Danse Macabre (7 page)

And monstrosity? What about that part of the game? What sort of handle can we get on that? If we don't define, can we at least exemplify? Here is a fairly explosive package, my friends. What about the freaks in the circus? The carny aberrations observed by the light of naked hundred-watt bulbs? What about Cheng and Eng, the famous Siamese twins? A majority of people considered them monstrous in their day, and an even greater number no doubt considered the fact that each had his own married life even more monstrous. America's most mordant—and sometimes funniest—cartoonist, a fellow named Rodrigues, has rung the changes on the Siamese-twin theme in his Aesop Brothers strip in the
National Lampoon
, where we have our noses rubbed in almost every possible bizarre exingency of life among the mortally attached: the sex lives of, the bathroom functions of, the love lives, the sicknesses. Rodrigues provides everything you ever wondered about in regard to Siamese twins . . . and fulfills your darkest surmises. To say that all of this is in poor taste may be true, but it's still a futile and impotent criticism—the old
National Enquirer
used to run pictures of car-wreck victims in pieces and dogs munching happily away at severed human heads, but it did a land-office business in grue before lapsing back into a quieter current of the American mainstream. *

*And yet there is life in the old
Enquirer
yet. I buy it if there's a juicy UFO story or something about Bigfoot, but mostly I only scan it rapidly while in a slow supermarket checkout lane, looking for such endearing lapses of taste as the notorious autopsy photo of Lee Harvey Oswald or their photo of Elvis Presley in his coffin. Still, it is a far cry froth the old mom COOKS PET DOG AND FEEDS IT TO KIDS days.

What about the other carny freaks? Are they classifiable as monstrosities? Dwarves? Midgets?

The bearded lady? The fat lady? The human skeleton? At one time or another most of us have been there, standing on the beaten, sawdust-strewn dirt with a chili-dog or a paper of sweet cotton candy in one hand while the barker hucksters us, usually with one sample of these human offshoots standing nearby as a specimen—the fat lady in her pink little girl's tutu, the tattooed man with the tail of a dragon curled around his burly neck like a fabulous hangman's noose, or the man who eats nails and scrap metal and light bulbs. Perhaps not so many of us have surrendered to the urge to cough up the two bits or four bits or six bits to go inside and see them, plus such alltime favorites as The Two-Headed Cow or The Baby in a Bottle (I have been writing horror stories since I was eight, but have never yet attended a freak show), but most of us have surely felt the impulse. And at some carnivals, the most terrible freak of all is kept out back, kept in darkness like some damned thing from

Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell, kept there because his performance was forbidden by law as long ago as 1910 kept in a pit and dressed in a rag. This is the geek, and for an extra buck or two you could stand at the edge of his pit and watch him bite off the head of a live chicken and then swallow it even as the decapitated bird fluttered in his hands.

There is something so attractive about freaks, yet something so forbidden and appalling, that the one serious effort to use them as the mainspring of a horror picture resulted in the film's quick shelving. The picture was
Freaks
, a Tod Browning film made in 1932 for MGM.
Freaks
is the story of Cleopatra, the beautiful acrobat who marries a midget. In the best E.C. tradition (an E.C. that was almost twenty years unborn in 1932), she has a heart as black as midnight in a coal mine. It's not the midget she's interested in, it's his money. Like the mateeating human trapdoor spiders of those comic-book stories yet to come, Cleo soon takes up with another man; in this case it's Hercules, the show's strongman. Like Cleopatra herself, Hercules is at least nominally okay, although it is with the freaks that our sympathies lie. These two heels begin a systematic poisoning program on Cleo's tiny husband. The other freaks discover what is going on and take an almost unspeakable revenge on the pair. Hercules is killed ( there is a rumor that, as Browning originally conceived the film, the strongman was to be castrated) and the beautiful Cleopatra is turned into a bird-woman, feathered and legless.

Browning made the mistake of using real freaks in his film. We may only feel really comfortable with horror as long as we can see the zipper running up the monster's hack, when we understand that we are not playing for keepsies. The climax of
Freaks
, as the Living Torso and the Armless Wonder and the Hilton Sisters—Siamese twins—among others, slither and flop through the mud after the screaming Cleopatra, was simply too much. Even some of MGM's tame exhibitors flatly refused to show it, and Carlos Clarens reports in his
Illustrated History of the Horror Pima
(Capricorn Books: 1968) that at its one preview in San Diego "a woman ran screaming up the aisle." The film was exhibited—after a fashion—in a version so radically cut that one film critic complained that he had no idea what he was watching. Clarens further reports that the film was banned for thirty years in the U.K., the country that has brought us, among other things, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, the Snivelling Shits, and the charming custom of "Paki-bashing."
Freaks
is now sometimes exhibited on PTV stations and may at this writing have finally become available on videocassettes. But to this day it remains a source of heated discussion, comment, and conjecture among horror fans—and although many have heard of it, surprisingly few have actually seen it.

4

Leaving freaks entirely out of it for the moment, what else do we consider horrible enough to label with what surely must be the world's oldest perjorative? Well, there were all those bizarre Dick Tracy villains, perhaps best epitomized by Flyface, and there was the archenemy of Don Window, The Scorpion, whose face was so horrible that he had to keep it constantly covered (although he would sometimes unveil it to minions who had failed him in some way—said minions would immediately drop dead of heart attacks, literally scared to death). So far as I know, the horrible secret of The Scorpion's physiognomy was never uncovered ( pardon the pun, heh-heh ) , but the intrepid Commander Winslow did once succeed in unmasking The Scorpion's daughter, who had the slack, dead face of a corpse. This information was delivered to the breathless reader in italics—
the slack,
dead face of a corpse!
—for added emphasis.

Perhaps the "new generation" of comic monsters is best epitomized by those created by Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, where for every superhero such as Spiderman or Captain America, there seem to be a dozen freakish aberrations: Dr. Octopus (known to children all over the comicreading world as Doc Ock), whose arms have been replaced by what appear to be a waving forest of homicidal vacuum-cleaner attachments; The Sandman, who is a sort of walking sand dune; The Vulture; Stegron; The Lizard; and most ominous of all, Dr. Doom, who has been so badly maimed in his Twisted Pursuit of Forbidden Science that he is now a great, clanking cyborg who wears a green cape, peers through eyeholes like the archers' slits in a medieval castle, and who appears to be literally sweating rivets. Superheroes with elements of monstrosity in their makeup seem less enduring. My own favorite, Plastic Man (always accompanied by his wonderfully screwball sidekick, Woozy Winks), just never made it. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four is a Plastic Man lookalike, and his cohort Ben Grimm ( aka The Thing) looks like a hardened lava flow, but they are among the few exceptions to the rule.

So far, we've talked about carny freaks and the caricatures we sometimes find in the funnies, but let's come a trifle closer to home. You might ask yourself what you consider monstrous or horrible in daily life—you're exempted from this if you're a doctor or a nurse; these people see all the aberrations they can handle, and much the same can be said for policemen and bartenders. But as for the rest of us?

Take fat. How fat does a person have to be before he or she passes over the line and into a perversion of the human form severe enough to be called monstrosity? Surely it is not the woman who shops Lane Bryant or the fellow who buys his suits in that section of the menswear store reserved for the "husky build"—or is it? Has the obese person reached the point of monstrosity when he or she can no longer go to the movies or to a concert because his/her buttocks will no longer fit between the fixed armrests of a single seat?

You will understand that I am not talking about how fat is too fat here, either in the medical or aesthetic sense, nor anyone's "right to be fat"; I am not talking about the lady you glimpsed crossing a country road to get her mail on a summer day, her gigantic butt encased in black slacks, cheeks whacking and wobbling together, belly hanging out of an untucked white blouse like slack dough; I am talking of a point where simple overweight has passed through the outermost checkpoints of normality and has become something that, regardless of morality or immorality, attracts the helpless eye and overwhelms it. I am speculating on your reaction—and my own—to those human beings so enormous that we wonder about how they may perform acts that we mostly take for granted: going through a door, sitting down in a car, calling home from a telephone booth, bending over to tie our shoes, taking a shower.

You may say to me, Steve, you're just talking carny again—the fat lady in her pink little girl's tutu; those humongous twins who have been immortalized in the Guinness Book of World Records riding away from the camera that clicked the picture on identical tiny motor scooters, their buttocks sticking out to either side like a dream of gravity in suspension. But in point of fact, I am not talking about such people, who, after all, exist in their own world where a different scale is applied to questions of normality; how freakish can you feel, even at five hundred pounds, in the company of dwarves, Living Torsos, and Siamese twins? Normality is a sociological concept. There's an old joke about two African leaders getting together with JFK for a state meeting and then going home on a plane together. One of them marvels, "Kennedy What a funny name!" In the same vein, there is the
Twilight
Zone
episode, "Eye of the Beholder," about the horribly ugly woman whose plastic surgery has failed for the umpteenth time . . . and we only find out at the end of the program that she exists in a future where most people look like grotesquely humanoid pigs. The "ugly" woman is, by our standards, at least, extraordinarily beautiful.

I am talking about the fat man or woman in our society—the four-hundred-pound businessman, for example—who routinely buys two seats in tourist when he flies and kicks up the armrest between them. I am talking about the woman who cooks herself four hamburgers for lunch, eats them between eight slices of bread, has a quart of potato salad on the side topped with sour cream, and follows this repast with half a gallon of Breyer's ice cream spread over the top of a Table Talk pie like frosting. On a business trip to New York in 1976, I observed a very fat man who had become trapped in a revolving door at the Doubleday Book Shop on Fifth Avenue. Gigantic and sweating in a blue pinstriped suit, he seemed to have been poured into his wedge of the door. The book shop's security guard was joined by a city policeman, and the two of them pushed and grunted until the door began to move again, jerk by jerk. At last it moved enough to let the gentleman out. I wondered then and wonder now if the crowd that gathered to watch this salvage operation was much different from those crowds that form when the carny barker begins his spiel . . . or when, in the original Universal film, Frankenstein's monster arose from its laboratory slab and walked.

Are fat people monstrous? How about somebody with a harelip or a large facial birthmark? You couldn't get into any self-respecting carny in the country with one of those—too common, so sorry. What about somebody with six fingers on one or both hands, or a total of six toes on both feet? There are a lot of those guys around, too. Or, getting down even further toward Your Block, U.S.A., what about someone with a really bad case of acne?

Of course ordinary pimples are no big deal; even the prettiest cheerleader on the squad is apt to get one on her forehead or near one corner of her kissable mouth once in a while, but ordinary fat is no big deal, either—I'm talking about the case of acne that has run absolutely apeshit, spreading like something out of a Japanese horror movie, pimples on pimples, and most of them red and suppurating.

Like the chest-burster in
Alien
, it's enough to put you off your popcorn . . . except this is
real
. Perhaps I've not touched your idea of monstrosity in real life even yet, and perhaps I won't, but for just a moment consider such an ordinary thing as left-handedness. Of course, the discrimination against lefthanded people is obvious from the start. If you've attended a college or high school with the more modern desks, you know that most of them are built for inhabitants of an exclusively right-handed world. Most educational facilities will order a few left-hand desks as a token gesture, but that's all. And during testing or composition situations, lefties are usually segregated on one side of the lecture hall so they will not jog the elbows of their more normal counterparts. But it goes deeper than discrimination. The roots of discrimination spread wide, but the roots of monstrosity spread both wide and deep. Left-handed baseball players are all considered screwballs, whether they are or not.* The French for left, bastardized from the Latin, is
la sinistre.