“See the queerest sights…”
barks the Charles Manson ticket taker...
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It was this strange documentary, “History of the Sideshow,” that sent me on a time travel… How our young minds craved adventure and knowledge, particularly of the grotesque. Rat Fink, Hammer Films, Dr. Shock, George the Animal Steele, these were our high art, and we studied their nuances like scholars. In a darkened time before vans, this beehive crowned van mom shuttled us in her wood-panel Ford wagon to the St. Francis Fair at Tullytown. Juiced on high-octane youth, six excited boys set loose, free at last from the shackles of adult supervision. Because the rides made him sick, we left Joe at the nickel pitch. (At evening’s end, we would find him proudly carrying a box of mismatched dishes, smiling, corncob kernels lodged in his teeth.) Darting through the midway, the sizzle and snaking vapor of Italian sausage sandwiches assaults my senses, so I shift $2 to my left pocket for later. Past the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Skydiver, the Tarantula. A Carney swabs soupy white up-chuck with a dripping string mop while a pale faced rider stumbles away. The Breed, the local biker gang, sleeveless and tattooed, foul mouthed monkey men with their braless mates part the throng with drunken Stormtrooper swagger. We travel safe below their radar. Only the money takers pay us any mind. “See the queerest sights…” barks the Charles Manson ticket taker, his evil eye upon us. Inside the olive drab tent the canvas splotched with water stains, grease spots the sweltering air is close, thickened in must-flavored stench that permeates our hair, clothes, and skin. Ropes strung between posts form barriers as strong as prison bars. Before each exhibit, we stand in silent reverence, better behaved than at any church service. Formaldehyde pickled babies, white rubber deformities in big cloudy jars. In one, an umbilical chord suspends like sea grass. (could this have been me?) The two-headed cow turns out a fraud, stuffed, the extra head clumsily stitched to the neck. “Found in the Okefenokee Swamp” The Frog Boy squats on a table sawed to the shape of a lily pad. His skin so black it’s raven hue blue, undeveloped mantis arms hang beneath his chin, bony branch ankles and calves connect to thick stump thighs and long thin boned toes spread and connect with membranes. Big yellow eyeballs roll back in his head, shift side-to-side, a wide, thick lipped, grinning mouth. “I eats bugs,” he Sachmo rasps, follows with a tongue flick, then a menacing, “He-He-He.” “From the Corn Fields of Kansas” The Half Man is little more than a stump, dinner plate ears frame a round farmer face, one working arm, the other a few fingers flapping from a shoulder. “Don’t you have legs?” asks an older boy. He unzips a side panel in his custom blue bib overalls and out pop five gnarl nailed wrigglers. “I can bend my leg to touch my ear,” and sure enough, he does, grinning as though it were clever. Such strangeness. Such strangeness leaves its mark on a boy, on a man. I wonder what it tells me of nature, God, and me. The documentary wryly concluded that we now live in enlightened times. Do-gooders have done their deeds, praise be, ended these offenses to our fine sensibilities. Today, there’s no stage for a Frog Boy, no job for a Half Man. |