The Best American Essays 2013 (8 page)

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 was 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 the 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

FROM
GQ

I
N 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.

A few minutes later he pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road by some woods, took out a hunting knife, and told me to get into the back of the cab. I began talking, saying the same things over and over. I said I knew he didn’t want to do it. I said it was his choice. I said he could do it in a few minutes. I said it was his choice. I said I wouldn’t go to the cops if nothing happened to me, but it was his choice—until he looked at me and I went still. There was going to be no more talking. I knew in my body that it was over. Then he said one word:
Run
. Without looking back, I ran into the woods and hid. I stayed there until I saw the truck pull onto the interstate. It was getting dark. I was still in shock, so I walked back out to the same road and started hitching south. I never went to the police and didn’t tell anyone for years.

This spring a friend sent a news-story link about a serial killer with the subject line “Is this your guy?” The serial killer’s name was Robert Ben Rhoades. Rhoades was a long-haul trucker, in jail since 1990, who had recently been convicted of a couple of new “cold cases.” I didn’t recognize him from the initial photos, but as I found pictures of him as a younger man, his face came to seem more familiar. The glasses were the same, the curve of the cheekbone, and something about the expression, particularly the set of the mouth. It had the same neutral arrogance. Rhoades looked like the guy who picked me up. But then, Rhoades looks like a lot of guys. He would have been only thirty-nine at the time, and I remember the trucker as an older man with light brown or graying hair. To a teenager, though, someone pushing forty is pretty old, and hair often looks darker in photos. The light in my memory is strange too. It was a cloudy day just before a summer storm, and everything in the truck is cast in gray.