We were lucky. It was June and warm. There were plenty of people on the sidewalks that night, just strolling around. I found a good place on Yonge Street near an ice-cream stand and took Bitsie out of my knapsack. Only he didn’t look like Bitsie very much anymore. Just to be on the safe side, we’d borrowed some things from the costume department and disguised him as a girl.
A very ugly girl. With big red felt lips, glasses, a kerchief with orange braids sticking out, and a peasant blouse with two tennis balls glued underneath in the appropriate places. I thought he was going to hate it, but he was so flattered by the idea that someone might recognize him that he was practically unbearable.54
I told myself this was going to be easy. All I had to do was move my lips as if I was trying not to move my lips and just let Bitsie do the rest. I put out a hat we’d also borrowed from the costume department and got started.
It was easy. Really easy. Bitsie was so into it. He went nuts. He did the Macarena. He did impressions of Nelly Furtado and the prime minister and some famous lady who used to get married all the time. He sang goofy fake opera songs and made jokes that I didn’t get.
But I guess they were funny. We’d only been doing it for about five minutes, but we already had a big crowd— and they were all laughing their heads off. Bitsie loved it.
I should have too, I guess. Our hat was filling up pretty fast. But something was making me nervous.
We were too good.
We were attracting too much attention.
I tried to tone Bitsie down a bit—but what could I do? I couldn’t say anything because people would get suspicious if we were both talking at the same time (and believe me, Bitsie had no intention of shutting up). I couldn’t stop him from moving. He was in charge there too. So I threw my hoodie over his head thinking I’d say, “That’s all for now, folks,” and they’d leave and I’d have a chance to talk to him alone about my worries. But that didn’t work either. Bitsie just threw the hoodie off, made some joke about puppet abuse and picked up right where he left off.
I tried to relax and go with it. I figured we almost had enough money so we wouldn’t have to do it much longer.
I was almost calm—until the lady with the yellow hair asked me that question.
“Where did a young girl like you learn to puppeteer like this?”
Of course I didn’t get to answer it. Bitsie took it upon himself to supply all the gory details. He started out okay.
He said, “Mostly I just taught myself. I’ve always been interested in theater and comedy.”
That would have been fine if he’d just left it at that. But he had everybody’s attention, and he was hardly going to waste it.
He lowered his eyes as if this was tough for him to talk about and went on. “Puppeteering became a way for me to escape the horrors of my family life. I retreated into my imaginary world in order to forget the physical and emotional abuse that awaited me at the hands of my cruel stepfather…”
Do I need to continue—or did you see that episode of Crime Wave too? Unfortunately, nobody in the crowd seemed to have. They all got these really sad looks on their faces and started throwing more money in the hat. Bitsie, I could just tell, thought he was brilliant. He started adding things that weren’t even in the TV show. About how I was living on the street now. About how my stepfather had a contract out on me. About how I’d started to believe that my puppet was talking to me. Things like that.
The lady, who by this time had mascara streaming down her face, touched me on the shoulder. She said, “Wait here.
I know someone who can help you. A policewoman who’s dealt with this type of thing before.” Then she ran off to get the cops.
Was Bitsie worried that the law was now on our trail? Ha! It didn’t even cross his mind. He was busy talking to a reporter from the National Herald, who’d noticed all the people and wanted to do a story on us for the next day’s paper.
That’s all I needed to hear. I grabbed Bitsie, my knapsack and the hat and bolted through the crowd.
Was Bitsie ever pissed off! He was screaming, “Hey! I was talking to that guy!” and everybody, I’m sure, was thinking what an amazing performer I was to be able to run and puppeteer backwards over my shoulder at the same time. Luckily, they all thought the escape was part of the act so it took a while before anyone started running after us.
There was no way I was going to stop until we were miles away from all those people and that reporter’s flashing camera.
I didn’t even slow down when Bitsie started biting my ear.
54 The guy was an egomaniac. You’d think if they could put a man on the moon, someone would be able to invent latex that wasn’t so full of itself.