The Electric Woman_A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts

by Tessa Fontaine

  “This is the one,” I say. I lick, puff my chest as I lean back and the tip hits my sphincter and I keep shoving it in anyway, and then I feel something rising and pull the sword and double over and retch.

  “Half-inch down,” Chris says. I try to high-five him still buckled over, but my hand doesn’t even reach his plane of vision.

  * * *

  An hour earlier, state police had come into our tent and ushered the last lingering audience members out.

  “When the lightning hits, the last place I want to be is at the top of the big wheel,” one of the cops says. “And the second-to-last place is in this circus tent.”

  It’s true that tents get picked up in storms, tossed around like a flap of loose skin and deposited far away. It’s true that there are all those tent stakes holding the thing in place that could also get tossed into the air and land on any person at any time doing anything.

  “We’re about to get a real bad one,” the cop says. “I’d put your people somewhere safe,” he says to Chris and Tommy.

  “Girls,” Chris says as the cops leave, “I want you all in your bunks. Stay in the trailer. You’ll be safe.”

  “Chris—” Sunshine starts, but he holds up his hand to her.

  We wait in the trailer for a few minutes, the lightning and thunder getting louder and closer, the men’s voices coming through the slits in the trailer’s walls. They are closing everything up, getting the insides of the tent and backstage storm-ready. I eye my empty trail-mix jug, feeling glad that earlier that day, though I’d started to squat over it beside my bunk to pee, I’d decided to just stop drinking much water in general, and held it.

  We stay put. Well, briefly. But then Sunshine goes into the tent where there is more space to make a phone call, and Cassie goes to show Brian the juggler something on her phone, and pretty soon we are all back in the main tent, the rain coming down and the thunder cracking outside.

  And that’s when, giving up on his initial directives and finding ways to pass the time, Chris tells me it is time to learn how to swallow swords.

  Tommy folded the hanger sword for me a few weeks back, and I’ve practiced based on his instruction, the tips he gave me while we stood out on the bally stage on slow days, but I haven’t practiced much because there’s so little time for anything. Plus, it’s not a thing that’s easy to explain, or read about. It’s something you just keep doing until you get it. I’d think about it during the day, while I was onstage inside one of the illusions. I’d fantasize about being center stage with a sword deep in my body and a wowed audience instead of sitting on a chair as a four-legged woman while they looked at me, annoyed. Doing something that the audience would find so attractive and repulsive both, doing something memorable. But by the time the show closed at night and I’d been performing for sixteen hours, I had no desire to practice new acts.

  “Don’t worry, Tess,” Tommy says later, patting my shoulder. “It took me years before I could get the sword all the way down.”

  * * *

  Story goes: as a high school student in New Jersey, Tommy decided he wanted to be a circus performer, but at six foot two and possessing little grace or flexibility, his options felt limited. He didn’t come from a circus family and didn’t have the physique of a typical aerialist or tumbler. What he wanted most of all was to wrestle an alligator. When he learned about sword swallowing, he thought it could take him to the circus, the gators.

  He checked out a bunch of books on swallowing swords from the library and spread them across his bed, desk, and floor. Their illustrated pages provided step-by-step how-to instructions and detailed accounts of some of history’s most famous sword swallowers. He got to work. For three years he practiced every day, sticking a folded coat hanger down his throat to replicate a sword. Though his classmates began heading toward jobs as accountants and roofers, Tommy kept shoving the metal down his throat. An angry girlfriend once screamed that she thought Tommy loved practicing for his sideshow fantasies more than he loved her. He agreed.

  Tommy’s short stint in college to study biology—the closest he could get to those gators—was over after he enrolled in the Coney Island Sideshow School. He joined the World of Wonders shortly thereafter.

  “I’d do anything to keep the sideshow alive,” Tommy says. “I know it’s my home.”

  * * *

  Have you ever stuck your finger deep in your mouth? Tried to make yourself puke? Touched your uvula? That’s what sword swallowing feels like when you first stick the sword in, but then, instead of heeding your body’s direction and removing the object that’s causing you to gag, you override the system. Stick it in a little deeper. Wait until you actually feel your insides rising to chase out the foreign object like townspeople chasing out a wolf, but instead of feeling grateful to your grandmothers and granddaughters for their good, safe work, you call back the wolf. Make his teeth a little sharper. Force him in.

  * * *

  Sword swallowing is one of the most iconic sideshow acts, something I thought I might see people practicing the first time I’d visited Gibsonton the way other people in other towns might practice baseball. When I pulled into Gibsonton that first time, what I first noticed was that the gas station had an amazingly long line of people buying beer. I had come down to meet Chris Christ and his partner, Ward Hall, right after I’d first learned about the World of Wonders. Just down the road a drive-through liquor barn sat next to half a dozen adult bookstores and strip clubs. Huge trucks hurtled down U.S. 41, Gibsonton’s main street, which stretched long and flat for miles, north toward Tampa, south toward beach towns like Bradenton and Sarasota with their Easter-colored vacation homes. Palm trees and swamp grass waved as truckers and tourists rushed through, always on their way somewhere else.

  They say at one time the town had the world’s only postal counter designed for dwarves. That conjoined twins ran a lemonade stand on the side of the highway. That the town had permanently altered its legislation to allow for elephants and tigers in every front yard, their trainers throwing knives around unblinking women in sequins when the mosquitoes weren’t too thick.

  Story goes: a few performers were on their way to Sarasota, Ringling Brothers’ Circus’s winter headquarters. In the batch were “the giant” Al Tomaini, who claimed to be eight foot four, and his wife, Jeanie, “the half-girl,” born with no legs. They noticed how peaceful a certain patch of swamp was and decided to stop right there. Not too close to cities and gawkers, not too far from the rest of their circus folks. They set up camp by the river and opened a little cookhouse. Once they and a few of their friends settled in, sideshow performers from a range of shows came quickly. It was a place for the winter months, when carnivals take a break, where the unusual would be usual. A rest stop. A retirement destination. A new home.

  By the time I visited Gibtown, the town’s very small sign stood overgrown by thick vines at the base of a bridge spanning the Alafia River. Passing through, you might miss Gibtown’s history, unless you notice the Showtown Bar & Grill, a grimy brick building that once served performers amazing enough to inspire the murals coating the walls. The paint is faded and peeling, the acrobat by the door nearly invisible.

  And yet, Gibtown is still the home of the real American sideshow. I forget, forget often, that these folks I’m working with, this show, are such legends. These three men teaching me to swallow swords hold various Guinness World Records, perform on all sorts of TV specials and in all sorts of movies, are the titans of the industry, even if the industry is mostly a ghost of what it was fifty years ago.

  * * *

  “Okay, me, too,” Francine, the burlesque dancer, says, walking over to us with her sword. She brought a real one with her and has been trying to learn the right technique for years.

  “You’re new, right?” Chris asks her. She smiles at him, nods. “And you’re not staying the whole season?”

  “I would if I could,” she says, “but no. I’m leaving after this spot.”

  �
��Then no,” Chris says.

  “No?”

  “No, I won’t teach you. Only skeleton crew gets to learn. You gotta do a whole season to have free classes on everything.”

  “That’s not fair!” she says.

  An explosion of spit and booming sound bursts from Chris’s mouth as a laugh.

  “Sorry, Francine,” Tommy says. “Tradition. For part-time performers like you, you get a discount on classes if you ever want to take one, but you can’t learn here.”

  “I really can’t believe that,” she says. “It’s kind of bullshit.”

  Chris stops laughing and looks at her, and the few hairs on the sides of his head might be waving a bit like a cartoon man preparing to explode with anger, his lip trembling.

  “Fine, okay, sorry,” she says, skulking away.

  Chris turns back to me. Dumb, unskilled, slow-learning me. “Tell me, Tess,” he says. “What did your mom think when you told her you were going to run away with the circus?” He’s instructed me to take a break for a few minutes while the bile retreats and my eyes stop watering.

  I could answer this truthfully. I could tell him the story, tell all these folks I’ve been working with for months now the truth, the whole thing, the mess of it. I’ve mentioned once or twice to a few of the other performers, Sunshine and Cassie and maybe Spif, that I have a sick mom. And they’ve told me about their lives. But life moves so quickly here, when it’s not moving painfully slowly. And when I think about trying to tell someone the whole long arc of the drama, I feel exhausted. I’m already exhausted. I look around me at all these tough folks who have had hard things happen in their lives and continue on, and it makes me want to do the same. To harden my gut. And then ready it for swords.

  “My family thinks it’s great,” I say.

  “They do?”

  “Sort of. Well, they said it sounded fun as long as I promised not to ever try sword swallowing.”

  “Ha,” Chris says. “You’re not very good at keeping promises.”

  “Right,” I say, and study the coat-hanger sword in front of me, hoping for some trick to reveal itself. Knowing it won’t.

  “You know why I invited you to come join the show?” he asks me.

  My heart stops. I do not know. I have no idea whatsoever. I have kept myself from even thinking about it, let alone asking anyone. I am scared of the answer. It will somehow further illuminate what a fraud I am here, what a fraud I am in how I obsessively think about my mom but don’t obsessively act to help her. I’m also desperate for the answer. I manage to nod my head.

  “You seemed genuinely interested in this world. You came to the show, looked me in the eyes, and I could see something about you there. That you’d stick around. Plus, I think you’re a good person. Someone like that should witness this.”

  So there it is. Tapped to step into another world as witness. To stick around. To watch. For a moment, the fact of my outsiderness doesn’t seem as alienating. There is something I can do as an outsider. Something only I among us can do. I can bear witness.

  “Thank you,” I say, overwhelmed, surprised.

  “Are you having fun?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, yes and also no.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve never worked this hard or been so bad at so many things. It’s kicking my ass.”

  “Ah,” he says. “That’s normal. It’ll do that. Just remember that no matter what, we’re always playing. It’s all just playing.”

  THE ANIMAL UNDONE

  Day 76 of 150

  World of Wonders

  September 2013

  How to take the animal apart:

  Tough pants, hard-toed shoes.

  Some of the first steps are easy. We unsnap the velvet curtains around the headless woman’s chair, locking the wooden wings that spread wide from the mummy cases, unsnap the hard vinyl belly cloths from the stage, its skirt. Close the sword cases, dismantle the electric chair, untwist its screws. For a moment, then, as we do our work, my hands touch items that amaze the audience. Many of the acts I’m in now—headless woman, four-legged woman—get a lot of groans. The other acts I talk—bed of nails, blade box contortion act—position me as the hype woman, a necessary conduit to focus the attention on the wonder taking place just beside me. The closest I came to making the amazement happened before I became an inside performer, when I was eating fire on the bally stage, or holding the snake, but those small miracles are cut down quickly by how easily new bally girls are hired and trained, by my knowledge of the pecking order.

  But I want more. I want to be wonderful. I want the electric chair.

  It isn’t the time to think about that now. Who I am here, in these teardown hours, matters only in terms of my physical being and my being part of the group.

  And so:

  Earlier in the day, we’ll have taken any hanging items down from the walls. We shove everything as far under the bunks as possible, to ready the bunk rooms to be stuffed with props.

  We must take care not to puncture any surfaces when unhinging, unpinning, unclipping, folding, rolling, twisting, or stacking. Not to contaminate any of the fragile parts with mud, feces, or blood. When we bleed, we wipe our own blood on our pants to keep our precious gear pristine.

  Starting with the tent’s central entrance across from the stage, we peel away the skin, clip by clip, from the bones. The live animal of the tent is dismantled. The junctures have the most resistance. It may hurt, pressing our fingers hard against the metal to release the vinyl, pressing until the skin on our fingers is marked. We do not fall off the top steps of the ladder as we reach way out to push and unclip and pull.

  Once we have peeled away the tent’s skin, we continue slipping it off the body as we work our way around until we have the fully separated hide of a flayed animal. It is now three hours into teardown. The tent walls fall to the ground in huge wrinkled piles like skin we must preserve. We keep on.

  We prepare each piece of the loosed vinyl tent on the ground for curing by hosing it down if it needs to be hosed, by dragging it along the ground until it is perfectly straight and flattened and then begin, yellow by red, yellow, red, yellow, red, folding and smoothing the creases. We tuck and pull, two of us crouching together for each fold so we move simultaneously, so no extra creases form beneath the folds. The vinyl tent must slide perfectly into a canvas bag, which must fit perfectly in a stack of other canvas bags, which must fit perfectly between Queen Kong and a light box in the meticulously organized truck container. All of this care. The minutiae inside the wild animal of sideshow.

  Five hours.

  We look at the tongue, our stage, that expanse of wood we’ve been parading across for ten days. We see the eye, that single doorway behind the curtain into the backstage world, into the animal’s brain where we live and work and sleep and eat and fight. This face will be dismembered last. Once all traces of the former animal are tucked inside, we hoist the stage up until it tucks flat against the side of the semi container, closing its eye until the next unveiling.

  Beside us on both sides and across the midway, carnie crews are leaping between sections of their rides, yelling, killing their animals, too. I wonder about wandering over to carnietown once teardown is done, to see if there are any special celebrations that go on before they load back up and move on to the next town.

  Seven hours.

  There is too much work to be done.

  And what is that bloody meat beating in the middle of it all?

  What keeps pumping when the bones have been released from the skin, when the skin has been folded and tucked away, when the mouth has been shut? What else is still throbbing? Do we hear that humming? Don’t we hear that music? A low drumming? Teeth, somewhere, hitting against a glass?

  I can hear it still, even after the semi is hitched and pulls the container onto the next grounds. I hear it when the lot is empty except for piles of hot-dog containers and a broken Oct
opus ride, and I hear it when we are barreling down the highway with the dead animal all packed away in the truck just ahead, I can hear it. Ravenous. Thrumming. Desperate to come alive.

  * * *

  The trailer behind the van is fishtailing. It’s a heavy, old trailer, and though the van was upgraded a few seasons ago, it isn’t hauling the trailer in a straight line. The trailer swerves to one side, pulling the van along with it. It’s throwing us over the lane dividers on the freeway, hemming us right up against the semitrucks throttling alongside us. We feel the blowback of the trucks’ wind pressing our trailer toward the other edge of the lane, a seesaw we can’t ever stabilize.

  We’ve unloaded the temporary performers. We dropped the last three off at the bus station and airport after teardown in Minnesota.

  Big Boss Chris has left, too. We are back to our skeleton crew, plus Short E, who will stay with us for most of the rest of the season. Well, our skeleton crew minus Pipscy. We are very quiet. It feels like the whole thing should be over, like we’ve survived the hardest part to survive and therefore it is time for a big break for everyone, margaritas by the pool, but we still have two and a half months to go.

  I had a text from Pipscy saying she’d made it home, saying it was wonderful to see her mother, her boyfriend, saying that she had found a job in a bar as a mermaid, one of those girls who swims, in a bikini and tail, in a giant tank behind the bar. She also had a mermaid gig lined up for the next Renaissance fair, too. Mermaids fill her future.

  We point the van toward Hutchinson, Kansas. But we don’t make it far.

  The van keeps skidding across the road, fishtailing back and forth. We pull over to check the tire pressure, fill the gas tank, change the oil. Nothing works. Hours pass, our caravan swaying gently back and forth across the highway lines while our performers inside all sit straight up on the bench seats, fists taut around the ceiling handles.

  A blue Honda is on the shoulder ahead of us. Our trailer sways. We can just make out the blur of several arms waving frantically from a pile of humans beside the blue car. We swerve, and Sunshine keeps her hands on ten and two at the wheel and says, “Oh shit, Oh shit,” and we’re all staring at the commotion beside the road, and suddenly, thankfully, we’re beside them and not directly upon them, we’re barreling past and we see two adults waving their arms madly around and a woman between them, her mouth open in a wail we cannot hear, and in her arms a child’s limp body.