In 1962 Groucho Marx convulsed the country with his confessions of illicit passion in a book called
Memoirs of a Mangy Lover. As a randy nine-year-old I obtained a paperback edition before you could say "prepubescent" and immersed myself in his slightly raunchy anecdotes. Needless to say, I was chapfallen when his book failed to deliver the dirty goods. It was merely a string of whimsical stories held together by the common theme of romantic collapse and calamity -- something I did not wish to study in depth at the time.
But today, older, wiser, and bereft of any meaningful connections with the distaff side of society, I, too, am ready to settle back and brew up some of my own memoirs of mangy love affairs gone awry.
Specifically, the tale of Alice of the Circus.
I have previously mentioned that in 1973 I worked as one of the advance clowns for Ringling Brothers. Among other things, this entailed spending 3 months in New York City touting The Greatest Show on Earth.
I enjoyed my settled routine in the Big Apple while it lasted, casting aside the nervous tics and ferret-like demeanor that comes all too often to those who lead a peripatetic existence. I went to church each Sunday and gradually put names to faces among the LDS congregants.
One member in particular had a face I desired to put a name to. Alice. She had jet black hair, effervescent brown eyes, pouty and luscious carmine lips, and a body that would not quit. I sat next to her every Sabbath, and gradually we began holding hands while singing hymns such as "Come, Come, Ye Saints" and "If You Could Hie to Kolob".
She was a nursing student at Colombia University, and lived at the Young Women's Hebrew Association building on Nagle Avenue in Manhattan.
When the circus hit town I invited her down to Madison Square Garden to watch it whenever she wanted. I had an in with the operator of the private elevator on the east side of the Garden. It was supposed to be strictly for the bigwigs, but the guy who ran it was crazy for yellow bread pudding the Greek joint on the corner served; I would bring him a cold hunk every few days -- and for that he let Alice and I ride up to the mezzanine as if we were royalty.
Alice was enchanted with the show. She became fast friends with the Hungarian teeter board act, giving the older women in the troupe back rubs when their spines threatened to blow out from catching the menfolk on their shoulders.
On her birthday Mark Anthony in clown alley made her a petite foam rubber birthday cake that turned inside out into a yellow duck.
After the last show I would escort her back to the YWHA. We stopped at a coffee shop along the way that featured something called 'sinkers' -- donuts of a particularly heavy composition that were ideal for dunking in coffee. In fact, the shop featured an 8 by 10 photo of Red Skelton doing his famous "How to Dunk a Donut" routine, using one of their donuts.
Male company was not allowed upstairs at the YWHA, and so we dallied in the lobby, making goo-goo eyes at each other and locking lips when we had the place to ourselves. We were in sync; simpatico; crazy about each other.
Then the time came for me to move on with my advance clown duties, first to Philadelphia and then to Chicago.
And we argued. She wanted me to call her every day. I said I'd write her every day. (A stamp cost eight cents, while a daily long distance call ran into a lot of nickles and dimes.) Then she called me a bad name. She said I was cheap.
I left her standing alone at the Orange Julius bar, took the subway back to my room, packed my bag, and was off to Philly that night.
And once I reached Philadelphia . . . I began calling her every day, to apologize.
She accepted my apologies gracefully, and even let me fly her out so we could attend a performance of H.M.S. Pinafore together.
All was well between us again. She went back to school in New York and I carried on with my publicity work.
Until Denver, when I realized that my bank book was hemorrhaging badly thanks to Ma Bell.
My last call to her was short, sharp, and stereotyped. I told her it was over; she cried; I told her she hadn't done anything wrong; it was all my fault; and she told me to stick my red rubber nose where the sun don't shine.
Alice was my first serious circus fling. After her, I decided that women and clowns don't mix. Clowns are social misfits whose yearning for affection is white hot and spills out in their wild attempts to win an audience's laughter and applause. As long as they are getting that, no woman can ever move into their hearts as anything but a temporary boarder. Real love and domesticity came to me only after I had quit the road (temporarily, as it turned out) and found an apple-cheeked schoolmarm in the wilds of North Dakota . . .
