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“So I says,” interrupts Papa, “ ‘But, miss, what about your teeth?’ Meaning she might break ’em or chip ’em, and she smiles wide, just like she’s smiling now, and says, ‘They’re sharp enough, I think!’ ”
Al was a standard-issue Yankee, set on self-determination and independence, but in that crisis his core of genius revealed itself. He decided to breed his own freak show.
“What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?” The resourceful pair began experimenting with illicit and prescription drugs, insecticides, and eventually radioisotopes. My mother developed a complex dependency on various drugs during this process, but she didn’t mind. Relying on Papa’s ingenuity to keep her supplied, Lily seemed to view her addiction as a minor by-product of their creative collaboration. Their firstborn was my brother Arturo, usually known as Aqua Boy. His hands and feet were in the form of flippers that
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Still, my parents noted that I had a strong voice and decided I might be an appropriate shill and talker for the business. A bald albino hunchback seemed the right enticement toward the esoteric talents of the rest of the family. The dwarfism, which was very apparent by my third birthday, came as a pleasant surprise to the patient pair and increased my value.
Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter’s face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.
Lillian in the supermarket, terrified and angry, her long hands running over shelves, knocking down cans, grabbing at last a box and muttering, reaches out to grab an innocent shopper, thrusts the box into the woman’s face, shrieking, “What is this! Tell me what this is!,” until the shopper, in irritated charity, says, “Cornflakes,” and shakes loose.
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
Why is she here? Why would she suddenly appear at the workplace of a neighbor who barely acknowledges her “Good mornings” in the hall? Could that senile slut of a nun have broken her word after all these years and told the girl the truth?
“They can relax,” Arty theorized, “because they know I’m not going to jump up into their laps.” (Arty tended to be snide about laps, not having one of his own.)
“We use the plural form, Olympia, whenever we refer to Electra and Iphigenia. We do not say ‘Where is Elly and Iphy?’ We say ‘Where are Elly and Iphy?’ ”
Lil always fussed over Maple, who looked like a big rumpled sponge. Maple had two eyes but they didn’t relate to each other. Lil said Maple had no bones. She and Al had decided Maple was female because they couldn’t find a penis.
Leona’s jar was labeled “The Lizard Girl” and she looked the part. Her head was long from front to back and the forehead was compressed and flattened over small features that collapsed into her long throat with no chin to disturb the line. She had a big fleshy tail, as thick as a leg where it sprouted from her spine, but then tapering to a point. There was a faint greenish sheen to her skin but I suspected that Arty was right in claiming that Al had painted it on after Leona died. “She was only seven months old,” Lil would murmur. “We never understood why she died.”
A man and his wife can get up to all sorts of shenanigans together, but the world sees a man with a kid and they figure he’s a good guy and has more important things to tend to than robbery.”
“I feel like I’ve got hair, Arty.” “That’s goose bumps, ass face.
It was becoming apparent that Chick himself had only one ambition and that was to help everybody so much that they would love him. That’s where my problem began. Chick left me chewing dust in the slave-dog department.
Giving Papa time to think, as Arty put it, was like pumping random rounds into a fireworks factory.
It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous.
He lanced boils with a flair, gave vaccinations, irrigated ears, noses, and rectums with equal zest,
“I acts,” Mama announced calmly from the floor. “Me is acted upon.” We all looked at her.
We all ate cake and traded long, absurd, and competitively exaggerated accounts of How Terrifyingly Near to Death the Sandstorm Brought Me. Papa’s version had him wandering from trailer to van hollering questions against the wind and getting unsatisfactory answers and “wondering where, by the shriveled scrotum of Saint Elmo, you’d all been blown to.”
But I was thinking I’d marry Arty and sleep with my arms around him in a big bed and do everything for him.
“She might decide to take over the planet or something, but I’m trying to keep a tight rein on that kind of stuff.
People talk easily to me. They think a bald albino hunchback dwarf can’t hide anything.
Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities.
If all these pretty women could shed the traits that made men want them (their prettiness) then they would no longer depend on their own exploitability but would use their talents and intelligence to become powerful.
Sometimes when we’ve been drinking I can’t help smiling at Miss Lick while I picture myself drilling her through the eye with her pop’s target pistol. The irony of my killing her righteously for doing what she considers righteous—and she, remember, never killed anyone—is hilarious to me.
“I was thinking,” McGurk said, finally, “that you use your voice real well. I was thinking, what if your voice wasn’t just coming at ’em from the air but was vibrating up from the soles of their feet and through their asses up their spines.
We were up in Michigan when Alma started testifying. She was down to her nubs by then. Her legs were gone from the hip and her arms ended at the elbow. She looked better.
the greed and spite of a transcendental maggot named Arturo Binewski, who used his own genetic defects and the weakness of the unemployed and illiterate to create an insanely self-destructive following that fed his maniacal ego.…”
That was the first we heard of the marauding that Arty’s followers had been up to. It seems they were hungry. A lot of them didn’t have any money left after turning everything over to Arty. Trailing around after him they had no way to earn any. But none of us had given any thought to how they would all eat.
His gift was his ability to bulldog and hogtie houseflies. He claimed to have learned it in the Shetland Islands,
“Cow flop,” he once told me in confidence, “does not work well. It draws the flies just fine, but the folks in the audience can’t see it. It’s too runny and you can’t pile it so they can see it from the ground. It’s no good to me at all if it’s dry enough to stack. Dry I could pile it up like flapjacks halfway to the moon, but the flies don’t take much interest in it. Horse shit, of course, draws well if it’s just fresh, but it doesn’t have enough impact on the crowd. Somehow people accept horse shit. Nearly anybody would tell you that the smell is homey rather than bad. We want that bit of
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His maggot farm was reliable and easy. He’d hang fingerless or toeless hands or feet up on hooks behind his trailer for a few days and pick out the worms as they hatched. He sold a lone maggot with its own lifetime supply of guaranteed sanctified feed for five dollars.
They also recruited their piano teacher, Jonathan Tomaini, who protested that he was a musician! An artist! Not a pimp!
“Take the mildew out of Arty’s crotch!” I snapped. “There’s a man outside that I don’t like,” said Chick. Arty wallowed irritably in the hot spray from the shower and rumbled at us. “Do this shit-squirting job and then worry about that!” “It’s on the back side of the balls, in the wrinkles, and behind his balls almost all the way to his asshole,” I said.
“The truth is always an insult or a joke. Lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort.”
“I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.”
There was trouble with some women’s clubs at about that time over cruelty to chickens. But they were nasty white Leghorns anyway. Stupid things. Now, I’d never give a Plymouth Rock or a nice Rhodie to a geek. I love a nice Rhode Island Red. They are the finest breed of chicken. They have character. We used turkeys for a while, too, and they’re even stupider than a Leghorn.
They’re still good but their mature voices just don’t have the purity and control that their white voices did. Arty can still white voice if he wants to, but Oly never did have a white time. I swear that child cried for titty in a full-throated contralto.
‘The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.’ Arty used to just keep me in stitches. Eleven years old he was then.
“… Isolation is a standard cult technique but I don’t use it. It’s standard procedure to get the poor buggers in a low moment, hustle them off to the boonies, and surround them with a strong-arm/soft-spiel combo. How could I do that? I’m a traveling show!
I figure a kid doesn’t choose. They don’t know enough to choose between chocolate and strawberry, much less between life and limblessness.
What made me really sick was that I didn’t want the twins to be rescued. I was glad Arty was mad at them, delighted that he didn’t want to see them, cock-a-hoop delirious at the thought of them utterly out of the running for Arty’s attention. Big, festering chunks of my heart glowed with a dank cave light of celebration at their lovely talented lives trapped by the Bag Man.
Elly’s face, twisted by revulsion: “But she wasn’t in time! He came when she pulled the trigger. He spurted like a cockroach oozing eggs as it dies!”
Caught Chick crushing ants today in the dust. Shocked me. He’s very gentle, usually. I’ve seen him watch his feet not to step on a bug. Feels terrible if he kills one by accident.
So—the kid says he thinks when he dies all the creatures he has ever hurt will be waiting for him, looking at him, still hurting from the hurt he laid on them.… Says he was walking along “just now” and stepped on a lone ant before he noticed it. “Failed again as usual” seems to be his feeling. So he flips off the rails and goes berserk on the anthill.
“Are you swallowing your own line of shit, Arty Binewski? Aren’t you forgetting that you’re just a two-bit freak with a gimmick?”
Mama often said that fat folks went out of style because every tenth ass on the street now was wider than the one in the tent. Folks could see it free on any block.
