The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(96)
Dr. Frankenstein is seated on a stool and his kilt drapes over his thighs, but his knees jut nakedly out and bend at perfect right angles, his feet braced against the stool’s lowest rung. White athletic socks reach midcalf. His Velcro sandals are brown and grainy with fairground dust.
The audience sees the three-inch pins with the sharpened tips. Gleaming, they lie in a pile beside his stool. Can they look at that sort of instrument and not imagine it hammering into their own bodies, sliding through their skin and into the mysteries of what lies inside?
He takes one pin in his right hand, holds it against his forearm so the sharp tip is pressing against his skin and he continues talking in slow, soft, melodic sentences. This act happens in a small tent within the larger tent. Shoulder to shoulder the crowd stands, clutching their mouths or stomachs or each other in anticipation of seeing something they don’t want to see but have just paid an extra dollar to see.
Quiet voice, slow voice.
“Now the other thing is the sensation of pain. That is nothing more than a simple meditation technique. I’m capable of shutting down that part of my brain by turning it off like a light switch.”
The thick, hot air is heavy as a costume. Drip drip, lulling all the heads in the room into some partial sleep, some dream calm, some sleepy trust, and then midsentence, metal pin hovering against his forearm, the air slowing with his heart, he slaps the metal head.
Hard.
The pin jams into the meat of his forearm. The pin’s head is flush with his skin and the rest of the metal is inside.
I never see this act, but I hear it every time. It has a separate PA system, which rests on its own small stage made of four rectangular pieces of steel and two pieces of wood. A separate stage, on a separate side of the tent, for a very different kind of act. Dr. Frankenstein refuses to share a stage with any “illusions,” because he doesn’t want anyone even considering that he is not doing the thing it appears he is doing.
Before we open we take a soapy bucket and scrub the stages to release the mud and grass and blood. Mostly, we scrub to loosen the blood.
“Are you ready to see it?” Sunshine asks me three months into the season. I nod.
I am standing at the back of the crowd. It’s not an act we can peek through a curtain to watch, because it’s enclosed in its own tent and, more important, because Red wants nothing to break his concentration. I know that metal pieces will slide into Red’s body, that he will become a human pincushion, but I have never been able to actually imagine the act. He isn’t allowed to perform it everywhere, since not all fairs allow for dings—our extra moneymakers. But all these big fairs let us have the dings, and so every twenty minutes, his low, slow voice slides through the mic and a new kind of pain begins back there. I am nervous standing in his tent, like a child who has wandered in and doesn’t know for sure whether Dr. Frankenstein will survive this act, like I don’t know if Red, a person I see every single day, a person I have worked hard to make remember my name, a person I admire, will survive this and be able to perform it again.
“When I was young, I had the strangest way of cleaning my teeth,” Dr. Frankenstein says. His low monotone picks up a little lilt at the end. A cue for a joke. “I liked to clean them from the outside. And I’d do that by lining this up right about here,” he says, holding a metal pin—the kind used for upholstery or corsages—perpendicularly against his cheek. He opens his mouth wide, then slowly wiggles the pin into his cheek.
Dr. Frankenstein’s tent within our tent is small—fifteen by fifteen feet—and intimate enough that I can see the wet, pink skin on the inside of his mouth push into a small mound before the silver glint of the pin peeks through. The head is sticking two inches out from the outside of his cheek, the sharp tip an inch inside his cheek.
This isn’t an illusion. There is no trick. It isn’t anything but exactly what it is: pain, mastered.
My breathing becomes shallow, and I have to keep looking away from the pins. I look back to Dr. Frankenstein, to Red, this man I have watched eat hamburgers and brush his long orange hair, and he slaps another pin into his flesh, and I’m worried that this might be the one to do him in. That after his forty-plus years in sideshows, this one pin will kill him.
I’m also jealous. This is an act the audience will never forget.
A few in the crowd have turned away from the stage or have closed their eyes or cast them to the dirt. When I sit backstage and listen to the sound of the voice, slow and low, a local radio station occasionally crossing frequencies and filling his silences with quiet staticky country music, there is an occasional other sound. The other sound is the violent rip of the two massive Velcroed curtains containing the tent within the tent as they tear apart, and when I am not too tired to peek my face out from behind my own curtain to make sure everything is okay enough, I see a pale face rushing between the Velcro flaps, out from Dr. Frankenstein, a face wet with perspiration.
Some barf. Some faint. Falling ovations, everyone calls them. At least one in each town. Compliments, all of them. High fives backstage sometimes, depending on the mood, depending on how much we hate each other at that hour. Sometimes high fives for everyone except the one whose fault it is that everything is bad that day, who sits alone off the back of the truck chain-smoking and typing furiously into their phone.
Next comes the pin through a large pinch of skin on his neck. There’s a little blood. I take a deep breath, dig in. I want to watch pain happen without looking away, but I can’t. I look away. Cover my eyes with my hands like a child in a scary movie. I thought, after all this time, that I’d be tough enough to see this act without flinching, but the truth of the moment is too powerful—a man, a coworker, a friend, even, harming his body right in front of my eyes, for my pleasure.