'We are outlaws in the eyes of America'
says Flexi Girl, 'always different'
I am Tonguesmith. Created for pleasure.
My mother was a hippie, who dropped a lot of lysergic acid. And other strange narcotics with mystical properties. The psilocybin William S Burroughs grail-quested through Amazonia to find, but could never discover. My father was the electric Folk-Rock group she groupied for on tour. Multiply, or in sequence. Or maybe it was the sizzle of radioactive fallout drifting in from the Yucca Flats nuclear tests. Absorbing into cellular DNA, corrupting chromosomes, innovating, bending gene-structures into new unfamiliar shapes. My favourite book as a child was HG Wells 'The Island Of Dr Moreau', about vivisection experiments splicing human and beast.
I've learned to coil my tongue like a Swiss Roll into the back of my throat. My teeth don't meet, and it gives my face an elongated appearance, but it does mean I can pass in a crowd without notice. I have an anteater tongue, or maybe a frog tongue. A chameleon or pangolin tongue. I research it. An anteater tongue is sixty centimetres which enables it to devour 30,000 termites a day, but is as thin as spaghetti. Mine is normal in every respect, but for length. When other kids strive to tongue-tip touch their noses, I can comfortably lick my forehead. At puberty, while other boys are masturbating, I can reach down and encircle cock and balls in my tongue's moist coils and bring myself to deliriously intense climax.
I am Tonguesmith. A life filled with strangeness. Stick-slim and awkward, a freakish biological misfit, shunned and ridiculed. My mother cares, after a fashion, but she has her life, her job at the Diner, her guys - a succession of sleazy sleep-over 'uncles'. By nineteen, I'm a scaredy-cat, escaping from tormentors into the woods, beside the lake, I crouch down, watch the bullfrogs and imitate their passive eye-bulging squat. Waiting for that flick-flick-flick tongue-flick that unites us, croaking in unison. It's then I see the travelling carnival in the glade beyond, something wicked this way coming. On a gipsy trail from the east. Beguiled and drawn towards the circle of ornate caravans and bright sideshow cars beneath the lilac trees, by dancers in black with ghost-white faces and coats slashed into strips that flair like dark feathers as they move. Dr Dark Electrico, Barker and Ring-Master notices me and beckons, he's intrigued by my talent, and abilities. He sees my potential. Alongside the Bearded Lady, the Human Skeleton, Danny Longlegs, the Stork Woman, Flexi-Girl and the Living Torso, I discover my first role, welcomed into a close-community of oddments and outcasts.