When the freaks, musicians, clowns, hoochie coochie dancers, and blockheads of 999 Eyes say this ain’t your grandfather’s sideshow, they’re not kidding. Their version of the great American midway is as vibrant, alive, and evolving as it was when P.T. Barnum made General Tom Thumb a household name, or when Ward Hall’s World of Wonders Amazement Show traversed the backroads of America in the 1940s, or when Jim Rose merged the carnival with grunge for his Circus Sideshow. Now Austin’s own original freak show and surreal sideshow is bringing the dime museum, the midway, the bally, burlesque, and vaudeville all under the same big top for the next evolution of this great American art form and its celebration of the unique and beautifully bizarre. “Everyone’s talking about nostalgia,” says Creative Director Jason Black, aka Black Scorpion. “I’m just trying to get ahead.”
Just in time for the season of the weird and strange, the troupe is filling the shelves of its museum of mutantstrosities, oiling the gears on the human-powered Ferris wheel, and fluffing the feathers and silks of the peep show, all for their newest extravaganza, Time Trap. Taking over Sagebrush on Oct. 28, the night will find the performers of 999 Eyes trapped in their own permanent Halloween, and the only way out is through time travel and a deal with Barnum himself.
Narratives have always been a big part of what makes 999 Eyes unique among its peers. “This show has always had magic,” says founder and Musical Director Samantha X, “and it’s not just, ‘Let’s do a bunch of shocking shit.'” In the case of Time Trap, she adds, “It’s got a very complex story that it’s hard to believe it’s not true. We don’t even know, sometimes. Were we really in 3033?”
“Time travel’s possible, especially in your mind,” says Black.
“People talk about traveling time but it’s not like, ‘I’m going to the Quickie Pickie,'” adds accordionist Dylan Blackthorn, taking a more metaphysical bent. “Traversing time is different, because you change as well as your surroundings.”
In that way, 999 Eyes is a time machine that glimpses at the continuing history of the sideshow to allow audiences to reappraise it as a living, breathing tradition. X recalled a conversation with the World’s Greatest Showman, Bobby Reynolds, a legendary fire-eater, sword-swallower, flea circus seller, and talker (the guy that lures you into the 10-in-1 tent to see wonders your mundane life will never reveal). “He says, ‘It’s so stupid. Whenever anyone paints the circus, or takes a photo, they make it sepia. It wasn’t sepia! It was so colorful.'” That’s why she recoils at the idea that there’s a revivalist element to 999 Eyes. “We’re not re-creating anything,” she says. “It’s not keeping alive anything. It’s always been alive. The circus and the carnival live in all of us.”
That’s not all that’s inside some of the performers. Take Juan Martinez: shaman, death rattle maker, and sword-swallower. Turns out, that’s not a skill that’s easy to learn – simply because there aren’t that many people to teach it. “I’ve had other sword-swallowers tell me I should not be alive right now, because I am self-taught. I taught myself by reading firsthand accounts and literature, and going, ‘OK, I know how it works in theory, so let’s put it in practice.'” He started with a toothbrush, and then a stainless steel spatula with a long handle, and finally a coat hanger. “Another performer who was here in town, Blockhead Benny, says, ‘If you can do that, you can swallow this sword.’ He gave me my first sword, I swallowed it, and he says, ‘Congratulations. That’s gross, I don’t want it back. You can have it.'”
Now Martinez passes on those same skills, but X noted that there’s a balance between keeping the act on stages without losing what makes it not just safe (“We’ve seen many sword-swallowers in hospital”) but special. “Part of keeping a tradition alive is protecting it like a precious pearl,” she says. “I teach tarot card reading, and there’s a fine line between making it inaccessible to people – ‘You can’t learn this if you don’t climb Mount Kilimanjaro first’ – and teaching it in a way that doesn’t take the seriousness into account.”
All the sideshow classics are there – the sword-swallower, walking on glass, blockheads – yet every 999 Eyes show is new, all springing from the rainbow mind of Black. Blackthorn dubs him “relentlessly creative, with an exhaustive repertoire of music that he’s written, but in addition to that all the creative concepts that you’ve brought out of the show.”
The puckish Black giggles. “It’s a disease. It’s a mental illness.”
So at his behest the Quantum Wrench that powers Time Trap was forged specifically for this event, just as there will be new performers (as X noted, “Giving people the platform to perform is something the midway and carnivals always did”). Fresh to the troupe are multi-instrumentalist Dr. $ick of the Asylum Street Spankers and Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Whorie the Clown, who joined 999 Eyes earlier this year. “I was born a clown,” she says, “and have been a clown my whole life, and now I have finally found my people.”
At the new show, Blackthorn will be operating the Quantum Wrench – but then, as the accordion player for That Damned Band, he’s used to wrangling heavy equipment, “and I’ve been known to wield a sledgehammer now and then,” he drolly notes. For many, the sound of the squeeze-box is the sound of the sideshow, but that’s another indicator of the evolving tradition. It wasn’t ubiquitous until the 1990s, when new troupes like the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and the Yard Dogs Roadshow brought in elements of middle-European Jewish klezmer music and Weimar cabaret.
“It was in part the accordion that drove 999 Eyes,” says X. Back in the early 2000s, Blackthorn had invited her to come on tour as part of his vision for a new carnival, with traditional Japanese butoh dancers sharing the stage with goblin musicians, “but it didn’t have any freaks. I was doing some freak stuff at the time, teaching the endocrine system using pictures of freaks, and at that point I went, ‘Oh, I’ll put together a freak show tent.'”
Initially, 999 Eyes was primarily a place for “mostly genetic oddities and natural born freaks, and over time it morphed itself,” says X. That’s meant fewer freaks in the roster, but the name stays the same. “At some time, Black says to me, ‘If I’m in it, it’s a freak show.’ I used to be like, ‘We have to have at least four natural-borns,’ and he’d go, ‘No, we don’t. If I’m in it, it’s a freak show.'”
That’s because Black was born with ectrodactyly, a genetic condition that means that each of his hands developed with one large thumb and two fingers, arcing away from each other like a crescent moon in full silvery shine. That’s why he calls himself “a natural born artist and freak.”
Black’s first venture into the circus world came via word of mouth, from a legend of the 1990s scene: Mister Lifto, who became a counterculture icon for weightlifting using not his hands but his piercings. Seeing him perform and become a celebrity inspired Black and led him to 999 Eyes. “It wasn’t necessarily him dropping a name, but I went, ‘What kind of career is this?'” He looked up X on MySpace, they met in Austin at Cafe Mundi, he flew to Portland for his first performance, and that’s how he not-so-metaphorically ran off to join the circus as an artist, performer, and freak.
Let’s talk about that word. The F-word. Freak. It’s long been a slur, associated with talkers trying to convince rubes to enter a tent and gawk at someone with a disability. Many performers were exploited, but for others it was a path to independence. As X noted, Tom Thumb not only died a millionaire but bailed Barnum’s circus out of debt twice as an investor. Indeed, in 1898, Barnum faced an organized labor stoppage when 40 of his most famous performers went on strike while on tour in London, demanding that the word “freak” be removed from all publicity material and replaced with the term “prodigy.” Over a century later, on 999 Eyes’ first tour, the performers once again took control of their linguistic destiny. X recalled that Black was in the tour bus “with the Lobster Girl, the Elephant Man, the Half Girl, and the Giant, and they were having conversations about, ‘It sucks to be called deformed. It sucks to be called abnormal.’ Well, what do you guys want to call it? ‘Let’s reclaim the word freak!'”
As X puts it, nobody is born a freak. A freak, she explains, “is a genetic human anomaly who’s willing to perform.”
And performing can be tough. Black recalled working on Coney Island, walking on glass and having to pull shards out of his feet, only to go back out 20 minutes later. But there’s one scar that has more meaning than most, an old scar on his hand – his empathy scar, which throbs whenever he sees someone else in pain. He got it when a surgeon decided that he shouldn’t have webbed fingers, so cut his body. It wasn’t until he was on that first tour that he found out that every other freak in the bus had a scar “from an American doctor from where they wanted to poke and prod and try something out.” Those scars created what he calls “a Mother Nature family connection. … I could look into someone else’s eyes and there was no doubt about them understanding where I come from.”
Part of Black’s act is about wonder at a different body; part is about admiring some of the extraordinary things only he can do; and part is about explanation (for more kid-friendly shows, he’s even worked with a puppet version of himself, to give implicit permission for children to look and ask questions). Yet some venues have tried to book troupes like 999 Eyes but blanched at the idea of having any natural born freaks on the bill. Others have been picketed by protesters. In both instances, it’s people basically telling Black Scorpion that he can’t perform in his own show. There have also been legal efforts by disability rights advocates to ban freak shows. “We were close to making it illegal for me to get onstage in Texas,” Black says, “and we just got lucky. The Texas Supreme Court is going to allow me to perform onstage – with their blessing,” he added, with dripping sarcasm.
For Black Scorpion, for X, and for all of the 999 Eyes crew, what they’re doing is taking an art form with a complicated past and making it into a truly inclusive place. Black says, “You can have Barnum. You can have your heroes, but you can behead your heroes, put them in a UFO, and make them better.”
999 Eyes Freakshow & Surreal Sideshow presents Time Trap: Sat., Oct. 28, 8pm-1am. Sagebrush, 5500 S. Congress. 21+, costumes mandatory. 999eyes.com.
This article appears in October 20 • 2023 and October 13 • 2023.