The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(8)

I’m introduced to Spif, our show’s knife thrower and assistant stage manager, who is leaning against the kitchen sink with slicked-back hair and a long beard—the point from which he derives his powers, he says. It splays out like the whole world has a static charge.

I try to mimic his cool lean. “This is gonna be quite an adventure,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “life on the road’s fucking crazy.”

“I bet,” I say. “Wait. Like, bad crazy? Like, scary?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Sometimes. But it doesn’t matter ’cause I can’t die.”

I look over at him and expect a smile, but his face is stoic. “How’s that?”

“I can’t be killed,” he says. “I’m a juggalo.”

Juggalos: die-hard fans of Insane Clown Posse, a horrorcore rap group whose listeners drink and spray Faygo soda and, as I just learned, can’t die.

“Well,” Spif says, “I can die, but not until I have a rusty ax, until I know voodoo, until I have a fat bitch named Bridget, and a little sip of Faygo, too,” he says, his words gaining rhythm, and then he raps a few lines. It’s from one of ICP’s hits, Spif explains, “I Want My Shit.” What a beautiful idea, that death could come only after the right boxes have been checked. I want to tell him I like the lyrics and why, but I don’t want to lay my grief on someone I’ve just met while standing in the middle of a party. Plus, I’m not sure if I am going to tell anyone here at all. What if I kept the door to that story closed here? I pinch my leg and keep my mouth shut.

Spif fiddles with a horseshoe piercing in his septum, then fingers one of the ten or twelve necklaces he wears on his neck—there are wooden beads, silver chains, an amulet, crystals. “I’m the only half-Mexican I’ve ever met,” he tells me, “who can’t speak any Spanish.” He’s handsome, in his early twenties, with the sort of face you might see carved for the statue of a city’s great battalion leader. I like that snippets of his life seem to tumble out of his mouth without hierarchy, those ICP lyrics delivered with the same passion and intensity as a mention of his teenage homelessness.

“Oh god, is he telling you about being a juggalo?” Sunshine asks, walking over. “You’ve got to stop him. It will never end.” She elbows him in the ribs. “Cigarette?” she asks, looking at him, but before he can respond, Pipscy throws her arms around his neck from behind and pulls him in close.

“Hey, love,” he says, burying his nose in her cheek. She purrs. Pipscy’s boyfriend, a Renaissance fair reenactor, stands a few feet away, readying to say goodbye to her for the five months we’ll be on the road. He doesn’t seem to notice.

“So how do these kinds of long-distance relationships work?” I ask Sunshine a little later. She spends twenty minutes telling me about her boyfriend from a warm perch in Tommy’s lap.

“I miss my boyfriend a lot, all the time,” she says, exhaling. “It’s really hard.” She gets off the boss’s lap and comes closer to me, lowering her voice. “I can’t wait to leave this show one day and be back with him all the time. Keep it quiet, but I want this season to be my last. It’s my seventh, and I’m tired of this shit.”

I ask Spif the same relationship question a little later. “Well,” he says, “it’s pretty much a don’t ask, don’t tell situation. What happens on the road stays on the road,” he says. “It’s hard, though. There’s no loyalty anymore.”

“So you’ve been faithful but other people haven’t been?” I ask.

He gives a wry smile and looks at me sideways. “I’m not saying nothing,” he says. “But what happens on the road stays there.”

*

The party carries on around me, people laughing and talking and doing all the normal party things in their dark-colored lipstick as some kind of punk or hardcore plays in the background and people walk up to one another and know the right things to say, have a whole world together that I don’t know how to enter. I feel incredibly far away from everything that’s happening.

I excuse myself and walk half a block down the street.

“You make it to Florida?” Devin says when he picks up the phone.

“Oh shit,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” he says.

“Oh shit.”

“Are you okay?”

I tell him about the bone necklaces, the blood paintings, the juggalo, the law of infidelity. I tell him everyone’s in black and a few people are speaking carnie and I am in a collared shirt and cowboy boots and I’m such a square and who do I think I am for believing I can do something like this and who do I think I am for not spending every minute with my mom and I feel out of place, totally, spiritually, physically, Christ, shit, oh shit.

“Well, yeah, isn’t that the point?” he says. I stay silent.

Devin’s becoming a techie. As I was shopping in Haight-Ashbury’s sex shops for fishnets and spiked, studded heels, he was in interviews using words like productivity and interface. He asked me to proofread his résumé while I asked him what color wig he liked best.

“Kid, you can always leave,” he says. This makes something in my soft insides turn to stone. I imagine calling Davy and my mom, telling them that it’s too tough out here, that I don’t fit in. I think about telling this to the woman who performed tricks on top of a surfer’s shoulders, to the woman who worked on an all-male fishing boat in the Pacific a few years later. To the woman patiently O-ing her mouth day after day and hoping a word will come out.