. . . but—a loud jangle from the telephone jarred me back to my bed.
I was half-awake, disoriented from my dream and hungover after too little sleep. I realized that awful noise was the wake-up call I’d requested when I finally made it back to The Algonquin from my late-night walk.
XXXX
By the time I got out of the cab at Madison Square Garden it was already mid-morning. I was worried and scared. There would be hell to pay for leveling that rube the night before. I really hurt him, I thought. Maybe I killed him.
As I made my way into the performers’ entrance at the rear of the building, there was, as always, a great deal of hubbub. Vendors’ trucks were competing for places to unload their wares: stocks of food for the troopers, animals, and fans; boxes full of balloons, candy, pendants; and lizards to re-supply the butchers. Everywhere there were people: troopers, some in costume, some in civilian dress; hard-working roustabouts carrying crates of this and that to repair and replace whatever that well-oiled machine had broken the night before. There was even an Indian elephant sunning himself, tied to the loading dock.
Surrounded by all of that commotion, I fearfully scanned the crowd and visualized a swarm of G-men waiting to haul me away in handcuffs. And if the cops didn’t get involved, I was sure the circus would can me. I wonder why I hadn’t run away and avoided that mess or just holed-up in my hotel room. But at some deep level I knew I didn’t have any choice but to come back. Though I felt somehow imprisoned by my job in the circus, the ritual and responsibility of predictable, daily work had always soothed me. There was no place else I could or would go. The only way I will ever leave Ringling Bros is boots-first. Over my years in the sideshow that was a frequent thought.
“Good morning, Jake.” A roustabout with a worn, gray knit hat pulled down around his ears, a cigarette clinched tightly between his yellow teeth, and a coil of frayed rope around his shoulder, stopped to chat with me. His easy demeanor let me know he knew nothing about what had happened the night before; I hoped no one else knew.
“Good morning, Hank,” I said, hurrying past.
He looked surprised. Typically I would have stopped, but not that day. Because of my recent outburst and the crappy way I felt, I was in no mood to talk to anyone. I quickly made my way to the dressing room that the freaks shared in the Garden. At two hours before the matinee I hoped I was early enough to avoid seeing any of the other sideshow performers who typically didn’t arrive that early. Even though we were a tight-knit group, a family so to speak, lately being around them made me anxious. At that point, I wasn’t really sure why.
I was relieved that the dressing area was empty. So as quickly as I could, I got in the cowboy costume I would wear for the matinee’s opening spec. While using the mirror to tie my blue calico bandana, I heard someone behind me. I scanned the mirror to see who it was but there was no one. I gazed into the mirror once again.
“Congratulations! I hear you’re a cross between Max Schmeling and Joe Stydahar. Score one for the freaks.”
Immediately recognizing the telltale German accent, I turned around and looked down. There he stood, all twenty-four inches of him. Harry Doll, the famous circus personality and pater familias of the Dancing Dolls family of little people, was my closest friend in Ringling Bros. He approached me and put his tiny right hand on my knee.
“You’re a regular monster of the midway; a protector of damsels in distress, midgets, and now, menagerie monkeys.”
I looked away. His attempt at humor embarrassed and irritated me. Normally Harry would make me laugh, but that day I didn’t even want to see him.
“What’s wrong, Jakey? You don’t seem like yourself.” Harry was typically very perceptive.
“Ah, it’s nothing.” I briefly glanced at him and quickly shifted my gaze to the mirror. In retrospect, I think it would have been good for me to unburden my self. I wanted to tell him; I really did. I wanted to come clean about how I was thinking of leaving the circus; to report about Gargantua and the rube; and about how I almost jumped out of a twelfth-story window the night before; I wanted to tell him about everything but I just couldn’t.
“By the way, I have a message for you from the boss,” Harry said, interrupting my thoughts. “Ingalls wants to see you before the show today. Is it about the rube? What got into you?”
I realized that Harry wasn’t going to back off. When he was curious about something he was like a bulldog that smells meat.
“I gotta go now, Harry. There’s no time. We’ll catch up later,” I said, too anxious to stay there a second longer.
“Whatever you like, Jake,” Harry said with resignation.
I just didn’t want to get into things with Harry or anyone else, for that matter. As a kid, I learned “La ropa sucia se lava en casa.” It’s an old Spanish saying: “Dirty laundry should be washed at home.”
I learned that proverb from Kika, the maid who helped Mama with our house. That old woman had been around for as long as I can remember. The last time I saw her I was fifteen. She was smiling with her toothless grin, standing at the threshold to my room, holding a breakfast tray she made up especially for me.
Kika was born and raised on a ranchito in the hardscrabble mountains outside Chihuahua City. She walked with a limp, dragging her left foot behind her. Her lifeless leg was the result of some childhood fever that had gone untreated for lack of a doctor and the funds to pay one if he’d miraculously materialized. As I recall, Kika’s gray hair was drawn back tightly in a bow, which accentuated both her round face—an artifact of her mestizo heritage—and the quarter-sized mole on her left check.
“Señora, tal vez le hicieron mal de ojo,” Kika had said to my mother some years before at the outset of my horrendous growth.
I remember how Mama listened intensely to her, nodded and responded: “Yes! Yes! Perhaps it was a Kina Hora (evil eye),” she said, referring to an identical Jewish version of that Mexican belief.
Mama and Kika subscribed to the same superstition. One originated with white and blue gauze-covered Bedouins huddled in an ancient date palm oasis, the other among Mayans clad in scarlet macaw feathers crouched in an emerald jungle. Both Mayans and Bedouins, like Mama and Kika, had strained to explain the inexplicable. My father, the rational one, called these explanations buba misas: a grandmother’s foolishness. At first, so did I. But I felt so bad in those days that I wondered if there was something to that “evil eye” business. Perhaps someone had put a spell on me.
I recalled the tray that Kika balanced on her belly that morning when I was fifteen. It was a loving attempt to get me to eat. The azafata was laden with a special breakfast I normally loved: steaming Mexican hot chocolate that smelled of cinnamon, almonds, and cocoa and handmade flour tortillas so fresh they melted the marigold butter she had slathered onto them into shiny riverlets.
When I turned my head away in disgust, Kika looked hurt. She was doing her best to make sense of the mean mask I wore over my adolescent sadness: “Ay mijo, tal vez tu tristeza nació de un susto (Oh, sweetheart, maybe your melancholy was born from a great fright you suffered),” she said.
“Tal vez,” I replied, my anger only slightly diminished by guilt. When she put the tray down on my dresser, I angrily motioned for her to take it away. She stepped closer to hug me but I moved back, afraid that if I let Kika get close I would start to weep and never stop. My tears would wash her, my parents, our meager belongings, and every house in Sunset Heights away in a flash flood of pent-up sorrow. Kika looked at me once again. Slowly, like in my dream, she stretched her right palm up to caress my cheek but she couldn’t reach it.
“Ay, Dios mío,” she called out, shaking her head with a smile that was equal parts grief and wonder. Then Kika picked up the tray with my uneaten breakfast, slowly turned around, and walked out of my room. I watched her limp away. The sound of her dragging foot echoed in my mind as I climbed back into bed to hide from the day.
Most people, besides my family, have no idea that I spent a lot of my life hiding.