Something Twisted This Way Comes
The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow
by Turk Pipkin
What you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed because there are no innocents.
They call him Lifto. He drags a concrete cinder block on stage, threads a chain through it and attaches the ends of the chain to the rings that pierce his nipples. With a primal scream, Lifto straightens his legs and lifts the cinder block into the air, supported only by his down-stretched nipples. Standing next to me in the audience, an over-sized surf-punk passes out cold, his eyes rolled back to white and his lips blue like death.
I'm in Orange County, California. Lollapalooza, the world's biggest rock-n-roll grunge-fest, has come to the heart of Reagan country with the force of a grand mal seizure. But the main attraction is not Nirvana, Pearl Jam or Ice Cube. Instead thousands of music fans have jammed up against the small midway stage where the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is knocking 'em cold. Literally. If the light bulb eating don't get you, the meat skewer through the cheeks will.
It's strange. It's wonderful. It's nauseating. It's "beautiful!" as spiel-meister Jim Rose repeatedly intones in a Tom Waits growl. Rose, a PT Barnum for the 21st Century, is a long-time street performer who transformed himself in just one year from walking on glass for spare change to being widely praised as the savior of a lost art form, the sideshow.
He has a rolodex full of mostly geeks (and the occasional freak) who seek him out with hopes of joining his show and displaying their strange talents and odd physical secrets which are just too bizarre to exhibit almost anywhere else.
How strange is it? Consider Matt "the Tube" Crowley, who quit selling drugs (at a Montana pharmacy) and joined Rose's sideshow where he daily imbibes a giant cocktail consisting of 40 ounces of beer, chocolate syrup, tomato ketchup and Maalox into his stomach. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it goes down through a six foot rubber hose inserted through Matt's nose.
How strange? The concoction going down is only half the gag. This lovely bile stew is then sucked back out of Matt's stomach with a large Plexiglas plunger and, at the final Lollapalooza show that I attended, Matt was joined on stage by the Chili Peppers' Flea, Ministry's Al Jourgenson and others who each did you-don't-want-to-know-what with a large glass of Matt's sumped stomach slime.
The audience howled as if riding a roller coaster of the mind. And like a roller coaster, once you're on board – with the crowd pressing you towards the stage – you can't walk out if you want to. And believe me, you want to. Something inside you screams "Run away! Go home! Pull down the blinds, turn on Mary Tyler Moore reruns and pretend these people don't exist!"
But they do exist. And for some reason that means you've got to stay; got to see if Jim Rose really allows his assistant to throw needle sharp darts into his bare back. Or if a Mad Hatter named Slug – the greatest one man band since Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner - really eats mass quantities of wriggling earthworms, crickets and his namesake slugs.
If this is a circus, it's a one-ringer as envisioned by William S. Burroughs, a Naked Lunch for those too lazy or too busy to read. Watching Rose's fast-paced "human demolition derby" is like open soul surgery in which a piece of you that you never knew existed is crudely ripped from your body and allowed to flop around in front of your eyes.
Rose's fascination with his preoccupation began as a kid. In the waning years of the American sideshow, the late 60's and early 70's, real life ten-in-ones still toured with some circuses and carnivals, and acts like Dickie the Penguin Boy and Siamese twins Ronnie and Donnie could still earn what they considered an honest living by displaying their physical oddities.
These days the physically unfortunate are kept off display and behind closed doors where their dignity – and oftentimes their livelihood – won't offend the sensitive general public. And that's why Rose's freaks are, for the most part, self-made. In sideshow lingo, they're not freaks at all, they're geeks; performers who've carefully and determinedly made themselves into what they are. A nip here, a tuck there; it's cosmetic surgery for those who think beauty really is skin deep.
There was a time when being a geek was considered the end of the road. In William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare
Alley, geeks are described as alcoholics or drug addicts who bite the heads off live chickens in order to get their fix. Tyrone Power played that geek in the movie by the same name and no one bothered to challenge the interpretation for over thirty years.
But about ten years ago, magician and NightCourt star Harry Anderson began to paint a new face on the geek as he performed what he calls the needle through the arm illusion. "A geek is a guy who swallows live rats." Harry would tell his audience, "And when he pulls 'em out, they're still alive... sort of. They're not as fuzzy."
Anderson's bloody needle trick, along with the shock comedy-magic of Penn and Teller, sparked a new interest in sideshow, but it was Oregon writer Katherine Dunn who really fanned the flames. Geek Love (Knopf, 1989) was the bold name of her even bolder novel about a sideshow called Binewski's Fabulon, a close knit family affair that rose and fell on the exhibition of their genetically de-engineered children. Mama Binewski, before giving birth to Siamese twins, a dwarf, a telekinetic psychic-surgeon and a flipper boy, had once been a simple geek.
"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing. 'Spread your lips, sweet Lil,' they'd cluck, 'and show us your choppers!'"
Geek Love was nominated for the National Book Award and went on to sell 200,000 copies. This did not go unnoticed by Jim Rose or by countless other readers who saw a bit of themselves in her strange creations.
About the same time, a bizarre movement called the Modern Primitives began to spread across the country, the devotees finding spiritual transcendence or just good sex though tattooing, body piercing and other physical rites. But until Jim Rose got his acts together and took them on the road, the general public had not seen much of this stuff since the sideshow heyday of the 40's. Maybe that's why so many people faint at the show.
"Mostly it's the guys who pass out." says Rose. "I think it's because guys are more macho and let their eyes overload their brains. Women are smart enough to turn their heads." Katherine Dunn, on the other hand, maintains that the show doesn't bother women because "they're ass deep in blood once a month anyway. This stuff is nothing."
So who comes to sees this self-styled Circus of the Scars? Rose says the usual audience will have "an artist sitting next to a punk rocker sitting next to a cowboy sitting next to a businessman." Sounds like the normal Austin music gig to me.
Besides, at ten bucks you'll get your money's worth if you do nothing more than show up early, stand with your back to the stage and watch the alternately shocked, delighted, disgusted and generally fascinated looks on the rest of the audience's faces.
The Torture King is one of the acts that makes them swoon. His pain-defying human pincushion/yogi act involves running numerous pins, skewers and needles through various parts of his body. At one point small light bulbs are attached to forty embroidery pins perforating his torso and the Torture King is connected to an electric coil and lit up like a Christmas tree. "Right before I electrocute him..." says Rose. "He gets this funny look on his face."
There may also be some new material Friday night in their show at the Back Room. Jimmy the Geek (a name Rose cannot escape) isn't quite ready with his live scorpion on the tongue act, but he has promised to demonstrate his dry ice in the mouth routine. Maybe that's who Jim Rose is: that mythical elementary school kid; you know the one who got his tongue stuck to the flag-pole on a sub-zero degree day.
Peeling off a layer of his tongue hasn't slowed down Rose's smooth-talking. He recently signed with Triad (who merged last week with show business leviathan William Morris), has toured the states all year to FRO (fainting room only), and is headed soon to Europe. There've been several offers to do a television special or film, but how to pull that off is a current quandary.
The trick may be to draw the viewer in so that they become more than just observers. The trick may be to turn the viewers themselves into geeks.
Music: A cute white mouse wriggles his nose and begins to explore his surroundings. The mouse explores his way past small stage props, a make-up mirror, a box of darts. A low growl is heard from the stage: "Beautiful!" Quick cut to faces in a crowd: shocked, woozy, looking away.
Cut back to: the mouse. Now he seems to have noticed that the camera is following him. He moves more quickly, passing sideshow banners and larger props. Cut to more faces in the crowd, wide-eyed, disbelieving. "Beautiful!" says the off-camera voice.
The mouse again: He is now running from our pursuit. He comes to the edge of a long table, trapped. A hand – our hand – reaches around the camera and gently picks up the mouse by its tail. The camera tilts up as the mouse is lifted directly above the camera and lowered down. As the mouse disappears into the lens, there is an audible "crunching" noise as the viewer munches on the mouse. "Beautiful!" says the voice. And the show begins.
"It's the greatest collection of live human marvels ever to perform on one stage," says Rose. "It's live, it's real, it's raw, it's dangerous! Katie bar the door!"
The only thing he's left out is that it's also laugh riot. Not since Le Petomane farted Le Marsellaise on the stage of the Moulin Rouge have performers wrung as much entertainment from such odd skills. With Rose's take-no-prisoners pacing and comedy, one never has time to look back, only forward to the next delightful horror. In the closing piece, Jim Rose lays his face down in a bed of broken glass and a woman volunteer comes up and stands on the back of his head.