Instead of paying for a bally talker like Tommy or Cassie to stand out front and work people in, a grind tape plays over loudspeakers while the carnival is open: “The only living horse smaller than a cat, inside, alive, today.” As freak shows became less popular in the second half of the twentieth century and show budgets decreased, the grind tape became a necessity.
Each of the grind tapes for the single-o’s here sounds old, both the voice and the tape, like an invitation to an earlier world, before those enthusiastic inflections were used as jokes, back when stranger things were on display.
There was a famous grind-tape recorder named Peter Hennen, one of the best in the business. Story goes: Hennen called a friend in the middle of the night and said, “I’ve got a good one! Listen: ‘See the little girl born to live her entire life underwater. She can’t come out or she will die. She’s in there now. She goes to school in there. You can come in and see her. You can ask her questions. She may not answer you.’” Was it a real mermaid? his friend wondered. Could it be?
Hennen was giddy, and explained that when you walked into the single-o, there would be a giant fishbowl with a few goldfish swimming in it and a sign with this disclaimer:
GOLDFISH DO SPEND THEIR ENTIRE LIFE UNDERWATER.
THESE ARE GIRL GOLDFISH AND THEY GO TO SCHOOL.
THEY LIVE IN SCHOOLS.
ASK THEM ANYTHING YOU WANT.
It’s amazing that the single-o’s work. But they’re always cheap, and what’s inside is never an explicit lie according to what has been advertised. The world’s fattest pig is pretty big. And the Giant Battalion horse is a Clydesdale, which is large. Why don’t people warn each other? Maybe they feel foolish after wanting to believe they were going to see something truly exceptional for fifty cents, or maybe they want others to fall for it, too.
The world’s smallest horse bally tape runs in a loop while Leo, the joint’s operator, leans back in his camp chair with a newspaper. He reads each page meticulously. Our PA system blares the same acts we’re talking every seven to ten minutes. I can’t imagine how dreadful it is for Leo. And yet, every time I walk on- or offstage, passing close to the mysterious trailer allegedly holding the smallest horse, he waves and smiles.
After work one day, as we’re rolling banners—an activity we do each night to preserve the thirty-foot-high hand-painted canvas that advertises all the acts we have inside—he catches my eye and points at his horse’s trailer. Did I want to see it? I trot over when we’re finished, climb the few steps, and there, in the recessed center of the platform, see a very small pony. It’s about the size of a golden retriever. I make some clicking sounds and hold out my hand, but the pony does not look up.
“I grow orchids,” Leo says. “That’s really what I love.” He takes out his phone and fumbles his thick fingers across the small buttons, breathing heavily and cursing quietly when the buttons aren’t taking him where he wants to go. I look down at the pony, steadily munching hay, taking no notice of my presence at all. “Here,” Leo says, coming up right beside me. On his screen is a photograph of a tiny violet orchid. “And here,” he says, showing me a snow-white large-petaled flower next. “They love it on my boat. It’s parked in Florida. You can come stay with me anytime,” he says. “You’re always welcome. Remind me of your name again?”
“Tess. Thank you,” I tell him. “They’re beautiful.” I’m amazed by his level of kindness toward a stranger. I imagine, in another context, that this kind of offer might come across as creepy, but he seems wholly focused on his flowers, and I have no reason to distrust him.
“How many seasons have you been out?” he asks.
“This is my first,” I say.
“Oh, you seem like a real pro,” he says, and I think about my Band-Aid finger and sore muscles and snake tears and nearly laugh out loud. “Well, the truth is that you’ll never be the same after doing this,” Leo says. “This kind of life changes you.”
“You’re not the first person who’s said that,” I say.
“Folks who spend life on the road are just different.”
“Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way?” I ask.
“That all depends,” he says, smiling. “Gotta wait to find out.” He pulls up more pictures of his orchids.
* * *
It seems so obvious—that whatever life you’re living will change you. But it’s not something I was aware of as a kid, not something kids are aware of in general—that their world is particular. I didn’t know my version of America was different from anyone else’s.
My America was full of women with armpit hair. A lot of musical events happened at my K–8 school, which doubled as a community center and day care with a rainbow painted above the door. There were drum circles and concerts on the scratchy grass, and my family would trek down to these events like everybody else. The women would stand up and sway their bodies along with the music, slowly at first, speeding up as they raised their arms to the sky for a fuller expression of the music entering them, and that’s when their soft, sweet armpit hair would emerge, and their skirts would twirl around them like trumpet flowers, and wafts of pot and sage would rise—it took me years to understand those scents as separate from one another. Sometimes men rose up, too, and swayed with half-closed eyelids like gentle ogres, and it was all sort of nice. It was what I understood America to be.
My mother shaved her pits. She shaved her legs. Sometimes. Once a week, she taught me. Well, from the ankle to the knee. Never shave above the knee, she told me, because there aren’t really hairs up there anyway, but the ones that are there will grow back black and thick like thorny vines.
She stood up when the loud music moved her like the other moved women, but she didn’t raise her arms to the sky. She snapped, or moved side to side, foot to foot. She swayed her hips, smiled, took sips of wine.
Once, when I was twelve or thirteen, I couldn’t believe the number of times she asked me to dance with her in one afternoon. Come on and dance, she called to me. Stop being so shy, she said sweetly, and smiled, both her hands out to me, snapping with the rhythm and then beckoning me over, and I wished above all else to be invisible. Or dead.
I surveyed the scene around me. The town, mostly these women, carried out ongoing campaigns for the blue-bellied salamanders and campaigns to preserve the open ridges and campaigns for the spawning salmon and campaigns to create meditation retreats for the children. We were the children, and we ate miner’s lettuce from the side of the road, and there was love—local, free-range, organic love. I wouldn’t have said, as I looked at the pom-poms of their pit hair beaded with drops of sweat like beautiful cobwebs, that I didn’t envy them. That kind of looseness, that total I-don’t-give-a-damn-ness. I think my mom felt the same. I could see her there, bouncing side to side, talking to a friend but eyeing the wild mothers, wondering if letting go completely was a trick she would ever be able to perform.
It would be easiest to say she was this and she was that—a free-spirited smiling hippie in this free-spirited smiling hippie town—but she wasn’t. She was, partially. She was complicated. Like everyone. A part of her wanted to be loose in the world, an ecstatic celebrator, and another part of her desperately wanted to be accepted by the wealthy pearl-wearing women who hired her to paint fabric for their draperies.
My mom and Davy had moved to this drum-circle town because he’d found a job close by, and they were part-time hippies and she was full-bellied pregnant with my brother. I asked my mom, years later, how she could have left my dad and married someone else so quickly. I didn’t ask it kindly.
Sometimes, you just have to make the best choice for you, even if it’s not the pretty one.
As soon as he’d heard that my mom was splitting up with her husband, Davy had left his job as chief audio engineer at NPR without another job, packed all his things into his car, and driven across the country from D.C. to San Francisco. For her. For the possibility of her.
Fate’s the word Davy used. Finding each
other again, getting married, him finding a job. A year after my brother was born, we went to a portrait studio in the mall. There were bears and plastic roses and wagons and piles of empty Christmas packages along the walls to use as props. We chose the wagon, set my small brother inside. I kneeled next to the wagon like an obedient little pioneer with my hands clasped tight in my good girl’s lap. I already knew, at five and a half, that I was the add-on. That I was not a core member of this nice, new, fated family. I stayed quiet a lot, afraid to remind anyone else of what they must know, too.
* * *
“Hello, love of my life,” Davy said to my mom. She was on the couch, had just woken up from a nap. After ten months in the hospital and rehabilitation facilities, she was released to his care. He rented a small apartment for a few months, had soft blankets and shower stools and raised toilet seats and all the accompanying products that are supposed to make recovery easier. She was alert, alive. Still paralyzed on the right side of her body. Still without language.
Her head wound was fresh again, as it usually was, because of the number of times they tried to stop the bleeding, to implant drains and tubes and magnets and replace the bone flap and take it back off and replace it again, off, on, off. There were a lot of infections. Constant infections.
She was home with Davy for a few weeks, then back to the hospital. Then back home for two months, then the hospital. She started having seizures. She had soaring temperatures. She fell. Hit her head. She would go back into the hospital, and the doctors would help how they could and Davy would be there every day and my brother and I would visit when we could, and then she would come back out and into his care, and he would do the best he could to care for her, an amazing job. But something would happen, another infection, weakness, wound trouble, whatever, and off they’d go to the hospital again.
“Italy,” he whispered to her. “Just keep thinking about Italy.”
* * *
After we close, I find I’ve been marked. By the snake, again, though differently this time. I held her today, still afraid, but she hadn’t drawn blood, and I’d tried to commune with her, sending her a sense of peace. I peel the sweat-sticky corset from my torso; my ribs finally expand with a full breath and ache with the relief, like the pain of a hand finally warming up after hours in the cold. Papery snake scales are stuck all over my skin. They cling everywhere, binding to me from the heat of the day, my fingernails filling with the rough flakes of snake as I run my fingers over the indentations from the corset’s ribs.
I lie down in my bunk, legs and feet aching, ribs hot, and close my eyes. Try to breathe. But quickly, I feel a heavy weight grow around my neck, a cold smooth body pressing into my throat and moving down my sternum. I know that there is no snake on my body, that I am lying safely in bed, exhausted, dirty, alone, but still I feel it, not only her weight and chill but also the expansion and contraction of her muscles as they move, her face pushing hard against the side of my face as she slithers up and over my head. People who’ve lost limbs sometimes feel phantom pains—could the same happen here? Maybe this will be the way life is from here on out, the weighty presence of that giant boa constrictor around my throat whether she’s there or not.
Still, the presence of the snake isn’t what keeps me awake. I am afraid of a recurring dream. It was always set somewhere different—a car I was driving, a room I was walking into—somewhere innocuous. When I’d enter, just out of my sight, from the back seat or behind a corner in the room, I’d hear my mother’s voice. She’d say something very quiet, almost imperceptible, and I’d look around until I found her. She’d be right there with all the other dream people doing banal things, suggesting a right turn ahead or wondering if the sandwich bread was whole wheat. I filled with joy. There was her voice, that familiar song I hadn’t heard in so long, and even as a dreamer, I knew these words were a gift. That her voice was, somehow, a miracle. And every time, that sweet happiness I felt would slowly start to fade as I looked around at all the other dream people, who acted as though it was normal for her, for any person, to speak. That was the moment I’d realize that her voice wasn’t real. That her words were ghosts of words she had spoken years before. Realizing that made time start happening faster, so I’d ask her to speak again, turning from the road my car was hurtling down, craning my body all the way around since our car could not crash in this dream, so I could get right up against the words she couldn’t possibly have said—What? Can you say it again?—but she never did, of course, my recognition of its impossibility killed the fantasy. But I’m inventing this dream! I wanted to shout, Please speak again, and sometimes she would take her palm and bring it softly, softly up to my cheek, her eyes meeting mine with their mirror of green, and I knew there was a lesson I was supposed to understand about acceptance. I refused it. Please speak again, I pleaded with her, Tell me what to do, please? I didn’t hear you? Please, again and again and again.
LET’S US HAVE FUN
Two months after the stroke
December 2010
Story goes: Sidonia the Hungarian Baroness began sprouting a beard just after giving birth to a little person. He weighed one and a half pounds. The baby’s father was Baron Anton de Barscy, a burly four-hundred-pound man who lost his fortune and was forced to flee Hungary just as their new child arrived. Taking their new life in stride, the family decided to begin touring as performers. 1885. They traveled with the circus together for many years, seeing the world, amazing audiences with their family story that was almost too good to be true.
Davy told us the incredible story of the de Barscys before we went to sleep, or around a fire at our camping spot, five miles into the redwoods from where we lived. The son, Davy would say, Baron Nicu de Barscy, was my first friend.
The de Barscys came to the United States in 1903 and continued performing together until the baron died in 1912, after which Sidonia the Hungarian Baroness married the Long-Haired Cherokee Buck Man, another performer on the circuit. The reorganized family continued playing circuses and sideshows until Sidonia’s declining health in 1923 caused the Long-Haired Cherokee Buck Man to leave her for a performing dwarf named Doletta Boykin. Sidonia died in 1925, and, after performing another decade, Nicu retired to a small town called Drummond, Oklahoma, that they’d passed through on their way elsewhere. Davy’s grandparents lived next door.
In the kitchen, there were a table and chairs made for a two-and-a-half-foot-tall man. When Davy, at seven, was invited in, it was the first time his legs didn’t dangle down from a chair, the first time he could rest his elbows comfortably on a table. He fit there. He was ecstatic. There was not only the magic of this Hungarian aristocrat living close by and performing in circuses and sideshows and traveling the globe, there was also the fact of finding, as a child, a world that seemed made just for him.
As a kid, I loved these stories. The idea that out there, somewhere, a weird, wild world awaited. A world that fit people of all sizes, where everyone was normal because nobody was. I kept the stories tucked away like tiny prizes I’d occasionally allow myself to admire.
* * *
Two months after my mom got sick, two months into the hospital and rehab facilities and emergency goodbyes and brain surgeries and therapies and grim consultations and leaking blood and brain fluid and crises and recoveries and humming, I met a carnie in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
I was walking with Devin back to our respective apartments from a bar.
The carnie was slumped against a bank on the town’s main drag in the middle of the night.
This was two years before I heard of the World of Wonders, two years before I knew anything about the town in Florida where sideshow performers went to retire.
I’d been in California most of the time since my mom had her stroke, saying goodbye and goodbye and goodbye, but she seemed not to be dying just yet, so I was back in Alabama. Trying to be totally, completely, absolutely normal.
We saw the man and asked if he needed help. He didn’t respond. We sh
ook the man by the shoulder and his eyelids retracted slowly like a toy losing its batteries and he said, “I work with the carnival and I lost it.”
The streets were filled with souped-up Ford trucks accelerating under the feet of hammered frat boys. We were nervous about what might happen to this man if we let him be, and charmed by the idea of the carnival, and so we said, “Come with us.” We bent down, one on either side, and held his elbows as he swayed to his feet.
“We’ll get you a taxi,” Devin said, “to take you back to the carnival.”
“Where is the carnival?” I asked.
“You know where,” he said. I wanted to know where. I wanted to have a sixth sense for that sort of thing, but I didn’t.
We stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, looking for a miracle cab in this cab-less college town, hoping a driver might know where the fairgrounds were. We stood for twenty minutes and no cabs passed. We couldn’t get any on the phone either, or find any information about any fairgrounds.
“What do you do in the carnival?” I asked, standing close to the nodding-off man while Devin waved and thumbed at passing cars. We were now hoping for a generous stranger.
“Rides,” he said. “The Gravitron. And more. A lot. Let’s us have some fun. Let’s go have fun.”
I looked at Devin, still frantically trying to wave down a car. Good-hearted, loyal Devin. He saw my look, walked back, and pulled me down the street by the elbow.
“We are not taking him back to my place. No,” he said.
“No,” I agreed. “That would be a bad idea.” We looked at the man, now wide awake and singing something to himself as he looked up and down the street. “But maybe not that bad of an idea. A real carnie. Let’s take him back to your place. You’ve got beers. I’ve got so many questions.”
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