It turned out that one of the locals had attended the girlie show every night for two weeks, and had a real thing about Alma. He'd heard Thaddeus trying to round up the money, and had offered to make up the difference in exchange for a little something "special." That something turned out to be a privately made film produced expressly for him. He wanted to watch Alma having sex with one of the freaks from the sideshow, but since they were just a bunch of actors in makeup, Thaddeus had decided to use me, since according to him I was the closest thing we had to a real freak.

We both objected, but Thaddeus hit the roof, screaming that there was a time limit on raising the money and that so far neither of us had contributed a red cent, that he had been carrying us for months. I expected Alma to walk out on him then, but she just sat very still and told him to get his camera, and when it was set up she began doing her standard strip for it.

Then Thaddeus aimed the lens at me, and I started shaking like a leaf. I had never had a woman before, and I was scared to death—and besides, this wasn't just any woman. It was Alma, and it made me feel cheap and dirty.

Thaddeus begged and pleaded and taunted and cajoled me, just the way he did with marks on the Midway, a parallel that wasn't lost on any of us. I looked at Alma lying back on the bed, totally nude, her face an expressionless mask, her legs spread apart, her clitoris glistening like a moist pearl in its blond velvet setting, tears trickling down her cheek, and I began crying too. I had dreamed of someday making love to a woman—even fumble-mouthed hunchbacks can dream—but never like this. I had never been farther from having an erection in my life, but then Thaddeus directed Alma to do certain things to me, and almost against my will I was suddenly able to perform. I felt her shudder—with disgust? Who knows—as I lay on top of her and her arms encircled me and came in contact with my hump, I saw our tears mingling as they rolled down her face and onto her neck, I sensed her muscles fighting against the urge to get up and run from the trailer, and finally it was over and Thaddeus got his money and owned his carnival. I've never been with a woman again.

It was weeks before Alma and I could even nod hello to each other. We've never sat down and spoken again the way we used to—oh, we exchange information when we have to, but we never talk about our hopes and dreams and fears anymore—and of all the things Thaddeus has done, that is the one I've never forgiven him for. He cost me a friend, and nobody has so many friends that they can afford to lose one. Especially not me.

Alma and I stayed with the carnival even after Thaddeus took it over. I had nowhere else to go, and impossible as it may sound, she still loved him. I don't think she liked him anymore, but evidently she could differentiate between the two. And after a while, our wounds healed, even if the memories remained.

Thaddeus wasted no time assembling our rather odd crew. He recruited old Stogie—an aging baggy-pants comic whose real name was Max Bloom and who hadn't worked in perhaps twenty years—to work the girlie show in the evenings so the girls would have a few minutes to rest between performances.

Stogie specialized in jokes that were so old that even Captain Billy's Whiz Bang hadn't bothered with them half a century ago; on the other hand, as Thaddeus was fond of confiding to me, he was too damned old and feeble to present any competition with the girls. As for Alma and the rest, they appreciated the brief respite from leering old men. (There was nothing altruistic about it, of course; Thaddeus just didn't think they pulled in as much money when they looked tired, but since it worked out well all the way around no one objected to his motivation.) If Stogie ever drew a laugh I never heard it, but I suppose he served much the same purpose as I did: people looked at me or listened to him, and suddenly they were a little more content with the way they were.

After a couple of the girls got attacked while working as strong as Thaddeus wanted them to, he decided to get a roughie for the show. Real bouncers cost too much, so he picked up a former pro football lineman named Big Alvin. (I never found out his last name, though I suppose it's in the record books somewhere.) Big Alvin was a big pussycat—he quit football because he didn't like hurting opposing players—but he looked like the Hulk, and when the rowdies saw him they didn't misbehave long enough to find out if he'd actually throw them out. The smart money around the carny said that he wouldn't lift a finger to save anyone, but fortunately the situation never arose.

Thaddeus even hired a former strip star from the heyday of burlesque, Joannie Pym, to act as a kind of den mother for the girls. Her official title, for reasons I'm still not totally clear about, was Queen Bee. Everyone called her Queenie, and her job, as near as I could tell, was to see to it that the girls didn't go to bed with anyone except Thaddeus. Outside of that, she worked on their costumes (since most of them started out naked, there wasn't an awful lot of work involved) and sobered them up when they needed it, which was almost every night.

Thaddeus always wanted a freak show. Jonas Stark had thought they were perverted and unnatural, so when Thaddeus took over the carnival he had to put one together from scratch. The only legitimate freak he ever got was Merrymax, an honest-to-God hermaphrodite. No matter how hard he looked, he never came up with a second one, which was one of the reasons he was so sensitive about the Ahasuerus Traveling Sideshow. He tried displaying me for a couple of nights, but no one was impressed. He hired a guy called Bill Koonce, who stood seven feet ten and was once offered a tryout with the New York Knicks; he dubbed him Treetop and even bought him a pair of elevator shoes, but after a week Treetop was setting up tents and stands on the Midway like everyone else. The one person besides Merrymax who stuck was Little Lulu, a forty-two-inch midget whose real name was Lulu Toole. I think Thaddeus kept her around for my benefit, but nothing ever happened: I found her appallingly unattractive, and she used to get furious trying to understand what I was saying. The only other oddity we carried was Hunkie, our geek.

I don't know his name either—in point of fact, we had had four different Hunkies before the current one—but it was rumored that he used to be a newspaper writer before he developed a taste for sniffing coke and biting off chickens' heads.

When he finally realized that he wasn't going to be able to round up a batch of "real" freaks, Thaddeus started hiring fake ones. Maybe because he himself was so drawn to the odd and the bizarre, he was absolutely convinced there were enormous profits to be made from a freak show, and he kept trying—unsuccessfully—to put one together.

Anyway, Digger the Rigger kept us above water—barely—for the first year, and the strip show contributed a little, and then somewhere along the way Thaddeus picked up Billybuck Dancer. The Dancer is the most polite, soft spoken guy you'd ever want to meet—he always stands when a woman enters the room, always tips his hat and even calls the strippers "ma'am" in his lilting Texas drawl, never drinks or smokes—but like I said, he's a little bit crazy.

There was even a story making the rounds that he once won a shootout with a famous Argentinean outlaw. As the story goes, they rented out a huge soccer arena in Buenos Aires and sold tickets. I don't know if it's true, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be. At any rate, the Dancer is an exciting entertainer: he's a crack shot—Thaddeus made me his assistant for a month, so I can vouch for it—and he's so handsome that all the girls pay to see him while their husbands and boyfriends are watching the strip show. He's a sad man, always giving the impression that he wishes he were somewhere else, or maybe sometime else. One thing I know: He's the only man on the lot that Thaddeus has never picked a fight with.