Turbo Tom
at ManRay
review and photo by Margaret Smith
Imagine how life would be if you couldn’t go to a party without some loser pleading, “Do that trick where you blow up a condom out of your nose!” or “C’mon, can’t you just eat one little teensy piece of glass?!”
You ain’t seen nothin’ – and I don’t care if you did catch Jim Rose’s show at Lollapalooza – until you’ve seen Turbo Tom, card-carrying freak.
Turbo Tom recently plied his trade at ManRay’s New Year’s Eve party, where he warmed up by inflating a condom with his nose. He then horfed down a shattered light bulb, holding a microphone close to his mouth lest anyone not quite get it. Hurrying the broken bits along with a two-worm chaser, Tom assured the audience that the glass shards in his stomach would take care of the critters. Not much consolation for him in the morning, at which time he said the whole stunt “will rip my ass apart.”
To make his life even more complicated, Tom pounded a nail into his nose with a baseball bat, ensnared his hand in an old-fashioned steel-jaw trap, and hung a piece of cinderblock from the rings in his nipples (don’t try that with your belly button piercings, my trendoid pretties). He rounded out the performance by lancing both cheeks with a meat skewer.
Throughout the show, Turbo Tom cushioned the blow of his antics with cuddly one-liners and an elegant stage presence sorely lacking in Jim Rose’s more famous repertoire.
At scarcely past midnight, the audience’s reactions made it seem more like Valentine’s. The children of the night shrieked with ecstasy rather than revulsion, swooned with ardor rather than a fundamental inability to cope.
Turbo Tom’s act serves as a peculiar bridge between two seemingly non-negotiable sectors of our population, the first being the rather mainstream crowd of college kids, working class Joes and Janes, and a lot of beefy jocks. The second is the nocturnal underground, a following which already saw Turbo Tom coming from a long way away. Turbo Tom’s show is one which offers plenty of gleefully sinister fun to both.
