A shot exploded late one night inside Ringling Train Car #19, where most of the new clowns, including myself, were domiciled. The narrow metal hallway that ran through the entire length of the Iron Lung (as we affectionately called it) magnified the echoing report until it sounded like a howitzer blast.
I was lying in my Murphy bed, reading a dog-eared Kurt Vonnegut paperback, and immediately stuck my head out the door of my roomette to find out what the ruckus might be. Dinko came flying down the hallway, yelling as he passed me, "Head for the hills -- it's another one of Bobby's castaways on the warpath!"
I pulled my head in like an alarmed box tortoise, flipped the latch, and waited nervously for this latest of Bobby's romantic victims to cool off and exit the train before we started to move on to the next town.
Lemme see, I said to myself sourly, that makes about Lady Number Five since the season began that has tried to exterminate Bobby Dorman (not his real name).
Dorman, you see, was the clown alley Casanova. The cliche had it that sailors have a girl in every port, and Bobby had one in every town the circus played -- but he had never mastered the art of "Love 'em and Leave 'em" to any extent, so the heart-broken gals, baldly told that the grand passion was kaput, always turned on him with a fury matched only by Mount Vesuvius and the last days of Pompeii. How Bobby managed to avoid being punctured so many times is something that still keeps me awake on hot summer nights.
There were several bullet holes in the hallway to prove how inept he was at making parting a sweet sorrow.
Ringling Brothers had always had clown alley groupies; lonely, desperate, and terrifically homely women who deluded themselves into thinking that life with a professional circus clown would be nothing but raucous hilarity. We called them 'town hounds', and they made themselves pathetically available in almost every town; hanging around clown alley, offering to do our laundry or bring us a sandwich. By humane consensus, we never gave them a tumble (at least I never saw any of my colleagues have anything to do with them). Those clowns who were not married could always pick up one of the show dancers for the season by the simple expedient of buying them dinner and drinks after the show each night.
Me, I had a girl I'd left behind in Minnesota -- we had vowed eternal faithfulness to each other when I had been accepted into the Ringling Clown College in Venice, Florida. I wrote her almost every day, and sent her painted platters, ceramic bells, silver-plated spoons, and other gewgaws from each city we played in. That she steadily two-timed me from the moment I left does not need to enter into this narrative, except to explain why I did not take up with any of the big top chorines.
But Bobby was different. He scorned the show dancers; instead, he prowled the late night cocktail lounges and smoky coffee houses that still existed back in the early 70's for older women. Lonely women. Gullible and plaint women. Women who had steady, well-paying jobs and didn't mind blowing a wad on Bobby to keep him well-dressed at the swankiest haberdasher and well-fed on surf and turf at the local chop house. He rarely slept in his roomette on the train, and was usually incommunicado to his fellow clowns except during actual show times.
It was not hard to understand his success with his victims, for he had been blessed with those large soggy eyes made famous by Margaret Keane. One look from those fatal baby blues, and even the witch from Hansel and Gretel would give him her broom and willingly hop into her own cauldron to provide him with a good meal.
For, you see, he also had one of those torsos that appear to be in famine mode, no matter how much fodder he gobbled up.
In fine, women wanted to mother him -- and he was only too happy to oblige them, with a soupcon of carnality on the side.
At first most of the new clowns, young bucks who were out to prove to the world just how much hell they could raise, were extremely proud of his conquests, as a sort of reflection on their own devil-may-care mindset, even if it meant dodging an occasional stray pistol shot. We'd see him with his current inamorata strolling about down by the circus train or holed up in the priciest steak house in town, and growl to each other what a lucky so-and-so he was.
But eventually the repeated melodrama of Jilted Lover Seeks Revenge grew rather tedious. Believe it or not, circus clowns work very hard at their craft, and cherish the restorative power of a good night's sleep -- on move out nights we grew to resent the hullabaloo that resulted from Dorman's callous farewells.
A delegation of younger clowns, including myself, finally caught him in his roomette one night, miraculously alone for once, and delivered an ultimatum, or, as Dinko called it, an 'ultimato'. If he was going to continue his wanton ways with townie females he had better say his good-byes far away from the train, so we could all get some assured shut-eye instead of dodging bullets. Otherwise, we muttered in the sinister tones we'd learned from watching Boris Karloff movies, he might find himself red-lighted -- thrown off the train while it was moving past some dismally uninhabited swamp.
Bobby merely pooh-poohed our remonstrances and continued with his staccato romances, until the show reached New York City in May.
We played Madison Square Garden for nearly a month, and so Dorman was stuck with his temporary mistress for much longer than usual. We could see he began to tire of her puppy-like devotion to him, and cringed when he started to treat her rudely and abruptly right in front of us.
The denouement was sudden, tawdry, and mysterious.
On move out night, with the circus train ready to head over to Philadelphia for a two week run, there was no shouting, shrieking, or shooting in or around the Iron Lung. Bobby's 'girlfriend', who I recall as rather tall with a predatory horse face, mooned about the tracks, taking long pulls from a bottle in a brown paper bag.
"That little %&##* is in for it now -- soon as my brothers get here" she kept repeating viciously to herself. I gave her a wide berth as I pulled myself up onto the Iron Lung.
Too tired to care about any further affaires de coeur, I left her to her crapulous fulminations and went to bed. I never even heard the train lurch into motion, and I was still dead to the world when we pulled into the Philadelphia trainyard the next afternoon.
When I finally got up and got down to clown alley, it was to discover that Bobby Dorman had never made it back onto the train the night before in New York. He was AWOL, missing in action -- gone and done a bunk.
He never showed up in Philadelphia, and when the boss clown made inquiries with Dorman's family about his possible whereabouts the only reply he got, he told us, was frosty silence.
Many years later Dinko told me he'd bumped into Bobby Dorman in New York, where he was a set designer on Broadway, and married to that same horse-faced harridan. Dinko told me that Dorman seemed reasonably happy and satisfied with the way things had turned out.
But then, Dinko always did like to make things up . . .
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