Lost in the Funhouse by Bill Zehme Page A

cheerful sad and strange place—a repository of the forgotten and the vanquished and the phony. It was where old-time acts went to die and the only place where certain godforsaken creatures had a chance to make a living. He loved the sweet spookiness of it all and returned and returned to Hubert’s, where the first thing he always saw was himself—many many versions of himself exaggerated/diminished fat-tall-skinny-dwarfed-etcetera—in funhouse mirror reflection at the foot of the concrete stairwell. He enjoyed that part every time, almost felt part of the program. Beyond the mirrors were decrepit posters of long-gone former attractions—Weird! Unusual! Primitive! Siamese Twins Doomed to Stay Joined Together Till Death! The Homeliest Woman in the World! Londy the Giantess! The Great Waldo (who swallowedwhole live mice and other breathing things)!
    Anyway, those ones didn’t work there anymore, but the ones who did got to know the boy very well. These ones, they worked on little elevated stages that lined the long dark occasionally fluorescent occasionally crimson-lit mostly shadowy mildewy expanse. Princess Wago (in her leopard leotards) he loved and also her pythons and boa constrictors(six-footers) with which she danced and sometimes draped over his shoulders, which was exciting. He struck up happy convoluted chats with Phil Dirks, him with the three eyes and two noses and two mouths, which seemed normal enough to the boy, gave him no pause at all. There was Miss Lydia, who contorted herself pretzelwise, and Susie the Elephant Skin Girl (nice to him always, let him touch her mottled gray flesh) and Professor Heckler and His Trained Fleas (beheld for an extra quarter; fleas juggled and rode a merry-go-round and danced and one kind of kicked this little football and they all fed on the Professor’s forearm—blood!) and Sealo the Seal Boy (a man with tiny flippers instead of arms) and Presto the magician who always said during his tricks, “I don’t really do this. It just looks like it.” (The boy most probably remembered those words always.) One guy who was there not very long sang with a ukelele in a crazy high falsetto voice and was called Larry Love the Human Canary, who later grew curly long hair and called himself Tiny Tim and got famous, which was exciting. Estelline, Refined Sophisticated Lady Sword Swallower, was always pleased to have the boy watch her daintily insert four blades, one after the other, including an antique U.S. Cavalry saber, down her proud gullet, then wipe each with a pristine hanky upon removal. But best of all was a horrid fellow named Hezekiah Trambles who went by the moniker of Congo the Jungle Creep, whose skin was the color of swamp water and whose hair stood/shot upright and who was missing many teeth, who took a special liking to Andy, in his own atrocious way, focusing on him while performing his “African voodoo magic”—trying always to enlist him for onstage decapitation. Congo was a crazy man, seemed so anyway, who leapt vigorously onto sawblades but broke no feet-skin and swallowed lit cigarettes, then swallowed foul liquid which never extinguished the cigarettes which he then spit up still burning. He plucked hair from heads—Andy’s certainly—and put it in a slimy bucket and chanted great gibberish over the bucket and pulled out a phony snake and threw it into the small crowds that gathered, once per hour, to behold such wonder. Afterward, Congo and Andy would talk in their own particular not dissimilar friendly awkward manner.
    It was perfect down there. And they were in a basement just likehim in his basement doing things other people didn’t do, which was all very normal and regular really. By the time he was twelve, he began sneaking off into the city on his own or with Jimmy Krieger to visit Hubert’s and excavate other urban delights. “We did the whole Truffaut
Day for Night
thing, where we’d skip a day of school and play hooky. We did it about four