Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  The circus was small. There were only five performers, which meant that just being a juggler (me), or a tightrope walker (Francesca), or trapeze artist (Pierre), or an acrobat (Robert) wasn’t enough. Even though each of us had our specialty, we all had to do a bit of everything. Leticia, who didn’t really have any circus skills, was the director and main clown. For ten hours a day I practiced acrobatics, tightrope walking, stilts, trapeze, and slapstick. When I wasn’t working on that stuff, I was teaching the others how to juggle. It was hard work, I was always sore, and my armpits were in constant pain from jumping off a three-high twenty times a day.

  The three-high was the most dangerous part of the show, so we had to practice it incessantly, as there was no room for error. It was a difficult trick. Francesca would jump up on Robert’s shoulders using his calf as a kind of springboard to launch off of. I would do the same thing to get up on Pierre’s shoulders so he could transfer me to Robert and Francesca. The complicated part was getting from Pierre’s shoulders to Francesca’s. We had tried various ways of getting me up there, but almost all of them ended up with me swinging through the air in the harness I was attached to. Francesca wasn’t tied in, and if I didn’t send her off balance while trying to get on her shoulders, I would usually knock her down when I came swinging back in her direction. Robert, who was trying to hold all of us up, didn’t seem to be enjoying it much either, but Leticia was adamant that this was going to be the grand finale with me juggling three clubs up on top. Eventually I figured out how to get up there, but the next problem was how to get down. The idea was for all three of us to jump at the same time, cued by a count-off from the band. The band hadn’t started rehearsing with us yet, so Leticia would count off for us. Francesca would jump backward to get out of my way while I fell straight down to be caught by Robert. When he did manage to catch me, he would grab my underarms so tightly that after five attempts what started as a yelp of pain became a scream. By the twentieth jump I was forcing back tears. This went on every day, with Leticia reminding us there wouldn’t be a harness in the show, which caused Robert to grip my armpits even harder. It didn’t take me long to start hating that guy.

  THE FARM WAS part circus rehearsal space, part punk-rock club, part apartment complex, part animal farm, part community garden, part preschool, and part anything else that could bring in a few extra bucks. When the circus finally started the new season, I began staying at The Farm since there was no way I could make it from Marin County to wherever we were performing by 6:00 a.m. The guy who ran The Farm, a lawyer named Andy, assured my mom that I would be fine there, and I started sharing an apartment that was built into one of the two airplane hangars attached to the back of the main building, with a night nurse from San Francisco General Hospital. The other hangar was home to a group called Survival Research Laboratories, which built huge, evil-looking robots whose only purpose was to destroy each other. Although I hated waking up at 5:00 a.m. and not getting home till 10:00 p.m., I enjoyed living in that madhouse. The residents were mostly self-obsessed creative types who held menial jobs in order to support their art.

  My roommate, whom I rarely saw because our schedules were so different, seemed to be the exception. The only thing I could find out about her that might be considered unique was that she chewed tobacco. At least she had left a can of Skoal lying around in the apartment, and having nothing better to do, I decided to try it one night. I immediately started sweating and puked all over the floor before I could make it to the communal bathroom down the hall. I couldn’t understand why anyone would chew that stuff. I remembered getting sick when I drank that bottle of wine, but mostly I remembered being funny and entertaining. This stuff only made me sick. I still felt nauseated the next day while performing in Tracy, a town between San Francisco and Fresno. I couldn’t be certain whether I was still feeling ill from the chewing tobacco or from the ninety-degree heat and Tracy’s overwhelming smell of manure. In either case, it was all I could do not to vomit standing on top of the three-high for our grand finale.

  OUR SHOW WAS split into three parts. The first part we referred to as the Adult Show. The story line was a political commentary on the Reagan administration, as told through juggling, trapeze, tightrope walking, and a misguided elephant that would repeatedly appear onstage to ruin our acts. I was too small for the elephant costume, which required two people to operate. Everyone but me took shifts in it since it came out to ruin everyone’s act at least once. The audience would go nuts every time it came out to knock me over, right as I was about to be the first person ever in the world to juggle fifteen balls. The Adult Show got that name not because of the political theme, but because before I had joined, only adults performed in it.

  The big selling points of our circus, at least when it came to applying for grants, were the second two parts: the Workshop and the Kids’ Show. Our audiences consisted of kids, ages five to twelve, and their parents. After we in the Adult Show did our thing, four of us would hold workshops with the kids for another hour or so, teaching them to walk on the tightrope, juggle, do somersaults, and so on. Pierre got to sit the second half out, since it would have been a terrible idea to let inexperienced kids swing from the forty-foot trapeze. It didn’t even seem like a very good idea to let him do it. Instead of a net, we put a six-inch-thick piece of foam directly under the trapeze, and Robert would stand there, pretending to be ready to catch him should he lose his grip. The four-foot strip of foam was all for show. Once Pierre got swinging, it was far more likely that he would have landed out in the audience, or hopefully on top of the truck parked backstage, than into the armpit-destroying hands of Robert.

  My workshops ranged in size from ten to twenty-five kids, depending on the turnout, and I had only an hour to get them ready for the Kids’ Show. I wasn’t a very good teacher, but there were always two or three kids who could actually keep three balls in the air after only an hour. I became pretty good at spotting the ones with no talent and would hand them some scarves to throw around. There was always at least one crier, but most of the kids were pretty excited to be in the circus for a few hours, showing off their new skills, juggling scarves or doing somersaults in the ring. I didn’t like being around kids that much and didn’t really know how to talk to them. They all seemed so immature and directionless to me. The workshops were one of my least favorite parts of being in the circus.

  I had a lot of least favorite parts.

  Waking up at 5:00 a.m. every morning sucked. I hated Robert more than anyone, but he lived closer to The Farm than anyone else, so he was there every morning to pick me up. Getting rides from Robert sucked.

  Upon arrival at the site, I had the unfortunate job of picking up dog shit. I wouldn’t have been so opposed to it had the job not come with the official title Pooper Scooper. It may have been intended to make the job cute-sounding, but for some reason that title had the opposite effect on me. It was actually a high-pressure job, considering we couldn’t really begin setting up until the area was shit-free, but instead of lending a hand, everyone else would stand around impatiently, watching me pick up feces. If we were really running late, the other members would walk around looking for dog shit, and yell, “Pooper scooper!” at the top of their lungs. I would then run over and pick the shit up with one of my clear plastic bags. Picking up dog shit sucked.

  After setting up, which took about four hours, it was time to get into costume in preparation for the arrival of the kids, who would start showing up around 10:00 a.m. I had to put on a pair of blue tights, a red leotard, and a pair of shorts that had been painted to look like Jackson Pollock made them. Then I would walk around the audience in full clown makeup and hand out brochures. Being a clown was one thing, but feeling like a clown sucked.

  Setting up, performing, and then teaching, often in ninety-degree heat, was a tough job. It was usually three o’clock by the time we took off our outfits, at which point it was time to tear down. Tearing down after what had already been a grueling ten-hour day reall
y fucking sucked.

  I did my best to smile and keep my feelings to myself. I even told people that being in the circus was fun. Every kid’s dream. That kind of shit. A local news station shot a segment on me and when they asked why I wanted to be in the circus, I gave them my stock answer. What else was I going to say? I had no idea why anyone would want to be in the circus, but when I saw myself on TV, it did look pretty convincing. No one seemed to question my enthusiasm, which is why I was stunned when Leticia told me I wasn’t going to be performing in the next season.

  “You’re kicking me out? What did I do?” I asked her. I was devastated, not because I would no longer be in the circus, but because I was being rejected. It was my first clear sign of failure. What had I done wrong? I worked my ass off for these people. I didn’t know what to say. I was paralyzed, which was the only thing that kept me from crying.

  “Listen, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just a lot of work taking a kid on the road, and…well, actually, it’s even harder dealing with your mom. We’ve all got too much going on to be able to talk to your mom every day, and frankly, it’s not so easy to tell whether you’re here because you want to be or because of her.”

  I stared at her, trying to figure out the answer to that one. Not my answer, but the right answer. In that moment it seemed as if the rest of my life depended on it.

  “Of course I want to be in the circus. This is what I do. I don’t have anything else.”

  Leticia looked at me dubiously. “Okay, but we’ve all been under the impression that if it wasn’t for your mom, you’d be doing something else. I mean, you’re a great juggler but…. Listen, this is what we’ll do. You can’t come on the road with us, but we’ll keep you on for the local shows. Okay?”

  I was still seething when I smiled and said thank you. It was only a few minutes before I found myself wishing that they had just kicked me out. I didn’t want to spend fourteen hours a day with these motherfuckers, who didn’t want me around anyway. Assholes. Come to think of it, I did hate the circus, but I really wanted to live at The Farm again during the next season.

  TO MAKE MATTERS worse, my mom, Kyle, and I moved to Berkeley, shortening the commute to San Francisco considerably. When spring came around, and we started rehearsing again, I didn’t get to live at The Farm anyway. Mom decided that instead of waking up at 5:30 in the morning, I could just as easily wake up at 4:00 and take BART in to the city. Every kid’s dream.

  It was another six months of unrelenting physical pain, and if I thought I was tired before, I was now always on the verge of exhaustion. I was lucky if I made it home by ten, but no matter how tired I seemed to be, I would get insomnia from thinking about the various problems I had with almost everyone I knew: Leticia, for being a bitch; Robert, for his unrelenting abuse of my armpits; and of course my mom for waking me up at four every morning after not sleeping because all these people were out to get me. It was getting harder to hide my discontent, except for those couple of hours when I put on my clown makeup, leotard, and tights and did my best to pretend I was enjoying myself.

  I was becoming more and more drawn to The Farm. The punks, hippies, anarchists, and other indefinable weirdos held a strange attraction for me. I didn’t have a room there anymore, but I was able to talk Andrew into letting me sleep in any available corner of the place, rather than come back and forth from Berkeley. I usually slept on or behind the stage, but when they started having more punk-rock shows in the main space, he gave me a key to the preschool downstairs.

  It wasn’t the best arrangement, considering the stage was directly over my head. It was so noisy I couldn’t sleep at all, but in the beginning I was too afraid to go upstairs. Judging from the characters drinking and smoking outside, it didn’t seem to be much of an atmosphere for kids. After the third night of trying to sleep through one of these shows, I gave up and went upstairs to see what was going on.

  There were hundreds of people up there. The most insane people I had ever seen. Mohawks, leather pants, tattoos, nose rings, and one guy who had shaved most of his head except for two very realistic devil horns that he had sculpted out of his hair. These people looked how I felt. Pissed off. I liked them even though I was completely invisible. No one bothered me up there except Andrew, who spotted me and asked, “Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

  “How the fuck am I supposed to sleep through this?” I yelled at him.

  “Listen, I don’t care what you do. I’m only bringing it up so if your mom asks me why you fell asleep in the middle of your show tomorrow, I can tell her I told you to go sleep.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I won’t tell my mom. What’s going on in there anyway?”

  “These guys are called the Circle Jerks. What do you think?” he asked, grinning.

  “It sounds like shit,” I said, leaning close to him so as not to offend anyone. As much as I was drawn to the crowd’s look and demeanor, the music was terrible.

  Like most white music, the stuff lacked any soul whatsoever. So much so that it almost seemed intentional, as if a whole lot of effort went into taking every ounce of soul out of it. How did people dance to this stuff?

  I found out when I walked into the theater. At ten years old I was still a foot and a half shorter than most people there, and they were packed in like sardines. It took me almost five minutes to get ten feet into the place to see what was going on. Insanity. A circle of spectators was watching fifty or so people running around in circles and beating one another up. Every few seconds someone would climb onstage and jump out on top of the audience. I’d never seen anything like it.

  I watched for as long as I could, but without any warning I kept getting slammed into by these huge, sweaty, leather-clad punk rockers. I made my way to the bleachers in the back of the room, hoping to find a safer place to watch from. Even though I had to wake up in a few hours, put on my leotard, and juggle for the kids, I decided to hang around. The circus seemed lame compared to this, but why did the music have to be so shitty? No wonder everyone was flailing around, hitting and kicking each other.

  The next day was brutal. I had stayed up for the last band, Black Flag, and didn’t get more than three hours of sleep. I was glad I saw them, though, because watching the singer of Black Flag run around in his underwear like an asshole made me feel slightly better about having to wear my fucking leotard the next day. I was over it. Sick of commuting, sick of waking up at 5:00 a.m., sick of wearing my hideous clown outfit, and most of all, sick of pretending to everyone and my mother that this was what I wanted to do with my life. I was fucking tired of the whole thing.

  This time I knew I wasn’t going to be asked back, which was fine with me, because I had a secret fantasy of going back to school and being a normal kid for once in my life. I didn’t know more than one or two other kids my own age, and the people I called friends were ten to fifteen years older than I was. I couldn’t wait for the season to end, even though it meant no more hanging out at The Farm. In the meantime, I decided I would go to as many punk-rock shows as I could, regardless of how tired I was. It turned out I really could juggle in my sleep, but the backflips and tumbling were hard. Aside from clearing the park of dog shit, I had pretty much stopped helping out with any of the setup. I told Mom I wanted to go back to school, and she agreed that it wasn’t a bad idea.

  eight

  In which our subject tries to escape from the powerful clutch of Chiva and is transformed into a bull-person

  CAROLINER PICKED ME up at seven in the morning in an old ’64 stretch Suburban airport limo. There were five of us in the band, so, with two people up front, the other three got their own bench seat. It was more comfortable than touring in Eli’s old Datsun. I decided to take the first stretch up front and see how nuts this Grux was for myself. Not that there was any rush. I had a whole month to get to know these guys.

  “Grrrrrreh,” he said as I climbed in.

  “Hey, I’m Oran.”

  “Grux,” he responded, but it di
dn’t sound a whole lot different from the grunt he had greeted me with. We drove in silence for a long time. There was no doubt the guy was kind of strange. He had obviously made his own clothes out of God knows what, and he was wearing a pair of homemade cardboard sunglasses with long sharp angles that shot out all over the place, covering everything from his cheeks to the top of his forehead. All of it—clothes, shoes, sunglasses, and probably even his underwear—was covered in Day-Glo paint. I couldn’t help thinking that if he had been wearing regular clothes he would have been absolutely unnoticeable. Almost invisible.

  After about an hour or two, he said, or rather grunted, without looking at me, “So what’s your deal?”

  After all that silence, it didn’t seem like a few more awkward minutes would hurt.

  “What’s my deal?” I eventually said, hoping he would figure out that it was a stupid question.

  “What do you do? What do you listen to? That kind of thing. Your deal.”

  “Well, I’m not sure what my deal is, but yeah, I play music, and I listen to it, as well.”

  He waited for more, but I left it at that. It was his turn to look at me as though I were crazy, which is what I was going for. Then he called back to Jeremy.

  “Where’d you say you found this guy?”

  Jeremy was asleep, so we drove on in silence for a while longer. I had pegged Grux as being just as uncomfortable and awkward as me, only he had developed a different system for getting by in a world that he didn’t understand. It was pretty clever, really. Where I acted cool and indifferent in order to keep people at arm’s length, Grux’s method was to wear Day-Glo-covered homemade clothes and communicate through a series of grunts and yells.

  “Seriously, though. What do you listen to?”

  Again I decided it was a stupid question, so I decided to give him a stupid answer.