Becky May Horner had some God-given talent of her own, for sure.
She had a way of making you hold off until streaks of light crept up from the center of your brain and lit your vision with unnamable colors.
She liked to make a man cry for release, and Christ, how I wept and begged, signing over bank accounts.
I sometimes wondered that if my first sexual encounter had been with someone less experienced I might not have fallen from heaven's grace to an altogether different kind.
The loss of my virginity drove Nicodemus berserk.
He knew it wouldn't be only my downfall but his own as well.
He prayed with me long into the heated nights while the willows draped full of misgivings and the cypress led toward Becky May's hovel.
She and her mama were packing up their washboards, tubs and ladder-back chairs with money enough for greater glory.
He went through receipts and bank books and stormed around the house.
I'd given her more than I'd thought, and there were many other town girls as well.
Some I recalled, some I had only brief images of after a couple of pints of Wild Turkey.
Once it started to go bad, he helped to ruin the rest.
It was in our genetic make-up, this predilection toward self-destruction.
He hung in while he could, but Nicodemus had always been at least half-crazy.
It didn't take very long.
A few months and we were pretty much finished, scraping bottom and whoring together, passing the bottle back and forth.
That was enough to drive me from my father's house, after the liquor turned us inside out and, smirking, he tried to kill me with a frying pan
.
3
I
found it easy going from one sideshow to another.
At sixteen, no longer recognizable as the flaxen-haired, sweet-faced ivory boy preacher, I went to work in my first carnival.
With my manner I made a perfect talker, calling in the marks to witness delights and grotesqueries never seen before.
They put me on a little platform and let me run the patter.
So long as I had a few shots of whiskey, I didn't mind all those flaming eyes turned on me from inside the faceless mob.
I was the Talker, who hauled them in.
Rubes called us "barkers," but you could never get anybody to lay down money if you only barked in their faces.
You talked, and the better you could gauge a person's appetite–what he might be after inside the
carny
–then the finer you could judge which attraction he'd be drawn to, and send him on his way.
It's why I was also a mentalist, a tarot and palm reader, a
madball
seer.
I'd been raised surrounded by people in pain searching for a way to set down their burdens.
I dressed the part in robes and a turban and looked into the crystal ball for effect, but all I really needed was to catch a glimpse of their anguish to know what to say in order to hustle them into the tents.
I could sense the big troubles left behind, and those that were still coming.
And all the while I was growing more insane.
I found myself dissipating as I walked through the rain.
I hadn't had a drink in three years but now I felt the way I used to after about a half bottle of 1521 rum, when my head was just starting to ease aside from the rest of my body.
It still happened like that from time to time even without the booze.
The
Fedex
guy who'd been swallowed by the Works stood just inside the doorway, staring forlornly at the rest of the world beyond the entrance.
He might've been crying or it might have only been mist on his face, I couldn't be certain.
He was still holding his package, whatever it was.
As I stepped past he whispered, "Don't come in.
This is hell.
I'm way deep down inside of hell."
"Man," I told him, "this isn't even close, believe me."
"Then you understand?"
"Oh yeah."
"But I–"
"It's an old story.
Really."
"The agony, it's...it's...my spirit–"
He didn't have the words.
It always terrified me that one day I'd lose the Talk and forget the words and be exactly like him, waving my hands about my face and stuttering in my grief.
"Get used to it," I said.
"My spirit's in pieces!" he whined.
"Listen–listen you said you understood, but I think you made a mistake.
I...I...listen–"
Suddenly the rage rose in me and I grabbed him by the neck.
He made a soft
gkk
sound and started to go a nice shade of purple while I tightened my grip.
He never let go of the package, though.
"Has your own father ever tried to cave in your skull with an iron skillet?
You ever have your kid stolen from you?
Has God ever reached down into your throat and yanked out your voice with a blazing fist?"
I eased up and he sputtered, gasping.
"I–n-no, hey, I've just got to tell you this, you don't–"
"Give it a rest."
"You don't grasp what it's like, no matter what you think.
You don't have any idea."
His eyes were heavy with all his commonplace secrets and I considered his sorrow.
I could read his woe as clearly as if it had been swabbed across his forehead with Day-
glo
paint.
There wasn't much, really, when you got down to it.
"Go back home to your lackluster job and indifferent cunt of a wife and your three sneering children.
They all want you dead."
"I know," He sobbed.
I dragged him to the door and booted his ass back out in the rain.
He screamed as if I'd tossed him into an electric fence, and I wondered if the shock of freedom would stop his heart.
I turned and moved through the Works, gliding, wishing myself a little further gone with each step.
"How old am I?" I asked.
"You're no longer a child," Juba said as if I were a child.
"You're twenty-five years old.
Your hair is already going gray.
You've squinted too hard for too long and have deeply set wrinkles around your eyes."
I hadn't looked in a mirror in months.
"Yes."
"Regret is an incomparable motivation."
"You ain't kidding, Bubba."
"You're at the end of your life."
"Am I?
Finally?"
Juba nodded his oblong head and it wagged wildly in all the wrong directions.
"Yes, but you've more to do."
"Okay."
"There is much to atone for, and you mustn't fail at this hour.
We won't allow that."
"You wouldn't, would you?"
"No."
"Thank Christ."
"Leave him alone, Juba," Jolly Nell said.
"He's here.
We're all here to get it done.
Let's go."
I kept wandering.
Sex, humanity and delusion clambered side by side with the
painfreaks
and broken-hearted inside the Works.
This was a school, a museum, a storehouse, a rent-controlled apartment building where nobody ever managed to leave.
Oils and dyes splattered the floor, walls draped with speckled blood.
Piles of clay and ash sat like ancient cairns and altars.
There were dozens of separate areas, all under the same big top.
Private quarters, showrooms, lecture halls, and sound rooms where musicians played harpsichords and bashed gongs.
Pages of poetry lay strewn in the corridors, air currents causing a drift and tide, sweeping opera scores and pornographic cartoon faxes along.
There was a time when I really could've gotten into this.
Scattered in the darkened halls and corners people were arguing, napping, drawing charcoal sketches, reading Plath and Thoreau and Lovecraft, getting high colonic cleansings, piercings, dialysis, and scratching each other's eyes out.
It took a while to take it all in.
There was a parlor where they received slowly spun glyph tattoos in nasty places, 3-D body art where the plastic jutted out of their flesh.
I dug some of it.
Whispers of adoration, vengeance, and admonition floated by–death threats, suicide notes, French horns blaring out of tune, and a chorus of soft sobbing that made the pulse in my throat tick harder.
I was again struck by how this type of artistic coalition hadn't been seen since Warhol's Factory, and the Works reeked of the same posturing.
They were all here in their numbers, waiting for something huge to happen.
I recognized them as I did any mob.
A fusion of the restless and unfulfilled, the unfortunate travelers and prying voyeurs, geniuses with and without talent, and the remarkably well-off and the utterly damned.
I kept waiting for somebody to go by in a platinum blond wig.
Jolly Nell was right, it was just another sideshow.
"Nice digs,"
Hertzburg
said, enjoying the action, his hair on end.
He eyed the many ladies, and perhaps they eyed him as well.
People laughed and pointed, maybe at me.
His leopard-spotted getup wasn't out of place, and he kept hitting poses, showing off his muscles.
"I'm not sure if this is the blackest heart of Babylon, but it's probably close enough."
"I thought it might be too tame for you," I said.
He sniffed the air.
"They've been killing each other in here for years and stacking the bodies like cordwood."
"No different than anywhere."
"For you, it's going to be."
"We'll see."
"You're never going to get out."
"Fuck that talk," I said.
"Find Jonah."
The denizens paraded by, drinking coffee, discussing the
Messenean
War and Scooby Doo.
How the Spartans marched over the
Taygetus
Mountains and annexed all the territory of their neighbor, Messenia.
How Casey
Kasem
, the unheralded champion of Seventies Saturday morning cartoons, brought a hipster persona to groovy mod rocker
Norville
"Shaggy" Rogers.
The
Messenians
revolted in 640 B.C.
Initial childhood fantasies revolved around Daphne or Fred or Both.
Velma Binkley, the perfect foil.
Almost defeated, controlling the territory of a subject population that outnumbered their population ten to one, it was only a matter of time before the conquerors themselves were overrun.
Shaggy and Scooby were a fine pairing in a parody featuring contests to solve mysteries at various abandoned amusement parks with the aid of Batman and Robin, Laurel and Hardy.
Downfall due to the culturally stagnant, sterile oligarchy.
Downfall due to the interjection of Scrappy Doo.
Some were shirtless, others bare-bottomed, carting books off to Sophomore Lit, hand correcting papers.
They played with knives and carried cereal bowls, and they hummed to John Lennon and recited the poetry of Sappho.
Maybe it was actually just like anywhere else, only compacted for efficiency.
Hertzburg
sneezed and his eyes watered.
He smelled death all over the place now.
I could tell who the doomed were.
Who was meant to be here and who had strayed in and accidentally been caught in the vortex.
Hertzburg
enjoyed the sights and kept turning, turning, his arms outstretched and bulging muscles rising higher, ready to launch into the maelstrom.
Jolly Nell looked a little scared, but she was still grinning.
.
Juba, expressionless as usual, slid among the throng as men walked between his alpine legs.