Take a Minnesota kid like me, who’d never been anywhere, and put him in the Ringling clown alley, traveling to a new city each week for 48 weeks, and what do you get?
An insightful bon vivant, naturally. One who has strolled the elegant boulevards and drifted through the sinister back alleys of the world, and who knows the value of whispering “Iftah ya simsim” in the right ear at the right time for access to mysteries and pleasures beyond reckoning.
I also collected bus tokens in each town. They were neat to use as tiddlywinks.
As Hank Snow famously sang: “I been everywhere, man.” New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Atlanta. Kansas City. Calgary. Houston. Philadelphia. Seattle. And even Soddy Daisy, Tennessee. To the complaisant mind, the constant travel from one metropolis to another may dull the senses -- but I found my wits sharpened and my perceptions deepened each time the circus train pulled into a new city. Each town has a distinctive smell, for instance. Chicago smells like broiled meat and sewage. Manhattan has a distinctive bouquet of fermented rat droppings and spilled gelato. New Orleans, before Katrina, absolutely reeked of roasting coffee beans. Detroit always smelled of heated metal and burning tires.
Food and drink vary from place to place, and one does not need to be a frenchified gourmet to distinguish a Philly grinder from a Baltimore hoagy. Or to relish the suppleness of a soft street taco in Amarillo as compared to the austere crispness of the fiery taquitos sold along the riverbank in San Antonio.
Even background noise is varied from town to town. The summer cicadas in Little Rock never let up; their buzzing followed me inside every building, bouncing around in my head until sanity was but a faint memory. In Long Beach the booming of the surf traveled underground to come up through the soles of my feet to my ear drums; it made me dream of constructing a raft like Thor Heyerdahl and drifting off to the Sandwich Islands.
I discovered that each city has its own vernacular. In Milwaukee a water fountain is a ‘bubbler.’ In Des Moines a rubber band is a rubber ‘binder.’ You must never use the word ‘Frisco’ in front of a resident of San Francisco, lest they slit you open with a glaive. In Jackson I heard one respectable old lady tell another “That ol’ booger is a good shot with a rifle.” If you want just a little of something Down East in Bangor you ask for a ‘tidge’ of it, as in “May I have just a tidge more blueberry pie please?”
Now that osteoarthritis has slowed me down and I have given up my car, I don’t plan on traveling more than a few miles from my Senior Housing apartment in the foreseeable future. I’ve traveled a good deal more than most folk; a comfortable wing chair, a glass of Vernors at my side, and a Patrick O’Brian sea novel, is all I now require to tide me over from day to day. In other words, as grandpap used to say, my get up and go has got up and went.
But I have my memories. And I remember the city of Salt Lake best of all. One reason is because it was the city where Chico was finally able to cash in his pennies. During the season he had scrounged everywhere for unwanted and abandoned pennies; on sidewalks, in phone booths, even under the bleachers. He put them in a five gallon glass water cooler bottle. When it was nearly full he took it to one bank after another to exchange for paper money. But bank clerks took one look at it and shut their grille doors in alarm, refusing to deal such an outre piggy bank. I helped him lug it around until my back began to warp. Without much hope, we took it into Zion’s National Bank in downtown Salt Lake City when the show played the Salt Palace. A bank vice president came out to inspect Chico’s penny vault and asked him if he knew how much was in there. Chico didn’t, obviously; but being Brooklyn born and bred he was ready to bluff it out to the last cent.
“Two-hundred-and-fifty-dollars-and-sixty-seven-cents” he said promptly.
“Fine!” enthused the vp. “We’ll set this up in the window and let customers guess the amount. The closest guess wins a gift certificate to ZCMI. I’ll have the cashier bring you your money in just a moment.”
So Chico walked out of there with a cool two-fifty and some cents -- and he was nice enough to give me twenty-five of it, for helping him carry that heavy glass bottle around to so many other banks first.
I blew most of it on a big box of See’s Nuts & Chews, and a coffee table book called “Meet the Mormons,” which I sent to my parents (who never read it; my mother put it in the linen drawer where she kept lace doilies and oversized dinner napkins.)
Other reasons I consider Salt Lake my favorite city is Temple Square and fried liver. Temple Square is a small public park that surrounds the LDS Temple. The first time I went there was when I’d just gotten a letter from mom telling me my Grandma Daisy was dead. She had been the only one in the family really happy to see me succeed as a clown. She never had any money to give me, but instead gave me lavender-scented hugs that a scared boy on his way to Florida really needed. As I sat there rereading the brief letter, I felt a sudden uplift -- the way you feel when a daylong drizzle lifts just at sunset so you can see the sun burst through the clouds for a few glorious moments. It was a small fine moment that I’ll always cherish, and associate with Temple Square and Salt Lake City.
And as for fried liver, I don’t know why it is but I consider fried liver a basic patriotic staple -- something I eat to ward off terrorists and tea parties. Nobody knows how to fix it except in Salt Lake City. They don’t bread it or monkey around with a lot of foolish spices. The restaurants beat it with a mallet to tenderize it, and then cook it with bacon and a generous helping of sliced yellow onions. They give you lima beans and a dinner roll to go with it. Whenever we played the Salt Palace I went to Denny’s for liver every other day. I never found it made as plain and as well in any other city.
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