Jim Rose and Melissa Rossi 

from "Freaks Like Me"

When I next opened my eyes, two hours later, we were in Montreal and the van had stopped moving. At least it had stopped moving in a forward direction. It was, instead, rocking side to side.

I picked the pillow out of my hair, peeled my face off the floor, and peered out the smoke-clouded window. A sea of teenagers was mobbing the van. Hundreds of them were out there, screaming, "Jim Rose! Lifto! Pincushion! Circus Queen! Tube! Hey, Slug, we brought you roadkill!"

Things were definitely looking up.

There are two quick rules of thumb a freak show uses to measure success. One is being mobbed. The second is making your fans faint. Nothing in the world is more flattering than a horizontal audience member with bubbles coming out of nose and mouth.

And the Canadians were heavy on the compliments that weekend. In Montreal we played at a nightclub we called the Electric Butt, although the actual name in French, Foufounes Electriques, made it sound a lot classier; then again, in French "scrotum-scratching" sounds sexy.

The Butt was the biggest, hippest, and artiest club we'd ever played at that point. A sprawling multilevel number that took up most of a block, it had chain link fences snaking through it, and spray-painted graffiti screamed from the walls in the curving halls and balconies that jutted off everywhere. A real modern-day Carnegie Hall, at least to us.

On Friday six hundred smashed into the place for our show. On Saturday we had a full house again, and turned hundreds away. The management knew we could sell out a third time, but had booked a band for the room. They frantically searched all over the city for a space. On Sunday we played the only place they could find: under a terrace, out back behind the Butt.

They hastily built us a stage in that open-aired warehouse typically used for trash storage. They stapled garbage bags over the back fence, so no one could peek in for free, and went on to staple up more, to make us garbage-bag dressing rooms. We weren't complaining; having used everything from rat-infested stairwells to Porta Pottis for quick changes, a garbage-bagged backstage was nearly a step up.

But then it started raining. Pouring. A Canadian-style typhoon. And the terrace wasn't much of a shelter. It turned into Niagara Falls, Ir. Water cascaded down from it, forming a small river on the stage. The club set out buckets; sandbags were in order.

The haphazardness of this outdoor show was stressing out the troupe, and some of them were hitting the bottle moderately, of course. Lifto comes to mind. Since Montreal rarely enforces nudity laws, Lifto was being his typical exhibitionist self and prancing about the stage naked, which somehow made the orange frilly-ended toothpick he'd rammed through his nose seem all the more obscene, perhaps because it clashed with his pink hair. "Oh, my God," he wailed, his giraffelike legs teetering in sparkly high heels as he sloshed across our makeshift stage. "What are we going to do with the water? What's going to happen when we get to the Electrocution act?"

I didn't know. One time we'd done the electrocution while the Pincushion stood in a pail of water, and it worked fine. Standing in an onstage river couldn't be that much different.

Besides, I had something else on my mind: the crowd in front of us. They were wild. There must have been some serious buzz about us all weekend because even more had turned out and they'd obviously seen the interview taped in Vancouver and broadcast on national TV, when we dared all of Canada to bring us something that Slug wouldn't eat.

Oh, they'd brought stuff, all right. Everywhere I looked they were holding up the Kibbles N Bits they'd brought to feed the slugivore, waving bags of chicken gizzards, swinging rats by their tails. I made a note not to sit next to Slug on the way back. His breath would be grosser than ever.

So I'm introduced onstage in the midst of this mayhem, and this was an easy crowd to warm up because they were already ballistic. "We give back to you the same energy you give us," I said into the mike, in a creepy, hypnotic way with my eyes wide open for effect. "So I want you to scream and clap at the count of three. You, sir, get your hands out of your pockets it's gonna hurt when you clap. Beady? One, two, mother..........' three."

The response was scary. The roar made my ears ring. These guys were wired. Grazed. Insane. Already. And Lifto's act would only rev them up more.

"And now, the most popular vulgar display since the outlawing of public hangings," I said as Lifto staggered onstage. "The Amazing Mr. Lifto."

Slug hit a piercing note on the keyboard as Lifto began attaching ornaments to his eleven pierced body parts. Lifto hoisted two black irons, attaching one to each of his fleshy earlobes. His ears stretched down to his shoulders. The crowd groaned.

He hooked a suitcase to his tongue. It yanked out of his mouth, stretched past his chin. The crowd screamed. He chained his nipples to a concrete block. And pulled. As if elasticized, his teats became two pointy rubber bands. The audience went berserk. "The man," I yelled, "that makes Dolly Parton look Flat!"

Of course, I sounded cool, calm, and every bit the professional showman that I pretend to be. But between sleep deprivation and the water onstage, I was edgy, Real edgy. Delirious.

P35