7.28.98

    From Merriam-Webster:

geek 2: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake

freak 3: one that is markedly unusual or abnormal: as a: a person or animal with a physical oddity who appears in a circus sideshow

    I'm reading Geek Love by Katherine Dunn who used to write a column for the Portland, Oregon, alternative weekly, Willamette Week. It starts off as a story about a geek and then turns into one about the freaks, children of the geek. Here's an excerpt from the book:

The Fly-Roper
His friends call him C.B. Ford. He was pot-bellied and bald and he tucked his pants into bright red, rose-stitched, pointy-toed cowboy boots with three-inch heels. There was a calm twinkle in his humor.

His gift was his ability to bulldog and hogtie houseflies. He claimed to have learned it in the Shetland Islands, where the girls came thirty lonesome miles over the moors to drink nickel beer and see the flicks at the Coast Guard station. "But," he laughed, "those girls were all set on getting to the States so you had to be careful with 'em. Nothing they'd like better than get knocked up by a Yank and have Papa herd him to the alter like one of their shit-dragging sheep."

The first fly was always a big to-do. He'd jump all over the stage swiping wildly at the air, come within a frog hair of splatting his fist into the chafing dish a dozen times, get the girl volunteer to flap her arms to flush the little buzzers his way, and all the while talking his talk about the similarities and differences between Herefords and bluebottles until his audience was half-convinced that he was never going to catch the fly but was laughing anyway and jumpy as a drunk with a glass of milk waiting for him to smack a bare hand into that pile of warm dung.

Then, suddenly, he'd catch the fly and hold it, closed in his fist, up to the microphone so they could hear it buzz. Then he'd blow on his thumb knuckle and shout and shake his fist hard, "to make the fly dizzy," and then snap his wrist as he flung the fly down hard onto the table. "Now he's out for a second, but he's just stunned and we've got to act quickly before he regains consciousness."

Whirling on the long-haired girl and drawing small stork-shaped scissors, he would lift a strand of her hair, separate a lone thread, and snip it close to her skull before she had time to do more than squeak.

"We'll tie a slipknot here at one end and have this big fella hobbled in a jiffy."

The slipknot in the hair would slide over one of the stiffly splayed legs of the fly and tighten. With a quick flourish a little fluorescent paper sign was taped to the loose end of the hair. While the first fly was recovering its wits C.B. Ford would catch five more as easily as picking grapes and serve them the same way, assuring his blushing assistant that her hair was so thick and lustrous that she could spare six single threads for the taming of a half a dozen wild beasts.

Inside three minutes a flock of confused flies was bobbling drunkenly through the air above the audience, trailing the tiny winking streamers that read "EAT AT JOE'S" and "HOME COOKING."

    Don't you just love that? C.B. Ford is actually just a minor, peripheral character but I really liked this little vignette. In a somewhat related vein take a look at this site. I laughed so hard when I saw it. Click on the link, come back here and let it fully load before taking it all in.

    The book is giving me some trouble. If any of you have read it I would love to hear your opinion. The story is fascinating when it manages to take me into another world but at times I just get so bogged down and exhausted by the horror. It is horrific in the way that Frankenstein is horrific. Of course, Frankenstein is not really horrific since we had all heard the story long before we actually read the story. What keeps nailing me, though, is that these characters (a boy with flippers; a pair of Siamese twins; a bald, albino, hunchback dwarf; and a telekinetic) seem so completely strange in their life and appearance but so normal in their dysfunction. Maybe that's the point. It's making me not like them too much, though.

    Sympathy is key in any good story. If the reader or the viewer can't find someone to latch onto then most likely the story will fall flat. Just about anytime I dislike a movie or a book it will be precisely for this reason. Of course, there are those pesky details like plot and development. At the rate this story is going it seems like there's not enough time to get it all in. It's kind of like when you're watching the X-Files and you have to keep glancing at the clock to see if they're going to squeeze the whole story in or if you should set yourself up to be mercifully tantalized. Only if there's no sequel then it's not really tantalizing, is it?

    I think I like the book. I think I do. I'll let you know. Now, go look at that other web page!