daughter at home. The Romanian, the talker said, wasn’t paid for her role in the sideshow but survived solely off tips. She was sharing her family secret, and shouldn’t we reward her for that? I remember falling for it hard, seeing her huge, sad eyes, and thinking about the monsters who wouldn’t pay her for her work in the show.

In previous iterations of the act, the blade box was laid down on top of a table like a coffin, the scantily clad girl laying herself down into her own shallow grave. An assistant would stand beside the box, sliding the blades into precut holes on the top and pushing them through until they emerged on the other side. The audience could wonder at both sides of the blade, imagining the shape of a contorted body inside or the tricks that might be at play without being able to see the exact constellation of the blades.

Inside the tent, where the audience’s skepticism and search for the nuance of deceit is always present, the visual assurance of both ends of the blade does a lot of work. When I’d first seen this act in Florida, I’d invented elaborate ideas about the hoax involved, the sword, for example, breaking off when it enters the box, holding to the box’s exterior by magnets, and another piece coming out the other side, plans that would have involved a significantly higher budget than we ever had.

*

I watch Tommy talk the blade box act twice, and when the third cycle of the show comes up, he asks if I am ready.

“Maybe? Probably not,” I say.

“Great, you’ll be fine,” he says, handing me the mic. He has the bally stage to talk, and other performers to manage, and money to deal with, and talking an extra act—a long one at that—isn’t something he can afford.

“I’ll stand next to you this first one, as your assistant, just in case anything goes wrong.”

We walk down to the separate side stage where the stand-up blade box reaches high into the air. Sunshine presents herself, and I start talking—“There are sixteen slits and slats into which we will be placing these blades,” I say—and she climbs in. Sort of remembering what Tommy had said, I throw in little details I’m not sure he’d said or I am inventing, and I stumble over words, repeating things I don’t need to repeat. The crowd has thirty or forty people in it. The blades are all in. And then I get to the moment.