Under the Electric Sky (10 page)

The Amazing Case of the Two-Legged Man

As an extra added attraction the Bill Lynch Shows offer you a close-up view of that strangest of all living creatures – the Two-Legged Man.

----Advertisement in
The Daily Gleaner
for the Fredericton Exhibition, August 31, 1956

N
o sooner had the two-legged man been identified than the carnival office trailer was crawling with curious folks after answers from the man at the centre of this hoax. The questions seemed to come at once and in the same tone.

“What the hell is this ‘two-legged man' stuff about?”

“Is this a joke at our expense?”

“Are we supposed to be the freaks, now?”

Bill Lynch chuckled quietly behind his desk and bit down on his cigar, the way he had developed a knack of doing in certain social situations. How peculiar that these people with regular faculties would compare themselves to spectacular freaks like the Turtle Woman. Where was their sense of humour?

Outside the office, a warm breeze rippled the grass through the Fredericton field that was now home to one unit of the second largest carnival in Canada. Lynch had amassed what many regarded as the finest show on the road by 1956 and that went for the entire continent. The grand showman had pulled into town a few days earlier, towing twenty-seven railway cars of flashy rides, games and performers to amuse and entertain the patrons of the Fredericton Exhibition.

Lynch's men had worked through the night to secure the rides in prime spots across the grounds. The twin Ferris wheels rose magnificently from the west end of the lot above the entire show. The Chair-O-Plane, the Octopus, the Round-Up, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Merry-Go-Round and nine different kiddie rides were strategically placed at the end of a long row of concession tents and sideshows. Consuela Flores, “the petite Latin American beauty,” was parading her black-maned Nubian Lion to onlookers in one of the tents. Three trick motorcyclists were burning up a large wooden bowl narrowly avoiding one another, monkeys were racing tiny cars up a straight wall and little girls were lining up for pony rides at the far end of the lot.

“By day the midway is a mighty mechanical maze,” an ad in the newspaper had proclaimed, “by night, a fabulous fairyland of fluorescent phantasy.”

The “Freak Animal Show” was a large draw, headlined by the bull with five legs, the two-legged pig, a two-foot-tall cow, a dwarf bull weighing 1,100 pounds and perhaps the most bizarre beast on the carnival that year: a giant double-bodied turkey “born to live with four legs, two bodies, two tails and only one head.”

Back in the office trailer, the joke of the two-legged man was going over a few heads. Lynch laughed reassuringly and invited everyone to relax and enjoy the show. At fifty-three, he was lean and erect and still had a waist around which hung high trousers. His hair had turned grey, but was neatly combed back with every strand stapled into place with precision. His mouth had long ago adapted to having a cigar hanging out of it, which had become another physical trait. When he smiled, his grin resembled a sort of noble clown's without the makeup. His eyes sparkled with humour.

There were a few things he understood better than most, the least of which was how to have a good time. It was funny, Lynch thought as the cigar smoke swirled around his head, after thirty years in the carnival business, after thousands of appearances in towns big and small throughout Atlantic Canada, that one small ad in a newspaper would cause this kind of response. The days of the human freak shows were winding down and not many had really put up a fuss about the World's Fattest Couple or Alzoria Watkins – the Turtle Woman – billed in 1934 as “the greatest freak attraction ever seen in Nova Scotia”.

Alzoria had travelled the carnival circuit throughout the United States, making a regular home at Coney Island in New York where she went by different names including “Walrus Girl” and “Pig Woman.” In Nova Scotia she turned a few heads by toddling out on stage with a cigar box full of photo postcards of herself that she would later autograph upon request. The photo was exactly what they were witnessing before them: Alzoria in a white swimsuit stuffed to capacity with her rotund torso. Spilling out of the suit on the bottom were two thigh-like bulges of skin with six toes attached to one and only one toe on the other. She would move by motion of the legs and her deformed arms, which lacked elbows but ended with tiny hands accentuated with six short, stubby fingers on each. She was not much more than a torso, really, which meant she was confined to the ground, in some respects appearing more like an animal than a woman. There was no hard shell, however, just a human back and an average non-disfigured face that shone with easy smiles from a woman who in some other world would be concerned only with making dinner for her family. In fact, her face was so ordinary it could have very easily been one of the hundreds in the crowd looking out at her in astonishment.

Lynch hired a number of top-quality professional acts out of the States over the years, through world-famous booking agents like George A. Hamid, Art Converse and the master sideshow promoter Pete Kortes. Over the years, Lynch's tents housed widely known freak curiosities like the Half-Man, Seal Boy, the Tattooed Man, the World's Fattest Couple – Happy Jack and Baby Frances who travelled the circuit in a specially reinforced Cadillac – and Ronnie and Donnie Galyon, the legendary conjoined twins who spent their childhood travelling the world, offering themselves for public scrutiny. Ronnie and Donnie were joined from the sternum to the groin and although they had four legs, they moved in a swift, sideways motion. They are still alive and well in Ohio in a home they bought with their carnival earnings. Lynch was particularly fond of the two brothers whom he saw as being as normal as any other boys, except that they lived their lives facing each other, unable to evade the constant confrontation of who they were.

The Bill Lynch Shows also offered world-class circus-style entertainment, free with ten-cent gate admission. A wide assortment of acrobats, sword-swallowers, giants, midgets, fire-eaters, knife throwers, snake charmers, mentalists, illusionists, magicians and even human projectiles amused Maritimers on stages provided by Lynch over the years.

By the late 1950s, the old freak shows were drying up, not out of a new-found moral sensibility, but for other reasons altogether. Advancements in medical technology made it possible to correct ailments that would have caused disorders in the past, abortion became a safe option after parents discovered their babies would be seriously deformed, and a lot of old carnies across the continent blame the government for sending out disability cheques to physically disabled people who could be out turning a buck at the sideshow. And then there's the hard fact that a lot of the “curiosities” that made the bill at the sideshows of old are simply not that freaky compared to current standards. Anyone who has ever set foot on a fairground in the last thirty years can attest without doubt that they've seen the world's fattest man or some character with tattoos over his entire body, riding the Merry-Go-Round and popping balloons with darts.

But there has always been a natural curiosity for weird things and the freaks of old were supplying it for a fee. Lynch never felt any moral qualms about the sideshows. The performers were well taken care of and many of them made a lot of money from their acts. Over the years, a lot of uptight people have upset performers with their own misdirected sense of high moral authority. The freaks were never looking for saviours – they were happy turning a buck like any other carny. The sideshow was their job and the carnival was their life. All they wanted was an opportunity to feel useful and a part of something.

From their perspective it was an old
Twilight Zone
episode. Imagine a bunch of freaks telling you that your existence offended them enough that they didn't want you around. But it was for your own good because these other freaks were exploiting you whether you knew it or not and they simply could not stand for that, being god-fearing freaks and all.

There was never any serious concern about exploitation, despite what some pious individuals may have believed. Consider, for example, Alzoria the Turtle Woman's act.

Alzoria would spin stories to the crowds about her mother selling her for a quarter to another woman who turned around and traded her to a carnival. Alzoria, a Black twenty-two-year-old, would even put on an over-the-top southern accent to make it all the more believable.

“When ah wuz bigga, dey sold me to a travellin' show each summah,” she would tell the crowd, as recorded by an old magician by the name of Walt Hudson. “Many times ah wuz molested by boys on dah show, but ah couldn't do nuthin about it. Ah only went to third grade in school. Nah ah work heah every summah.”

The sympathetic patrons would line up to give her a dime for autographed photos, trying to make amends for such a sad life. Only none of it was true. Alzoria, who went by a few different last names over the years, grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and married twice. She had completed high school, was very much a content person who earned a lot from her condition and the gullibility of the “marks”, as she would call them.

So who was this two-legged man, anyway, with his overwhelming sense of guilt? For the freaks, he was an easy pushover.

Freaks, losers, outsiders, criminals and crazies of all stripes have found the carnival a safe haven. There were never any judgments cast, even by the people who worked on the show who wouldn't fall into any of these categories. As long as somebody was willing to work hard enough, they would fit in. It was family, after all, and everybody needed a home somewhere.

At one point in the early 1960s, Lynch contracted the services of a mysterious man by the name of Sam Alexander to provide sideshow entertainment for a month or so throughout the Maritimes. Sam was a veteran of the American sideshow circuit, an unassuming slender character at first glance, with dark, sad eyes and a face that seemed peculiar in certain lights. He spoke in eloquent phrases in calm, soothing tones and projected a pleasant persona. But the face. The face was
wrong
somehow. His forehead and ears appeared normal and his dark hair was tidy and natural. But there were strange lines from the bridge of the nose to below the jawline. It was as if the mouth, nose and chin had been sculpted by an artist, without any consideration given to the rest of the face.

In his twenties, Sam was a talented stage actor with a theatre group in Chicago on his way to the big time. One night, while cleaning out an empty gas tank, an explosion burned the bottom part of his face beyond recognition. The wounds became infected and doctors were forced to cut the skin around his mouth, nose and chin until all that was left was pus and teeth and jawbone. After more than a year in hospital, Sam was sent to a home for the destitute.

The depression associated with such a trauma offered no hope of returning to polite society, doctors believed, and having his looks taken away came as a tremendous grief for the actor. He soon met a nurse at the home whose husband was a doctor specializing in prosthetics, who agreed to sculpt a mask to conceal the deformity. Around this time, Sam was trying to beat the depression and figured the best way to feel useful again was to get a job, but having to endure stares and scorn from the public while attempting to lead a normal life would have been unbearable. But he had to do something.

It was then that he read an ad in the local newspaper for a carnival opening up for a stay near the home. He took a shot and found Pete Kortes, the man who provided the sideshow for Lynch for years. Sam pulled off his face one day on the lot and Kortes found his new star attraction. The haunting visage underneath was spectacular. Sam's act was sealed forever: The Man with Two Faces.

He travelled throughout North America revealing himself to onlookers in shady tents across the continent. Behind exaggeratedly painted 115-foot banners blowing in the breeze depicting the freaks to be found inside, Sam Alexander would hold an audience captive with his story. The performance would start with Sam facing the audience, looking dapper and almost handsome in the shadows, as he recounted the terrible and unfortunate circumstances that created the Man with Two Faces before them. The story, told in an unwavering, sober tone, outlined Sam's start as a promising actor and the role fate would play in his own life tragedy, the night the explosion burned his face. He explained all of this in a calm, detailed monologue, as if it were professional theatre. At the end, Sam would turn his back to the audience, remove the prosthetic mask and face them once more with the whole bottom of his face missing. It was terrifying. Women would cry and others would faint. Stomachs would turn. It was exactly the type of freak show people wanted to see. Kortes quickly made Sam the headline attraction at the ten-in-one (ten sideshows for one admission) with a stern warning that the show was “not for the faint of heart.”

Sam had found a purpose and direction in life thanks to the show. The money he made was spent on corrective surgery over the years, but after over seventy operations hadn't garnered the results he was looking for, he gave up trying to look like everyone else. Near the end of his life, Sam abandoned the mask and confronted the everyday world with his real face exposed.

But he had found acceptance on the carnival and the sideshow in the early years when it mattered.

“I probably would have ended my days in an institution,” he once said of the sideshow that saved his life, as recorded by Shirley Carroll O'Connor in her book
Life is a Circus
. “A whole new world opened up for me. I belonged. I was independent and that feeling was shared by all the so-called ‘freaks' who, like me, would have been warehoused in institutions or hidden away by their relatives.”

They were freaks, yes, but there was dignity in it. The same human desires that appeared in “regular folks” also existed in their deformed bodies. They suffered from that universal malady known as loneliness, but had found purpose and belonging behind the tents.