Going Green with The Lizardman
What kind of creature walks like a man, communicates, thinks, and is capable of reasoning, but bears the appearance of anything but human? A forked tongue curls between both rows of teeth; those of the top row come to an unnatural point. Above each eye is a series of five bump-like horns forming a ridge upon his brow. His ears are long and the entire face and most of his body is the same ghastly green and comprised of scales. The bipedal Lovecraftian Frankenstein described is none other than Erik Sprague: The Lizardman.
What goes into a transformation from PHD candidate at the University at Albany and a Philosophy student at Hartwick, to a sideshow performer/comic reptilian humanoid? Approximately 700 hours worth of tattooing that covers his person from head to toe, including his lips, and even eyelids. The horns are the work of sub-dermal Teflon implants and the tongue bifurcation is courtesy of an argon laser.
What may have started as a youthful obsession is now an occupation for the inked, pierced, and plugged lizard man. Through this work, he became one of the luminaries of the modification movement: a burgeoning group that ranges from tattoos to scrotal suspension. Clearly, a man of this stature would not make his living tucked away in the office of an ad agency. Nor will he ever have the choice to do so by today's standards. He wears his freak badge proudly, as it is tattooed across his chest. Performing sideshow acts nationally and internationally, his repertoire contains cringe-worthy yet fascinating acts such as suspension, and even mental floss with live little green snakes.
As outlandish as his repertoire and reptilian outward appearance is it became clear over the course of the interview that having the courage to take his identity further than any other "self-respecting stand-up citizen," makes him more authentically human than most.
Jess Hopsicker: How is everything?
Lizard Man: Everything is good so far.
JH: Given your desire to differentiate or individualize yourself, what observations have you had about mainstream culture?
LM: Wow. That is a hell of a lead off.
JH: Well, but I did ask how you were doing.
LM: Ha-ha, yeah, that's true, you did go with a "how you doing." Wow, you make me think. I would say that "individualize myself" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not so much that I seek to individualize myself as I seek to embrace my individuality. Individualizing yourself is redundant at best, possibly impossible. Just a non-notion in a way, because we're all individuals. That's just the nature of our being. It's one of those hard rules of existence. Nobody is not an individual. We are all different. So to individualize yourself, I guess the most charitable interpretation I could give that would be what I prefer to say, which is to embrace your individuality. To focus on the things that make you unique as opposed to downplaying them and playing up the things that make you more like other people. Rather than focusing on the things we have in common, I think it's better to focus on the things that are different, things that separate us out. Not separate us from each other, but separate us in terms of our own identity. As far as how that relates to having views on mainstream culture, I think the biggest one is that mainstream culture, particularly in the West in this particular period of history, tends to exemplify the opposite. It tends to encourage us to not embrace our individuality, to join in as sort of a cultural process. And I think we're better off and would be in a better state culturally if people took an educated self-interest view; if they looked at themselves as individuals rather than identify with groups. Like, you know, Republican, or straight or gay, or whatever group. If they just thought for themselves rather than saying, "oh, well how can I join in?" Rather than look at what makes me, me.
JH: Would you recommend a bifurcated tongue?
LM: Absolutely - if the person has an interest in tongue bifurcation I can say that my experience and that of all those I have ever known has been overwhelmingly positive. Still, like anything else in life it isn't for necessarily everyone.
JH: Do you see the world differently because of such a transformation?
LM: This is what I do for my own benefit because I want to and what I do as an entertainer and what I do as an entertainer and an artist has gradually brought my outer appearance more in line with the way people thought of me. When I was younger and first starting off, I was a freak because of my ideas and my views on the world. No big surprise there. Now, I'm viewed as a freak for the way that I look and the things that I do on stage. What's gone on before was, "oh, he's such a normal looking boy. How weird that he has these odd geopolitical notions and strange ideas about personal freedom," and things like that. Now it's, "look at him, he's a freak, he's tattooed completely green and he's shoving a sword down his throat." I pull it out and then say something outlandish about nationalism and international politics and they go, "hey, he's a freak on the outside, and he's got freaky ideas." But I always had the freaky ideas. They came first.
JH: What do your parents think about your appearance? Does The Lizardman go over well in family gatherings?
LM: My parents are very supportive and happy with what I have done. Certainly it wasn't exactly what they might have expected but like any good parent they are happy that I am happy.
JH: What do you do for the human spotlight act?
LM: I work a small powerful light bulb on a wire into my nose and down the back of my throat into my mouth while holding a crystal ball in my teeth. This focuses the light into a tight beam that I sweep over crowd. I rarely perform it but it's an interesting novelty.
JH: Has anything life threatening ever happened during a performance? Infections, misplaced sword, severe blood loss?
LM: The whole show is life threatening. I have had plenty of cuts, bruised ribs, burns and the like but the fact that I am alive means nothing too serious thus far - bad sideshow accidents tend to be fatal.
JH: Is gargantuan alcohol consumption part of the sideshow performance? I was watching one of your YouTube videos and you're just pounding beer after beer.
LM: I do drink. Alcohol is my drug of choice, which, given time and place and culture, is not surprising. It's an easy one to end up with. It isn't really necessary to the show, there's no necessary connection, and it's just something I like to do. I could have just as easily put up a video of me eating pizza. The pizza isn't necessary to anything, it just happens to be my favorite food. That particular video, if I'm thinking of the one you just referenced, is where I took a show and edited out all the times during the show where I took a drink and made one long video montage of them. It was kind of a curious thing. I had gone up to Minnesota for this weekend to do a show for a tattoo shop. It was a really good time but those guys love to drink. I mean I enjoy drinking. I have developed a reputation for drinking and long parties and stuff like that. These guys really drank, even in my estimation. So I thought it would be funny, especially with the number of drinks they brought me while I was performing, to figure out what percentage of my hour and twenty minute show that night ended up being drinking. By stringing them all together, I had the total video montage, and it turned out that somewhere around five percent of my performance amounted to raising a glass and taking a drink.
JH: It's like concerts in a way.
LM: Yeah, it is just weird, like you say; it's an interesting thing from the performer's view. It's always customary if you get a drink on stage, and I usually do, to toast the crowd, and then I start to think about how much time do I spend doing different things on stage.
What amount are jokes? What is the content of the show? Then to say, there are a lot of little actions, how do they figure in? From a stage psychology point of view, there are things like the way that George Burns used to smoke his cigar. People are really into the craft of performance, especially comedy and stand up. His cigar smoking was not just casual. Even though he might not have been thinking about it at the forefront of his mind, he was more thinking about the story and the joke he was telling, there was a method to his actions. The pauses, as opposed to just dropping a pause when you're speaking like you might as a stage actor with a soliloquy or something- which would seem really weird for comedian to do- but if he's stopping to take a drag on the cigar, he's giving you time to process the information he just gave you. He's finding something to do that's a motivated action that makes sense while the last laugh is trailing off or something like that. So there's a definite method, there's a craft. Some comedians use the drink that's in their hands, some people smoke cigarettes, other people have weird little quirks or stage pacing, stuff like that. There is a way to study it, look at it, and make it a legitimate part of the show. Or other times it's just hey, I was thirsty.
JH: Is there anything that you wouldn't do on stage? The list of things in your act is inclusive.
LM: Things I wouldn't do on stage? Take the list of things I wouldn't do in general and I wouldn't do them on stage, for starters. As for specifics, if it's things that I would do but wouldn't do on stage, it comes down to anything I thought was boring or not entertaining. I don't know that there's a hard fast rule that I would say, "I would absolutely never do this on stage," unless it's something that I would absolutely never do in any circumstance. I don't think I would ever sit on stage and clip my toenails, but who knows, maybe some weird avant-garde performance opportunity will pop up and I'll think to myself, "Wow! This is would be a great opportunity to clip my toenails as a symbol of something!" I don't think that's going to happen though.
JH: Probably not.
LM: I could go back and do some student gallery work like the one I did while I was in art school. That's the only sort of place that clipping your toenails ever gets a response. If you're maybe a freshman or sophomore art student.
JH: What did you do for art school?
LM: I attended Hartwick College , which is not far off from Syracuse , where I will be for AM-JAM. It is in Oneonta, and I studied art and philosophy there. Then I went on to study Philosophy in a doctoral program at the University of Albany . One day I woke up and realized how much debt, I was going into taking out loans for graduate school and said, "this is insane, and it's just for a little piece of paper, so I'm going to leave and go tour and make money instead of take out loans."
JH: Exactly the thing I'm trying to do, really.
LM: Right. It's weird because there was this whole time in my life where I thought I was going to be a teacher, probably a professor, and I still sort of like that idea. I grew up with both of my parents working as teachers. I guess now, as I get older it's starting to even out the amount of time I spent as a student, professional academic, versus anything else in my life. So, it's starting to catch up to a fifty-fifty balance. But I think it still holds the lion's share. So it's not that I don't have a great deal of respect for education and want people to be educated, but it's very easy for me to come up with reasons for people not to stay in school or not to go to school whatsoever. It's one of those things where I have the weird idea, which in this case I think is just a pragmatic idea, where people go, "you went to school, you're well educated. Tell them why they should go to school." I go, "Well, first of all, they have to make a financial consideration. What are they going to school for? Can they make more money by going and getting real world experience right now? People are not going to ask me to encourage their kids to go to school unless their kid is going to be like a nuclear physicist or something where there is no other option.
JH: Then you could come up with the money to pay for the degrees.
LM: Right. And it's one of those things where I'm like, "look, in the best of worlds, given the way our culture raises children, most people at eighteen, nineteen years old, when you go and start college, are in the no position to begin the serious learning that happens there. They don't have the focus. That's why college freshmen are, by and large, and I fit perfectly into this category, fairly obnoxious. Nothing really good comes out of your freshman year, other than the parties and the people and everything else. If you're eighteen, nineteen, you're strong, you're healthy. Go work construction. Go make an ass load of money. Get a little time in the real world, gain some maturity, come back, then your freshman year would actually be a valuable part of the four years rather than the one year long hangover that it takes for you to snap out of it and then start paying attention in class, hopefully, by your sophomore year. Some people never stop paying attention. If I look at the courses, I took my freshman year and the things I did, academically that was pretty much a wash. What that was about was getting a feel for my campus, and the campus politics, meeting other people, stuff like that, and laying a foundation. But I could have done all that in a month. That would have been one semester instead of a year, maybe a week even. Now in my life, I can walk into that situation and take much better advantage of it, because I'm a lot older and I have a lot better ideas on how to approach things like that. If I had taken two years off, I could have earned enough money to put away in the bank, have a bit nicer way of living, and eat less crappy food.
JH: And you probably would have ended up a completely different person.
LM: Yeah, potentially, or it might have accelerated. Because the idea of transforming my body, the very earliest seed of it, started my senior year of high school, which I split kind of in half going to high school and commuting to take courses at the nearby state college. If I had time to go out in the world and make sense of things and approach it so I got into a framework, like the art department and the philosophy department, the people that I was working with, I might have developed it a lot better and a lot quicker. So starting later could have meant finishing earlier, in respect of if you make better time. If you take that lag of, "okay I'm just the deranged park animal with some freedom, finally," things happen a lot quicker.
JH: What are you planning on doing next to your body?
LM: Currently, I am focused on finishing the tattooing.
JH: Is there anything else that we can look forward to?
LM: AM-JAM has always been interesting. I think it's been my first show of the year for a number of years. Usually not a lot happens early in January, just coming off Christmas and all that. This means I usually have a lot of time at home, which is where many strange ideas occur to me. They get to ruminate and I talk myself into something being a good idea whether it is or not, so it is always kind of interesting. This year it will actually be my second show of the year because I'm flying to Istanbul to do a TV show earlier in that week. When I land, coming back from Turkey , I will be getting a rental car and driving to New York right off the plane, pretty much. But for the show specifically, it's going to be nine years for me, doing stuff at AM-JAM. In the beginning, I was just kind of showing up, hanging out, and just doing odd stuff. Laying on a bed of nails and really just laying there because nothing else is happening on the stage, or other times I was a living catwalk for a leather fashion show one year. I just lay on the bed of nails and all the models stood up on top of me to show off the outfit, stepped down, and moved around. Then as I developed more and more of a stage show, things developed. Some years it would just be, do a couple of stunts, other years it was to put together a performance set. Last year we did an interesting thing where I did the family friendly sideshow stuff in the afternoons and then really dirty adult comedy. I started doing more and more straight stand up with no stunts. This year I've got a similar idea going on. There's a version of my show I've been scripting and working on ever since coming out of Halloween where I spent the entire month of October in Vegas. So there's going to be some of those Vegas elements I want to bring up. And there's going to be some magic tricks and some other jokes that I'm going to put into the mix. So really, as usual, AM-JAM is going to be the test run for the 2008 additions, revisions, and subtractions from the show. So it's a chance to see from what I've been doing, what the show was from last year, what this year's version is kind of going to be. So, the AM-JAM people are like the test audience and such. So I know I'll have a good time and I know they'll have a good time but by the same token I'll be able to tweak and look and say, "alright, how am I going to take this throughout the year and see where it ends up?"
JH: It would be the perfect time to do that, too.
LM: Mmhhmm.
JH: Yeah, have fun in Istanbul .
LM: I'm looking forward to it! It's really one of the places that I haven't gotten to go. I want to. But there are many places that I haven't gotten to go that I'm not actually trying to, but then they fall in your lap. I got the phone call and they were like, "would you consider coming to Istanbul , Turkey ?" And I was like, "yeah, I was never planning on going there, but the opportunity arises, I'll go check it out!" It should be a nice throwback. I mean I've got my possible philosophy tie. So I can look around and be like, "ooh, Constantinople , Istanbul ," old buildings and stuff like that fascinate me, so I'm looking forward to it.
JH: Your media coverage is quite a long list.
LM: Yeah. The list online is very poor documenting or at least very poor transcribing onto the websites and things like that for this past year or so. So there's actually even more than what's there. I've been having and continue to have a pretty good run. It's been about ten years now that I've been primarily focused on doing sideshow and working as an entertainer and more and more things keep coming along.
JH: Is there anything else that we haven't covered?
LM: I'm sure there are things that we haven't covered, but so long as we cover things that you want to cover, I think we'll be all right.
Maybe this next issue will be what it takes to get the Hartwick alumni to be proud of the freak alumnus. They focus on, what's his name, the guy that does Dilbert. He tends to be the entertainment reference that they make.
JH: Not you?
LM: I don't seem to get a lot of love from the alumni association at Hartwick. They still ask me for donations every year, but other than that I think there's a couple of professors that maybe make an aside mention of me in a class now and then, but other than that, I don't get a lot from them.
JH: Why do you think that is?
LM: I don't know. I think it might be partially lack of awareness. Given, sort of demographic-wise, it's a lot more likely that most of the students there, falling into the sixteen to thirty-five range which tends to be the core of my fans and people who are aware of me and what I do. The students there probably know who I am, but they don't necessarily know I'm an alumnus from the college they're attending. But I'm betting that a lot of the professors don't really follow their students lives unless they hang around, so they probably don't even realize that the student they had became the Lizard Man, other than the one or two that I know do. You know, the people who work administration, they're going to be completely out of touch. Probably some of them have kids that are coming home form elementary school with the Ripley's book that I'm on the cover of, and their looking at it going, "Oh! What a weirdo!" I was their classmate. I would almost guarantee that there are a number of people I graduated with that would have no idea that they went school and graduated with the Lizard Man. Such is life.
