© 1997 by Richard Solly.
Used with permission.
(Posted January 9, 1998 · Issue 23; archived January 30, 1998)
I sat quiet and still, gazing out a window as Father Note: The Human Pincushion was a name commonly adopted by
sideshow performers such as Edward Gibson, who had a congenital
immunity to pain. He appeared with his doctor before the New York
Neurological Society at the Academy of Medicine in 1932.
removed the lathing-hatchet lodged in my skull.
I was seven. He called me "courageous, a good soldier."
And the afternoon I shot my own finger with a .22,
he said, Brave men bear pain. Though I could not
even imagine what he meant, I flexed a biceps
the way I saw him do it. Mother's look often puzzled me.
Once, practicing piano, I banged my face in frustration
on the keyboard. She stared, as if my broken nose
were a monster's twisted snout. Why, I ask,
do others, too, stare and gasp in parlors when I tug
my lip forward, insert a hat pin through it?
To me, it's child's play to pierce each finger
with a pin, flash them like Gothic jewelry.
I am surprised by those who shout
when they prick their fingers. What, I've asked,
is pain? I try to understand, study their faces
and incredulous eyes for a clue, but I possess
no genetic code for pain, no fear in my own flesh,
bones, joints or teeth. I do not itch or cry, cannot
be punished by man or God. Some say immunity
is wasted on me, because I have no idea of what I am
spared. I should be sentenced to observe the dying
in hospitals. I've tried a normal life, playing clarinet
for the U.S. Marine Corps Band, working as a chauffeur,
a ticket man in a theater, until lured by money to vaudeville -
every evening at eight, matinees at two. Bare-chested,
I invited the audience on stage to push pins
up to their heads into my chest, fingers, soft flesh
under my arms - fifty or sixty pins at a time.
The Human Pincushion. I planned my own crucifixion -
hawked as the Greatest Spectacle on Earth. Not one seat
in the house was empty. Never had so many come to see
a man die. The cross was hauled on stage, and I lay down
as if it were a divan. Lights dimmed, drums rolled,
and my assistant hammered the first spike through my palm.
Maybe it was the sound of steel against steel,
the squirt of blood, that made the audience panic,
shriek "No, no," and race out. We feared people
might be trampled to death and canceled my performance.
I was disappointed. They knew I didn't have to suffer
to be redeemed. I promised a painless crucifixion.
Richard Solly, a professional writer and teacher, lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Bush Artist Fellowship and several Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships. His most recent book (with James Jennings) is The Way Home: A Collective Memoir of the Hazelden Experience, (Hazelden, 1997). His essay "The Long Way Home: Narratives on Healing" will appear in an anthology to be published by Dutton in 1998.