The Best American Essays 2013 Page 6

  I hadn’t noticed the painted numbers next to the vestibules. The car we stood at was 101. I looked back down the line. The next one was 102. I turned and walked. Only fifty-one cars to go. The sunbather was at 137, the window washer at 148. Car 152 was in the good neighborhood. It was a dining car. Of course, circus people eat. Red vinyl booths, center aisle, Formica counter. A cook in a chef’s hat scrubbed a grill. “Closed,” he said.

  “Schwartzy here?”

  The cook looked down to the end of the car where a baldheaded man squinted from behind bars. I walked toward the barred window. I saw the sign: PAYMASTER. “Hi,” I said. Schwartzy was unusually short, with one wayward eyeball, maybe made of glass.

  Circus people don’t meet and greet. No one says hello, or goodbye, or what’s up. They tend to stare at you until you state your business, and if you don’t, or if your business isn’t particularly intriguing, they walk away. And many of the administrative circus people, like Schwartzy and Backdoor Jack, had physical afflictions: missing limbs, clubfeet, harelips, purple splotches on their faces, and they all limped. This guy Schwartzy watched me through the bars. I tried to get a fix on which eye was doing the seeing, to which I should be directing my request.

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if you had any job openings.”

  “Are you a diesel mechanic?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “I need a diesel mechanic.”

  “I was once a dishwasher.” I was in a dining car, after all.

  He shook his head. “Try concessions.”

  “Concessions?”

  “At the building, see Bobby Johnson, he may have something for you.”

  “The building?”

  He turned his back on the window.

  I headed back to the civic center—the building.

  Concessionaires were young and hung out front by the ticket windows, a bunch of them wearing candy-cane-striped smocks and setting up souvenir stands. They were hawkers, vendors, watching for anyone with money. “Hey you, come ’ere, how much money you got?”

  “I’m looking for work,” I said. “Do you know Bobby Johnson?”

  “Do I know Bobby Johnson?” The kid was about my age, sitting on a box with his back to a wagon; he looked over at a tall black guy with a goatee who was piecing together a program display. “Hey, Pierre, do we know Bobby Johnson?”

  It was clear that they did. “Do you know where he is?” I said.

  “Do we know where he is?” He turned his face toward the open door of the wagon; inside I saw a desk, a swivel chair, a bunch of cardboard boxes. “Does anyone know Bobby Johnson?” It was clear too, he was messing with me.

  Bobby Johnson, head of concessions, was inside the wagon, and, incredibly, he wore a black eye patch. He was tall, thin, and soft-spoken. He shook his head sadly. “I got nothing now,” he said. “Why don’t you head over to the red show? They’re right down the road in Philadelphia.” Ringling had two traveling units back then, red and blue; now they have a third, gold show, traveling different routes simultaneously. I had never been out of New England; Philadelphia, right down the road to this guy, might as well have been in Greece.

  Not ten feet away the black guy, Pierre, suddenly bellowed, “Programs! Get your programs!” There were absolutely no ticket buyers; the show didn’t start for three hours. The front of the building overlooked a plaza facing downtown Providence. Men and women in business suits slogged out of office buildings and headed for parking garages. Pierre kept roaring, “Programs!” It was baffling and earsplitting. People two blocks away turned their heads.

  At one point his boss, Bobby Johnson, poked his head out the door of the wagon and said, “Pierre, shut up, please.” But the guy kept hollering. Johnson was a quiet man; I bent to hear what he said, which was, “Sorry, no jobs.” At that point I gave up. In spite of romantic notions to the contrary, it seemed clear that one didn’t simply decide to join the circus and have them issue you a bandanna and a tambourine. I was doomed to my squalid apartment, junkie roommate, and brick washing.

  But when I turned to go, Pierre stopped shouting and said, “Half these guys will quit when we go west.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’? You want a job, don’t you? All the guys you see here will quit when we go west.” He raised his voice, shouting into the wagon, “Won’t they, Bobby? Won’t they quit when we go west?” Then to me, “Happens every year. You come to Albuquerque, he’ll put you on.” He gave me a reassuring nod. “Won’t you, Bobby? Won’t you put him on if he comes to Albuquerque?”

  The boss poked his head out the door again. I watched his one good eye. Was he nodding? He was nodding. “Yeah,” he said. “We always need help in Albuquerque.”

  “See, told you, come to Albuquerque you’ll have a job. Programs!”

  Upon further questioning, it became clear that this show was about to make one of their longest jumps of the season, a three-day run from the next town, Boston, across the country to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They rarely had runs that long, and when they did they always lost a lot of help. “Most of these guys are easterners,” Pierre said. “They don’t want to go out west. Happens when we come back too, the westerners all quit.”

  If Philadelphia was Greece, Albuquerque was another planet. I was raised in Rhode Island; my travel experience was limited to six-hour traffic jams each summer when my parents tried to get us to Cape Cod in July. I had twenty-five cents to my name. All I knew about Albuquerque was I would need a plane to get there, and I knew plane tickets cost more than a quarter. Walking back to my apartment, I reasoned it out. The circus was in Boston two weeks; two brick-washer paychecks at sixty bucks each; if I held out on the rent, paid weekly, I would have $120. I stopped at a phone and invested ten of my twenty-five cents to discover that one-way to Albuquerque was $80. Eureka! If I could dodge my landlord and roommates for a couple weeks, I would run away to join the circus.

  I know you are thinking, What an idiot. What a ridiculous plan. But I had nothing in Providence. Is it possible to run away from nothing to something? Is that a romantic notion? Or a rational decision for a teenage brick washer earning $1.60 per hour and living with junkies? I wasn’t a junkie myself, though I tried heroin a couple times when it was free. You can see why I shy from revealing this information to my esteemed colleagues. Why I leave the segment of my life called “Circus” off my curriculum vitae.

  My plan, desperate, idiotic, or otherwise, did work. Two weeks after spotting that alluring white train in the grimy Providence train yard, I arrived in Albuquerque. It wasn’t easy dodging my landlord; in fact I spent the final two nights before departure sleeping at the airport. I landed in Albuquerque with $7—and here is where luck kicked in; here is where a truly romantic notion surfaced, a notion that there is a benevolent God somewhere watching over idiots, drunks, children, innocents of all types. Certainly I fit the category. If the circus people had turned me away in Albuquerque that day, I don’t know what I would have done with $7 and no return ticket. As it was, I had been worried about where the circus building was located and how I would get there, and lo and behold, divine intervention, the old Albuquerque civic auditorium, long since torn down, was within sight of the airport. The circus was in full view when I stepped off the plane into the dry New Mexico heat.

  You are thinking here, This is where it turns romantic, right? Now we get the story as seen on TV: My Season Under the Big Top. But no. I did get a job that day. I found Bobby Johnson. He seemed only mildly surprised to see me, and he turned me over to a Mexican who handed me a heavy red board with twenty-five puffy beehives of cotton candy stuck to it. “Fifty cents,” he said. “Come back when they’re gone.”

  “Come back?” He pointed to blue doors leading into the arena. I heard the music blasting, the ringmaster’s garbled exclamations, the applause and exhortations of the crowd. I headed out, in actually, to the beginning of my circus career. I stayed ten years. That first day I earned about $2, and it wa
s harder than brick washing. My last day, just shy of my twenty-eighth birthday, I declined a contract guaranteeing me six figures over ten months where I would work a total of sixteen minutes a day. By then I had had about every circus job available except animal training. I was on concessions, wardrobe, ring curb, transportation, rigging. Finally, high-wire walking was as high as I cared to go. I could have gone for a management position, show director, or a job at the main office in Washington, D.C.; I could have made a life of it. Ringling is a solid organization, the core of Feld Entertainment, the largest producer of live family entertainment in the world. They own all the ice shows you have ever heard of, as well as Disney on Parade, plus permanent shows in Vegas and Atlantic City and two traveling units overseas. Working for them is not much different from working at AT&T or Walmart. They have benefits and retirement plans, a credit union, organizations to protect retired animals and performers, and lobbyists to check the PETA people. But I had had enough of it. In ten years on the show, I had saved enough money to pay for a college education, and that was what I wanted. So I ran off to join a school. It has worked out. I am still here. After fifteen years, I am no longer a first-of-May teacher: I have tenure, people call me “Professor,” and I no longer succumb to the allure of white trains.

  It is not that romantic notions didn’t crop up along the way, especially with the wire walking; it was just that when they did, I found them hard to relate to, absurd even. Once, being interviewed by a young blond newspaper reporter, I let it slip that my wire-walking days were nearing an end. The poor girl, wide-eyed, wouldn’t accept it. “No,” she said. “It’s your life!” Well, okay, if that was what she wanted to believe. When seeking to charm young blond newspaper reporters, any romantic notion will do. But it wasn’t my life. It was something I learned by steadfast practice, worked at for seven years, got paid well for, and quit.

  About romance there are a lot of misconceptions.

  Back in the eighties, I knew a hairdresser in New York, a young man with his own shop on the Upper East Side, a great business, appointments a month in advance, no new clients—this guy was talented and booked solid, $85 haircuts. One day, while cutting my hair, he told me he was closing the business, moving to Orlando, Florida. I naturally figured he was going to a more lucrative market. “That’s sad news for me,” I said, “but great for you, cutting the hair of Disney stars at two hundred bucks a pop.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m done with hair.”

  “What! You’re a genius stylist. You’ve got people begging you to cut their hair. How can you give up something you’re born to do?”

  He flabbergasted me by stating that he had enrolled in lion-training school. Citing my circus background, I expressed doubt about the existence of such a thing. “It exists,” he told me. “Magicians and wild cats, like Siegfried and Roy, making tigers disappear and whatnot.”

  Realizing he was serious, I suggested that such an outlandish, long-shot, unstable vocation was a major departure from the dependable occupation he enjoyed as a topnotch New York hairdresser. “Hairdresser,” he said. “Big deal.”

  “Think of your future, man!”

  “That’s what I’m thinking about,” he said. “I’m married. I’m going to have a kid.” He stopped cutting and pointed his scissors at me. “And no kid wants a dad who is a hairdresser.” He paused, stared up at the ceiling, as if at any moment the spotlight might find him. “A lion tamer,” he said. “That’s something a kid can state with pride. ‘My dad is a lion tamer!’”

  It was hard to argue.

  That was the end of a great hairdresser. I don’t know if he ever made it in the land of Siegfried and Roy. Even Siegfried and Roy didn’t make it in the land of Siegfried and Roy, whose show, by the way, was owned by Feld Entertainment. The problem with romantic notions is the notions part. Notions are fleeting; they go away. One minute you are making a tiger vanish; the next moment he is having you for dinner. Being eaten by tigers is not romantic.

  I knew another guy, a fifth-generation circus performer in Italy, who dreamed about running away to join a town, an American town, specifically, Reno, Nevada. He wanted to dress up like an Old West gambler with a black vest and bolero tie and deal cards in a casino. That was his dream. All day, when he wasn’t working in his family’s show, he practiced card tricks, card shuffling, card manipulations. He was good at it. But he couldn’t leave his family, because for two hundred years they had run this tent show all over Europe. The family needed him to work. It wasn’t in his blood, his parents told him, to emigrate to America and become a cardsharp. He was a circus person, of an old and respected family; it was inconceivable that he slip fate and fly to Reno. There was a loyalty issue; he felt guilty for abandoning his family even in spirit. The circus bored him to death, literally; he became depressed, and after many years committed suicide. His way of running away, I guess. Suicide is not romantic.

  Some people, usually young males, think it is romantic to go to war, to be honorable and brave with your buddies in glorious battle. But when your balls are blown off, it is not romantic. What will Dad say to the guys at the VFW? My son got his nuts shot off? Even if Dad’s own balls are sufficient to say that, it won’t be glorious. He will cry in his beer. His buddies will think, Poor bastard, and pat his back. That is not romantic. That is pitiful. How will Junior get a girlfriend now? How will Dad be a grandpappy? How will progeny be maintained? What will Mom say to the neighbors? There are many questions when romantic notions are dashed.

  Maybe romantic is going out to Wyoming and roping a wild bronco. But after you get out of the hospital, you have to feed the son of a bitch. He bites and kicks and doesn’t take kindly to the saddle, and after you get out of the hospital again, you neglect and abandon him, and the PETA people haul your ass into court—there is no romance in court, ever.

  Maybe all this romantic crap is Hollywood’s fault, our need to escape by sitting before a television. In real life, romantic heroes are unclean. Cowboys, pirates, explorers, soldiers—those guys never bathe. Audie Murphy was famous for playing himself in movies. Who knows Robert L. Howard or Joe Hooper? Both are soldiers more decorated than Murphy. Sports heroes are sweaty and full of chemicals. Astronauts in tight capsules do not have Jacuzzis. In real life, heroes stink. But we have Hollywood to keep them fresh and wholesome. John Wayne was a bigot, but not on the big screen. His white hat didn’t even pick up dust when he rode across the desert; he didn’t bleed or sweat. Ted Williams was too cheap to eat at restaurants; he gave Boston baseball fans the finger. Joe DiMaggio was moody and mean-spirited. He was mentally cruel to poor Marilyn, one of our most fragile and enduring romantic legends.

  When I questioned my poet friend carefully, it turned out that his grandfather, age eighteen, hadn’t actually run off at all. His mother knew exactly where he was all the time. In fact, he saved his dirty laundry in a duffel bag until the circus came within hoofing distance of his home, and then he would meet Mom and exchange his dirty clothes for clean and folded. Mom probably had an apple pie and a couple sandwiches in her cache as well. “Why did you say ‘run off’?” I asked the poet. He suggested the circus, like gypsy life, is simply associated with footloose freedom by those of us earning a living in cubicles and classrooms. “Metaphorical freedom,” he said. “We’re susceptible to it.” Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, seems to agree. “Circuses attract that element in the psyche that craves symbolic and dreamlike experiences. When work, facts, and literal issues are our main focus, we have a desperate need for liberation.”

  My esteemed colleague admitted the cliché of it all, the romantic nonsense of the possibility of escaping who we are. He told me about walking his dog outside on a very clear winter night. He lives out in the country, and he was dazzled—actually, literally starstuck—by the vivid constellations. He said words were not failing him; he kept thinking dazzling, alluring, glittering, transcending. He thought, Andromeda. Cepheus. Ursa Major, Canis Minor. And then he thought, What th
e hell am I thinking? I can’t write a poem about the stars! That’s the ultimate cliché, the most romantic nonsense going. I’m turning into one of my students. What’s next? Hallmark cards? He chuckled and called his dog. “Where are you, hound major?” He walked home, watching his snowy boots.

  As a writer, I spent years hiding and denying my connection to the circus because I had the romantic notion that fiction writers simply made things up out of thin air or their intrinsic, God-given genius. An idea, I see now, about as crazy as running away to join the circus.

  VANESSA VESELKA

  Highway of Lost Girls

  FROM GQ

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1985, somewhere near Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, the body of a young woman was pulled from a truck-stop dumpster. I had just hitched a ride and was sitting in a nearby truck waiting for the driver to pay for gas so we could leave. When they found her, there was shouting. A man from the restaurant ran out and started yelling for everyone to stay away as a small crowd gathered around the dumpster in the rain. Word filtered back that the dead girl was a teenage hitchhiker. I remember thinking it could be me, since I was also a teenage hitchhiker. Watching the driver of my truck walk back across the wet asphalt, a second thought arose: It could be him. He could be the killer. The driver reached the cab, swung up behind the wheel, and said we should get going. He said he didn’t want to get caught up in anything time-consuming. Stowing his paperwork, he released the brake. Neither of us said anything about the dead girl. As we pulled away, I looked once more in the side mirror. They were stringing crime tape around the dumpster just as another state trooper rolled into the lot.

  That ride turned out to be fine. We drove up to Ohio drinking Diet Coke and listening to Bruce Springsteen. The trucker bought me lunch and didn’t even try to have sex with me, which made him a prince in my world. Several days later, though, heading south on I-95 through the Carolinas, I got picked up by another trucker, who was not fine. I don’t remember much about him except that he was taller and leaner than most truckers and didn’t wear jeans or T-shirts. He wore a cotton button-down with the sleeves rolled neatly up over his biceps and had the cleanest cab I ever saw. He must have seemed okay or I wouldn’t have gotten in the truck with him. Once out on the road, though, he changed. He stopped responding to my questions. His bearing shifted. He grew taller in his seat, and his face muscles relaxed into something both arrogant and blank. Then he started talking about the dead girl in the dumpster and asked me if I’d ever heard of the Laughing Death Society. “We laugh at death,” he told me.