Stuck on the Circus Train

When the Ringling Blue Unit played Denver in 1972 I took a bad fall in the ring on opening night and injured my back. The doctor told me to get at least a week of bed rest before going back to work, so I was stuck on the circus train with nothing to do. I loved the ‘Iron Lung’ when it was rolling along the tracks, unfolding America before my artless eyes as we moved towards the next town. But in the middle of the day, standing still on a smelly sidetrack, with no one around, I felt like I was in solitary confinement.

It was a grand opportunity to nap, of course -- circus folk are chronically deprived of enough sleep during the season. By the time October rolled around I always had bags under my eyes that could accommodate a bushel of turnips. But a stationary train car makes a lot of weird and loud noises during the daytime. At irregular intervals there is the sibilant hissing of released steam -- at least, I HOPE it was steam. Unhitching a line of boxcars, even several tracks away, sounds like a herd of elephants firing off bazookas. And from time to time the whole damn car would vibrate furiously, for no apparent reason. So just as I was about to drift off into a sustained reverie some kind of Donnybrook would malevolently awake me.  

There was no television or radio reception -- the ‘Iron Lung’ acted like a lead casing, keeping out broadcast waves and kryptonite rays in equal proportions. And I had unwisely gone through all my reading material during the trip to Denver -- I didn’t have an unread MAD Magazine or P.G. Wodehouse paperback to my name. I was getting seriously bored with myself. I tried learning to play solitaire with a pack of cards that Chico left for me. I hated having to remember card sequences. It was too much like file clerking.

When Steve Smith came by one night to ask if I needed anything I begged him to bring me something to read. He obligingly dropped off a few copies of the New Yorker magazine. But at that stage in my intellectual development I had not yet developed a sturdy vocabulary, so when I ran across words in the New Yorker like ‘sclerotic’ and ‘pusillanimous’ I gave up in despair. I vowed that as soon as I was no longer bedridden I would get me the biggest, fattest dictionary in the world.

Good old Tim Holst didn’t leave me in the lurch, either. He brought by a hardback book entitled “The Fate of the Persecutors of the Prophet Joseph Smith” by N.B. Lundwall. Although it promised some gruesome tales of revenge it turned out to be rather heavy going, theology-wise. Of course, I had my own copy of the Book of Mormon to read whenever I liked -- but I was bogged down in the Book of Alma, which details the seemingly endless wars between the Nephites and the Lamanites. I couldn’t keep track of who was smiting who, and, like Mark Twain snidely remarked, I was finding it to be “chloroform in print.” My callow intellect lacked the depth and patience to appreciate the spiritual riches therein -- it would be another ten years before I really began to relish reading LDS scriptures.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, Dougie Ashton came by one night, slightly lit, to hand me a coffee table book he said was all about kangaroos. It certainly was all about kangaroos, and the interesting positions that stuffed specimens can be made to pose in for lubricious purposes. I tossed it away.

I was finally saved from vertical insanity by Roofus T. Goofus, who was visiting an antique shop with his showgirl sweetheart Alice when he came across an old edition of Charles Dicken’s “The Memoirs of Grimaldi.” Writing under the pen name of Boz, Dickens had edited the great clown’s original 400 page manuscript down to a hundred and fifty pages for the British magazine Bentley’s Miscalleny -- and then it had been brought out in book form when Dickens became a world sensation. I had always wanted to read this book, but had never found it in any of the used bookstores I continuously haunted. Roofus never told me how much he had paid for the book -- he just threw it into my roomette one evening on his way to visit Alice in the showgirl’s car.

I wallowed in the technical details of English pantomime that only Dickens could describe with such precision and accuracy. I grinned like an ape as he lovingly described Grimaldi’s favorite tricks and routines. And I bawled like a baby at the pathos Dickens produced in describing the celebrated clown’s last days -- spent in poverty and crippling illness, forgotten by all. Reading that book was an emotional and physical catharsis for me, and when I finished it I forced myself to get out of bed before the week was up and go back to work, despite the pain. For I belonged to a sacred brotherhood, though it was disdained by many -- and my duty and responsibility lay clear before me: Throw that pie and drop those pants!