Step Right Up!
Memoirs of a Sword Swallower

by Daniel P Mannix

 

Chapter 1
Flamo up in Flames

I probably never would have become America's leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn't happened to explode that night in front of Krinko's Great Combined Carnival Sideshows. The tragedy — if such it may be called — took place at eleven o'clock when there's only time for one more show before the carnival closes for the night, so all the concessions compete for the late crowd at the same time. The sideshow had a bad location, being next to the Oriental Dancing Girls ("Fugitives from a Life of Shame in the Sultan's Harem") and it's pretty hard to compete with ten naked girls for the public's interest.

But a good sideshow can compete with anything. When Flamo stood up on the platform outside the sideshow tent, naked to the waist with the two great torches in his hands throwing up plumes of golden fire topped by black smoke that reached above the ferris wheels — well, it was something that nothing in the Arabian Nights, Grimm's Fairy Tales or an opium smoker's dreams could top. People left all the other concessions to rush to the sideshow, and I led the rush.

Some of the other acts had come out on the platform to join Flamo: a cowboy playing his guitar, a Hindu fakir sticking hat pins into himself, a gypsy palmist, and an almost nude girl hopefully holding up a fifteen-foot rock python. As I say, in a sideshow there's something to appeal to every taste. But none of them could touch Flamo as a public attraction.

Slowly the fire-eater put back his head and thrust one of the burning torches between his lips. Flames rushed out of his mouth like the backlash of a blast furnace, making his cheeks and throat glow like a jack-o'-lantern and throwing a witch glow over the other acts. Women screamed in the rapidly forming crowd and a man beside me suddenly turned sick and tried to force his way out through the mob. Flamo gradually closed his lips over the flame until the fire went out, leaving only the dancing light of the torch in his other hand to illuminate the platform. Taking care to hold the lighted torch well away from his body, he filled a drinking glass half full of gasoline from a scarlet tin marked DANGEROUS. Instantly the Hindu fakir grabbed up a potbellied flute and began to play a wild chant into the microphone while the sideshow talker beat on a metal triangle and shouted, "This is it, folks! Something you'll never see again."

I'd seen fire-eaters work before, so I guessed that Flamo was going to do the Fountain of Fire. Not many fire-eaters care to try this stunt because even if they don't blow themselves up they're liable to set the audience on fire. To perform the Fountain, the fire-eater takes a mouthful of gas, blows it out in a fine stream, and then lights it. Some fire-eaters will even puff out circles of flame that go undulating up into the air like burning smoke rings. I'd never seen a fire-eater do the stunt except in a dead calm and this evening little gusts of wind were flapping the Sideshow banners — the big canvas pictures of the performers that hang outside a sideshow.

Fountain of Fire act (1887)

Flamo hesitated. He probably wouldn't have attempted the Fountain if the Oriental Dancing Girls hadn't suddenly turned loose a series of bumps and grinds that began to draw away some of the sideshow crowd. Then the fire-eater made his decision. He took a mouthful of gasoline and stood waiting for the wind to die down. I was in the front row of the crowd and by the leaping light of the torch in his hand I could see the fire-eater's face, thin and sunken in spite of his puffed-out cheeks, as he watched the breeze bellying the banner line. He was a swarthy man, apparently of South European blood, his thick black hair carefully combed, and his bare hairless chest as scrawny as an emaciated child's. Suddenly a little trickle of gas leaked from the corner of his mouth and ran down his chin. Instantly a tiny flash of fire from the torch leaped toward it, running through the air as though along an invisible fuse as it ignited the gasoline vapor. The little trickle blazed up and his whole mouthful of gas exploded.

I was blinded for a second by the flash. The fire-eater's whole face was burning and he threw himself off the platform and rolled on the ground, trying to put out the fire. I tore off my coat and tried to smother the flames. The frenzied man beat me off, but the cowboy jumped off the platform and together we put out the fire.

"Hadn't you better call a doctor?" I asked the cowboy.

"What for?" he said in honest surprise. "He'll be all right in a couple of weeks."

The crowd was pressing in around us so closely that I had to fight to keep from being trampled. People kept asking, "Is he dead?" with the same interest that they'd shown while watching Flamo do his act. I helped the cowboy carry Flamo toward the tent. The talker grabbed the mike and shouted, "All right, folks. The show is closed for the evening. There's a fine show on either side of us." The old lady in gypsy costume dropped the tent flap behind us as we carried Flamo inside. A moment later the sidewalls of the tent, which were gleaming a translucent rose from the bright lights on the banner line, suddenly went black as someone disconnected the outside circuit.

The cowboy and I laid Flamo on the thick rosin-scented sawdust. I stood there helplessly, but the carnival people seemed to know exactly what to do. There was no question of the show having to go on. Unlike a circus, a carnival concession is a small, intimate group and the performers were only interested in helping Flamo. The Hindu fakir, a squat old man with a face that seemed to have been whittled out of a hickory knot by a dull knife, stumped in with a saucepan full of warm water he had apparently grabbed from one of the carnival's refreshment booths. A moment later, the girl with the python ran in with a box of baking soda in her hand and the snake still slung around her neck.

Unwrapping the reptile as though he were a feather boa, she handed him to me saying casually, "Here, hold him. He won't bite but don't let him get a turn around you with his tail."

The snake and I looked at each other uncertainly. Instead of being slimy, he felt smooth and slightly cool like a pair of snake-skin shoes left out overnight. As soon as I took him in my arms I could feel the power pulsing through his coils as though I were handling a fire hose under strong pressure. The python reared the upper yard of himself and looked at me, his triangular head only a few inches from my face. Suddenly he shot his head forward and began to pour himself over my shoulder. I gently and respectfully restrained him and, after getting a purchase on my left ankle with the tip of his tail, he seemed to quiet down.

Snake charmer

His mistress had begun pouring baking soda into the saucepan while the old fakir patted the solution onto Flamo's face. There was nothing I could do to help except hold the snake. I looked around the tent. The top was held up by two lines of poles about ten feet apart running down the middle. A long chain was run through holes in the poles and from the chain red canvas had been hung to the ground. Down the center of this chained-off space ran a line of little platforms only a few inches high. Each platform contained the paraphernalia of a different performer. An international madman could not have brought together a more exotic collection. I identified the bullwhips and lariats of the cowboy, the jade-headed hatpins belonging to the fakir, the glass-fronted snake boxes of the snake charmer, and a tattooing outfit with stencils showing South Pacific hula girls and old frigates under full sail. At one end of the tent was a platform littered with playing cards, silk handkerchiefs, and the apparatus for sawing a woman in half. On a crossbar above the platform sat two little ringdoves as comfortable as though in a tree, snuggled together and watching the proceedings with bright black eyes. The other end of the tent was curtained off, but the curtain had been pulled back at one corner and a little ticket box erected, bearing such signs as IS SEX WORTH IT? and YOU OWE IT TO YOUR FUTURE WIFE TO SEE THIS EXHIBIT!

The rest of the sideshow performers had entered the tent and were collecting around Flamo. The old fakir who had taken over the doctoring of Flamo seemed to be the head of the show. His stumpy fingers moved with surprising gentleness over the fire-eater's face where masses of blisters were beginning to swell. Occasionally he gave orders in an almost unintelligible gibberish that the others instantly obeyed.

Flamo spoke for the first time. "How do I look — pretty bad?" He put his hand up to touch the blisters and the snake charmer gently stopped him.

"Why, you'll be giving another bally in a week," said the show's tattooed man. He was a powerfully built fellow in his late fifties with a fringe of white hair around his bald head. He was bringing a horse out of the curtained-off recess of the tent. He led the animal past me toward a stall behind the platform at the other end. I was so fascinated watching the network of blue-green tattoo marks which covered not only his body but also his bald head that the horse had gone by me before I noticed that she had five legs.

"Lucky thing it was only your face," continued the tattooed man, putting the horse in the stall and shaking some oats into a nose bag. "I worked with a Human Salamander once who used to introduce his act with a flourish by drinking several glasses of gasoline. One evening the fumes from the gas got into his left lung and when he tried to swallow a lighted torch the lung exploded. He didn't die, but he developed a dislike of fire-eating and had to make a living burning designs on himself with a blow torch."

"I'll be laid up a month with this thing," said Flamo sadly. "The carny moves tomorrow. You leave me here in a hospital and take the show on. I'll go back to my wife when I feel better and stay with her. I may even give up fire-eating and get a regular job. Krinko, you better call the hospital."

Krinko

The fakir grunted. "You married girl who wants to live in a house and not travel with sideshow. Why any man in his right mind marry woman like that — but I go phone."

He rose and waddled out of the tent. Flamo sank back with a sigh. The elderly lady in the gypsy outfit sat down beside him and began tearing up strips of cloth for bandages with the dispassionate expertise of a professional seamstress. She was a plump, pleasant-faced woman with iron-gray hair done in a pompadour style like an 1890 Gibson girl. The snake charmer sat on the fire-eater's other side and took the cloth strips as they were finished. She soaked them in the warm solution and put them on Flamo's face. The snake charmer still had the body of a young girl but the harsh overhead lights showed that the texture of her skin was coarsening and she was approaching middle age.

The cowboy had sat down on the platform beside the magical apparatus and, pulling a little bag of tobacco from his vest, he began to roll a cigarette without even looking at his fingers. He was a thin, long-legged young man, his face tanned the color of the brown canvas tent. He looked as though he'd be more at home in Levi's than the embroidered outfit he was wearing. I wondered what had made him leave the West for life in a carnival. Beside him was sitting a cute, brown-haired girl wearing only a spangled bra and tight red shorts which she filled nicely. She and the cowboy seemed very intimate, for he rolled her a smoke and she accepted the cigarette without comment, as though it were a usual procedure.

The wailing moan of an ambulance's siren sounded outside the tent, growing louder as the car rushed up the midway. The siren stopped with a groan outside the entrance, and Krinko came in with a young intern and two orderlies carrying a stretcher. The intern examined Flamo casually.

"Just regular second-degree burns," he said to the orderlies regretfully. "I hoped it might be something special."

The elderly lady went into the ambulance with Flamo to make sure everything would be all right. The tattooed man put on a heavy leather glove, and went about turning out lights by unscrewing the big, thousand-watt bulbs that hung in a chain around the tent. He left one bulb burning in the middle. Instantly, the shadows that had been hanging heavily in the corners leaped forward like a flood of black water to the limits of the light. The red lacquer finish of the magician's props glowed in the subdued light like dull neon and the clutter of esoteric props made the tent look more like an alchemist's workshop than ever.

Krinko, the old fakir, pulled off the brilliant green turban he was wearing, disclosing a close-cropped turf of gray hair. He plunged his stubby hands into the scrub and pulled nervously.

"Now I lose an act. What I do? Got to have fire act for bally. This bad."

I spoke up. "How about teaching me fire-eating? I'd like to join the show."

Everybody stared at me. But to my surprise no one asked why I wanted to work in a carnival as a fire-eater. No one even asked my name.

The tattooed man said gently, "I don't know if you'd like carny life, son. There're plenty of nice people living on carny lots. But plenty of misfits end up here, too."

"That's O.K. I've always been a sort of misfit myself," I told him.

 

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