Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (39 page)

chance to work with him because he’s the real deal, an actual circus

sideshow man,” Tommy Breen tells me. “I mean, he’s the king.” Tommy

graduated from Rutgers in New Jersey as a theater major. You might

think that joining a traditional sideshow in the twenty-first century

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would be a college graduate’s last hurrah of whimsy before buckling

into a nine-to-five grind, kind of like a year backpacking Europe. Not

for Tommy. After a few years with World of Wonders, he wants to be in

the sideshow business for as long as he’s physically able.

He credits Ward and Chris for that. “Everything I have today as

far as my dreams of being in the sideshow business I owe to him and

Chris,” Tommy says. “I’d be moving pianos or substitute teaching or

something if not for Ward.”

With his young protégés and the veteran Red, Ward’s traveling show

is once again a true 10-in-1. He bills it as the only one in the United

States. Of course, as with all showman claims, it pays to be a little

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skeptical.

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Ward doesn’t travel full-time with the show these days and only oc-

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casionally works the bally platform. He’s turned most of the bally work

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to Mike, another young protégé. On the road, Tommy manages the

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behind-the-scene mechanics, as well as performs on stage.

Catching up with Ward isn’t easy. He’s a celebrity in the show world.

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He’s giving lectures, emceeing other shows around the country, and

working on the Hollywood film
Passion
Play
, starring Megan Fox,

Mickey Rourke, and Bill Murray with appearances by Poobah and Red,

the sword swallower.

The 2009 release of
World
of
Wonders
, a book about his show, has

upped his appeal as well. Photographers Jimmy and Den Katz captured

stellar images of Ward and the show along with Ward’s audacious ad-

mission: “I’m a professional liar. I could take a Volkswagen and make

you believe it is a Rolls-Royce. If I had another life, I’d like to be a trial

lawyer or perhaps an evangelical TV minister.”

How could he not be in demand?

Gibtown, Land of Freak Legends

A carnival season passes before I’m able to sit down with Ward. In the

meantime, Showtown U.S.A. beckons. Tommy tells me Gibtown still

nostalgically appeals to sideshow fans and performers, even though it’s

only a ghost of what it once was.

To understand any romance that the gritty backwater community

on the east side of Tampa Bay holds, you have to glimpse back, far

back, to the time when the Tamiami Trail/U.S. Highway 41 (Gibson-

ton’s main drag) was the primary route to Sarasota and Naples from

proof

anywhere north.

In the 1920s, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus

started wintering in Sarasota. It wasn’t much of a town, there was lots

of vacant land, the warm winters were easy on the animals, and the

circus bigwigs could be bigwigs with wild abandon. John Ringling, for

one, lived in high style. He built a Venetian-themed mansion on Sara-

sota Bay with all the grandiosity and garishness you’d expect of a circus

magnate. He gave it a pretentious name, Ca’ d’Zan, and built a museum

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for rare art that he named after himself. This all understandably ce-

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mented little Sarasota as a circus town. Other circuses followed. Most

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all circuses at that time had sideshows.

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Sideshow folks were on the fringe of circus life in more ways than

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one. They entertained audiences in tents outside the Big Top before

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the circus show. They often didn’t even get to eat in the same food

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tent with circus performers. In Florida they created their own Shangri-

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La about 50 miles north of Sarasota on the Tamiami Trail, in Gibson-

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ton, a farming community with a few rental fishing cottages. The first

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sideshow residents discovered it on a fishing trip in the 1920s. They

2

returned and settled. Then their friends came. Sideshow operators and

their performers followed. By 1950, Gibtown was the place to winter if

you made your living letting people stare at your third eye, pulling rab-

bits from a hat, or hammering nails up your nose. Sideshow perform-

ers literally ran the community. The volunteer fire chief was an 8-foot,

4-inch sideshow giant and the police chief was a dwarf whose head only

came up to his cruiser’s window seal. To stop someone, he’d hold up a

sign that said “Police, pull over.” So many midgets and dwarfs lived in

Gibtown that the local post office installed a shorter counter for the

“little people.”

Most sideshow folks lived in mobile homes. They dined and danced

at the private Gibtown Showman’s Club on Friday nights. They ate

breakfast at Giant’s Camp, a diner owned by the “World’s Strangest

Married Couple,” giant Al Tomaini (the fire chief) and his two-foot,

six-inch legless wife, Jeanie, once dubbed the “World’s Only Living Half

Girl.” The diner was a hotspot for show folks and their fans for more

than a half century. I had the good fortune of eating one of its famous

biscuits while the adopted Tomaini children were still running it after

their sideshow parents had died. I made the mistake of asking a fellow

diner about Lobster Boy. After that, no one would look at me.

Lobster Boy was Gibtown’s most infamous resident, and his demise

proof

tops anything the most creative writer could dream up. Grady Stiles Jr.

was born with ectrodactyly, a genetic deformity that fuses the bones in

hands and feet. His fingers were joined to each side, making his hands

look like lobster pincers. His legs ended at the knees. He married a

sideshow dancer, but they had a tumultuous marriage. Once Maria left

him for a dwarf. They later remarried, which turned out to be a fatal

mistake.

In 1992, Maria and her stepson, a sideshow blockhead, paid another

young sideshow performer $1,500 to murder Grady. Making the story

even more surreal, Lobster Boy was shot and killed in his living room

while watching the horror movie
Monkey
Boy
.

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Stiles’s wife and family later would claim that Lobster Boy was a

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vile alcoholic who managed to abuse her even though he walked on his

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hands. This isn’t so far-fetched when you take into consideration that

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he had managed to shoot his daughter’s fiancé. Stiles was convicted of

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the suitor’s murder but escaped prison because of his disability.

Stiles’s wife, the blockhead stepson, and the hit man were convicted

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of murder and manslaughter. Their trials were media carnivals. The

Lobster Boy/blockhead murder-for-hire story made headlines around

the world and decades later continues to make most every Gibtown

documentary. Out-of-town sideshow fanatics still drive by and take

photos of the scene of the crime, now a rusty mobile home on an over-

grown lot. Locals understandably are a little lobster-weary.

Only 12 miles from the high-rises of downtown Tampa, Gibsonton,

on the boggy east side of Tampa Bay at the mouth of the Alafia River,

seems far removed. It’s a lonely stretch that’s scenic only if you own

phosphate mines, the area’s largest export. The Tamiami Trail/U.S.

Highway 41 leads past fertilizer silos, barnacled cargo ships along the

Port of Tampa, through stretches of scrubby palm flatland pimpled

with gray gypsum stacks.

A small sign amid native palms and scrub marks the turn for the

grounds of the International Independent Showmen’s Association, for-

merly called the Gibtown Showmen’s Club, site of the world’s largest

annual carnival tradeshow. More than ten thousand carnies annually

converge at the cavernous trade hall for the latest in grab-bars, fried

foods, and puke-inducing rides. The club also hosts its own Bike Week

extravaganza in February, where motorcycle mania meets carnies in a

mélange of Florida fringe worlds. During their off-season, show folks

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and carnies gather socially at the club’s private bar when they come

back to roost four or so months out of the year. The season is in swing,

and the association doesn’t even answer the phones.

Across the mouth of the Alafia River, Gibtown looks like a commu-

nity whose time has passed. The iconic Giant’s Camp diner has been

scrapped from the earth and replaced by a tidy green lawn and iron

fence. Mosaic, the phosphate and chemical giant, now owns the land.

The only reminder of the diner is a steel boot sculpture on a pillar and

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a white rental cabin that looks far better than it probably ever did. This

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is as close as Gibsonton gets to a historic district.

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Old Gibtown isn’t so much a place people move to as one they land

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in. Almost everyone lives in mobile homes. Mobile homes sit on big

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empty lots, in trailer parks, jammed up next to weathered cottages,

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and there are several half-and-halfs, mobile homes with a house built

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around them. Small dour houses are sprinkled here and there. On the

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outskirts near Interstate 4, new upper-middle-class subdivisions with

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stamp-size lots sprout up between trailer parks like flowers rising out

902

of the weeds. Tampa suburbanites have moved in and use the inter-

state to bypass old Gibtown on their commute. A new Wal-Mart is the

local mall.

Despite the griminess, old Gibtown has a bizarre kind of charm. You

could probably shoot a gun off in your front yard and the neighbors

wouldn’t come to their windows. You can do pretty much anything you

want on your property including parking an elephant or a Ferris wheel

in the backyard. Old-timers proudly claim it’s the only area of the coun-

try with residential show business zoning allowing such far-out things.

Travelers have little reason to stop unless they’re thirsty for a beer or

a tank of gas. The main thoroughfare is a string of old bait shops, a used

RV and boat lot, a closed thrift store, midcentury motor courts with

rotting rental cottages, gas stations, three bars, a small strip club, and

a barn-shaped liquor store that you literally drive into for a six-pack.

The post office with the midget-height counters has long since been

replaced. The new one shoulders a 4FishStuff store in a sad-looking

shopping center.

The only sideshow icon left is the Showtown USA Bar & Grill. Cov-

ered on the outside with faded sideshow murals, the bar has been a

watering hole for show people since the 1970s. It’s lunchtime and the

sign out front says it serves the best hamburger in town. Ominously,

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only a few cars are parked in the sandy lot.

Florida no longer allows smoking around served food. Instead of

relegating smokers to congregate outside, Showtown has a wall divid-

ing the grill from the bar, and separate entrances, although they are a

little hard to find in the mural. The small grill doesn’t look like it’s been

updated since it opened. No one is in sight. A clatter comes from the

kitchen, and the smell of grease hangs in the air. I join the dozen in the

bar.

The windowless Showtown has vintage dive bar features, like a black

suspended ceiling, a jukebox, U-shaped bar, and an old Budweiser beer

light with all the little Clydesdales. But even in its dim and smoky state,

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you can still see what makes it special. Colorful sideshow artwork and

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murals cover the walls, the creation of local banner artist Bill Brown-

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ing, who also painted the ones outside. Spotlights shine on the vivid

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paintings of oddball performers. If you study long enough, you can find

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Poobah.

The motley crew of afternoon barflies seem no longer wowed by the

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decor.

I take a seat among an eclectic assortment of local veterans. There’s

the chatty Cajun with few teeth who’s halfway through a pitcher of

beer; Butch, a solemn, mustached retiree in a U.S. Vet ball cap tolerat-

ing his Cajun acquaintance; a creepy clean-cut guy in his fifties wearing

a Devil Rays cap who won’t stop staring at me; and a sharply dressed

Bahamian who was raised in London, lived in Los Angeles, and recently

retired in nearby Apollo Beach. He just stumbled across the Showtown

bar on his way back from being turned away from the local VFW.

They banter about their military service, except for the ogler. None

of them work in the carnival business, but Butch says he grew up in

Gibtown in the 1950s. His neighbors had a motordrome show—the

drive-around-in-a-steel-mesh-ball motorcycle act. Occasionally they’d

let him ride around in the ball, too, which of course, is a young boy’s

dream. Once at the Florida State Fair, they pretended they didn’t know

him and picked him out of the audience to try it. “I was kind of scared I