Lost in the Funhouse by Bill Zehme

Everything and everyone and every smell and every noise was here and here was where one could be whatever/whoever one wanted to be, could become other things and other people and—
    Dhrupick …
    Dhrupick—the spirit that was Dhrupick—could be loosed here, was born certainly probably to experiment here to discover things here. Manhattan, every stained and pocked crevice of it, every parcel of its soddenspeckled pavement, would be whatever he/they wanted it to be. Here was where he/they would transcend always.
    The boil grew and grew on the back of his neck—for a year, he claimed—pulsing at times, festering with pus, and the doctor, when
the doctor finally looked at it, called it a cyst. A cyst! Oh! He liked his cyst quite a lot, was fascinated with it, this purpling yellowing bulb, protruding an inch from under his skin and just as wide in circumference, it was much more substantial than all of his lifetime of pimples, pimples which never stopped rising even now on his grown-man face and his grown-man back, welty kinds of acne pimples, even though he was always good at washing and hygiene and everything, since he’d been seeing dermatologists since he was like thirteen. The doctor wanted to lance the cyst right then right there, but he said no, not yet, and invited the doctor to come to his show at the Improvisation on Melrose Avenue and the doctor did come that appointed night and watched as people were urged to line up and step onto the stage for the privilege of touching the cyst, but only after they submitted to washing their hands in the bowl of alcohol solution which Linda had set up where she was dispensing clean towels and maybe four people actually did it—“Not too hard, now. Just gently. No no no! Just gently. Seriously. Really, don’t squeeze it or don’t touch hard. You can really do damage if you do. Please. Seriously. This is not a joke. Just touch it. Please don’t be funny. Anyone else? That it? Thank you. Um, okay”—but the ones who did touch it were friends and agreed to do it because he wanted them to and everyone in the room including and especially the friends who touched the cyst, not to mention all the viewers who later watched it on television during the program
An Evening at the Improv,
were really kind of nauseous over the whole thing. He was quite proud of himself, however, since it reminded him of old things and certain people he used to know. The doctor removed the cyst on another day.
    Best thing the city ever gave him, best thing he ever found there, absolutely, was Hubert’s Museum & Live Flea Circus. He was ten, maybe, when Grandma Pearl first took him. Grandma Pearl lived in the city for a handful of years after Papu Cy died and she liked to show the delicious first grandchild (her Kid McCoy, she called him) secret places and spectacles to further widen his eyes. Even after shelater moved in with her daughter’s family on Grassfield Road—about which Andy was especially delighted, although it meant bunking with Michael—she never stopped taking him to amazements that he wanted to see, such as when the Fabian boy played concerts in New Jersey and the awful wrestling men did their nonsense in tri-state arenas and, years earlier, when he wanted to be in the studio audiences of the little television programs like
Howdy Doody
and
Wonderama
that were made in the city. But then came the day that they explored Times Square and she led him along Forty-second Street to the penny arcade between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. At the rear of this clattering arcade was the staircase that descended to the basement that was the subterranean urban sideshow that was Hubert’s. Opened in 1925 as a dime museum—parlance for the ten-cent admission price paid to view human curiosities therein (although by this time a ticket cost twenty-five cents per)—Hubert’s would rank just a shade below Coney Island as the most important place Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman would ever know. It was a very