Gorilla Girl

Bonnie Campbell

When beer is mixed and left to ferment and bread is set out to rise, they sometimes collect wild yeasts; these foreigners drop out of the jet stream or rise up from the bowels of the planet, unwelcome particles which give the finished product a sharp flavor. I suspect this is what happened to my mother when she was pregnant with me. Sometime during the first trimester she must have let her guard down, perhaps in the public toilet at the flea market in Paw Paw; in a moment of inattention, something airborne and bony slipped inside her to poison the brew, something like a curse.

If I cared to describe the details of my birth and the ecstasy of release from that suffocating maternal clench, you might question whether I actually recall such an early event. In fact I recall, in miserable detail, this and every sensation that has followed in the tangled and knotted lifeline connecting that howling newborn to me, seventeen years later. I recall that despite the humid heat of the southern Michigan summer, my parents kept me at optimum temperature with air conditioning, and in the bitter winter I was warmed by a clean-burning gas furnace whose filter they changed regularly. Despite these ideal conditions, I was an unhappy baby, screaming during the day and most of the night as well, whether flat on my back or rolled onto my stomach, whether a gentle breeze blew or the night was still. When I found toys or even blankets in my crib, I tossed them out, unwilling to submit to their paltry comforts. On my parents' shelves are the guidebooks they purchased during this time: Doctor Spock's Baby Care Book, Bringing Up Baby, Saving Yourself from Baby.

It seems foolish to suggest that my having resulted from an accidental conception should have made any difference. And certainly my mother was wrong about my problem ever having been colic, for had it been colic, I'd have been feeling better by the time I was using complete sentences to demand rare-cooked meat and glass after glass of cool water. For years my parents tried to sustain the illusion that I was a normal child, but my siblings learned by trial and error to keep away from me. My brother broke his wrist the time I pushed him off the roof--before ordering me down, he first should have considered how precariously near the edge he stood. As a kindergartner, I bit my sister's leg so badly that she needed six stitches. Throughout those early years, I yelled for food at the first pang of hunger, bathed irregularly, and threw things, so my bedroom floor was a pool of broken dishes, torn books and drywall dust. My father, a dedicated actuary, replaced my broken windows with plexiglass. In photographs from this time, I have a red and swollen look.

At school I tried to wait my turn for the playground swing or a particular crayon, but after a minute or so, I would yield to my monster and take the object of desire. Even the most mundane acts--such as my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Mitschlager, straightening and re-straightening the stack of papers on her desk--could drive me to a frenzy. The school psychologist was averse to prescribing Ritalin or other drugs to "bright" children such as me, and my sense of self-preservation told me that in this man's presence I ought to be on my best behavior. He scolded my parents and teachers. Weren't my verbal skills superb? he said. When I did apply myself to math, wasn't I doing it at a level above my classmates? I needed to be loved and challenged, he said, and my fits of rage would diminish. And if Mrs. Mitschlager complained that I snarled in response to her questions, then perhaps she shouldn't call on me.

During the day, my outbursts reduced my tension and body heat, but nights alone in my room were nearly unbearable. In order to go to sleep, I practiced cursing, and sometimes could enunciate verbal strings such as, "Fucking-motherfucking-sonofabitch-cunt-sucking-cock" without degenerating into animal sounds. If this didn't help me sleep, I banged my head against the headboard or squeezed my hands together until the bones ached. Apart from this occasional self-infliction of pain, however, I did not touch myself. If my hand fell across my stomach in sleep, I soon awoke to a sensation of burning skin. Sometimes even the brush of my blankets and pajamas was too much, and I tossed them off as I had done in my crib and slept naked with my legs apart and arms out to my sides.

Tommy Pederson was the biggest and meanest boy in our fourth grade class, and every day at lunch, he and his cronies hung kids upside-down from the monkey bars to empty their pockets. The time they grabbed me, they flipped me so my underpants were displayed for all. As if that were not enough, Tommy pushed his grubby finger under the elastic of those underpants and touched the folded skin between my legs. As gravity sent blood to my face, I willed myself to become a superstrong monster--Frankenstein and Rubberman in one--and I twisted my new form around to bite Tommy Pederson's forearm through his jean jacket. He screamed and fell, and we wrestled in the sand. At one point he straddled me, pinning my arms, but when I knocked his head with mine he let go. Once atop him, I grabbed a plastic lunch box and clobbered him with it until his head fell back into the sand, until drool and snotty blood rolled down his face. I recall both the pleasure of winning and the disappointment of realizing that Tommy was not going to fight anymore.

In earlier matches, I had kicked kids or smacked them or wrested swing set chains from them but had never engaged in a full body match, unfurling all my strength. In the afterglow of this contest, my head was clear, and my body felt as calm as the center of my own storm, released momentarily from both the volcanic pressure within and the oceanic weight pressing from outside. My limbs swung loose, and I free-floated as though gravity had been lifted. When I got home that afternoon, my mother was sitting near the phone, sobbing into folded arms.

After school I spent time out-of-doors in our quiet neighborhood of ranch homes attached to two car garages, and I took pleasure in capturing insects. A tight vibration of wings sounded against my teeth as I held a grasshopper steady between my tongue and hard palate, anticipating the thrill of biting into that alien skin and extinguishing life. Crickets snapped against the top of my mouth until I ground them between my molars. Sky-green praying mantises raked their arms against my gums, begging for reprieve even after I'd severed their thoraxes from their abdomens.

"What on earth are you doing?" screamed my mother the time she saw me put a Junebug into my mouth.

"Nothing." I closed my teeth, crunched the shell, and swallowed.

"What's in your mouth?" She moved closer, right into my face.

"Nothing." I thrust my tongue toward her. The corners of her mouth recoiled from me, and she released a little shriek. I felt with my finger and found a Junebug leg with ridges the length of it, ending in a small black foot. I smeared it onto my jeans. Rather than admonish me, she walked away, chubby arms dangling in defeat.

The Sandersons, four houses down from us, kept a pit bull. He paced in his cage like a zoo beast, jaws slavering, mottled stripes stretching and contracting over his torso. Often I approached to watch him throw his body against the chain link. With his armor of muscle pushing out against his skin, he seemed to embody the turbulence of my own corporeality. I could fall asleep to the crazed barking as peacefully as another child to a lullaby. If I knelt on hands and knees before his cage and concentrated hard enough, my own body began to change. My teeth sharpened and grew longer--I could feel them with my tongue. My limbs thinned, my chest pulped with muscle, and I flinched at the sharp pain of sprouting a tail from my backside. As I became an animal, the pressure inside my skin lessened, the feeling of too much heat and too much blood racing through tiny venous caverns subsided. One day, however, I forgot to hide behind the Sandersons' inkberry bushes and attempted my transformation in view of their living room. Father and mother, brother and sister, the cartoon family clutched each other in horror. I should have stopped when I saw them but was loathe to leave my sublime state. When I threw my head up and growled at them, they phoned my mother, who revived me with a yank to my front paw, propelling me too quickly back into my own pink and inadequate flesh, ruining me.

I snarled and tugged at her slacks with my teeth. The thready affections I felt toward my mother further shriveled beside the strength of my rage, and yet something always prevented me from physically harming her. It didn't take a near-genius I.Q. to recognize that I was to blame for her misery, and something like guilt even pricked me on occasion, but such feelings were pebbles at the bottom of my stomach while madder passions rushed through me like white water. After she dragged me home, I stomped upstairs, kicked a new hole in the drywall under my window, and began chewing my hand, working it the way the pit bull worked his rawhide, biting to feel the force of teeth on both sides, stopping just short of puncturing the skin.

Perhaps if my parents had beaten me, or even spanked me, there would have been some relief. Perhaps by transference, the release of their anger would have diminished some of my own. But the anger of the family--if not of the whole lower peninsula of Michigan--was concentrated in me. The others in my family were driven by feeble emotions like heartbreak, astonishment, and some happiness. My parents, after all, were peaceful people who lamented only in silence the forgotten pill, or the broken condom, or the ill-fitting diaphragm--whatever misadventure caused that one over-energized sperm to penetrate the defenses and pierce the shell of my mother's egg. Or perhaps the egg itself had kicked away the diaphragm, torn the condom, taken the dumb sperm by the tail and devoured it.

One evening while they ate supper in the kitchen, I sat with my TV tray in the living room. I usually watched the news in hopes of seeing fires or foreign brutalities, but today I had found Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When good Doctor Jekyll turned into evil Mr. Hyde, hair sprouted from the backs of my hands in sympathy. "I am free!" shouted Mr. Hyde. "I am free!" He could whip that Irish girl like a horse now, just as I could whack Tommy Pederson with a lunch box while he wept and drooled. Laughter tinkled from the kitchen. My sister was on the middle school basketball team, and my family was celebrating some victory of hers with no idea what fate might await them. I twisted my mouth and imagined myself swaggering into the kitchen, knocking their microwavable dishes to the floor and throttling their soft necks, one after another. I finished my dinner, imagining it was live bugs and amphibians instead of meat loaf and string beans, and then I chewed my thumb until it bled.

When my parents noticed my new form of self-mutilation, they bribed me with a promise of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde book with over a hundred photo stills from the movie, and sent me to a real psychologist, Dr. Radcliff. Throughout several sessions, I growled in his office, half-heartedly willing my transformation to pit bull terrier at the reduced rate of sixty dollars an hour. He watched me, amused, arms crossed over his chest. He was a clean-cut man in his thirties, broad in the shoulders and not tall, apparently married to the rabbit-like blonde gritting her teeth in the photo on his desk. After a couple of weeks, when I finally deigned to sit in his patient's chair, he let loose with his twisted behaviorist theory. Whatever I felt, he said, was fine, just don't let on to anybody. Self-control was the key to survival.

"When you are older, eighteen or so," said Radcliff, "you can sleep in a doghouse, but for now, just pretend to be a civilized girl so they don't put you away or give you shock therapy. Humor your mother and eat your oatmeal instead of bugs, for God's sake." I did give up the bugs, but not for God's sake or my mother's. There was something about Radcliff's bulldog chest and forearms, his sweaty-cologne smell, and the Dracula green eyes. While the school psychologist had never stopped chattering and humoring me, Radcliff could sit silent for a full fifty minutes, waiting for me to answer a single question. I came to view him as a mentor, a man who refused to be shocked or seduced, a solid wall against which I could ram myself without fear of breaking it down.

Things went more smoothly for the next few years, until, as the school's brain-numbing health movies had promised, I began to menstruate. When I first discovered blood flowing from my nether regions, I was ecstatic. But by the third month, I realized there would never be more than a trickle. Why? I screamed at my mother. Why all the god damned fuss over this? To better express myself, I stomped into the backyard and pulled her rose bushes out of the ground with my bare hands, puncturing my palms, fingers and forearms with hundreds of thorns. I tossed the uprooted bushes at my mother and shook off those that stuck to me.

Even as I pounded bloody fists on the picture window and cursed her, my mother was on the phone arranging an emergency meeting with Radcliff. She cleaned me up before bringing me in, but I found a paper clip on Radcliff's carpet and toyed with it while he spoke. "You're really upsetting your mother," he said. I pushed the end of the paper clip deep into one after another of the thorn holes, so that each in turn began to dribble blood. When Radcliff realized what I was doing, he swooped like a bat and slapped me full across the face. "Jesus fucking Christ!" he said and grabbed my shoulders. "Do you want to be locked up? Because that's what's going to happen if you don't stop this shit. Am I getting through?" He throttled my shoulders and shook me, his thumbs digging into my chest. "Think tranquilizers. Think electrodes." The sting from his slap radiated outward until my whole body buzzed with calm.

"Tell your mother you're sorry," he said, loosening his grip.

I shook my head yes. He let go of me, but I still felt his fingers digging in, and I hoped there'd be bruises.

Phys ed had always been my favorite class, and in my sophomore year the gym teacher and track coach Ms. Heart cautiously invited me to join the track team. For months I had sensed her sizing up the wall of muscle beneath my skin, muscle as strong as chain mail, as tight as a straight jacket. After the first day of practice, she declared I was a mile runner. By the end of the season I would hold the school record for the mile, and in my junior year I would break the state record by more than a second. Each day Ms. Heart gave me a program written on an index card which took about three hours to complete. Sometimes before I could finish, I vomited behind the bleachers. The other girls slacked off, postured for the boy's track team, then lied to Heart about what they had done or else invented maladies. Heart was unsympathetic; running, she said, was the cure for cramps, headaches, and allergies. In her, as in Radcliff, I had an ally, a person who wouldn't turn soft, a constant force willing me to be stronger. When I jogged evenings in our neighborhood, it felt like there were two of me: the person I saw in the mirror and that second creature with teeth like a pit bull, leashed and dragging a concrete block.

On a particularly warm spring day, after sprinting a quarter mile around the track, I stood panting, hands on knees, near the high jump pit. A red-haired boy lay in the sun on the landing pad, one arm bent behind his head, the other absent-mindedly stroking his bare chest. He looked at me, as luxurious as a cat yawning, and let his thumb drift and then pause over his nipple. I became sensible of the wad between his legs. The heat from my own body was suddenly suffocating me, and I imagined that the boy's skin was cool. Only then did I realize how running and lifting weights had changed me. No longer was my muscle a single sheet beneath my skin, a rubbery exoskeleton holding me together. Each muscle in my arms and legs now felt like a separate creature, ready to chew through my skin and escape. When I was able to move, I sprinted around the school to the cross-country path where I ran six miles without stopping.

There's no sense pretending that I hadn't become good-looking. Though my father resembled a sea cow, my mother and siblings were handsome enough. If the monster Medusa had been the most beautiful creature in the ocean at one time, why not me? My black hair dangled in ropes to my shoulders--I hadn't the patience to brush it as my mother implored, and I cut it myself with art class scissors I'd stolen from school, letting the ends fall to my bedroom floor. Often after a race, or even while I searched my hall locker, a circle of observers formed around me, at a safe distance, not close enough to touch me. In fact, nobody ever dared touch me until late one night when I was leg-pressing the maximum weight on the Universal machine, rhythmically pushing the pedals away with my bare feet, then easing them back with a clank. At the same time, I was planning a paper for my sociology class, shaping long, convincing sentences I could never compose while motionless.

Like a shaft of light, Heart's aroma of sweat, rubber, and cocoa butter spiked the room. Strong, small hands reached from behind and began to massage my shoulders and the back of my neck, speeding the flow of my blood. I closed my eyes and let my head fall to the side, moaning with each exhalation. But when she let her hands, dark veins erect on their backs, slide down over my biceps so they touched my breasts, the whole room began to throb. My vision blurred. I extended my legs to lift the stack of iron weights, tossed back my head, and roared like a jungle beast stuck with an arrow. Heart gasped, pulled away her hands, and ran from the room. I continued to howl, out of my mind with heat and confusion, wanting to stroke Heart's stringy, muscled limbs, and wanting to squeeze her leathery throat while she gasped for breath.

In the lobby of Radcliff's office, at my next regular appointment, I thumbed through issues of National Geographic, tapping my foot wildly, absent-mindedly stabbing myself with my house key, imprinting tiny, V-shaped wounds up and down my legs and arms. An article about big cats said that they moved at speeds up to sixty miles per hour. Imagine the sting of the wind at such a velocity. An article about the great apes featured women researchers with gorillas. King Kong was one of my favorite movies, so these gorillas disappointed. Far from being bloodthirsty, these were gentle and strictly vegetarian. I had assumed they would eat grubs and insects at the very least. Hell, Kong had eaten people.

Radcliff seemed distracted, so I asked what he knew about the great apes, and he started up about how intelligent they were. King Kong had been plenty smart, I commented, and Radcliff laughed. He liked to think that I no longer wanted to be an animal, but at that very moment, I was concentrating to become a movie gorilla. As I felt the first pricklings of wild hair sprout from my pores, my insides began to quake. A tidal wave gained momentum. Floodgates threatened to burst. The big rock clogging the mouth of the volcano rattled in its niche.

Never had the transformation been like this. To stop myself, I told Radcliff about the incident with Heart. What had I felt? he asked. "I burned like a furnace," I said. "I roared like a lion."

Radcliff pushed his papers onto the floor. He dropped to his knees and laid his head on my lap. "I love you," he said, without warning or preamble. "I've loved you since you were eleven and you wanted to be a dog. God forgive me."

His head was heavy on my legs. I placed my open hand on the side of his face, which was bigger and more ghoulish up close. I pushed a strand of hair, gray and soft, behind his ear and slid the tips of my nail-bitten fingers between his beefy neck and the collar of his shirt. I leaned close to rub my cheek against his sandpaper face. As the musk of his sweat and aftershave seeped into my skin, my insides began to unfold and swell as though waves of flesh emanated from a hot liquid core. Radcliff's moist breath poured over my thigh, inflaming the skin. Though I wanted to caress him, I also foamed and bubbled like an angry cauldron.

A nervous seaweedy eye stared up from my lap. Was this pathetic swamp creature the man for whom I gave up the delicacies of the grasshopper family? Was this my champion of self-control? Was this the Frankenstein's chest against which I could hurl myself? My affections shriveled to a pea and fell to the floor of my stomach. He lifted a hand toward mine, but its pale fingers disgusted me and I shoved him off my lap. "Asshole-bastard," I tried to say, but it came out as a snarl. "Son-of-aarrrrg," I growled, slamming the door behind me. The receptionist looked up, alarmed, through tiny eyes, and I kicked her steel desk, making a sound that reverberated through the lobby. All the way home, I sputtered and spat, unable to form curses.

As I lay uncovered in the dark that night, tormented by thoughts of Radcliff, Heart, and the red-haired boy, I was driven to stroke my own naked chest. The blood rose to the surface of my skin, but I continued. My hands moved as if on a Ouija board across my stomach and between my legs, and once having given myself over to this adventure, I couldn't stop. The sensation I had felt in Radcliff's office now overwhelmed me, the unfolding away from some intense center--a dense flower whose lead-heavy petals grew from inside faster than I could tear them away. I rubbed myself until the muscles of my hands ached, bringing forth at least a dozen explosions of flesh, each one more excruciating than the last. My eyes rolled back so far I feared the muscles would snap. Once I screamed so loudly that my brother and father came running. I turned away and faked sleep, cupping my crotch until they went away, pathetic stick figures.

Instead of relaxing or relieving, each climax further tormented me. My skin pumped sweat, and the flesh between my legs swelled and grew numb. I wept furiously into my pillow and bit it until feathers flew out. Finally I ripped the screen out of my window, jumped twelve feet to the grass, and filled my lungs with night air. Savoring the sting of the pavement on my bare feet, I ran naked through empty subdivision streets until I fell exhausted onto a manicured lawn a few miles away. I grasped some rose bushes and squeezed until the thorns punctured my hands. My blood had been altered, infused with sex. No longer would exercise suffice. I needed to be bled like a gypsy horse.

By entangling myself in the arms of something like a hundred men, I hoped to find one who would satisfy me, one who could give me a kind of pleasure which did not make me want to jump off a high building. The promise of each seemed great, but each failed me in turn. Once in a while, in the heated strangeness of passion, I felt the presence of my own male part, coexisting with my female organs. However, at this prompt, my mate's penis seemed to shrivel up inside of him and disappear. He became a receptacle, passive, small in proportion to me despite the physical facts to the contrary. However strong the men seemed, they longed, by the end, to be conquered. Fathers of neighborhood children, teachers, clerks at the grocery store, even Dr. Radcliff.

Radcliff was the biggest disappointment. Because of our years together, I thought he might be my match, but after an initial blaze, he fizzled and sank below the surface like the rest, and like the rest, tried to drag me down with him. As he slept, I buzzed with energy and looked around his wood-paneled bedroom, overcome by the sensation that I had just given birth to him. Wasn't this the very picture of my rage? My strong body wrapped furiously around a limp and weakened man? His pale, spent penis touched his leg and rested upon the delicate and alien cushion of his scrotum. Tiny, raw, unprotected--here was the shape of the thing that infuriated me. His skin was cool, and I was on fire. I could crush those parts, first holding them lightly in my mouth and then biting down.

Radcliff was my second to last experiment. The following day, I bit the UPS delivery man so passionately that he went to the emergency room. Nights afterward, I lay alone in bed, grinding my teeth and trying to keep my hands at my sides, but always, in the end, sacrificing myself to the terrible ecstasy.

In the last week of August, the fair came to town. On opening night I elbowed my way through the directionless mob. When I saw a girl from the track team, I spit at the ground. I got French fries with vinegar and ate them so hot they burned my mouth. Men lured me to play their coin games, their tossing and shooting games, but when I turned my Medusa gaze on them, they stopped cajoling. Their voices changed to whispers, their male parts shriveled.

At the far end of the midway, I paid two dollars to view "Samba of the Jungle: See Her Change Before Your Eyes." I handed the fat man my dollar and followed an anemic-looking kid into the tent. A blonde in a frayed, leopard-spotted wrap stood behind the bars of a cage on the dimly lit platform. Her eyes fluttered as if she were in a trance, but otherwise she remained still as patrons filtered in. When the overhead lights went out, a recorded circus voice scratched, "See Samba, a woman found in the jungles of Africa. A scientist studied her until they found him in his laboratory, torn to pieces by this she-beast."

The she-beast's skin was pasty; I wondered where in the jungle she'd found peroxide for her lousy bleach job. Varicose veins snaked down below her ratty dress. What had seemed at first a trance now looked like drunkenness. As the lights dimmed further, her face began to glow and change--her hair darkened, her features thickened as she became an animal, and then the tent went black. A spotlight flicked on, and a gorilla burst out of the cage and leapt into the audience. The other patrons screamed and ran for the exit. The ape jumped off the stage and roared into my face through rubber teeth. I fell to the grassy floor and pounded the earth as tears of pure joy streamed across my face. When the lights came on, the gorilla suit shook its head and humped back onto the stage and behind the curtain. I paid again and this time watched closely. As the woman's face lit up, I saw the pinpoint of light projecting from a spot above and behind the audience; a movie of the transformation was being shown on her face. The falseness of the act, however, didn't bother me--the poor woman simply hadn't learned to change herself yet. In the dark, at the back of the tent, hair sprouted sympathetically on my arms and legs.

Before I visited the Samba show the next morning, I saw the gorilla-blonde walking to the cinder block public bathrooms. I ran to catch up with her. Here was a comrade, a fellow fury, a woman who yearned to be a beast.

"Hey, I saw your show."

"Leave me alone," she slurred and hastened her stumbly walk.

"But we're sisters, don't you see," I insisted, my voice unusually clear. "We both need to transform."

"Stay the hell away from me." Her bluish throat quivered.

I grabbed her frizzy hair and pulled her around to face me. She fluttered alcoholic eyes. Booze seeped from her glands, and the stale odor incensed me. I slapped her twice. She scratched at my face with her nails, but I grabbed her hands and squeezed her finger bones together until she fell to her knees. When I let go, she shook out her hands and started walking away, saying she would get the police, so I tackled her on the dirty lawn of flattened snow cone cups and cigarette butts and dragged her into the empty women's room. With my teeth I shredded the bottom of my shirt into ropes of cloth and tied her to the toilet seat. I held one hand over her mouth as I stripped her support hose from her hips and legs with the other, and then I gagged her with them. Now I was King Kong, only this dull-eyed bride wasn't coming with me. I locked the stall door and climbed out over the top. Samba of the jungle, my ass. She didn't deserve the distinction.

My plan crystallized as I walked, and the midway crowd opened for me at every turn. I bought French fries, but they were lukewarm, and I tossed them onto the ground in front of a policeman leaning against a temporary barrier. He looked into my eyes before deciding not to speak. I browsed the boutique trailers and then settled upon an oversized, tiger-striped shirt, which I put on as a dress behind a cotton candy stand. I returned to the Samba exhibit where I found the fat man who had taken my money sitting behind a sign, "Out-to-lunch." I informed him--his name was Mr. Boone--that his jungle girl was indisposed, and I would be taking her place.

"What the hell are you talking about?" His feet were crossed up on the entrance gate. His neck was red and bristly above an overtaxed pocket T-shirt. He paused to suck from a bottle of blackberry brandy. "Wait," he said, pointing a thick finger at me. "I've seen you hanging around."

"Fire her and give me the job."

"What's in it for me?" He had been staring at my legs, but when he leaned to look up my

shirt-dress, I pushed his chair sideways with my foot as if flushing a public toilet. He barely caught himself. I stretched my lips around to display my whole set of teeth and growled.

Boone clutched his bottle to his stomach. "Are you threatening me, Babe?" We stared at each other until he looked away. After taking another drink he stood, adjusted his suspenders, and studied me as though I were a prize beef heifer. "I've always had blondes," he said, lighting a cigarette. "But I can see you're well-muscled. If we put you in a bikini get-up, guys might even pay to see you twice."

The signs advertising my act are absurd. They announce that I was retrieved from "Nairobi in South Africa." The blonde hair on the old posters has been darkened. A picture labeled "The Experiment" shows me spread-eagled on a bed wearing electrodes, a geeky white scientist leaning over me. In the next frame, a gorilla stands with broken restraints dangling from its wrists. The scientist lies crumpled. It reads, "Something Terrible Happened."

This job gives me mornings free, so I work out, lifting weights with the guys who run the games of chance. Boone owns my favorite videos, which I watch in his trailer. At night I wander the 4-H barns, admiring insect collections and scaring ponies, and if I see a fat grasshopper I snap it into my mouth. Lately I have been paying one of the concessions women to braid my hair into thirty snake-like braids. Boone takes care of the money and arranges the gigs, and George who wears the gorilla suit handles the production. And every half hour, noon to midnight, on cue, I wind my rage into a tighter and tighter ball behind my navel. When the pressure becomes too great, this ball explodes. The gates to the walled continent burst open, and the beast emerges.

Were the projector to switch off and the lights to click on, the audience would see a metamorphosis more shocking than they could imagine. My heart-shaped face sprouts hair, my skin darkens as though burned, male sex parts burst from my groin to complement my female ones, and my breasts harden into a muscular, leathery plate. The air becomes crisp, and every person in the tent feels connected to my Middle West gorilla, my mad-amorous crusher of households, my rampager of tidy rose gardens. Occasionally a woman rattles with laughter or else sobs in the dark--she has recognized, in my form, the monster of her own wasted strength.