By Kim Carlin (Ant Magazine, Baltimore, Summer 1995)
A little patter to make the marks feel superior:
At some point in the past year I looked around and realized that most of my friends are misfits. Maybe it’s working on this story that put that idea in my mind, but I think it’s something I’ve known for a while. I’m glad, knowing this. It reveals a universal truth: scratch beneath the surface of most people, and you’ll find that they don’t quite fit in – no matter how much they seem to.
Most of us know how to appear normal. There are plenty of times when the appearance of normalcy comes in bandy. Kids, for example, who are just finding their way in the world, prefer conformity, so to be different is a kind of torment for a child. And because we’re all different, to be a child is universally a kind of torment. We’ve all suffered it. Some more than others.
That childish culture of conformity keeps working into adulthood. I know, you’re thinking of those blue-suits downtown, propelling themselves skyward every morning in pursuit of commercial success. But I’m thinking about you in the Doc Martens, yeah, you with the pierced nipples. The “alternative” culture has its own uniforms, and an etiquette as rigid as Emily Post’s. It’s a cult of the ugly, the used, the used up.
The rule, post-modern ennui. Technology is boring. Beauty is boring. love is boring. Boredom is boring. We’re each alone and separate, so let’s be alone together. Full circle. We seek conformity by rejecting conformity to norms into which we suspect we could never fit.
So it was a happy moment when I realized how strange my friends are. I found myself in an unfamiliar state. Let’s call it “being at ease.” Everyone in the room was odd and awkward. I joined in enthusiastically, stuttering out the impossibility of human contact, accepting my own swarming internal oddity.
Oh, don’t be taken in by this surface calm. I could tell you stories about myself. But why should I? You’ve got stories of your own. Oh, you know you’re a weirdo. Yes you are. Don’t bother denying it. it shows.
Come a little closer, dearie.
Maybe it’s that desire to find others who are as odd as oneself that makes Jim Rose’s internationally beloved sideshow the darling attraction of the alternative set. Traveling with Lollapalooza, it must have been the only honest act in that miasma of commercialism pretending to be alternative art – the sideshow talker is, after all, at peace with his desire to take money from whoever will cough it up; the mass producer of rainforest-friendly deodorant is pretending to a higher cause.
Your tiny piercings pale before the monstrous holes in the ears, nose, nipples, and other appendages of Lifto. You could only dream of hefting steam irons with your penis.
That sense of in-placeness in out-of-placeness may explain why the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is a mecca for art students and oddballs. There you see a range of normal” human physiology that can encompass horn-like growths from the forehead, conjoined twins, dwarfism. Suddenly your heat rash doesn’t seem so bad. Your elephant-like ears grow more endearing.
It may explain why people in my circle have been calling Crumb the “feel-good movie of the year.” No matter how bizarre your own family, Crumb’s is stranger. No matter how disgusting your sexual fantasies, his are weirder. By putting onto paper the secret unconscious we all scrupulously hide, he’s made it possible for us to accept our own secret perversities, which are much more normal than his! They’re normal! We’re normal! Ain’t life grand?
Our main attraction!
And it may explain James Taylor. By day a slightly eccentric civil servant. A teacher at Dundalk Community College. Founder of Dolphin-Moon Press. Collector of anything you can get more than one of. In every available waking moment (and he’s got a lot of them because, as he explains, he’s got “the metabolism of a tree shrew”) he’s the self-described “biggest rube on the midway.” The confidante and biographer of Jeanie Tomaini, celebrated “half girl” and widow of famed sideshow giant Al Tomaini. The recipient of telephone calls from Howard Bone, “the man who cannot be hung.” Acquaintance of Teller (the silent half of Penn & Teller).
Publisher, editor, and brains behind Shocked and Amazed!, a twice-yearly journal that offers an insider’s view of the truly weird world of the sideshow culture. The first issue hit shelves of Atomic Books in early July.
Here he stands before you: Dressed to the teeth in his own personal vision of Victoriana, oddly and generously whiskered, with a bolo tie tucked into the collar of a complexly buttoned Western shirt, under a prodigious adams apple, which rests under a prodigious nose, and between the two one of the most prodigiously foul mouths you’ll ever encounter.
Every sentence is an exclamation. He screeches and yowls in imitation of the people he’s describing, flings his sinewy limbs around to punctuate the images he’s conjuring up. I couldn’t use enough exclamation points to convey the energy in James’ speech. Our editorial policy of excluding a certain word beginning with the letter “f” from our pages requires that every other word be deleted.
He shows me around his meticulously restored East Baltimore Victorian, his collections of kachina dolls, bouquets of hair woven from the dead to remember the dead (death – a Victorian obsession he shares). In a large bedroom converted to an office, a sideshow mummy leans carelessly against a sofa. He doesn’t take me into the basement, where I’m told the truly spooky collections reside.
Instead, we keep climbing, up into the attic where he works at a desk packed with papers and sideshow artifacts. At the head of the stairs we’re greeted by a two-headed cow. On every surface is a thing or ten or twenty: a two-bodied pig, a brain in a jar, and thousands of relics of historic sideshows, gaffed freaks (specially made to delight and amaze, like the “rope squirrel from the isle of macrame!”), photos, books, banners.
Everybody knows about James’ obsession with sideshows. Poet David Beaudouin, founder of Tropos Press, has willed James his own head, in a poem that describes the things James might do with said object. When I asked David if he meant it, he said, seriously, “Karen [Dave’s wife] doesn’t like it, and it’s illegal, but I do, and James knows it.”
My head is spinning, and James keeps talking a mile a minute. I haven’t brought enough tape. I suspect there isn’t enough tape in the world to hold all that James has got to say about sideshows and the friends he’s made while working on Shocked and Amazed!. The project started in I992 at the urging of New York Press editor John Strasbaugh and other friends.
You won’t believe your eyes!
“He’s straight out of a nineteenth century sideshow,” said James’ partner in Shocked and Amazed!, Scott Huffines of Atomic Books. “He looks like he walked off a carnival lot.”
They’re in the business of the project together. As much as James may appear to be the talker (in sideshows, there are no “barkers,” only talkers, whose patter lures in the marks – they are the real show, according to James, what’s inside could never live up to the wonderful things they promise), Scott is the salesman here. He’s marketing the magazine through his bookstore, mail catalogue, and Wide World Web home page.
No, James isn’t the talker. He’s the evil genius behind “the book that won’t die.”
A long, sad tale.
James had been complaining for so long that there were no good books about the sideshows, his friends finally got fed up and said, write one yourself. “Everybody talks about the business like it had been dead since I930,and I know it’s out there,” he says. “In fact, there are those who would argue that the heyday of sideshows was within our lifetime, and there were more sideshows at the York Fair this past year than ever.
His own first encounter with asideshow didn’t come until I992, when he went up to the York Fair. “I never had a carnival or circus tradition,” he explains. “My parents never took me, and it wasn’t a thing I did on my own, and until my mother got romantically involved with Jerry Farrow, who runs several carnivals, I never went. Even though I was interested enough to buy all the books on it and everything else.”
Shocked and Amazed! was conceived as a book, but as James started interviewing sideshow people, it became clear a single book wouldn’t hold it all. The stacks of interview tapes he’s assembled fill a cupboard in a spare bedroom. It took three years to complete the first issue, and he plans to put out two a year until he runs out of material or runs outof steam.
A walk down memory lane.
Like Scott, James was always interested in freak shows, and collected every book he could find on the subject. That’s how they met, when James walked into Atomic looking for something he didn’t already own. “I walked in and asked to see anything he had on sideshows or freaks,” James remembers. “He started pulling stuff off the shelves, and I thought, where’d he find this @!#!?&!! stuff?!?!”
“Blame it on Catholic school,” says Scott. “The Essex public library had a copy of Very Special People, and that got me interested at around 9 or 10 years old. It got worse as I got older. My school had this servicewhere you could buy books from a catalogue, and once a month they’d come into the classroom and drop them off, and that’s where I got them.
I remember poring over my dog-eared copy of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! on my chaste schoolgirl bed, but I didn’t end up collecting the stuff. There are no two-headed cows in my attic – or in Scott’s. “I think some people just want to read about it or have the pictures. If I have a book about it, I’m content. I can go to the Mutter Museum and know it’s available,” explains Scott. “But there are people who physically want to possess the stuff.”
For James, there’s the desire to own anything to do with sideshows, anything that’s been in a sideshow,anything made for a sideshow. But Shocked and Amazed grew out of James’ desire to possess the human stories beneath the outer shell of oddity.
Step right up and see for yourself!
“Fiedler in Freaks – Myths, and Images of the Secret Self says that what it basically comes down to is a desire to confront the other, things that are forbidden,” explains James. “Essentially, the $ title sums it up; the whole idea of the hidden self. It’s what makes people go to monster movies, what makes them pack that damned medical museum up in Philadelphia, the Mutter. You can go in there anytime you want, and the place is mobbed.
“And you know what’s really funny, when it was free they would always have people in there. Since they started charging admission, more people came!!! P.T. Barnum was right. You have to understand what people want. Everybody enjoys a good joke, and if it ain’t a joke, they enjoy getting the living shit scared out of them ‘for educational purposes only’!”
So there’s a guy up on the platform with no arms, and he’s rolling a cigarette with his toes. And you’re watching. Or there’s a human blockhead up there. He’s pounding a screwdriver up his nose and making jokes the whole time – “no brain, no pain!” And you’re watching. A beautiful woman forces a razor-sharp sword down her throat. And you’re watching.
“That’s disgusting,” whines a sallow, churchy-looking fella in the back row. The performer calls back. “Did you pay to get in this show? Well, I got your money up front, and I don’t give a damn what you think! You paid to watch me do it, and because you paid, I’m doing it!”
Today only! Adult admission for the children’s price!
What’s the children’s price? $1. What’s the adult price? $1.
“Everybody makes a buck off this stuff,” snorts James. “Which to me is part of the joy of the business. Something people don’t know, when they’re saying, ‘these poor freaks are being taken advantage of,’ freaks owned shows, and they made fabulous money. Look at Jeanie and Al Tomaini, they were world famous and retired at age 30 to buy a trailer park and camp, running a restaurant and all that crap.”
He gleefully describes the famous freaks who were faked. Men in dresses, women with glued-on tails. And the real freaks. I ask if he has a secret oddity. “A deformed foot,” he replies, “but nothing I could make a buck off of.”
