Lobster Boy

by Fred Rosen

  The Stiles family was still struggling along from day to day. Everyone had to do their share, including Grady, Jr. It was time for the child to go out and make a living like everyone else. His father decided he would join the family business. Young Grady would become a carny.

  Grady, Sr., forced his son to quit school and join the carnival. From small town to small town, across the northern plains and the southern panhandle, into the cool New England forests and the muggy northeastern states in the summers, young Grady climbed up onto the platform with his father.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the bally man shouted. “Step right up, pay your money and see ‘The Lobster Family!’”

  People would pay money, get a ticket, and enter a small, canvas tent. Upon entering, they would see a raised, wooden platform, on which Grady Stiles, Sr., and his son sat in chairs. As they gazed at this exotic form of human oddity, Grady, Sr., began his routine. As he had throughout his carnival life, Grady would entertain the folks by relating the story of his family’s disability, pointing to his smiling son, Lobster Boy, as the next generation who had to grin and bear it.

  In those days, the carnival was indeed a family. There were none of the “forty-milers” you have now, those that join the carnival briefly and move on. In those days, people joined up for the duration; they stayed with the same carnival through thick and thin, through mud and rain or locusts or whatever. They were there for each other, The Fat Man, The Bearded Lady, the roustabouts, the strippers, the workers in the “grab trucks,” who sold the equivalent of junk food.

  The living conditions in the back of drafty trailers and tents were abysmal, but young Grady, Jr., enjoyed being a showman, exhibiting himself on the platform, earning a salary like his father.

  The Stileses signed on with the Lorow Brothers and were put in a “10 in 1” show that featured ten “freak” acts under one tent for the same price. The Lobster Family became the star attraction.

  During the winter months, Grady traveled with his father back to Gibsonton and lived there with his mother and sisters. Unlike his experience in Pittsburgh, he was not ridiculed for his appearance. After all, the odd was usual in Gibsonton. It was a show town, filled with carnival and circus oddities.

  Young Grady fit in with the local kids. He could play baseball like they did and he loved to wrestle. It was fun getting his strong arms around his opponent and squeezing until they had no choice but to submit and cry uncle or be further crushed in Grady’s python-like arms. As for locomotion, he was as fast on his hands as most people were on their feet. Even faster.

  Yet despite his adaptation to his handicap and the acceptance he received in Gibsonton, Grady grew up bitter at the world at large for not accepting him. Determined to prove to the world he was just as good as they were, he got stronger than anyone else.

  All Grady had was his arms. Years of crawling around on them, of supporting his entire body weight on those appendages, made them strong. His claws had bone and muscle and sinew in them, too. He gradually learned how to use his claws, to do nearly everything anyone else could, from simple tasks like washing to more complex ones like writing, and later, much later, firing a revolver … accurately. And they became powerful enough to crush anything he grasped with them, powerful enough to inflict pain. His strength allowed him to indulge a sadistic side that had built up in him over the years. He enjoyed inflicting pain, especially when he was drunk.

  If anyone bothered him, Grady’s claw shot out and slapped the malefactor alongside the head. Those who were hit by his claw said it felt like being hit with a board. Before his victim could stand, Grady would scuttle over and head butt him in the stomach. An explosion of air and his opponent went down again. Then Grady would place his powerful arms around the target’s throat and began squeezing.

  As for his parents, not much is known about Grady’s relationship with them. In later years, he talked rarely to his wife Teresa about his childhood and adolescence. If his parents abused him in any way, he did not tell. He did, however, acquire a taste for liquor, and drank with Grady, Sr., and Edna as he grew older. Grady favored Seagram’s 7.

  Years later, all that bitterness he’d stored up as a child and adolescent would come raging out of control when he drank too much, which was, his family would say, every night. God forbid if you were a family member who got in Grady’s path when he got drunk.

  His carnival career pretty much precluded Grady from having a formal education. The schooling he got was life’s experience. He could read print in a book, but as for cursive writing, it was unintelligible gibberish. He couldn’t write except for his name, which was done in an elementary school-type of scrawl.

  Grady was an extremely intelligent man, smart enough to eventually run his own sideshow. What he lacked in formal education he more than made up for in street smarts. He was also charming and effusive to those he liked. In those early years, he dressed well, and when he was flush, he ate in the finest restaurants.

  Of course, getting around was still a problem. In public, he used a wheelchair for locomotion. In private, he just crawled on his hands and delighted in showing anyone who was interested how he could walk just as quickly on those hands as the so-called “normal” people on their God-given feet.

  By the 1950s, Grady, Sr., and his son had tired of working for someone else and went out on their own. In 1954, at the age of seventeen, Grady married Deborah Brady in Tampa, Florida. But the marriage didn’t work out; they were separated after a year and eventually divorced. They had no children. And so Grady continued, up on the platform with the carnival, but eyeing the girls, looking for another one to make his own.

  Mary Teresa Herzog was born April 23, 1938, in a small town in Vermont, where a cold winter’s day could find the temperature plunging to ten below zero. What she remembered most from her childhood was the cold, mostly the frost in her home.

  Her mother Jean and father Harvey did not get along and when she was six, they divorced. Her mother married Frank Tyler. Until Grady, he was the most important man in her life.

  In those days, incest was not talked about. It was even more taboo than now. And so, having no choice, having no power, young Teresa submitted to her stepfather’s frequent sexual abuse for years. However, one of the things that made her life bearable was the circuit carnival that stopped at her town several times a year.

  “The carnival fascinated me. I guess it fascinated most young people. I thought the lights and the excitement were just great,” Teresa recalls.

  Teresa wanted to get closer to the carny, so whenever the carnival came to town, she helped sell tickets—until one day in 1956. When she was eighteen years old, she shook off that small-town New England routine for good and joined the carnival.

  Three years later, she had grown into an attractive young woman with a pretty face and a good figure.

  She fell in love with a carnival roustabout named Jerry Plummer. A good-looking young man, Jerry operated one of the bulldozers that moved the carnival paraphernalia during setups and takedowns from one dusty, backwater town to another.

  Teresa and Plummer got married. It was not a happy marriage.

  The girl abused in childhood had married a man who abused her as an adult. Within months of their marriage, Jerry beat Teresa. He threw punch after punch in anger, breaking most of her teeth. One night, in a fit of rage over some unnamed slight, he threw hot coffee at her and scalded her skin. But that was just the beginning of her humiliation.

  On another occasion, Jerry thrust the sharp point of his switchblade against the small of Teresa’s back and forced her to walk in front of hundreds of people on the midway.

  When Teresa got pregnant with his child, he knocked her down the stairs, getting pleasure out of her pain. Jerry, though, grew tired of the sport. “He left me,” Teresa recalls. The game just wasn’t fun anymore.

  Unlike many abused women, who feel helpless, alone, and depressed when their abuser is out of the picture, Mary Teresa took responsibility for her
own life. Still legally married to Jerry, she engaged an attorney and got a divorce. Now she had to support herself and her new daughter, Debra.

  On a warm May day in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1959, the charming Lobster Boy and the incest victim from New England met and fell in love.

  Grady had already seen her selling tickets and secretly admired her. But within the hierarchy of the carnival, he was on the top as a performer and she was on the bottom as a worker. Grady and his father, while still a team, were now billed as “The Lobster Family—4th and 5th Generation” of freaks. They worked for Stan Wright and Jimmy Steinmetz in the World of Mirth carnival that toured the forty-eight states.

  Fate intervened when the bosses, sensing her potential, offered her a job as a bally girl working the sideshow. Grady knew that if she were closer to the show, he would be able to date her more easily.

  For Teresa, it meant more money and a chance to escape the monotony of the ticket booth. Teresa readily accepted. She became a full-fledged carny. Soon, she had graduated from bally girl into part of an act, as the “Blade Box Girl.” Her role was to enter a box and seemingly be stabbed by swords thrust into it from every angle.

  Teresa became a carnival jack-of-all-trades. She was so good as The Blade Box Girl, she also became “The Electrified Girl.”

  Teresa would sit in a throne-like chair similar to one used to execute prisoners. When her assistant threw the switch, an electrical glow formed around her, and lightning bolts leaped from hand to hand. She seemed in a semi-stupor, yet she remained unharmed. When the current was finally turned off, she stood and gazed down at her adoring crowd, as they applauded the illusion.

  To Grady, it made no difference whether she was in an electric chair or a blade box. It was all just making a living, and who cared what you did? What he really cared about was that once he set eyes on her, he wanted to have her.

  Grady courted her with attention and presents. Never had Teresa been so loved and so wanted by anybody as she was by Grady Stiles. He wined and dined her, made her feel like part of his family.

  “Grady was such a charming man,” Teresa recalls, her voice filled with love and nostalgia. “Everyone enjoyed being in his company.”

  Here was a man, a real man, despite his deformity, who wanted to take care of her. Finally, they began living together.

  They made a decent living in the carnival. During the off-season, Teresa took a job in a shrimp factory in Tampa to help make ends meet. She and Grady lived together for nine years before he officially married her.

  Grady was a good provider. However, when he was drinking, Grady started beating Teresa early in their relationship, taking care to keep his blows to the body. It wouldn’t do for her to be seen on the midway with a battered face.

  The first child born to Grady and Teresa was named Margaret. Margaret died after twenty-six days. Teresa says the cause of death was pneumonia.

  The second child born to Grady and Teresa was named David. David died after twenty-eight days. Once again, Teresa says the cause of death was pneumonia. Apparently, the constant travel and the drafty living conditions on the road caused both infant deaths.

  The family problems continued.

  “Grady’s father became ill and couldn’t really do the work,” Teresa recalls. By 1961, in failing health, Grady Stiles, Sr., quit show business for good.

  “His father wasn’t making it here in Florida, and the cost of living was too much for him, so he moved back to Pittsburgh. Grady was still living in Florida [with me] and he’d go to Pittsburgh when his father got ill. He got an apartment to be close by. We almost lost him a couple of times.”

  While Grady was in Pittsburgh, Teresa recalls that he “drank with his parents. They drank a lot. They drank beer while Grady drank whiskey.”

  To make ends meet, Grady and Teresa went into Tampa and opened up a single low—carnival slang for a show just featuring one act which, of course, was Grady on the platform. And during the season, they would travel.

  In 1963, their third child, Donna Marie, was born. This time, the Stileses were blessed. Not only was Donna a healthy child, she was born without her father’s deformity. She would not have to go through life a freak. It was something he should have been thankful for. Instead, it embittered Grady even more.

  Right after Donna’s birth, Grady started drinking heavily. He would stay out late at night drinking liquor and playing cards with his carnival buddies. Sometimes, he’d go on drinking binges and be away from home for days at a time. When he did come home, he would generally make it to the living room and pass out on the floor. Sometimes, he’d throw up first and then sleep in his own vomit.

  In the morning, Debra and Donna would get up, get washed, and change into their school clothes. They would have to step over Grady to get out of the trailer.

  None of this was lost on Grady. He might not have had formal schooling, but he was still a smart man. Part of him warred with himself to become more of a father, someone his kids could look up to, at least figuratively. He made a strong effort to change. He stopped drinking as much and started to come home more often.

  During this brief period of semi-sobriety, when Teresa heard him come home, she would make the children go to their room.

  “I want you to be very quiet,” she told them, “and not disturb your father.”

  What she did not tell them was that it was in their own best interests because when he was drunk, Grady liked to beat his kids. There is no indication that Teresa ever tried to stop him. Perhaps she was too busy protecting herself. Sometimes, Teresa says, the beatings she suffered were so severe that she could barely get out of bed in the morning.

  Their fourth child, Catherine, who would become known as Cathy, was born in 1969. She was born with the same deformity as her father. She would have to grow up with lobster claws and stunted legs that ended just below the knees.

  Six

  Strolling by the trailer in Gibsonton, the Stiles place looked like any other, slightly run-down, but not seedy. Just hard-working carny people trying to make a go of it.

  Inside, Donna Stiles, a sad-eyed, tow-headed child, would see the same thing every day. And it seemed normal, just like other families. When you’re five or seven, everything seems normal, just like other families.

  Donna was born April 29, 1963, in Syosset, a middle-class suburb in Long Island, New York. Grady and Teresa had been on the road playing Long Island when her water broke. Teresa was rushed to the hospital. The child she gave birth to was completely normal.

  Donna was raised in Gibsonton, and most of her early childhood years remain a blur. Her earliest memories come from about the age of seven. “There was nothing really good I can recall,” she says now. “He [her father] always drank. Continually drank. I really started noticing it at about seven because he would yell at us if he was drinking at home.”

  Her father would get up around 11 or 12 o’clock every day. He’d have a “glass of tea” in his bedroom and then he would come out of the bedroom and sit on a chair for a couple of hours. A few more glasses of tea and then he’d wheel himself out the door.

  In those days, he had a car with handheld controls. He would drive, or get someone to push him in his wheelchair down to Harry’s Bar, the local watering hole that was a quarter of a mile from the house.

  Donna and her half sister, Debra, and later her sister, Cathy, went to school every day. If Grady was there when they came home at night, invariably, he’d be drunk. And he would yell, heaping abuse on his children in a drunken rage.

  Sober, though, Grady was subdued, rarely raising his voice. “I never seen him much when he wasn’t drinking. If he didn’t have a drink in his hand, he was sleeping,” Donna recalls.

  That didn’t leave much in between. Once April rolled around, the respite of school didn’t help, either.

  At the start of the carnival season, Grady needed all the help he could get. While he was insistent that his children get a good education, he routinely pulled them out o
f school three months before the end of the term.

  Together, The Lobster Family would hit the road, traveling from town to town, the children working side by side with the adults during setups and takedowns of the tent, under which Grady plied his trade. The kids would also work with their mother selling tickets, counting money, whatever their father required of them. He was the complete and absolute boss in his home.

  Teresa, fully aware that the kids were getting cheated out of a proper education, would make sure to take books along. Maybe there was nothing she could do about them being on the road, but if they had to be out there, she would make certain they continued their reading.

  Day after day, Grady would get drunk. He’d scream at the kids. Then he would give them beatings or spankings. Sometimes, it would happen if one of his kids talked back to him.

  “Who the fuck you think you’re talking to like that?” Grady would shout, and the claw would shoot out like lightning and smack his child across the mouth.

  Sometimes, he’d beat his kids without provocation, just to keep them in line.

  All the children suffered the same punishment, including his stepdaughter, Debra. Still, Donna was probably disciplined the worst.

  She noticed that within the context of his rage, the other kids didn’t get as many beatings. Maybe that was because Donna had been born the only normal child, and she had to suffer for it.

  Teresa stood by while Grady beat her kids. But Teresa wanted to protect her children; when Grady beat her, she tried to keep the violence confined to the bedroom, behind closed doors. Frequently, she wasn’t successful.

  “Go get me a drink,” Grady would shout at his wife.

  Teresa would obediently comply. As she took the drink to him, Grady would grab her butt or her leg and punch her hard. Hidden under the long-sleeved shirts and pants she wore year-round, were bruises where Grady’s claws had done their dirty work.