It should be mentioned in these chronicles that high intelligence was not a prerequisite for the Ringling clown alley. Oh, there were a few Rhodes Scholars and high IQ’s scattered amidst the motley crowd, but such individuals never blended harmoniously with their coworkers in the alley. They seemed to be slumming, or on an expedition to examine and perhaps capture specimens of the native circus wildlife. For the sake of narrative flow I will amalgamate these several into one, and name him Waldo.
As we got ready for come in, Waldo would invariably set aside a heavy tome on philosophy or physics to tell the clear blue air that the dichotomy of Nietzsche was most intriguing. On the one hand . . .
At this point Prince Paul would likely butt in with “Is dat zo, Sharlie? You vanna buy ein quacker?” I think he was mimicking some radio comedian of long ago, but just exactly who I have never been able to honestly figure out.
Then Mark Anthony would begin rhyming. He actually was quite an intelligent guy, but his knowledge was rather scattershot, and not confined to any one particular discipline. And he never self edited himself. He said just what was running through his mind. He could belch and break wind simultaneously, which made him a hero to most of clown alley.
“Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Barbara Frietchie -- eating peanuts, wanted lychee!” he would croon.
Slightly nettled, Waldo would try to regain his train of thought: “As I was saying, the German existential mindset was probably influenced by . . . “
At this point Swede Johnson would rise majestically from his camp stool to declaim “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
“I resemble that remark!” Holst would holler at him. Holst, too, was quite well educated; but he took great pains to hide it. He was after a management job with Ringling, and knew that too many brains spoil the broth. Or something like that (hey, I never said I was saddled with a high IQ!)
Waldo would subside, muttering academic footnotes to himself.
It was an axiom in clown alley that low intelligence meant high trust. You could always depend on a dummy to do what they said they were going to do.
JoJo the Dog Eared Boy was a good example.
As our mouser he faithfully discharged his duties as gofer, picking up whatever we wanted from the outside world when we couldn’t get out there ourselves. Groceries, dry cleaning, you name it; JoJo took our money and came back with the goods, and with every bit of spare change we had coming. It would have been easy to nick a dime here and there, but he never did so. You could give the guy a thousand dollars for a pack of gum,and he’d be back in an hour with your Juicy Fruit, and full change.
However, he was a sucker for Chinese fortune cookies. He believed in them implicitly.
“Those Chinese sagebrushes know what they’re talking about, yes they know what they’re talking about!” he would aver when pressed to explain his gullibility.
It turned into a game; we would send him out for something and include a few bucks so he could grab some ham fried rice for himself. Inevitably he would return with some startling revelation about his prospects and/or love life as revealed in his fortune cookie.
“Lookit!” he would squeal excitedly. “Says here I’m to stay calm to avoid confusion and then riches will fall on me like a rockslide. Just like a rockslide!”
Shaking our hands one by one, he would thank us effusively for all our kindnesses towards him during his days of poverty. Now his ship was about to come in and he would wave at us from inside his limousine. He packed his meager belongings in a cardboard suitcase and sat up all night on the train vestibule waiting for Wall Street or Rockefeller to come calling.
When he came back into the alley the next day, nothing daunted, we innocently asked about his millions. Had he invested it all in buggy whips already? No, he replied cheerfully; sometimes those Chinese sagebrushes didn’t get things exactly right, but still he was going to stay calm to avoid confusion -- that much, at least, had come true!
Another time the little white slip told him to marry the next blonde he met. That happened to be Aricellie, Charlie Baumann’s wife. She took pity on the simpleton and didn’t report his romantic advances to her husband, who doubled as the tiger trainer. Holst told him that she wasn’t a real blonde anyway, but dyed her hair. That seemed to mollify JoJo, and he let up on her.
Getting back to Waldo for a moment; he always loved to display his grasp of foreign languages, speaking familiarly with the Hungarian teeterboard act in what he told us was fluent Hungarian. Or quoting Nietzsche in his native German to the dour Baumann. This didn’t garner him any brownie points in clown alley, where we prided ourselves on knowing every scurrilous swear word in a dozen different languages and nothing more. When Waldo began to expand on the intricacies of the German umlaut, Prince Paul and Horowitz would start up a loud conversation in Yiddish, and I might add a little something in Norwegian (learned from my father) such as “Ga til helvete!”
Still, there’s no denying that having some smarts could have saved me spondulicks and embarrassment in the long run. One day I was on my way to the arena when a guy in a flashy Cadillac pulled up to the curb and motioned anxiously for me to come over to the driver’s window.
“Whatcha want?” I asked.
“You need a good watch, buddy? I got lots of ‘em in the trunk. Brand new, never been worn. I got a Rolex you can have for twenty dollars!”
I massaged my chin, remembering my mother’s warning that if something is too good to be true you’d better take advantage of it right away. So I ponied up the twenty and showed up in clown alley with a shiny new watch. Which I showed immediately to Holst.
“Lookit this brand new Rolodex I got today. Only paid twenty bucks for it!” I boasted.
Holst glanced at it briefly, then shook his head in disgust.
“A Rolodex is a filing system, you jughead. And if that’s a real Rolex then I’m a Baptist. You got rooked, Tork. That thing will stop running in a few days and leave a green band around your wrist! You shoulda flushed that twenty bucks down the toilet instead.”
Incensed at his boorish attitude towards my good fortune, I retorted with a crushing bon mot:
“Oh yeah?”
Then I strode away in high dudgeon. Nearly stratospheric. He thinks he’s so darn smart, I said to myself; we’ll see who has the last laugh when I take my Rola-watchamacallit down to the pawn shop and get a couple hundred for it!
Which I didn’t. The pawnbroker laughed me out of the shop, saying he wouldn’t pay a nickel for such drek if it were in a gumball machine.
And it took me nearly two days to get that dratted green band washed off my wrist.
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