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  The Americana already had a bearded lady so I made an enemy just by getting hired on. Her name was Julia and she had a milder case of the same curse I had—the Werewolf Disease. Its medical name was a mouthful nobody ever tried to speak. Hypertrichosis. I was born with it and had thick dark hair pretty much everywhere. Julia the Bearded Lady had the full beard and patches on her forehead which she kept shaved, and patches of hair on other parts of her body. She was afraid they would give her the boot and replace her with me. I didn’t see a problem. She was the Bearded Lady, I was Wolf Girl. That should’ve been the end of it. But she wouldn’t let it go. She didn’t want any competition so she tried to kill me my first night there. She didn’t do it herself, she got a gazoonie to try to ice me. A gazoonie is carnie lingo for a roughie or roughneck, a low-paid boy who helps set up and tear down rides and game booths. I didn’t know the lingo at the time. All I knew was that the muscular guy grabbed me from behind as I was coming back from the shitter and put a blade to my throat. It was dark and I had trouble finding the trashy trailer they’d put me and Zelda in.

  When you don’t talk you get pretty good at nonverbal communication. I hadn’t spoken a word since I was six. So before the gazoonie sliced open my Adam’s Apple, I reached my right hand back and grabbed his joint. I didn’t give him a chance to get scared I was going to try to rip it off. I started in rubbing it with my whorehouse wiles and he got hard right off the bat.

  “You a hot little bitch, ain’t ya,” he said as he let go so I could turn around and tend to his stiff business. I unzipped him and he flopped out springy and eager. I used my mouth because biting it off was my best defense against his blade, but my whore’s intuition told me his heart wasn’t in killing me. I figured that if I did him good enough, he would want me as a regular. So I wolfed him down like a hungry little cub.

  The half moon looked down on us as he stuffed his shrinking thing back in his pants. He still had the knife in his hand but I’d taken the starch out of him. “I didn’t wanna kill ya,” he confessed. “Julia, the Bearded Lady? She paid me to do it. Shee-it, a sawbuck ain’t enough for doing a cute little cocksucker like you. I’m keeping her money and telling her I’ll rat her out if she makes a stink.”

  Back in the smelly trailer, I wrote it all down for Zelda. As she was deciphering my chicken-scratch, she said, “I wisht you’d try talking and save us both a lot of trouble. But I reckon you’ve forgot how by now. I’m sorry, hon.”

  I wrote most of my messages on a book-size chalkboard. For longer missives I used pen and paper. This was a pen-and-paper deal. Zelda read it and said, “I’m gonna pay this bitch a visit and put the fear of the Lord in her. I don’t care if we are new. We don’t put up with this shit from nobody.”

  Zelda was usually pretty easy going but when she got riled up, look out! Hell to pay. And no easy credit. The Bearded Bitch was killing a bottle of hooch when we busted in on her. A midget with king-size dong was painting her toenails with one hand and flogging his pecker with the other.

  Zelda snatched the bottle out of the woman’s hand threatened to bean her with it. “You make another move against my girl here,” Zelda said through clenched teeth, “I’ll kill you myself and shove a bottle up your snatch and light it up! You got that, bitch?”

  Julia nodded groggily. The midget grabbed his clothes and fell out of the trailer.

  I growled at the woman, hiked my leg and pissed on her foot. I had years of experience playing the Wild Child so this was a breeze. She looked like she wanted to kill me but she sat there and took it. She knew she had it coming. And she didn’t want that bottle coming at her noggin. Or her snatch.

  Then I surprised everybody, myself included, by sitting in Julia’s lap and resting my head on her breast. She had on a fake silk robe unbuttoned halfway to her belly. Maybe the midget had been feeling her up or maybe he’d had other plans with that nail polish. Her tits tempted me. They were long and saggy but tempting. Things tempt me all the time. Sometimes I give in to them and sometimes not. This time was not a not.

  I pushed her robe open and fastened my mouth on her left tit. Unlike me, she didn’t have hair on her tits, except for a few long straggly ones growing in that little round patch of bumpy skin around the nipple. I sucked and whimpered. Tears trickled down my face bush, like I’d found my long-lost mammy. Real tears too. They came easy. Julia petted my head and whispered how sorry she was for trying to get that roughie to kill me.

  I cut my eyes at Zelda and gave her a wink. She cocked a brow back at me. Then I clamped my front teeth on Julia’s stiff little nipple and bit it right off. She commenced to screaming as she jumped up and dumped me off her lap. Blood streamed from her wounded tit. I stood up and spat that tender piece of her on the floor at her feet.

  Zelda shushed her. Told her if she didn’t stop screaming and wailing she would knock her ass out. “Anybody asks,” Zelda said, “you had a shaving accident. Now you stay the fuck away from my girl.”

  I licked her blood from my lips and grinned a wolfish grin. I did-n’t expect I’d be having any more trouble out of the Bearded Lady. And that was just our first night at the carnie camp. Things were about to get a hell of a lot more stimulating than that.

  Next morning Boss Bizzle introduced us to the rest of the company. He was a big man with wide shoulders always sporting red-white-andblue suspenders to hold his pants up over his potbelly. That’s how everybody called him: Boss Bizzle. Never Boss without the Bizzle or Bizzle without the Boss. And never ever Mr. Bizzle. Boss Bizzle or nothing. He was our Moses leading us out of the dustbowl desert and into brokedown towns where we would scratch out a mean living.

  Boss Bizzle threw me in with the freaks and told them to keep a close eye on me on account of I was a wild child and probably retarded in my thinking. Zelda stopped him right there and told him I was learning to read and write and that I was smart as a whip.

  Boss Bizzle said, “If she gets too wild she’ll taste my whip. How come she don’t talk?”

  Zelda said, “She’s been treated like dumb animal most of her life. Nobody ever bothered to find out how smart she was.”

  Boss Bizzle put his hand on top of my head. He looked me in my eyes and said, “You understand me, girl?” He winked. “We ain’t gonna have no trouble, you and me. Are we?”

  I growled at him. He snatched his hand away. Then I winked back. He chuckled. And said, “I reckon she’ll do. What’s her name? Besides Wolf Girl.”

  Zelda glanced at me with a tinge of sadness in her eyes, then she said, “She don’t have a name. If she ever did, she don’t remember it. She’s been kicked around, handed down, locked away and put on display. You name it, it’s been done to her. She don’t remember her mama and daddy or know what come of them. I just call her hon or honey. Most folks call her Wolfie or W.G.”

  Boss Bizzle nodded and hooked his big thumbs in his suspenders and gave them a tug. I didn’t see any pity in his eyes but I saw something I couldn’t name. Something odd was going on behind his bug eyes. I figured I’d know soon enough what it was, and that it would-n’t be anything good.

  He looked around and then asked where Julia was. Zelda said, “She cut herself shaving.” Boss Bizzle said, “That ain’t no excuse.” And Zelda said, “It was a tender spot, you know, private.” Boss Bizzle nodded like he knew all about women’s tender spots. Then he snapped his suspenders and lit up a cigar and headed off to his trailer.

  I didn’t mind being thrown in with the other freaks but I think Zelda didn’t like it at all. Not at first. I’d been a carnie before so I’d seen my share of freaks already but these Americana freaks had the others beat for freak-show shock. Other shows had their fat lady but our Fannie the Fat Lady was six hundred pounds of packed blubber on a beautiful woman with a glorious singing voice. We had Plug-O: the man with two cocks. And I don’t mean pet roosters. He also had three ball sacks and a total of three balls. Zelda said she wondered what it would be like to be porked by a man with two cocks. I think she was
joking because I knew for a fact that she had at least three guys poking her at one time back at the brothel. Most whores had. Not me.

  There weren’t that many men with a taste for my kind. Most of my johns were farmboys with a hankering for cows or sheep. Or older men with a taste for the strange. Or the young and strange. I didn’t know they had a name for those men until years later, guys that like jailbait pussy. Pedophile. When I first heard it, I thought it was a file for toenails. Now I know better. (If there was a way to cure a pedophile, wouldn’t you have to call it a pedicure? But they say there ain’t no cure for it.) I’ve learned a lot since those old days. Lot of water under the bridge since then. Lot of cocks up the chute too. From where I stand now, I can say I thinned the pedophile population a right smart over the years. But we’ll get to that. Maybe. I ain’t decided how much to tell this time around. I might save some for a second installment. That how’s they do memoirs sometimes. And I reckon that’s what this is. I got more wild stories than you can shake a dick at. All true too.

  I was telling you about the Americana Carnival’s freaks. The one that got under my skin the most was Petey the Human Pincushion. Him and his cousin Count Crisco the Sword Swallower. He was no more a count than I was a princess but he could swallow swords and eat fire to beat the band. I could watch him all right without feeling sick but not Petey, who was always sticking himself with sharp things. Like a hatpin all the way through his tongue. Or through his face, in one cheek and out the other. He could hammer nails through various parts of his anatomy and not even bleed. Once I saw him shove hat-pin through his dick. He did that for a private show, not for the usual rubes and townies. I have a pretty strong stomach but some of the stuff Petey did nearly made me faint away in horror.

  One of the freakiest of the freaks was Tess the Three-legged Girl. She was born with four but one leg started rotting off so the doctor had to amputate it. She was such a small woman, I wondered how she could have sex with that third leg so much in the way. But when it comes to fucking, folks usually find a way. If they didn’t nobody would be here.

  Zelda wanted me to give up whoring and concentrate on being a hairy freak. She didn’t put it that way of course. She said I was too young and that Mama Rose hadn’t done right by me by whoring me out, me being so young and all. “We loved her,” Zelda said, “but Mama Rose weren’t no saint. You gotta remember that, hon. The life we live, we ain’t likely to meet no saints. I don’t like to say it, but Mama Rose had her wicked side.”

  I cocked my head, silently asking Zelda to explain. But all she said was, “We don’t need to get into that now. You just take my word for it. And forget about whoring. It’s all right for me ‘cause I’m grown up and I don’t have many years left where men will pay me for it. I got to make hay while the sun shines. Nothing sadder than a old whore who don’t know when to give it up.”

  I thought there were plenty of things sadder but I let it alone. Zelda rolled over on her top bunk and went to sleep. I opened my book and started reading. I’d outgrown the Dick and Jane books. The Bible was too hard yet but I had found Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a drawer of junk in the trailer and was struggling to get through the stories. The man lived in a fairy tale world but the fairies were evil and most everybody was a “jelly-bean”—F. Scott’s word for loafers and deadbeats. Something easier to read would’ve been better after Dick and Jane and their annoying little shit Spot but it was all I had. I had to ask Zelda what a lot of the words meant and there were some she’d never heard before. Years later I read him again and had more appreciation for his storytelling skills. But back in those days, the man was just one more trial I had to endure if I wanted to improve myself. I was not going to be a jelly-bean!

  Zelda went right to work whoring our second night as carnies. She’d talked turkey with Boss Bizzle and agreed to give him a cut of her earnings. She wasn’t a bad cooch dancer so it didn’t take much to get the rubes worked up enough to pay her for five minutes with her pussy. At ten dollars a pop, she did all right, considering the country was mired up in the Great Depression. I wanted some of that action but she wasn’t going to help me so I got in thick as thieves with Theo the talker, and it wasn’t long before he was lining me up with clems with a taste for the strange and hairy. Zelda did her goofus dudes in our jungle buggy if her john had any class at all, or behind the trailer for the usual hicks and clems.

  I did my “gentlemen” in a closed-off section of sideshow shockers, canvas side walls housing horrible things in jars and such, things you hope you never have to see but yet you pay to see them. Things like dead two-headed babies pickled pink. Or John Dillinger’s King Kong dick. A unicorn’s horn laid out in miniature casket. Water-head babies. Dead baby with a lizard’s tail. Actual shrunken heads with lips sewn shut.

  And the thing that gave me the creeps every time I looked at it—a humanlike head with something like squid tentacles growing out of it and teeth in a small round mouth that looked like it could grind up a whole cow easy as pie. It had knobs on its head that might’ve been the beginnings of baby devil horns. The eyes in that head followed me around. I got to where I’d throw an empty feed sack over that big jar so I wouldn’t have to see that monster while I was in there with a horny hick. Funny though, I could feel its eyes on me anyway, like it was peeping at me through the feed sack’s weave. Nobody could ever tell me how the Americana came by that monstrous head but I knew it was real and not some faked-up piece of crap cobbled together to fool the rubes. Floating in embalming fluid or something like that to keep it fresh, the thing was haunted. Nothing could live in that jar of chemical juice but this thing was inhabited. There was a mind in there and it was trying to touch me somehow. Call me crazy but I know it was.

  And then it did. It touched me.

  Theo the talker had told me that Boss Bizzle didn’t want those oddities on exhibit anymore on account of the complaints of too many townies in too many towns and hamlets. Theo thought it was the dead babies that shocked the rubes and made frail fillies faint. But after being near that monster head in the big glass jar, I knew better. That thing got under your skin and into your skull. It did things to you. It turned you all squishy inside and quivery with fear and darker feelings. In my case, it filled me with murderous urges. Now you could rightly say I was already on the lookout for more Melvin Locusts to make them pay for Mama Rose because she was worth ten of those sons of bitches, but that jar head monster multiplied my murderous urges and focused them down to one fine point like a magnifying glass does rays of the sun. That spooky thing sharpened my meanness to a fierce point and made it ready to burn deadly holes in any son of a bitch I turned it on.

  The thing got inside me when this tall skinny rube was mounting me from behind. He said his name was Jasper. Not that I gave a damn what his name was. I was leaning on a table in front of John Dillinger’s twelve-inch pickled dick, wondering what the hell it was made of cause it sure as hell wasn’t an honest-to-goodness penis any man ever grew. I’d about decided it was a sausage some counterfeit artist concocted. Concocted, get it? Anyway, old Jasper was slipping his little Vienna sausage to me when I felt that thing tapping at my skull, demanding to be let inside. I went cold all over. It started at the top of my head and dropped down like a frigid curtain. Dillinger’s dick suddenly swirled around in its jar like it was alive and looking at me with its slit eye. All the oddities stirred, shimmied or fluttered like a stiff breeze had blown through the tent, or an earth shiver. I think old Jasper felt it too cause he went “Oh me, oh me, oh my” like his brain was all at once addled.

  I knew right away it was the jar head monster making all the commotion and turning me cold with murderous rage. The man poking me from behind like a dog was Melvin Locust and it was my job to kill him. Didn’t matter that I’d killed him once before. A man as evil as Melvin had to be killed over and over cause he wouldn’t stay dead. Evil always comes back around. And I was the designated evil killer.

  So I picked up tha
t pickle jar with John Dillinger’s dick floating in it, watching me, and I turned around and smashed it upside Jasper’s head. It didn’t break the first time but it did make Jasper stagger back a few steps, his minnow dick flopping and snapping like a fish in the air and blood streaming down his face. I hit him again. This time the jar broke and pickle juice washed down his face and that big sausage dick hit the floor a couple of seconds before Jasper did.

  But I was just getting going good. The vile thing in the covered-up jar put the pictures in my head and I acted them out. With a shard of broken glass I sliced Jasper’s jugular and caught the blood spurts in my mouth until they stopped. Kneeling like I was saying my prayers, I relished the taste of dead man’s blood on my lips and the oily feel of it in the soft fur of my face. As an afterthought I used the same glass shard to saw off Jasper’s pecker. Then I yanked the feed sack off the monster’s big jar, unscrewed the metal lid and dropped the dead pecker into the cloudy soup with that evil head. Those tentacles fluttered, then whipped out to grab the dead man’s dick and flipped it into those evil squid teeth. The thing’s eyes blinked and I pissed myself.

  I panicked. I’d killed a simple clem and was stuck with his corpse. Evidence of my own evildoing. My first impulse was to run. Run out of the tent and off into the night. Like the wild child I was supposed to be. I was heading out of the tent when a tink tink tink stopped me. I turned to face the thing in the jar that had called me back. I looked into its black eyes. Its tentacles lifted and waved slowly like they were trying to hypnotize me. Or give me some dark blessing. I right away went calm. And I knew what to do. I went to find Theo the talker and took him back to the scene of my crazy-ass crime. He disposed of Jasper’s body and cleaned up the bloody mess.