People who don’t know me well wonder
why my art is dark. If they meet me
socially they wonder why a “nice”
fellow would paint such material.
Once an African American woman,
fresh from working with what they
used to call “witch doctors” in
Africa, walked through my studio and
said, “I get this, this like African
art, life and death shown all
together.”
“Where did you get this?” she asked,
perhaps playfully implying
appropriation. I aw-shucks-ed like
an idiot savant and said, “I don’t
know, I was raised old-school
catholic with plenty of bleeding
saints and, of course, the human
heart with thorns puncturing it and
fire shooting out the top. Maybe
that. It’s hard to say.”
My sister-in-law won’t go into my
studio. She calls it satanic, which
I take as a compliment. An
electrician working on my house
walked through and said, “Whose
nightmares are those?” I held my
tongue about young adult experiences
with psychedelic substances. This
was a good decision.
My strongest memories of
circus-related experiences happened
at the State Fair in Michigan around
1959.
My father was a dentist who
struggled with alcoholism and
eventually died from it. They say
dentists have a high suicide rate,
giving pain all day and having to
smile though it, I imagine. My dad
didn’t take that out, but he did go
to alcohol like pretty much everyone
else in the 50’s and 60’s. One thing
my dad was very good at was telling
scary stories around a campfire. He
made faces and noises and wasn’t
afraid to scare us. I still remember
some of them, like the moaning man
who had arisen from his grave and
clumps up the stairs. Clump, clump,
clump (you make the sound with your
foot). He stops and moans on each
step, “Who stole my golden arm?” In
the story, you’re sleeping on it and
in the climax he digs right
through you to retrieve his
golden arm and you die.
Once he took us to a massive series
of sand dunes on the east side of
Lake Michigan (now Sleeping Bear
Dunes National Lakeshore). No one
else seemed to notice but what I saw
at the rest area at the top was a
field trip consisting of what we now
call physically and/or mentally
challenged kids. At that time we
called them retards or worse. They
were yelling and gesticulating and
to my young mind they seemed to be
chasing us down the hill like in the
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The two events got connected in my
mind. My dad filmed in 16mm all ten
of us running down the dune,
deliberately falling as dramatically
as possible. He knew how to film it
in slow motion. Or maybe that was my
memory.
He also took us to the State Fair
before it had “incidents” and
suburbanites got too scared to go.
In Detroit the fairgrounds were
“below 8 mile” and if you’ve seen
Eminem’s movie 8 Mile you’d
know this was the division between
the urban largely black city and the
white suburbs. Even in the 1950’s
the trip the state fair was a
thrilling and slightly dangerous
experience for us. But not because
of the racial mix, because of the
freak show.
I still remember my first freak show
vividly: the darkened room, the
expectation of some human
monstrosity that would challenge our
understanding of God’s supposedly
harmonious world. We did meet one
memorable character I’ve since seen
in books. The Elephant Woman talked
to us and gave out pamphlets on her
condition, ichthyosis, I believe.
This took a bit of the fun out of
oogling, but in a way made it more
memorable. I’ve since learned her
name was Charlotte Vogel. Some of
our brood suffered from a milder
form of this we called merely dry
skin. Implications of contagion from
the Elephant woman were not
allowed.
There were a few movie stars there,
Dinah Shore singing for Chevrolet,
and a young Betty White selling I
don’t know what. A short line of
people queued up to sit on her lap,
so we got into it. I sat on her lap.
That’s all I remember, that it
happened and became my most intimate
physical contact with a movie star
(though I did sit next to Ellen
Burstyn of The Exorcist once
at a bar mitzvah in LA. I bumped
into Martin Short coming out of the
men’s room in a restaurant near
Siena, Italy. I like to think the
knowing glance we exchanged gave me
status as someone who wouldn’t tell
the locals a famous American
comedian was eating there with his
family.
As we were leaving the State Fair,
they did some kind of prank over the
loudspeaker (unacceptable today)
that the Alligator Girl had escaped.
I don’t know if we saw an Alligator
Girl. In my mind she sort of merged
with the Elephant Woman only she was
scarier, more like an animal likely
to crawl around in the parking lot
under cars waiting to eat children
trying to leave the fair. Maybe that
made an impression.
C.B. Murphy
