The Death of Otto

Clowns are not supposed to die. They get walloped with mallets and blown up with large red sticks of dynamite, but they’re supposed to just run around after the fatal blow and then wave merrily at the crowd.

It’s not right when a clown dies. Or when love dies. Or a child dies.

When the Ringling Blue Unit played Madison Square Garden that spring of 1972 Otto Griebling played pinochle between shows with Chico; he supplied us with light bulbs for our roomettes on the train by stealthily appropriating them from obscure corners of the Garden; he drank a beer between shows each day; he doused himself with Lilac Vegetal so the crowds would know he was playing a hobo, not actually being one.

His voice lost to throat cancer, he was the Shakespeare of mime; his dumpy face encompassed the vasty deep and played to those secret ligaments that reach past the heart into the void of human expectations. As we settled into the Garden, finding baby rats hatched in our clown trunks and paying protection money to the Teamsters to keep our clown props from disappearing, Otto’s silent scenarios grew funnier and more poignant. His frail attempts to balance a spinning plate on a stick grew to symbolize mankind's giddy efforts to find stability where none existed. Out in the audience he sluggishly polished a railing until he ran up against a pretty girl. His dramatic and instantaneous crush on her was ludicrously pathetic. As he bent over for a kiss he represented every lovesick novice in the world, and when the girl inevitably broke into hysterical peals of laughter at his approach his visible disappointment, and then wrath, were wondrous to behold. Straightening up while pulling the lapels of his ragged coat down, he summarily swatted the girl with his rag and wearily stumped away, to begin polishing and searching all over again. As the days went by at the Garden, Otto stayed out in the audience longer and longer playing out these serio-comic scenes.  

Then one morning he was gone. His trunk was closed and locked. Even the sample piece of shag rug he kept in front of it to rest his bunioned feet between shows had been put away.

Where did he go? We asked LeVoi Hipps. He didn’t know. We asked Prince Paul and Swede Johnson. They couldn’t tell, either. When Charlie Baumann came in to give the ten minute warning prior to come in, he stopped briefly by the doorway to say that Otto was at the Lenox Hill Hospital for a checkup and would be back in a few days.

But in a few days he was dead, not coming back to clown alley. His was the first death in my young life that tore at my immature heart. I didn’t want him to go away; I needed him to further study the subtleties of slapstick. For there is such a thing, not just Three Stooges hooliganism and violence. I wanted so very much to learn how he rigged his derby hat so when he threw it out into the crowded arena it would come sailing back to him like a boomerang. You can see Harold Lloyd do the same trick in his movie ‘The Milky Way’. But I never learned how it was done, and nobody in the alley knew the secret, so it went away with Otto.

Then the years began to take away my other clown friends. Prince Paul was sent to a nursing home in Sarasota, where all he did was run around the dining hall counterclockwise, like he did during Spec. Mark Anthony came down with tuberculosis, moved to California, and died living in a friend’s garage. Tim Holst, after ascending to the top of what D’Israeli called the “Greasy Pole” as Vice President of Talent for Ringling, died suddenly and peacefully while watching a basketball game in a hotel room in Brazil. The list grew longer every year, until I wanted to cry out like Job’s servant: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”  

And then one day my little clowny boy, who was named after my great benefactor Irvin Feld, and my great friend Tim Holst, and who loved to dress up like a clown for Halloween to please his dad -- just before his eighth birthday, he, too, left me, and left my wife, after falling into a diabetic coma. We didn’t even know he had diabetes until it was too late. I put away the striped clown pants my mother had made for him for next Halloween. She would never make anything for our other kids, but for funny face Irvin she worked on her Singer despite her arthritis. Now there would never be another trick or treat for little Irvin Holst Torkildson. He sleeps away the time in a tiny plot in Pleasant Grove here in Utah, until the Trumpet blows or the Clown Car comes for him.  

The questions of Jesus:

Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

Hardwired and conservative, I’ve let tradition rule

My life until I’ve grown as stubborn as a hinny mule.

I do not question all the ruts I’ve dug in years gone by.

My passion for minutiae is now cold and hard and dry.

But then the Great Disruptor tells me all my mint and rue

Are tithed in vain if I do not my habits all review.

How hard it is to change my course upon this broad new sea;

Oh Lord please make me unafraid to face thy novelty!   

Something Fishy in Clown Alley

I didn’t think it was a good idea, but decided not to burst Tim Holst’s bubble that nippy spring  day in Troy, New York. Ringling had a three day stand in town; Holst and I had been fishing from the banks of the Hudson in comradely silence. That morning our catch included some small perch and a few bullheads.

“Let’s take ‘em back to the train so I can put ‘em in the shower with Linda!” Holst suggested, the wild gleam of the newlywed in his eye. “She’ll love the joke!” Holst was now Assistant Performance Director, having usurped that position from Rhubarb Bob the year before. So he had a stateroom on the train, with its very own shower. Only the creme de la creme of circus folk had such a luxury. Although I knew nothing about the female species back then (and still don’t know diddly squat about ‘em today) I felt that such a shenanigan would not be conducive to increased harmony in Holst’s new household. But I held my peace as we wended our way back to the train. I waited outside the train car where Holst and his new bride resided, and it wasn’t long before he came rushing out, or, rather, was propelled out the vestibule by a partially dressed but fully angry wife.

“Didn’t appreciate the gag, eh?” I asked sympathetically.

“Never mind, Tork” he replied, squaring his shoulders and giving me that gung-ho grin all fishermen use when they’ve been skunked. “There’s another hour or two before I gotta get to the building, so let’s catch us some more bullheads!”

“You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie!” I replied in the same hearty manner. And off we went to stalk the wily mud cat once again.

I came by my piscatorial predilection honestly, having grown up around a tribe of avid fisher folk in Minneapolis. My older brother Billy fished religiously up at the Lake of the Woods; my Uncle Jim had a shack he put on White Bear Lake each winter for ice fishing; even my dad, as inert as any sandbag, bought a plastic gallon of pickled herring every December; and my pals and I were cane pole samurai when it came to doing battle with the carp that swarmed around the sewer outlets on the Mississippi.

Joining the circus did not dim my hunger for fishing, nor do much to improve my veracity when it came to fish stories. I found some like-minded conspirators in Holst, Chico, and Roofus T. Goofus. Whenever there was a river or half decent lake near the train or the arena, we would break out our Popeil Pocket fishing gear and lose a serious amount of sleep by getting up way too early to catch whatever might be biting that morning. The one drawback to our fishing expeditions were the numerous and officious game wardens and deputies that kept pestering us for a fishing license. We didn’t need no stinkin’ fishing license, but we didn’t tell anybody in a Smokey the Bear hat that; instead we smiled politely and said sorry officer but we’re only in town for a few days with the circus so we didn’t have time to get one would you like some free tickets to the show for you and your lovely family? That usually did the trick. They’d look the other way when we slipped them a half dozen Annie Oakleys. Of course, as I stated earlier in this wayward narrative, Ringling was pretty chintzy about handing out free passes, so Chico had a cousin of his who ran a printing shop in Brooklyn run up some authentic looking passes on cardstock, and we would pass those out -- and then hope to god we didn’t meet up with that officer again before move out night.

And you haven’t lived until you’ve fished off of a train vestibule that’s parked over a river gorge in the Rockies or the Cascade mountains out West. On long trips, the circus train often stopped for an hour or more on a side track while waiting for an express to go past. Sometimes that meant we could dangle our hooks a few hundred feet down into a crystal clear trout stream and start hauling ‘em up. Most of them managed to wriggle off the hook before we could get them all the way up, but just having a brookie on my line for ten minutes was worth it. Besides, I don’t believe the cook in the pie car would have filleted and fried them up for me anyways.

What did I do with the fish I did manage to catch? Well, I didn’t throw them into anybody’s shower! Early in the season I discovered that after the last show at night the Romanian bareback riding acts loved to sit outside their train car if the weather were nice to boil up a communal pot of stew, drink wine, and sing the sad old songs of their motherland, accompanied by zither and zongora. Being a hospitable people, they often invited me to come stick my mitt in the stewpot. The smell was tantalizing, but I wasn’t too certain about what they were using for stock, so at first I politely declined. Swede told me that anytime an animal died on the show the Romanians showed up to butcher it and have it for dinner. When I caught my first mess of fish that season I asked one of the Romanian women if she’d like to have it. She smacked her lips and that night by the side of their train car I dipped my mitt into the pot because I knew it contained my fish. It was to die for. I partook of several helpings, and would have licked the pot clean but for the fact I found a fish eyeball floating in my last bowl of the evening. The Romanians believed in using every bit of the fish, including the head. After that, I was a little more discriminating when I accepted their invitation after bringing them my catch. They didn’t bother to fillet the fish very well either; it wasn’t unusual for a big husky Romanian man to run up to a child and indicate he needed to be punched in the stomach, after which he’d disgorge a fishbone that had lodged in the trachea.  

Perhaps the best thing I ever did with some fish, at least the most satisfying, involved my vendetta against the lanky trainmaster after he found my bicycle in one of his storage closets, where I stored it on move out nights, and tossed it out while the train was moving. I paid him back with a large carp that I left to fester in his toolkit during our stay in Little Rock, Arkansas. By the time he discovered it, the bubbling mass of foul corruption was something straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft story.

Robocalls

From the New York Times:  Last year, about 15 billion robocalls were placed to numbers on the Do Not Call registry . . .

A  smartphone is no guarantee

That you won’t be called constantly

About mortgage rates

And cruise line updates

(or sent poems like this one, for free)

The Questions of Jesus

 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

I add unto my stature with technology, correct?

I grow in consequence as with more people I connect!

My smartphone and my iPod give me power that’s supreme;

So do not tell me internet importance is a dream.

A cubit is old fashioned, I prefer the gigabyte.

I’ll use my tablet for great glory and gigantic height.

All hail the wifi kingdom that is coming on the Cloud!

Will Christ and his disciples become lost among the crowd?

And yet, and yet the still small voice that makes foundations sink

Reminds me that to God alone belongs the saving link.

The Return of Uncle Felbish

Prince Paul started it all in clown alley during our run in Des Moines.

He came into the Ringling Blue Unit alley with the New York Times tucked under one arm and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic under the other, cleared his throat until I thought his tonsils would come flying out, and proclaimed:

“It’s official, meyn brider. Word has come down that Uncle Felbish is returning!”

Swede Johnson blasphemed softly but intensely into his battered plug clown hat before asking:

“When is that devil going to get here?”

“Tomorrow, or Saturday at the latest.”

Lotsi, Lazlo Donnert’s son, began asking “Who is dis . . . “ but got no further; his father yanked him aside and slobbered all over him in Hungarian. Lotsi shivered, then nodded his head in agreement.

Dougie Ashton shot up like a bottle rocket and shouted defiantly “Buck ‘em all, is what I say! And that includes Uncle Felbish!”

And Don Washburn, whose Sparky the Clown character sported the largest pair of clown shoes in circus history, lowered his head into his hands and began to moan while he rocked back and forth.

We First of Mays were frankly puzzled. Who in the Sam Hill was this alarming Uncle Felbish? We hadn’t heard about him in Clown College, or read about him in any circus history books, or heard even a rumor about him from the roustabouts or showgirls.

“Are you talking about Irvin Feld, is that your ‘Felbish’?” asked Tim Holst.

No! Not the circus owner.  The veteran clowns were adamant. Uncle Felbish was . . . he was . . . and he came . . . and when he got here . . .

None of them could finish a coherent sentence. They turned silently to their trunks and began getting ready for the afternoon come in.

Murray Horowitz, who was called ‘Raccoon Face’ behind his back because of the black band of makeup he incorporated around his eyes, soberly told us newbies, “You only get to see Uncle Felbish once, baby, and then you’re either in . . . or you’re OUT.”

“What do you think we should we do to get ready for him, guys?” I nervously asked Holst and Chico and Roofus T. Goofus.

“Throw away that ratty old hat you been wearing, pinhead” advised Swede Johnson, ambling over to our worried kaffee klatch. “And you” pointing to Holst. “Stop trying to make clown shoes with papier mache.” Holst had indeed been experimenting with papier mache to extend the length of a pair of work boots to comical proportions. He didn’t relish spending two hundred dollars on a pair of professionally made clown shoes because he was trying to pay off his student loan in that first season. So far his experiments had resulted in nothing but a lot of spilled flour paste and soggy newspaper.

“Uncle Felbish is murder; he’s poison” Swede said ominously. “He can’t be bs’ed, no matter how smooth you are!” He looked at us under his beetling brows, resembling for all the world Snoopy doing his vulture impression in ‘Peanuts.’ “Just keep your nose clean, that’s all.”

After the matinee performance I started asking around about Uncle Felbish. Stancho and the Bulgarians didn’t know about him. Backdoor Jack said there was no such thing, and told me to get the hell away from his card table if I was going to waste his time with such crap. LeVoi Hipps, who was boss clown and also served as head electrician, was less than helpful. I found him wrapping black electrical tape around a thick orange extension cord.

“Well, Torkil-twinkle” he started slowly (he never bothered to pronounce my name correctly), “this-a hyear Uncle Felbish is quite theeee character, yessiree bob! I don’t rightly think I orter tell yew anything about him. I reckon yew just gotta find out fer yerself!” He was sounding like Mr. Haney from ‘Green Acres’ by this time, so I told him thanks for nothing. I finally summoned up the courage to ask Rhubarb Bob, the assistant Performance Director. He looked very grave. But he always looked that way, like he had just come from one funeral and was going immediately to another.

“Let me check with Mr. Baumann on that” he finally said.

Sheesh maneesh, I thought to myself, this Felbish guy must be worse than Dracula!

I reported my findings to Holst and Chico and Roofus, and since I really hadn’t found anything out, I started to make things up.

“He’s from the federal government” I extemporized. “Department of Circus Safety and Welfare.”

“What's he want?” asked Chico.

“He can shut down the show and put us all out of work if he don’t like the way clown alley is running” I said importantly, by now totally sucked into my own fantasy. “Not even Mr. Feld can overrule him!”

“Holy *%@&!” blurted out Rufus T. Goofus. “I’m gonna make a new cotton candy outfit!” Roofus had a wonderful walkaround sight gag wherein he dressed as one of the cotton candy vendors and swathed himself in pink cotton, giving the appearance of having fallen into the cotton spinning machine and then barely escaping with his life. But the pink stained cotton had gotten pretty dirty from rough handling, so that now it was hard to tell if he had fallen into a cotton candy machine or a manure pile.

I started to believe my own hooey, running in place as if my bladder were full and saying to myself in a frightened girly voice “I knew I shoulda got that wig from Zauder’s! Ew, I’m in so much trouble!”  

Clown alley became a hive of frantic activity the rest of that day and into the next. Holst borrowed a pair of surplus clown shoes from boss clown Hipps and took them to a shoe repair shop to have them quickly refurbished so the horsehair stuffing didn’t show; Chico removed the Playboy centerfold he had pasted onto the outside of his clown trunk.

Even Swede Johnson, whose costume purposely matched his collapsing face by appearing ready to fall apart at the seams, fixed up his clown shoes. He wore white nursing shoes, so he got out a bottle of white shoe polish and applied the little fluffy ball at the end of the stick vigorously to them until they were as bright and clean as the driven snow.

The word had spread throughout the show that Uncle Felbish was on his way. We got sympathy calls from some of the showgirls, who brought us cupcakes to buck us up. Joe Hodgini, a holdover from the old John Ringling North days, who oversaw the roustabouts while sitting in his golf cart, offered to detail a half dozen of them to clown alley when the fiend showed up, armed with tent stakes, to watch our backs. LeVoi Hipps decided that would only inflame the situation, and reluctantly refused his offer.

Normally the hard physical demands of clowning on the Ringling show put me to sleep like a log each night; but the night of that awful announcement I couldn’t grab a wink. What if I lost my job and had to go back home in disgrace? I hadn’t saved up nearly enough money to do any of the things I’d dreamed about. My career would be over before it started. I tossed and turned until my sheets were pretzels.

The next day clown alley went on Red Alert.

Prince Paul stationed himself at the entrance to give warning of Uncle Felbish’s approach. Swede, the most impious old sinner since Emperor Nero, suggested that some of us might like to pray for deliverance if we felt so inclined. Even Dougie, who normally put up a bold front when faced with a threat, kept a low profile by refraining from playing Tiger Rag on his trumpet while we got made up -- a recital he never missed once he found out how much we detested his playing.

Only Otto, grand old Otto, remained unaffected by the panic. Voiceless due to throat cancer, he calmly surveyed our scurrying hither and thither with amused contempt. But we First of Mays were in a growing cold sweat, and paid no attention to him.

The matinee came and went without any Uncle Felbish. Clown alley remained a brooding encampment of fear. Sparky appeared to be the first one to crack.

“I can’t take it anymore!” he shouted out, beginning to giggle wildly. Then he became unintelligible. “Tell them already, tell them!”

“Here he comes!” screamed Prince Paul. I held my breath as into clown alley walked . . .

Schwartzy! That miserable crossed-eyed drunk who brought us clean sheets each week on the train. Schwartzy? He was Uncle Felbish? He blinked unevenly at us, like a hungover owl, and then asked if anyone had seen his other pair of pants.

The light slowly dawned as I looked around at the veteran clowns, who had all collapsed in hysterics. We First of Mays had been conned, duped, hoodwinked by a practical joke of massive, even classical, proportions.

“There’s no Uncle Felbish, you old goat!” I said to Swede, who was shaking with laughter. “And the whole show was in on it, weren’t they?”

“Pretty much” replied Swede. “I never saw such a bunch of appleknockers as you greaseballs in my life! Hook, line, and sinker!”

Some of the First of Mays finally joined in on the merriment, and got Prince to explain that for years past it had been a cherished scheme on the show to create a boogeyman named Uncle Felbish to keep the new clowns on their toes when the summer doldrums began to take over in the Midwest. It always got them worried sick.

I kept myself aloof from the childish glee, considering the whole thing a meaningless piece of flummery.

But next season, with a new crop of First of Mays just begging for it, I told Prince Paul I thought it was time for a visit from Uncle Felbish when we played Milwaukee . . .

Snack Time in Clown Alley

Over the years I’ve worked in many different environments. Whether factory, store, office, or school, there have been snacks. Sometimes lavish, sometimes spartan; sometimes free, sometimes in vending machines. In Thailand the average Bangkok office is rife with goodies that workers bring in from the street vendors. It’s all casual, with no thought for recompense. The stuff is so cheap that it would be an insult to charge for it. Black duck eggs boiled in tea and then buried in a clay jar in the ground for a month; sticky rice steamed inside fresh bamboo sections -- you can eat the whole thing; mooncakes filled with sweet red beans; chicken satay on bamboo skewers, dripping with peanut sauce; sesame seed brittle; candied cassava; and sweet fresh fruit that makes you think you’ve died and gone to heaven -- mangoes, papayas, little bananas the size of your index finger, dragon fruit, star fruit, rambutan, custard apples, and mangosteens.

Up in Minnesota I worked in factories where the ladies competed with each other to see who could bring in the heartiest casserole or coffee cake to share with coworkers. The cholesterol readings were off the charts!

Then again, I’ve worked in offices, most recently here in Provo, where the mindset when it came to snacking and sharing was definitely mingy. At one private school I worked at no one brought anything in, and the vending machines dispensed packages of saw dust. I decided to shake things up one day and brought in a basket of fruit from the supermarket; apples, oranges, bananas, pears, and even a few lemons. I also picked up a package of figs and a package of dates to scatter throughout the larger fruits. I set this in the teacher’s lounge and awaited results. The first one to notice was the school principal, who reacted as if he’d been slapped in the face with a soiled diaper.

“Who brought this in?” he demanded.

“I did” I said calmly. “Anything the matter?”

“Why, no, I guess not. Only, it might upset some of the teachers.”

I had no answer for that, so went back to work grading papers.

As the day wore on nobody touched any of the fruit. At last I spoke up and invited the staff to help themselves. Hesitantly at first, then in a frenzied rush, they attacked my fruit basket to pocket everything they could lay their hands on. They ate none of it. They just took it to eat at home later.   

That convinced me that Mormons are weird. And I’m one of ‘em!

Clown alley, of course, had its own rules and procedures for noshing during work hours.

The first item of business in each new building on set up day was for Anchorface and Chico to scope out the concession stands in the building. You’d be surprised how many of those places throw away perfectly good hot dogs, hamburgers, and pizza slices just because they are a few hours old. Anchorface and Chico were authorized on behalf of clown alley to offer concession owners ten cents on the dollar to divert items meant for the dumpster to clown alley. Of course, this broke all sorts of health ordinances, but the concession owners felt that clowns were not quite human, and so the regulations did not really apply. As long as the food was edible, we tended to agree with them.

Then there were the day old bakery stores that used to dot the land. Do they still have those fine old institutions, where you could buy a loaf of bread for a quarter and packages of Twinkies or Suzy Q’s for a nickel apiece? Honey buns were fifteen cents for a dozen. And they’d throw in a package of stale donuts for free. Swede Johnson would usually stop by such a place once a week, then share it with one and all in clown alley. He asked for nothing in return.

“What the hell” he’d comment to no one in particular, “it keeps the First of Mays from eating too much meat.”

The Circus Fans of America often hosted barbeques and picnics for clown alley in the Southern States, where their membership was strongest. They’d bring us fried fish and hush puppies or gigantic ham sandwiches that would choke a whale, but they were awful nuisances once we let them into clown alley. They liked to hunt for ‘souvenirs’, swiping half empty tins of Stein’s Clown White or a pair of gloves. We always had to have Charlie Baumann eventually ban them from the building (but not before we got fed!)

Then there were the press events. Oh boy, those were humdingers! In each town the local circus promoter would invite the media to a wondrous banquet on opening night to wine and dine them into giving the show a good review. The malnourished reporters would wolf down a dozen shrimp and guzzle Korbel until it ran out of their ears, but there was always plenty leftover at the end of their debauch. Just sitting there, waiting to be enjoyed by those bold enough to invade the banquet hall and capture it. This took split second timing. First we’d send in someone innocent looking, like me, to ask the catering staff if they had any bones for the clown alley dogs. I’d look longingly at the leftovers while most of the staff went into the kitchen to rummage for bones; the remaining staff, taking pity on my obvious longing for a few choice morsels, would encourage me to take a plateful of anything I wanted. Go ahead, kid; nobody’ll miss it.

Gee, thanks mister. Could I get a bag of some sort, maybe?

That shy request would usually send the rest of the staff back into the kitchen to look for a bag for the scrawny kid with big eyes. In a flash, after I’d given the high sign, several clowns would move in silently and sweep as much of the loot as possible into plastic duffel bags we bought for just such a contingency. Then they would waft silently out before the staff came back with my bag and bones.

Thanks a lot, guys. You’re the best! And my eyes would tear up as I left. Too many chopped green onions in that cheese ball!

It was feast or famine in clown alley. Sometimes we had rich pickings from those press banquets or from circus fans, but more often the vultures would begin circling around clown alley just before payday as our food money ran out.

One particularly arid week I was languishing for something outside of pie car chili and peanut butter sandwiches, which I’d been forced to subsist on after a particularly wild binge at a used book store.

Roofus T. Goofus brought in a luscious pan of deep dish brownies, just glistening with satin cocoa butter. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.

“Don’t let anybody touch ‘em, Tork” he asked me. Then he gave me a wink and a nudge. “They’re Alice B. Toklas brownies, if ya know what I mean!” More winks and nudges. I nodded sagely, having no idea what he was talking about. “We’ll share ‘em out after the show tonight.”

As soon as the alley was empty for a moment I helped myself to half the pan in a spasm of uncontrollable greed. The ensuing evening remains mostly a happy blank in my memory. I’m told I was discovered floating gently on a pink cloud and had to be tethered to my clown trunk to keep from shooting through the ceiling. I seem to recall Roofus yelling at me, as if from a great distance -- but it didn’t bother me, since I immediately turned him into a humming bird, and then turned everyone else in clown alley into hummingbirds, and we all flew away to the moon . . .

The next day I had the munchies really bad. Lucky for me it was payday, so when the eagle screamed (circus slang for the handing out of paychecks) I collected mine and spent an unconscionable amount on Cheetos, Bugles, Cracker Jack, and burritos. Roofus T. Goofus stayed unaccountably mad at me for several weeks afterwards. Well, there’s no accounting for the moods of hungry clowns.   

The Love Letters of Stancho

Mac the bus driver on the Ringling Blue Unit also had the concession to sell Ringling stationary. Naturally, he also sold postage stamps. He marked them up to twelve cents a piece so he could make a little something on the side for his old age. The gouger.

When the train was parked miles away from the arena Mac cleared a tidy profit. A one way ride was 25 cents, so everyone who did not own their own car had to pony up at least fifty cents each day. Mac made a run to the train between shows as well, and if there were some kind of big attraction in the vicinity, such as a Six Flags or discount liquor warehouse, he also made special runs. But when the train was parked right next to the arena, Mac had to hustle the Ringling stationary to make a any money for the week.

“Need some paper and envelopes, kid?” he’d ask me each day. He knew his clientele well. I often wrote three or four letters each day. To family. To friends. To girls I’d met along the way who deigned to give me their mailing address. To friendly LDS Bishops who’d had me over for Sunday dinner when I’d managed to get to church on Sunday. I loved writing to book authors. I wrote to John McCabe, William K. Everson, and Robert Lewis Taylor, care of their publishers. And actually got replies! It must have been the Ringling stationary, because my missives were greatly lacking in much charm, wit, or penmanship. I wrote them all out in longhand.

John McCabe actually invited me to start a correspondence with him about clowns and comedy. He’d written a bestselling biography about Laurel & Hardy, and so we began shooting notes to each other about the best way to do a spit take and the endless comedic possibilities of the bowler hat.  

As the show traveled through the muggy Midwest that summer I was approached by one of the Bulgarian acrobats with an odd request. Stancho was built like a brick wall and made no bones about wanting to find an American lady farmer he could marry so he could stay in the country. He loved the United States. He loved American food, American beer, and American cigarettes. I never saw him without a Marlboro stuck between his lips. His head was connected directly to his shoulders, and he turned his whole body to me earnestly early one summer day to ask that I write a billet doux for him to a lady pig farmer he’d met in Ohio. Stancho had struck up a conversation with her after a matinee performance; he thought she liked him, so wanted to stake it all on a love letter to her. But since his English was almost nonexistent, and he always saw me writing letters, he thought perhaps I would do this nice thing for him.

Nothing loath to push along a bit of romance, I took down his dictation, which consisted of some inarticulate grunts, the phrase “love you much” repeated ad nauseum, and some graphic pantomime as to what he intended to do to her if and when they ever met up again. I managed to produce several decent paragraphs that reduced his pornographic ravings to a mild notification of his affection for her, and handed it over to him. He gave me a hearty slap on the shoulder, nearly dislocating a clavicle, and pronounced me ‘one good guy, by damn!’

I thought no more of the matter until two weeks later, when Stancho dragged me out of clown alley to report that his lady pig farmer had not only written him back, but made arrangements to meet him at the Sunset Motel in Bismarck, North Dakota, when the show played there, for a night of international accord. He needed to respond to her immediately with an ardent assent, and pressed me to once again be his amanuensis. I quickly scribbled a note telling her that Stancho was amenable to her diplomatic plans. This time he didn’t slap me on the back, the Slavic fool kissed me on both cheeks, fortunately removing his smoldering Marlboro before doing so.

Stancho soon had the word circulating that if you needed a hot letter for a hot lady, the skinny young whiteface with the long brown hair was your man. I was inundated with requests from tongue-tied Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, to compose ballads and out and out salacious propositions for their ladies fair. Sharpening my quill with gusto, I went to work with a will. It felt good to be needed in a literary way.

And did I pull a Mac the bus driver on them, charging them for my services? I did not. As the song says, I did it all for love. More fool me. For soon the requests were piling up, and the durn furriners were getting pickier and pickier about what they wanted me to say for them. A simple “I love you my darling” was not good enough anymore; they wanted Shakespeare and Cyrano de Bergerac. That’s when I discovered how thin-skinned I really am as a writer. I cradle each of my sentences like a newborn babe, and anyone who dares to criticize or threaten one of them is a monster. Who should be burned at the stake.

Besides, I was starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome from all that labored scribbling.   

Too chicken to tell them all directly “Nyet,” I bought an arm sling at a Walgreens and wore it conspicuously for the next several days, pointing to it sadly and shaking my head in the negative whenever a hormone-wracked Romeo requested an epistle to their hot tomato.

I’d neglected my own correspondence during this mad period, but dasn’t be seen writing anything lest the baying horde descend upon me again. So I recorded letters on cassette tapes, using a cassette tape recorder that Holst had. Back in the 70’s everyone had a cassette player, unless you were a Hutterite.

Anchorface had noted my literary popularity, so when I retired from the field he stepped in to offer his services. The only difference being he charged five dollars per love letter. I thought they’d lynch him, but amazingly enough he built up quite a large customer base for his love notes -- which, I may say without prejudice, never came close to expressing their sentiments as tenderly as mine did. His were strictly cut rate, tin plate, Casanova.

The Questions of Jesus

 And the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?

I am not micromanaged by the Lord in my affairs;

He’s given much of counsel in the past for all my cares.

My mother wit I must apply to problems great and small,

And never fail to thank my God and for his help to call.

For sometimes small things, plain and drab, to greatness quickly lead,

If for inspiration I do ask, then humbly heed.

But sometimes I must figure out just what I’m meant to do,

And trust that God knows that my aim will be both straight and true.

But if I blunder by mistake, and not by haughty sin,

The Lord will be forgiving and still gather me full in!

Lullaby

It’s time to say goodnight my friends

Cuz all good things must have their ends.

I crawl into my downy bed

to find a pillow for my head

And start to dream most instantly

Of angels watching over me

Oh, I may toss and turn a bit

But soon my brows will be unknit

I hope you too will find repose

And not count sheep or all your toes

The secret to a good night’s rest

Is some warm milk that you ingest

But if a cow you haven’t got

Then read a book with moldy plot

And soon your eyes will close so sweet

That you won’t even need a sheet

But fall upon your wooden floor

For many hours steeped in snore.