shabby coat a flip and bows as the curtain parts and reveals a scrawny dude
in a loincloth sitting at a dinner table with dull silver candelabra and chipped china.
--If it wasn't utterly exploitive?
Two chubby chicks in thigh-high leather boots, ripped lace corsets, snake tattoos and
black lipstick come on stage. One ties a napkin around the Glasseater's neck while the
other places a tray covered by a dented silver dome in front of him. She pulls the dome
away with a lackluster flourish, revealing a huge soup bowl piled high with rusty nails,
shattered glass, twists of broken spring, bottle caps, chips of razor blades and bent
sewing needles.
He takes the soupspoon from his setting, breathes onto it and wipes it in his bare armpit,
dips up a helping of the scrap, smiles with broken teeth, shovels it in his mouth and
begins to chew with his mouth open as the audience groans and squeals. Blood and bits of
torn flesh dribble from his mouth along with shards of steel and glass as he swallows hard
and snorts and a fine spray of blood fans from his nostrils.
I toss the empty popcorn box on top of the pile of beer cups, beer cans, beer bottles and
corndog wrappers erupting from a rancid trash barrel.
--If I didn't know he was gonna stop bleeding before he got off stage, and be as good as
new tomorrow morning, that would make this better.
The small crowd of Brooklyn hipsters, old-school Coney Islanders, roughnecks and shorties
does a collective gross-out and flinches as he spits blood at them and it splashes against
the sheet of transparent plastic draped between them and the stage.
The frown on Lydia's face carves itself a little deeper.
--Waste. Immoral waste.
I poke a finger in the opening of my rapidly thinning last pack of Luckys and count the
remainders.
--Not your blood.
She glances at me, shakes her head.
--Is that what you think? Well it is, Joe. It's mine and it's yours. And more than that,
it's the blood of the uninfected people watching this spectacle without a notion of what's
going on.
The act comes to an end as the Glasseater autoregurgitates the wreckage, along with a fair
amount of blood and fleshy bits, and the curtain drops.
Lydia turns on the bleacher and whispers at me over the hubbub of the crowd waiting for
the next act.
--That blood? Someone could have used that to stay healthy another day. And someone,
someone completely ignorant of the Vyrus is going to be replacing the blood that asshole
just wasted. It's like watching a Hummer drive by with the windows rolled down and the AC
on full blast. Makes me want to puke.
The sound system cranks and Motorhead blisters the speakers with Jailbait.
The chubby girls, topless other than crosses of black electric tape over their nipples,
sporting ripped satin pantaloons, one carrying twin beds of nails and the other carrying a
sledgehammer, come from behind the curtain.
I point an unlit cigarette at the stage.
Joe Pitt 3 - Half the Blood of Brooklyn
--Then I'm guessing this act is gonna really piss you off.
The MC raises his arms.
--Ladeez and gentilemans! The esoteric and erotic mysteries of the Far East as revealed by
Vendetta and Harm!
Lydia jumps from the bleachers, puts her head down, storms across the stained and
threadbare carpets laid over the sand and ducks out of the tent.
I put my last cigarette in my mouth and watch the first girl sandwich herself between the
nail beds and the second girl start tap-dancing on top of her, wielding the hammer like a
cane. More blood flows.
Having seen enough to know that the point of the act isn't to demonstrate how one lays on
nails
without
being harmed, I follow Lydia.
The torches planted in the sand outside the entrance whip in the breeze off the ocean,
streams of greasy smoke tail up the beach and under the rotting wood of the boardwalk that
half the tent hides beneath.
Lydia is stomping
in a loincloth sitting at a dinner table with dull silver candelabra and chipped china.
--If it wasn't utterly exploitive?
Two chubby chicks in thigh-high leather boots, ripped lace corsets, snake tattoos and
black lipstick come on stage. One ties a napkin around the Glasseater's neck while the
other places a tray covered by a dented silver dome in front of him. She pulls the dome
away with a lackluster flourish, revealing a huge soup bowl piled high with rusty nails,
shattered glass, twists of broken spring, bottle caps, chips of razor blades and bent
sewing needles.
He takes the soupspoon from his setting, breathes onto it and wipes it in his bare armpit,
dips up a helping of the scrap, smiles with broken teeth, shovels it in his mouth and
begins to chew with his mouth open as the audience groans and squeals. Blood and bits of
torn flesh dribble from his mouth along with shards of steel and glass as he swallows hard
and snorts and a fine spray of blood fans from his nostrils.
I toss the empty popcorn box on top of the pile of beer cups, beer cans, beer bottles and
corndog wrappers erupting from a rancid trash barrel.
--If I didn't know he was gonna stop bleeding before he got off stage, and be as good as
new tomorrow morning, that would make this better.
The small crowd of Brooklyn hipsters, old-school Coney Islanders, roughnecks and shorties
does a collective gross-out and flinches as he spits blood at them and it splashes against
the sheet of transparent plastic draped between them and the stage.
The frown on Lydia's face carves itself a little deeper.
--Waste. Immoral waste.
I poke a finger in the opening of my rapidly thinning last pack of Luckys and count the
remainders.
--Not your blood.
She glances at me, shakes her head.
--Is that what you think? Well it is, Joe. It's mine and it's yours. And more than that,
it's the blood of the uninfected people watching this spectacle without a notion of what's
going on.
The act comes to an end as the Glasseater autoregurgitates the wreckage, along with a fair
amount of blood and fleshy bits, and the curtain drops.
Lydia turns on the bleacher and whispers at me over the hubbub of the crowd waiting for
the next act.
--That blood? Someone could have used that to stay healthy another day. And someone,
someone completely ignorant of the Vyrus is going to be replacing the blood that asshole
just wasted. It's like watching a Hummer drive by with the windows rolled down and the AC
on full blast. Makes me want to puke.
The sound system cranks and Motorhead blisters the speakers with Jailbait.
The chubby girls, topless other than crosses of black electric tape over their nipples,
sporting ripped satin pantaloons, one carrying twin beds of nails and the other carrying a
sledgehammer, come from behind the curtain.
I point an unlit cigarette at the stage.
Joe Pitt 3 - Half the Blood of Brooklyn
--Then I'm guessing this act is gonna really piss you off.
The MC raises his arms.
--Ladeez and gentilemans! The esoteric and erotic mysteries of the Far East as revealed by
Vendetta and Harm!
Lydia jumps from the bleachers, puts her head down, storms across the stained and
threadbare carpets laid over the sand and ducks out of the tent.
I put my last cigarette in my mouth and watch the first girl sandwich herself between the
nail beds and the second girl start tap-dancing on top of her, wielding the hammer like a
cane. More blood flows.
Having seen enough to know that the point of the act isn't to demonstrate how one lays on
nails
without
being harmed, I follow Lydia.
The torches planted in the sand outside the entrance whip in the breeze off the ocean,
streams of greasy smoke tail up the beach and under the rotting wood of the boardwalk that
half the tent hides beneath.
Lydia is stomping
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