39.

Audrey’s homecoming from the Kalamazoo detention center, the return from her aborted first year of university education, was not joyous. Even with Grandma Pencil officially banished, the Mori-arty house was repellent to her.

So after six months in her unhappy home, Audrey did what any nineteen-year-old would have done in her situation: She joined the most famous traveling freak show in the country.

Lollapalooza. The alternative music festival had exploded onto the national scene four years earlier and had become a well-oiled (and well-greased) machine—the nation’s most popular touring rock, rap, and punk-vaganza. A blowout of tunes for goons coming soon to a town near you. Slop-happy dirters like Dinosaur Jr., Babes in Toyland, and the Butthole Surfers rocking their wormy psychedelic chili. Fishbone, Primus, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers spewing funk onto the mud-coiffed masses. Ice Cube, Ice-T with Body Count, and Arrested Development kicking it with their verbologic mythic. Massive crowds of nineteen-year-olds dropping acid, smoking reefer, and looking for someone to sweat on. Side stages with the likes of Vulgar Boatmen and Moister Nipples. There were other attractions: jungle gyms; open-mike poetry readings; shallow pits where for five dollars you could whack a television with a sledgehammer; booths where a bald meathead tattooed a Celtic design around your bicep while you breathed pure oxygen for a dollar a minute before getting your eyebrow pierced. Sucks to your commercial sponsors and manufactured boy bands! Lollapalooza was the youth culture of now, where the kids could rock to non-radio bands!

It also had the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.

Jim Rose telephoned Audrey personally. Before she even hung up the phone, she was mentally packed and heading out the door.

The audience didn’t know what to expect when Audrey took the stage. Dressed in non-ripped jeans and a comfortable sweater, she looked like a pretty co-ed. A trim, shapely figure. Someone a guy might turn his head for, but no more than that. Mostly, she looked too nice to be there. Not this show. This girl couldn’t follow Matt “The Tube” Crowley or Bebe the Circus Queen. This girl’s arms weren’t black with tattoos. This girl’s ears, lips, nose, and eyebrows weren’t disfigured by hoops and studs. (Alas, only her labia.)

Visually, the only thing that made her a freak was her underarm crutches. And then, upon careful inspection, her lack of feet. Most people, though, didn’t examine her so closely. When Audrey maneuvered onto that 10' × 10' stage under the daylight glow of that bright yellow tent, no one felt a sense of danger. Not a single dreadlock-sporting slacker thought he might upchuck from this act—not like when The Amazing Mister Lifto hoisted a beer keg with his nipples!

This becrutched girl was an Alpha Delta Pi, for crap’s sake. Pre-faded Gap jeans? Conditioned, wavy blond hair? Lipstick? Blush? Tasteful eyeliner? A friendly smile? Who was this imposter? Was this some kind of joke ? Murmurs arose from the audience.

At center stage, Audrey mounted the stool. She squeezed her crutches between her knees.

From the crowd came snickers. Whistles and catcalls. A lone request to “Take off your shirt!”

At this point, Audrey would lift one of her crutches—titanium-aluminum alloy—and devour it.

It’s easy to write, “She ate her crutch.” But witnessing this act, live, was another story.

Her eyes were stones. With two hands, she positioned the crutch like a giant hoagie, the narrow end pointed toward her mouth. She bit. Then came the backfire of snapping metal, loud as a rifle. Two or three rapid chews and swallows, and she was onto the next bite. Again the violent report, followed by emotionless, machine-like crunching.

A little-known fact: Metal sings when it’s pulverized by teeth. The stress—the bending, the flattening, the tearing—emanates an eerie, sonorous wave. High-pitched and steady, like the ringing of a triangle. But this tone isn’t warm. It’s an atonal mish-mash, a sickening blend, like an entire scale struck simultaneously on a piano. The varying lengths and densities of the metal fragments create this otherworldly groan while Audrey’s mouth attacks. She looks like a starving rodent—a rat or a beaver—gnawing for its life. Her spittle, like holy water, showers the crowd. Her chest heaves. She pants. Her throat swells until the skin is taut as a balloon—tension, oh man, is it going to pop?—and then it shrinks. Again, it swells. And shrinks. Low grunts and arrhythmic nasal breathing. This savage, strangely erotic scene lasts eight seconds. Then she is finished.

Mayhem. Gasps. Vomiting. Fainting spells. Ecstatic howls. Primal thunder shakes the tent.

Within a month, Audrey’s carefully planned fifteen-minute act, during which she consumes two crutches, four saxophones, five effects pedals, an electric guitar, and, as a finale, a drum set, turns into an unscripted challenge: Bring something The Amazing Audrey can’t eat, and you’ll be jamming with Sonic Youth on the main stage to night!

It was an all-request free-for-all. Audience members offered patio bricks, baseball bats, hypodermic needles, the leather jackets off their backs, full bottles of Bordeaux or Jack Daniels (for reasons unknown to this day, the alcohol didn’t affect her), crowbars, tubes of wasabi, radial tires, fish tanks, thermometers, razor blades, oak end tables, and so on.

She never hesitated, not even for dramatic effect, as Jim Rose often counseled her to do. She didn’t pretend that an object frightened her, didn’t feign worry that it would never fit in her stomach, that it might—no, no, NO—kill her! Audrey was no showman. She was a hungry, violent, pissed-off young lady who mutilated everything in her path with her gorgeous chompers. Without flair, without flourish, without sentiment.

Day after day, show after show, the crowds went berserk. These were disenfranchised youth of America—bored suburbanites with no war to protest and no repressive economy to repress them. Freedom had become the oppressive force. Freedom meant skateboarding headfirst into trashcans. Drinking forties and watching syndicated episodes of Small Wonder as the sun came up. Stealing hubcaps off police cars. Sucking down balloons of nitrous oxide. Freedom was excess, and these kids turned their hatred of freedom toward anything with flourish—extended guitar solos, hairsprayed bangs, sports cars. They flushed wads of flair down the toilet and giggled when it backed up the sewage lines. Their hearts were full of anarchy, and their bank accounts were full of cash.

But their nihilism was cautious. They wanted, above anything else, to see how fucked up you could get, so they could seem fucked up by proxy. When they described to their pals, over a bong of chronic, how they’d actually been there, how they’d stood ten feet from the stage and watched it all without flinching, how they’d even cracked up because this one dude was white as a sheet, how they couldn’t believe how crazy it all was, that shit was out of hand—when they narrated this scene in all its gory detail, they became kings for a day.

This isn’t news, though.

Nothing this generation did, thought about, laughed at, loved, hated, or rented was worthwhile or original.

Being messed-up to impress people is a primal urge. Think elementary school. Picking up the worm to gross out the girl. Eating it to win her heart. Plenty of schoolboys ate worms for Audrey.

Nobody ate a worm for McKenna.

But the worm-eaters made Audrey a small fortune.