Across the street is Sideshows by the Seashore, which, according to the ballyhoo, is the last permanently situated ten-in-one freak show still ripping tickets in America. O’Hara hands $3 to a tattooed cashier and steps into a dark box. Despite its name, there’s no sea breeze here, just stale sweat, a raw plywood stage and steel bleachers. Beside the stage is a dressing room, and from the edge of the door light leaks onto an aquarium containing a plastic model of a reptile with a human head. Scrawled above it on the wall is the question “What is it?” as if perhaps it is something other than a piece of plastic. At 11:20 p.m. on a Sunday, the hipsters and tourists have long since fled the boardwalk, and the audience skews heavily Puerto Rican, and many seem caught in the late weekend purgatory between drunk and hungover. The show runs nonstop in a lethargic loop, and the first act O’Hara catches is the third on the bill. He is Koko, advertised as a three-foot-seven-inch dwarf, and as he struts onstage, O’Hara thinks of the upward-trajectory bullet that killed the boy.
