Whatever the detective found out sent my mother into a tailspin, but when I learned these tales—too shocking for my mother to tell me herself—they seemed episodes in a mid-century Fanny Hill. In this chapter Sally turns a trick with a senator, and during his postcoital nap scoops up his wallet and credit cards and heads right for the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach; in those precomputer days, stolen credit card numbers took weeks to catch up with you, and of course she knew precisely how many weeks to stay. In this chapter she hangs out in Memphis with her friends Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (“Hey there, little Red Ridin’ Hood…”), and exacts revenge on some rival with attitude when she and her girlfriends add to the haughty girl’s gas tank a couple of pounds of sugar. She winds up visiting the apartment of a folksinger who’s come to town to soak up Memphis blues, “Cute, though he couldn’t sing worth a damn: Bob Dylan, did you ever hear of him?” In this chapter she steps in front of a city bus, timing it just so as to get knocked flat on the asphalt, then settles out of court for six thousand bucks. She has a weekly liaison with a mortician, whose erotic requirements are quite precise: she arrives at the funeral home, changes into a shroud, and powders her face a very pale shade. Then she lies in an open casket and tries to hold absolutely still, breathing as little as possible while he takes his pleasure. Comic relief: she gets a job in a carnival, working as a Snake Lady, half woman, half boa. This is how it’s done: Sally sits in a wooden box like one of those individual steam baths in an old movie, just her head sticking out. There’s a rubber coil wrapped around her neck, and from beneath the coil emerges the long, thick body of a real snake, whose head is concealed in another compartment of the box. When the people pay their quarters, there she is, the Snake Lady, wisecracking, her red bouffant gleaming, and her work is to talk back to all the smart-ass customers with something funny to say. I do not think my sister incapable of embellishing a story, but this one’s true; I know because she still speaks “carny,” an incomprehensible secret lingo carnival workers use to communicate without the “straights”—the yokels and townies—knowing what they’re talking about. Carny is an amazing variation on the idea of pig Latin, with variable numbers of nonsense syllables inserted before consonants; it sounds like insane glossolalia, brush-tent Baptists high on Jesus and strychnine.