Freak Love -- Jim Rose Breathes New Hype Into The Circus Sideshow

LET US BEGIN WITH a partial list of sharp, pointy or otherwise icky items that frequently find their way into Jim Rose's mouth:

Razor blades.

Dry ice.

Light bulbs (chewed).

Cigarettes (stubbed out on tongue).

Sixteen-penny nails - if you consider the sinus cavity, into which Rose pounds the nails via his nostril, to be part of the mouth.

Likewise, screwdrivers.

By this point you may have decided that Jim Rose is not a person you would like to get to know better, much less loan your Chap-Stik to. On the other hand, the talents hinted at above may cause you to wonder: cartridge razors or double-edged?

Good of you to ask. Double-edged. Rose pops them onto his tongue, gives the impression of swallowing them (with a dental-floss chaser), then pulls them back out, neatly threaded onto the length of floss like a stringer of stainless-steel fish. A real crowd-pleaser, that one.

Nevertheless, the most remarkable feat performed by Rose mouth-wise has been to resuscitate a venerable form of entertainment, the circus sideshow. In the span of a few years Rose has graduated from disgusting a few hundred people sardined into a Middle Eastern restaurant in Seattle - his home base - to filling 2,000- to 3,000-seat theaters across the United States, Canada and Great Britain and being censored on network TV in Australia, the country that gave us dwarf-tossing.

For his next feat, Rose is poised to appear on a home video distributed by a national record label as early as this fall. At present Rose is barnstorming a land of ancient barns - Europe - and defying translation into French, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Flemish.

In Bangkok, where his reputation precedes him, the tabloids call Rose "The Massacre of Ceremonies."

Truly, before a microphone is where Rose's mouth does some of its best work. His act is the least repellent of those presented by the five-performer troupe known as the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. Yet without him the others would be nothing. Or at least much less of something. Or - yes, this is it - little more than a run-of-the-mill collection of worm-eating, cheek-skewering, condom-snorting, cinder-block-dangling human marvels.

Jim Rose is their P.T. Barnum. He is a man with vision. A special kind of vision. Vision of the sort that enables you to see how, yes, sticking one's face in a shower of sparks from a metal grinder would be a pretty cool thing, but doing it with a cigarette between the lips and emerging only after the cigarette has been lit would be cooler still.

His story is a story of spark-bright hope for a dimming age when TV commercials are often more interesting than the programs.

"The ultimate American success story," wrote one admirer. "Pulled up (hard) by the bootstraps. Horatio Alger meets Marat/Sade."

Rose is a turner of phrases, sometimes followed by stomachs; a dispenser of adrenaline; a certified shock therapist. In a city that for all its cosmopolitan pretense harbors much that is dull, Rose is anything but.

There might be a way for Rose to bore you, but it would probably involve some type of power tool.

OH WHAT A SPECIAL NIGHT this is. Even pressing your face in shattered glass can get humdrum when you do it night after night. But this night is different. Special is the only way to describe it.

The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is opening its 1993 Shock Therapy world tour by performing in front of its largest hometown audience ever - 1,300 people stuffed into the Moore Theatre, filling every $8 and $10 seat, hanging out of the ornate balconies, stacked three deep at the men's-room urinals. On stage, men dressed head to toe in black - jeans, turtlenecks and ski masks, like Navy SEALS - scamper about with cables and cameras, preparing to shoot the official, distribution-rights-for-sale-to-the-highest-bidder, Jim Rose Circus Sideshow home video.

Backstage the atmosphere is, how shall we put it ... Felliniesque. A much-pierced ex-insurance salesman called the Amazing Mr. Lifto, for reasons that will soon become obvious, saunters about in black tights, hot-pink satin camisole and pink kimono. Mountain-climbing carabiners dangle from his ear lobes.

Lifto's colleague, The Torture King, emerges from the dressing room, his chest skin aerated by several dozen syringe needles. The Enigma also materializes, dressed in tails and a black top hat draped with a veil. Through the black lace The Enigma's girlfriend kisses him deeply. At 7 this morning she finished inking the last piece of the jigsaw-puzzle tattoo that covers him from bald head to toe. Watching the two of them kiss you have to marvel at how much money The Enigma must have saved by falling in love with a tattoo artist.

Matt "The Tube" Crowley is nowhere to be seen, but the former Montana pharmacist's props await: a 2-liter Plexiglas piston-plunger device with a length of clear plastic tubing; a 24 oz. squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup; a 32 oz. bottle of ketchup; a 40 oz. bottle of beer; two 16 oz. bottles of Pepto Bismol. Beside the ketchup, unrelated to the act, is a paperback copy of the book "Apocalypse Culture," bestowed by an appreciative fan at last night's Portland show. The book is inscribed: "TO THE TUBE. LAUGHING LET US PERISH!"

Meanwhile, Jim Rose sits in a dressing room with his wife, Bebe. On stage, she plays the role of the kittenish Circus Queen, passing the performers their swords and skewers and throwing darts into her husband's back.

Rose is built like a bantam rooster - short but wiry, with a washboard stomach and arms of twisted rope. His hair resembles jet-black straw. He wears a black sleeveless T-shirt, obsidian beads, silver-studded belt, black genie pants, black stomper boots. He looks like hell, presuming hell has a fashion sense. His face - goateed, gaunt, gravelly - hangs in repose.

It is a face capable of gross distortions. It can go from pleasure to pain and back in the time it takes a raccoon trap to snap down on a man's fingers (as it happens, a relatively tame moment in the show's first act). By the time The Enigma takes his place behind a keyboard and plays the deranged calliope music that signals the start of the show, a glow has poured into Rose's face. His eyes go buggy; neck tendons go taut.

"You sir!" he harangues a man in the spitting-distance seats. "Take your hands out of your pockets, or it's gonna hurt when you clap."

Much clapping ensues during the 90-minute show. Also groans, cheers, screams, laughter and occasional semi-gagging sounds, like those from the girl sitting beside us in driver's-ed class the day we screened "Blood on the Pavement."

If you have never seen The Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, try to imagine a bloodless car crash, with color commentary by Rose. Allow us to try to capture its essence with a partial list of highlights:

Rose swallows dry ice, blows smoke. The Tube snorts condom up nose, out mouth. The Tube smashes hand with can of ravioli. The Tube sticks AMF Strikeline bowling ball to hand with Super Glue, lifts ball straight up; rips hand off ball. Rose lies supine on bed of nails while four audience members stand on him. Mr. Lifto dangles electric irons from ears, suitcase from nose, cinder block from nipples, electric irons from - as Rose told USA Today - "the part of him that's most a mister."

The acts proceed one at a time, sutured together by Rose's macabre patter. "Bee-yooo-ti-ful creature," he chants hypnotically during Lifto's feats. "Bee-yooo-ti-ful."

Intermission. Many tattooed people mill about the lobby, along with many non-tattooed people. A 28-year-old attorney and a 33-year-old warehouseman from Bellevue discuss their plans to practice reclining in broken glass. The concession stand does a surprisingly brisk business. Lifto's mother, here from Port Townsend with Lifto's grandmother to see the show for the first time, buys some M&Ms. "I wish it were someone else," she says, fussing with her freshly permed hair. "It wouldn't hurt so much."

The lights in the lobby flash twice.

Rose opens Act II, announcing with mock gravity: "If someone beside you faints, raise your hand so we can send medical assistance."

Torture King extinguishes blow torch with tongue. Torture King sticks pins through arm. "I've seen junkies faint . . . Bee-yooo-ti-ful . . . Bee-yooo-ti-ful," Rose purrs. "I can't take my eyes off you, Torture King." Torture King pushes metal skewer through one cheek and bumps it against the other, struggling to poke through.

"He's teasing you. He's teasing you! The Torture King has a sense of humor, too," Rose says, his commentary thick with the drama of William Shatner summer stock. "Torture King, if you ever have a child and something happens to you . . . Lifto, The Enigma, Matt The Tube AND I, JIM ROSE, will EXHIBIT and raise that child as though it were our own. . . . You're a genius, a brilliant artist my friend, I will never, ever exploit you. . . . NOW PUSH THAT MEAT SKEWER THROUGH YOUR (EXPLETIVE) FACE!"

Torture King complies. Then The Enigma strips down to bikini briefs, eats worms. The Tube assembles Plexiglas apparatus, fills it with aforementioned backstage liquids not generally served together.

"Alllllrrright, Seattle," Rose growls. "It's Miller time! He likes to get drunk, but he hates the taste of beer. It's also called the frat-boy challenge."

In hospital emergency rooms it would be called "gavage-lavage." The Tube removes tube from nose, smacks lips.

Finally, where it should be, the finale: face in glass. Long ballyhoo leads up to actual face plant. "Ow!" Rose screams, pulling a wad of foreign material out of the pile of glittering shards. "Somebody put some paper in here." Dramatic pause. "What are you laughin' at? Paper cuts are the worst."

Rose instructs crowd to holler: "Throw your ass in the glass." Crowd complies; Rose is touched.

"Oh Seattle," he says humbly. "I . . . would . . . be . . . honored."

He kneels, lays microphone beside glass, and then . . .

Kerrunch! - down he goes. Ooof! - up goes a lovely volunteer, one foot on Rose's neck, the other on the back of his head.

Out of the glass crawls Rose's nicotine-ground growl: "It's the lowest form of entertainment! Thank you for coming! Get the (expletive) off my head!"

ROSE HAS HIS WAY WITH WORDS. Let us put it this way: We would pay just to hear him describe shaving his face, even with an electric razor.

"I try to talk in a language that might have been used 60 years ago by an evil diplomat," he says.

To overhear him fielding questions from a member of the press is to witness a maestro of the blurb.

"Basically, these are insanity's greatest hits," we once heard him say across a long-distance line to an Australian paper's entertainment writer. "No blood. If there is, it will be a total accident. Anybody can just cut and bleed. The idea is to do things that normally would have that effect, but it doesn't.

"We have had, of course, periodically what's known as a falling ovation..."

Rose admires the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose black humor and direct language revolutionized 20th-century French literature. Celine wrote of a world one critic called "a river of muck with a luminous surface."

Rose's influences also seem to include carny barkers, TV evangelists and infomercial hosts. Close friends confirm that, except for rare private moments, Rose's switch is mostly stuck in the "on" position. His recent reading list included a photo book of oddities titled "Dear Mr. Ripley," and "Circus Press Agent: The Life and Times of Roland Butler." Though he employs a William Morris agent, it is mostly Rose himself who manages his career, including writing his own press releases.

Such as the one intended for local promoters that says: "Jim Rose is a master salesperson who can turn blurbs into features." And, "Controversy: Start a third-party letter-writing campaign to all clergy, politicians, press and social groups complaining about the show. ..."

As Rose noted via the same press release: "HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE HYPE SELLS TICKETS." Hype gets you only so far, though; at some point you must actually put your ass in the glass. Unlike the humbug artists who gave sideshows a bad name during their decline in the 1940s and '50s, Rose can cash the checks that his mouth writes.

SHOCKING BUT TRUE: THERE IS evidence to suggest that this man who chews G.E. soft whites is a picky eater. Be advised that we have seen Rose removing onions from a ham sandwich and sniffing suspicious-looking Chinese appetizers.

It is several months after the Moore Theatre show. Rose is between tours of Britain and Australia. He has consented to let us chronicle certain proscribed areas of his life.

We convene for a late dinner at Cyclops, a Belltown establishment furnished with Formica tables and decorated with disturbing, pulsating sculptures.

Rose's table is full. There's Rose, his wife Bebe, friend Sondra who used to date the Sideshow road manager, semi-official Sideshow photographer Alison, and four guys - two live down the hall from the loft where Rose and Bebe are crashing.

Rose orders. Man doth not live by glass shards alone; sometimes a plate of chiles rellenos pollo hits the spot. The waitress recounts her recent bicycling accident. A car knocked her right off her saddle. Rose is riveted.

"Did people congregate?" he asks. "If I had handled it you could have sold tickets."

A graphic designer-tattoo artist who lives above Cyclops and prefers to be known by her logo, a triangle with a slash through it, drops by. Triangle-slash unrolls a design for the Sideshow's new T-shirts, posters and stage banner.

"The old one" - it also adorned a barf bag distributed at some performances - "we've made two tours with it," Rose explains. "You want something new. Keep the show fresh. Plus, the banner looks like a postage stamp now that we're playing in front of 2,000 people."

"Rock star," snorts Alison.

Rose talks to one of his neighbors about turning the guy's play, "Women Behind Bars," into a movie. "If I weren't touring so much I'd like to get behind something like that," Rose says. "I'd hype the (urine word) out of it."

"Hype-master," says Alison.

Rose mentions the names of several companies he says are bidding for the rights to distribute his Circus Sideshow home video: Geffen, Polygram, Sony.

"Have you tried Disney?" suggests Alison.

Eventually, Rose leaves the table, providing the opportunity to pump Bebe for personal data.

"I've been wiz heem for seven years, but he steel amazes me," she says, in the way that the French are famous for expressing themselves. "Eet's never boring wiz heem. He steel makes me laugh. Ze thing he come ups wiz. Ze quotes. He's crazee, but not insane. I don't sink."

Bebe first laid eyes on him in Paris, on the cobblestones in front of the Pompidou Center. It was a moment she cannot forget, and we cannot blame her. Bebe was up from her family home in the Loire Valley to visit a brother. Rose was working the Pompidou Center crowd - wriggling out of a straitjacket, slipping out of handcuffs, sticking his face in glass ... the usual.

"I gave heem a good teep," Bebe recalls. "I hang around, ask heem question, same as anybody else: Why?"

Bebe is about to describe their first date when all of a sudden Rose returns. "Don't talk about it," he commands.

After dinner Rose goes to check out a band called Circus of Power at a club where he will advise one of the club's owners that Tijuana is a showman's paradise where a man with a donkey act can go far.

We get separated from Rose and find Bebe at another club sitting around a table languidly smoking cigarettes with a group of friends she jokingly calls "the Circus widows." She tries to explain her husband's reticence. She is - as usual - cordial, sweet, French.

"You're a journaleest," Bebe explains. "We got to keep some secrets. Don't take eet personally."

ROSE IS A MAN OF MUCH MYSTERY and many press releases.

Here is the Jim Rose he would have us know:

He spent youthful summers working at carnivals and state fairs where he met the last generation of human marvels (also known as "made freaks," to distinguish them from so-called born freaks like Prince Randian the human torso, Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and Mme. Josephine Fortune Clofullia, the Swiss Bearded Lady). At an age when many young men's thoughts turn to fraternity hazing, Rose was seized by an "artistic vision" to assemble the greatest collection of odd humans ever to perform on one stage. For several years thereafter he traveled the globe seeking out the bizarre and learning how to extinguish Marlboros with his tongue.

In 1990 he performed his first Seattle show, solo, on a belly-dancing stage at the Ali Baba restaurant. By showtime the owners had to bar the door, leaving the overflow crowd to gawk from the sidewalk. His reputation spread fast as urban legend. Soon, as Rose likes to say, "like-minded monsters sat up in their crypts." They auditioned and formed the nucleus for today's Jim Rose Circus Sideshow.

He has called the show "rock and roll for the eyes," also, "the most popular, vulgar display since they outlawed public hanging."

He is 36 years old and offers this advice to those who would follow his path: Know your glass.

To which we would add these independently gathered facts:

Raised in Arizona, he told ghost stories as a child and amused his friends by laying on his back, filling his mouth with milk, and letting a dog lap it out.

His father, who bought real estate for the city of Phoenix, remembers a game of skill that Jim invented when still a boy. The game involved dropping a marble into a hole cut in a cigar box. Young Jim charged friends a penny for the chance to win a nickel.

Mr. Rose says, "I just presumed he would be in sales in one way or another."

His mother offers this insight: "We'd say `What are you going to do when you grow up?' He'd say he'd be Santa Claus' helper. When he found out in first grade there was no Santa Claus it blew all his dreams at once. He was terribly upset. He got over it quick."

In high school - the same one, as it happens, attended by Steven Spielberg and Lynda ("Wonder Woman") Carter - he delivered the morning announcements over the PA system, acted in student plays, and, in his spare time, went to work for a local pest-control outfit. By year's end he was in charge of sales. Through his cold calls and door-to-door visits, a rapidly multiplying number of Phoenix homes were protected from roaches, termites and carpenter ants.

At 19 he bought a five-bedroom house with a fountain. He sold the house and started his own pest-control business. Eventually, he sold that, too, and followed his bliss, moving to Europe to learn "internal juggling" with razor blades and other body-endangering feats. Before settling in Seattle in 1989 he worked the boardwalk at Venice Beach, Calif. A Santa Monica newspaper once published a front-page photo of Rose with a dollar bill seemingly stapled to his forehead.

Last summer, Rose's Circus Sideshow crisscrossed the U.S. as part of the Lollapalooza tour, a 30-city alternative-rock Woodstock. This year: the world.

A few unpaid testimonials:

"I think he'd make a great cult leader, except something tells me to be a cult leader you have to be internally mean-spirited and I don't think Jim is." - Chris Cornell, Soundgarden lead singer, and Lollapalooza mate.

"These people must be absolutely sick. ... Unfortunately, we do not have the power to ban them. They should go back to where they came from and clean up their act and their minds." - Glasgow (Scotland) City Council member Bill Aitken.

"What I saw on stage was something I've rarely seen in a performance art outside sports. What I saw in Jim Rose was the human heart exposed ... I think these things come along when we need some kind of reminder that my God yes, even in this air-conditioned, wall-to-wall carpeted world we still dwell in these malleable, fragile cocoons." - Katherine Dunn, author of "Geek Love" and neophyte fire-eater.

"He is a star. Like movie star or something." - Anwar Aboul Hosn, owner, Ali Baba restaurant.

"He's just always been a ham, I guess you would say." - Rose's mother.

Neither of Rose's parents has seen the Sideshow in person, but they watched an abbreviated version on "Sally Jessy Raphael." They agree it's disgusting and they are very proud.

Oh - one last item, of the type that makes you think maybe we're more alike than different, after all: Rose is said to suffer an irrational fear of sending food back in a restaurant and having the cook prepare a new order and spit on it.

FOR FUTURE SHOCK, glimpse between the covers of Jim Rose's spiral-bound notebook. There, in a sloppy hand, are preserved all manner of inspiration.

We visit Rose one violently sunny afternoon when he has just arisen in a downtown loft amid a charmless block of self-storage lockers and parking garages. Rose and Bebe are staying here as guests of their musician-friend Keith Christensen, a person with more guitars than walls.

Rose puts down a bowl of cereal to find his spiral-bound notebook and starts flipping through its pages.

"Stun guns," he offers. "I wanna start zapping The Enigma. Hmmmm . . . burning hot water, we're going to start working with a little bit. The Duct Tape Escape. I told you about that, right? Mummify Matt The Tube. Because you always hear about burglars wrapping people up in it. You start realizing what everyday 20th-century phobias might be, just bad stuff, then you figure it out.

"Oh, here's something. Scorpions. Wanna put 'em in my mouth. Let 'em crawl around on the tongue. Stop a fan with the tongue. Catch a burning arrow with hand. Catching blow darts with teeth. Can't do the bullet anymore; who's gonna pull the trigger?"

Insurance problems. They're killing the small businessman.

"Being shot out of a cannon. See, I envision being in one of those Velcro suits. In the Kingdome. Being shot out of a cannon and sticking to the roof. . . . Oh, also - motor oil. I want The Enigma to start drinking a quart of motor oil."

We ask him a question, same as Bebe did, same as anybody else would: Why? Not just specifically, but in general. Why?

"It's a combination of attention-deficit disorder and not knowing how to play the guitar or sing," Rose says. "Also, as a kid I was the one who told the killer ghost stories; now the ghosts are real."

He sets his cereal bowl on the floor and juggles some clubs until a Jack Russell terrier named Tatum toddles up and starts lapping the milk. Rose shoos the dog away, fiddles with Keith's ancient color TV and pops in a rough cut of the Circus Sideshow video.

He wishes it could have included a piece added to the show only after the Moore Theatre performance. In the new piece, Torture King reclines on a bed of swords while a concrete block is smashed on his chest with a sledgehammer; meanwhile, Rose describes the action like a golf announcer watching Arnold Palmer line up a putt.

"He's measuring, measuring. Placing the block on his chest carefully. The whole circus holds its collective breath on this one. He's rolled his eyes up. I see only white. Trance-like. For some reason, he doesn't cherish longevity."

Rose is in a trance-like state of his own. He loves the sound of his own voice. He always has. It has served him so well.

Kit Boss is a Pacific staff writer. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.