Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 18

e all know the scene in the classic movie, the David Lynch masterpiece, but Daisy’s version was better. How Daisy St. Patience remembered the movie, it wasn’t even sepia-toned. The setting was still an auditorium filled with row upon row of tiered seats, standing-room-only crowded, that full house of straightlaced, Victorian nobility. Ladies in bustles. Men in tall silk hats. Everyone hushed with anticipation. They were all staring intently at a screen of cloth stretched over a lightweight frame, the type of screen used to separate beds in old hospital wards. But when that screen slid aside to reveal an almost naked figure …Daisy’s interpretation was better.

To start with, there was music. An unseen hand pressed an offstage button, and a thumping bass beat shook that staid auditorium. The house lights dimmed. From loudspeakers, a voice shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Pathological Society of London brings you the sexy …the sin-sational …the searing-hot, one-and-only …the Elephant Man!”

In Lady Daisy’s revision Joseph Merrick made his entrance in a burst of blue smoke bomb, wearing a skintight California highway patrolman’s buff-color uniform. A brown stripe running down the outside of each thigh. Twenty-one, twenty-two years old. He’d wear a giant-sized pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses in perfect proportion to his huge Elephant Man head. His every seam was cleverly held together with Velcro; he’d wear nothing you couldn’t get off with a firm yank. He’d wear a banana hammock engineered for maximum flop. And boots. Sexy black leather boots.

One nipple was pierced, pinned through with a polished policeman’s badge on his otherwise bare torso.

No, when Joseph Merrick was presented to the Pathological Society of London in 1884 he didn’t need to dance—but he did. That was the fantasy of Daisy St. Patience. No working the brass pole, not for him, but Daisy imagined him wearing a black Chippendales bow tie. This Elephant Man augmented his tan with baby oil. Who’s to say what really went down? History tells us the Elephant Man didn’t sport sexy Speedo tan lines—those sexy runway lines that point the shortcut to some sexy Elephant Man groin, groin, groin. Rumor has it he didn’t shave his legs or wax his chest, not even while he was touring the European Continent. Again, history records that he was twenty-one, twenty-two years old. Who’s to say Joseph Merrick didn’t get his elephant ears pierced for some hot saddle plugs? A gold ring glinting in his sexy navel. Odds are excellent that he got his lopsided Elephant Man chest inked with a couple of tribal tats. In Daisy’s version, Joe Merrick wore the effects of his Proteus syndrome and neuro-fibromatosis like a hot-pink thong, bumping and grinding his G-stringed self to invade the personal space of those esteemed scientist voyeurs. No passive object for critical gaze, he rotated his deformed hips. Shimmying and finger-snapping. Flexing his washboard elephant abs. No cowering victim, he flexed his fibroid-distorted self and returned their aghast stares with his sexy Elephant Man smile. He grinned his bulbous Elephant Man face like he’d been growing his big forehead lump since he was a three-year-old kid in Leicestershire, pumping up his skull and practicing moves in front of a mirror for today’s command performance. His skeleton might’ve been tortured, but his capped teeth looked perfect, blazing white in the spotlight. Delivering it home, hot, to those whale-boned mamas. Bringing them the ol’ razzle-dazzle with his Elephant Man jazz hands, he did his smooth moonwalk. Working his mutilations with the arrogance of a Playgirl centerfold, Merrick executed perfect backflips. He did handstands and shook his junk in everyone’s cookie-cutter Victorian face. So close they could feel the heat coming off his Elephant Man thighs, he was just boom, boom, boom to the scorching mix of Donna Summer and Lady Gaga. Strutting the sexy curvature of his twisted spine, he pumped his bony cockeyed pelvis. Unmistakable. Sans apology. His every knotted muscle said: Here, this is what it is to be alive. His thrusting crotch said: Come and get it!

Showing his audience no mercy, Merrick was all: Deal with it, bitches.

He was sweating now, flaunting his Elephant Man nipples and his bushy Elephant Man armpit hair. He sidled up to rub his pheromone-drenched elephant skin, all Brillo Pad–wet, against folks seated along the aisle. Dry-humping the shoulders of elegant gents, he shook his elephant ass cheeks like two scoops of lizard ice cream.

In Daisy’s version, barely legal Joe Merrick, almost-elephant-jailbait, he sold the audience his bad attitude self. Like a flaming banquet of all-you-can eat birth defects. Like a visitor from the planet of Worst-Case Scenario. He made those eminent Victorian ladies want nothing more than to be the mama of his Elephant Man babies. Outsider sexy, he made everyone present forget the tragedy they’d been sold about his Elephant Man life.

Elephant Joe. The Elephant Dude. He worked that Bloomsbury crowd for all the pound notes they could tuck into his G-string. He lap-danced the blushing bachelorettes until they spilled their Long Island iced teas, intentionally, just to hide the overly excited wet soaking through their hoop skirts. The telephone had barely been invented, but already people were trying to slip Joseph Merrick their unlisted numbers.

No, the way Daisy told the story, he didn’t just stand there like an object for physicians to stare at. Nobody screamed. Nobody wept quietly into their handkerchiefs, or barfed.

People whistled and stomped. They swooned. People chanted, in unison, “Elephant MAN …elephant MAN …elephant MAN!”

That was what happened when Joseph Merrick was presented at Pathological Society of London in 1884. According to Daisy St. Patience, he had thick, flowing, shoulder-length blond hair.

And if that’s not exactly how it actually happened, says Daisy …well, that’s the way it should’ve.