Barney handed each of us a banana. He stepped to the gorilla cage and held the flashlight so that it shone on his face.
“I’m sorry, Gabe,” he said. “I was a little drunk. When I was married, I cheated on my wife. Now you know something on me.”
He peeled the banana and gently slid it into the cage. One by one, each of us took our turn apologizing to Gabe, who sat motionless in the shadows. Everyone told him something personal and gave him a banana. On my turn I faced the darkness and muttered my greatest secret—the transvestite in New York. Gabe didn’t answer.
Arnie went last. He was crying. He opened his pants and said, “See, they ain’t that much to mine either.” Arnie stuffed four bananas through the cage and claimed credit for bringing all the men to apologize.
We slipped away, leaving them to talk in private. The next day, Gabe performed exceedingly well. After the show, the trainers sat in their customary circle, arguing the fine points of manure, each defending his animal.
The circus roamed deeper into the South and I was rewarded for my diligence with a promotion that, like most advances I’ve received, proved my undoing. Someone had quit and Flathead offered me the job because of my size—the circus diet and strenuous labor had cost me several pounds. I was practically a wraith. Flathead introduced me to Mr. Kaybach, a dirty-haired man whose odor was a point of personal honor. As long as I stayed upwind, we got along well.
He showed me how to wriggle into my costume, an oilskin sheath with a hidden zipper. He warned that it was hot and I should wear only underwear. Tattered quilting padded the interior to swell my torso. Two flippers hung from my chest which I could operate by careful insertion of my hands. The back of the costume tapered to a pair of rubber flippers set close together. A surprisingly realistic mask completed my transformation into a walrus. I peeked through tiny slits between two tusks. Kaybach explained our routine and I waited eagerly inside the dark tent for my debut.
The audience encircled a pool of water containing fake ice floes and false rocks. The dark hump they saw was Louie the Great Trained Walrus, direct from the Bering Straits, the Smartest Walrus in Captivity. To further the illusion, Kaybach dumped a wheelbarrow load of ice cubes into the fetid water. He explained that Louie communicated with standard head shakes, and could clap his flippers in mathematical tally.
He called my name and I plunged off the rocks and through the shallow water. By squatting inside the oilskin bag, I could make Louie appear to rear on his haunches.
“Are you a girl walrus?”
I vigorously shook my head no.
“He’s a male, folks! Take a look at those tusks. We lost three Eskimos capturing him. Very sad.” A pause for the audience to consider their own danger. “Are you married, Louie?”
Again I shook my head.
“You got a girlfriend, Louie?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want one?”
This was my cue to launch myself across the pool toward the nearest woman in the audience. She usually screamed and people backed away. Kaybach yelled at me to settle down. I appeared to defy him momentarily before slinking back to the center of the pool. By this time, enough water had leaked in to make my skin slimy.
“You know how bachelors are, folks,” Kaybach continued with a broad wink. “And everyone knows what seafood does to a fellow.”
He asked a few more questions—what state we were in, who the local mayor was—arranging a multiple choice for me to answer yes or no. When I was correct, he threw a dead fish which I forced through the mouth flap to lie cold and smelly against my chest. Kaybach told the audience that I could only count to ten and invited them to stump me with problems of arithmetic. Someone asked the sum of five plus two. Kaybach yelled the question to me and I clapped my front flippers seven times. After a few more tests, a circus plant bullied his way to the front and shouted that he’d seen this on TV and it was a fake. He said the walrus was trained to respond only to the voice of its master, who spoke in code. Kaybach assured everyone that this was not true. He suggested that the man ask his own question, providing the answer didn’t go past ten.
“Square roots,” the plant said.
“What’s that?” Kaybach asked.
“A number times itself.” The plant turned to the crowd. “You know, from high school. The square root of a hundred is ten because ten times ten is a hundred.”
The audience nodded and the plant faced me. “Okay, Louie, what’s the square root of nine?”
He turned his back again and showed three fingers so that the audience could see, but not me. Kaybach began to stutter a protest. The plant shut him up and asked me again. To build suspense, I waited thirty seconds before clapping my flippers three times.
The audience always applauded, as much to see a bully get shut down by a walrus as for the answer. The plant shook his head in disbelief. Kaybach tossed a fish and asked the final question.
“Are you a walrus, Louie?”
I shook my head no.
“Oh, I guess you think you’re human, then.”
I nodded very fast.
“I’m sorry, Louie. You’re nothing but a walrus. You’ll never be a man.”
I sank into the water, performed an awkward circling maneuver, and scuttled behind a rock. Kaybach thanked everyone and asked for a big hand for a walrus so smart that he knew genuine sadness—he’d never be a human.
I had a half-hour break before beginning again with a new plant and a different fake question. I had become a circus performer, or in Barney’s parlance, a kinker. The name came from the effects of the nightlong wagon rides in the old days, after which the performers spent a couple of hours stretching kinks from their bodies.
The various sideshows were tucked into a midway of carny games as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Even the benign ring toss and dart throw were rigged. The con operators allowed a few people to win large, highly visible prizes. They picked the winners carefully. The best investments were young couples, or a family that moved as a group. Forced to carry the prize the rest of their visit, the winners served as advertising. Many people won at the start of the day; none toward the end.
As a full-fledged kinker, I had access to the forbidden zone of performer alley. Here the clowns played chess, the aerialists disdained anyone confined to earth, and the dwarfs spent most of their time baiting the Parrot Lady. They constantly threatened to pluck her, and commented quite openly on her presumed skill at fellatio.
One Sunday, in a community so religious the circus wasn’t allowed to admit the public until well past noon, the heat rose to ninety-eight. Only the aerialists and the Parrot Lady had trailers with air-conditioning. The rest of us sat semiclothed in available shade. The dwarfs began crooning a love song on the Parrot Lady’s aluminum steps. She opened her door with enough force to smack it against the trailer. The dwarfs retreated like tumbleweed.
“A bird in hand,” one said.
“Is worth a hand in the bush,” said the other.
“I got a sword she can’t swallow.”
“Get lost, you little pissants,” the Parrot Lady said. She leaned against the doorjamb in the shimmering heat. “Hey, Walrus Man,” she called. “Come here.”
All the kinkers blinked from a doze, staring at me, then at her. I stumbled to her trailer as if moving through fog. My clothes clung to me.
“Save me a sandwich,” said one of the dwarfs.
The air-conditioned trailer made the sweat cold on my body.
She motioned me to a couch. Gingham curtains hung from each window, and an autographed picture of Elvis Presley sat on a tiny TV. The room was very small, very neat.
“Thirsty?” she said. “Like a drink?”
I nodded and she poured clear liquid from a pitcher into a glass, added ice and an olive.
“Nothing better in summer than a martini,” she said.
Not wanting her to know that I’d never sampled such an exotic drink, I drank it in one chug and asked for another. S
he lifted her eyebrows and poured me one. I drank half for the sake of civility.
“The one thing I hate more than dwarfs,” she said, “is the circus.”
She wore a long white dress with a high collar and sleeves that ran to her wrists. No tattoos were visible. A rowing machine occupied a third of the trailer’s space. She topped my drink and filled her own glass.
“This is my fourth circus,” she said. “I’ve worked with fat ladies, bearded women, Siamese twins, rubber-skinned people, and midgets. The three-legged man. A giant. Freaks by nature, all freaks but me.”
“Not you.”
She offered her glass for a toast and I drained mine. She filled it again. We sat across from each other. The room was so narrow our knees touched.
“They hate me because they can’t understand why someone would choose to be a freak. It took me five years to get tattooed. You can’t do it all at once. I had the best artists in the country tattoo me.”
“Did it hurt?”
“That’s the main part of it. Freaks have to hurt and I wanted mine real. Everyone can see that I’m a freak now. I finally suffered for real to get there.”
I nodded, confused. A row of dolls stood on a shelf bracketed to the wall. She poured more drinks and settled into the chair. Her ankles were primly crossed, exposing only her toes. She wore no jewelry.
“I hate them because they’re what I was in secret, before the tattoos. I was a freak too. You just couldn’t tell. I was tired of hurting on the inside, like them. I hate my tattoos and I hate the men who pay to see them. Nobody knows about my inside. The rest of the freaks are the opposite. They’re normal inside but stuck in a freak’s body. Not me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s why I’m telling you.”
“What?”
“I can’t have children.”
I sipped my drink. I wanted a cigarette but didn’t see an ashtray. I didn’t know what to say.
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
“You could adopt.”
“Shut up!” she said. “I’ve seen ads in the paper for adoption. ‘Call collect,’ they say. ‘All expenses paid.’ I won’t buy a baby. You better go. Don’t tell anyone anything. Let them believe we fucked like minks.”
I stood and fell sideways on the couch. Moving slowly, I got to the door and turned to say goodbye. Her pale hands covered her face. She was crying.
“I love those dwarfs,” she said. “They’re my kids.”
I opened the door and made it to the bottom step before falling. The difference in temperature was swift and hard as a roundhouse blow. Someone helped me stand. The dust on my skin turned to mud from my abrupt sweating. An aerialist walked me to a truck and lay me in the shade.
An hour later Kaybach kicked me awake, berating me for being late, though he’d heard the reason. I staggered after him. Con men and kinkers wiggled their eyebrows, winked and grinned. A female equestrian caressed me with her gaze as if I were the last wild mustang out of the Bighorns. I barely had time to wriggle into my costume before Kaybach began herding the suckers in.
Our tent had no ventilation and was ten degrees hotter than outside. The water in the pool had a skin on the surface. When I lay down on the fake rocks, the world began spinning. Closing my eyes made me twice as dizzy. From a great distance Kaybach called his cue and I realized that he had been yelling for some time. I slid into the nasty water.
I managed to get through the preliminary routines with Kaybach’s patient repetition of cue. He threw a fish as reward, which I dutifully tucked inside the mouth flap. Its body was swollen from heat. Mixed with fish stink was the heavy odor of gin oozing from my pores. I clenched my teeth to quell nausea. While Kaybach spieled about my intelligence, I shoved the dead fish back into the water. The smell clung to my chin and face. Water had seeped through the eye slits, encasing me in an amnion of scum. My head throbbed. As long as I didn’t move, my belly remained under control.
Kaybach asked the yes-or-no questions. I squatted to make the walrus rear on his haunches, each movement an effort. The mask felt welded to my head. Kaybach threw a fish that bounced off my torso. The thought of retrieving it ruined me. My belly folded in on itself, and I knew that the spew would suffocate me. Kaybach was yelling. My face poured sweat.
I pulled my hands from the flipper compartments, worked my arms into position, and treated the crowd to the rare sight of a walrus decapitating itself. The mask splashed into the water. I retched a stream that arced from Louie’s neck. Kaybach stepped into the pool and yelled for everyone to leave. People were screaming and demanding refunds.
I swam to the safety of my fake ice floe. Water had gushed into the oilskin suit, and briefly I feared drowning. I left the costume in the water, crawled to the edge of the tent, lifted the canvas and inhaled. The hundred-degree air tasted sweet and glorious. Sideshow tents were butted against the big top with a small space in between for stakes and ropes. I fled down the alley in my underwear. Peaches and Barney were gone from the truck. I rinsed my body in a tub of her drinking water and dressed in my extra clothes. The parking lot was a rolling field with beat-down grass. Locals worked it for a few bucks and a free pass. The third car picked me up. Twenty minutes later I stood in a town, the name of which I didn’t know.
I oriented myself so the setting sun lay on my left, and began walking north. The Drinking Gourd emerged at dusk. Kentucky produced both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis. Like Kentuckians of the Civil War, I was loyal to no direction. I was neither kinker nor freak, yankee nor reb, boss nor bum. I wasn’t much of a playwright either.
LEFT HANDED (1868?—at least 1948)
Left Handed was a Navajo herder who, on his reservation, dictated two autobiographies to Yale anthropologist Walter Dyk. These are day-to-day accounts like no others: Left Handed apparently recalled every word of every conversation he ever had, and recalled where he found every sheep and horse that ever strayed. Dyk described him as humorous and tolerant.
Son of Old Man Hat covers his childhood until his marriage, at twenty. Left Handed covers the three years of his unhappy marriage to an unnamed woman of the Red Clay clan. Walter and Ruth Dyk edited Left Handed (down to 571 pages), and Columbia University Press brought it out in 1980.
Left Handed rarely comments or describes feelings. In this incident, however, which concludes Left Handed, he is full of sorrow; sorrow was “everything that was in” him. He is about twenty-three years old. He has just left his wife, and determined never again to marry a woman of the Red Clay clan.
from LEFT HANDED
They used to say when you leave a woman, when you leave your wife, you turn around when you get on top of the hill. That’s what they used to say. All at once I thought about that; when I got on top, I thought maybe I’d look back. That’s what they used to say, whenever you leave a wife, if you get on top of a hill, you always look back. So there I thought about that; I turned my horse around and looked back to where I left my wife. I could see her home. I could see the hogan, the hogan that they used for shade. I could see those two; it was quite a distance. I could see that far; at that time, I had good eyesight. I looked back, and I could see the outline and the brush hogan too. There were some people walking around it; I could see them walking around the hogan. Then I just turned my horse around and went over this hill. When I went over, I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I was thinking, but I don’t know. I was out of my mind, I guess. Looked like I couldn’t even hear or see anything. It seemed to me that I wasn’t going anyplace. It seemed to me like I was staying still at one place. That’s the way I was. It looked like I wasn’t going anyplace; but I knew I was going because I could see the herd going, and I knew I was behind them.
All that day I didn’t have anything with me, that is, food. I just had a little jug for water and a little bucket and some salt. That was all I had with me when I was going along with my herd.
When I was on this big flat, I could see my horses all scattered around. Then I started to go after them. I thought I would take them with me too. I rounded them up, and started with my herd. The horses were going along with the herd. They were all mixed up with the herd, and I just went along with them. I think it was a little over thirty horses that I had rounded up. I had that many horses, and there were many sheep. There must have been over one thousand head. I went down toward the northwest in this big flat, going along with my herd and my horses, and around about that time, the sun was pretty near down. And I got to a place where it was good for my herd to be that night. We were on a big hill, and I got my sheep on top of this hill, and the horses too. They couldn’t get down because there was a high peak way on top. There was only one way that they could get out, one space where they could get out. But I wanted to watch them, I wanted to be up all night to watch them. When I got all my herd and horses on top of this hill, I took the saddle off of my horse, hobbled him, and chased him into the bunch. It was around dark then. There I was sitting, where I had laid my saddle. I sat there, watching them. Anytime when they wanted to get out I chased them back. That’s what I did all night. It was a long night. Every time the horses went to get out, I just grabbed up my old blanket, and shook it toward them and chased them back. That’s the way I had been doing all night.
It was about morning, and all at once I went to sleep, and I don’t know how long I slept. I heard the horses running, right under the rock. As soon as I heard them running I got up and started after them. I tried my best to turn them back but I couldn’t. I worked hard, and ran back and forth, but they just were running as hard as they could. I couldn’t turn them back at all. There was my horse that I was using, hobbled right against me too. But I stopped one horse. Then I put the rope on it and bridle, and I put my saddle on it, and I got on my horse and started after the rest of the horses. They were way down below, as far as they could go. I tried my best to get them back but I couldn’t; they were going as hard as they could go. My horse wasn’t fast enough to get them back so I just let them go. I turned around, and I looked up to where the sheep were. They were coming down off of this hill. I rode up there and I got back up on this hill where my things were. I put my things back on the saddle again, and went after the sheep. I started out with my herd again, down toward a place called Dry Spring, looking back every once in a while to see my horses going, Making dust. Down I went to this place, the place called Dry Spring. I was just thinking about the horses and cattle; the cattle were up on the mountain, and I let them go too, because they were way up on the mountain. I just went ahead with my herd. All at once I came upon a lake, and I started toward that lake. I just kept going to this lake. I didn’t know whether I was thinking or not. Maybe I was moving around, maybe not. I didn’t know. I just couldn’t tell what I was doing. All I knew was I was after my herd; that was all I knew. So I just kept on riding after my herd, down to this lake. Soon I got there and the herd was so thirsty they sure made a noise when they saw this lake. Running down, trying to get drink, they were just going as hard as they could go so they could get water. I got down there; I rode around them, saw them drinking, and looked around.
Modern American Memoirs Page 37