Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

7. step right up

No, I didn’t run away with it, but it might be fair to say that the circus ran away with me. As a teenager in Virginia, I performed sideshow and menagerie chores for Hunt Brothers, a show with more animals and a larger cast though, sadly, no Bobbi. (Except from afar or in my fantasies I would never see the likes of her again, although as an adult I made the mistake many times of projecting — unfairly — her image, her archetype, onto young women who, though lively and eccentric enough, were fundamentally unsuited for the role.) I also worked brief stints as ticket seller and concessionaire on the midways of a number of carnivals and fairs. The moment the first vehicles in a garish caravan began to roll into one of the small Southern towns where we lived, I would be bicycling to the setup lot, looking for a chance, as the showfolk would say, to be “with it,” wishing I might leave town in their company.

The attraction for me wasn’t so much the fierce individualism and freedom from convention afforded by the transient life — though the older I got the greater the appeal of the open road — but rather the sheer exuberant gilding-the-lily poetics of the baroque spectacles themselves, the invitation to bask in the rainbowed prisms of a movable Oz from behind whose spangled curtains genuine wizards seldom failed to emerge.

The circus provided a separate reality, with an emphasis, if truth be told, on reality. In the lyrics of a popular song, the term “Barnum & Bailey world” was coined as a synonym for all that is phony and false. Certainly, there was deception, bombast, and ballyhoo aplenty, and even outright grifting in some of the smaller shows, but ultimately the old-fashioned circus was real to a degree rarely approached by most modern entertainments, including “reality TV.” Those snarling tigers swiping at a trainer in the center ring were flesh and fang and claw, not some Pixar animation; those aerialists working without a net literally risked their lives at every breathtaking performance. Beauty, novelty, mirth, and danger mingled in real time, real space a few yards from one’s place in the stands; posing the question “Which is the true phony, Barnum & Bailey or the Hollywood blockbuster; the Great Wallendas (whose seven-person high-wire pyramid I witnessed shortly before their fatal fall in Detroit), or the preposterous heroics generated on some studio geek’s computer?”

Perpetually in 3-D, with no need for dorky glasses, a circus even stirred smell into the sensory mix: cardinal aromas of sweat, fear, sawdust, canvas, greasepaint, spun sugar, frying onions, and the steaming shit of various and sundry beasts of the world. And resting like a translucent — and perhaps transcendent — cherry atop the olfactory omnium-gatherum, the whole overflowing showtime sundae, was the pure aesthetics and philosophical eloquence — the poignant Zen — of the aerial masters.

When asked by a police magistrate why he famously and illegally walked a wire between the World Trade Center’s twin skyscrapers, Philippe Petit responded in a manner worthy of a Kyoto sensei: “I see three oranges, I have to juggle; I see two towers, I have to walk.” Karl Wallenda, when asked why he refused the protection of a net, replied, “God is my net.” And on another occasion, the Wallenda patriarch quietly declared, “On the wire is living. Everything else is only waiting.”

In some spiritual disciplines such remarks would be recognized (and venerated) as “crazy wisdom.” As from my seat in the peanut gallery I observe daily the wholesale distortion and corruption of consensual reality by corporate interests, their Madison Avenue pimps, and their stooges in government, I take a certain refuge in crazy wisdom, even when (maybe especially when) it emanates from avatars in pink circus tights.

Summer lay on the rural Southeast like a sheet of flypaper. Men, dogs, farm animals, commerce, time itself, seemed stuck to the page with a yellowish narcotic glue. Hours, days, weeks dragged by as slowly as a celebrity divorce. Only we kids, with our sandlot ball games, our dips in the river, seemed the least bit animated, but by August, we, too, had surrendered to the torpor, our whoops and wahoos gradually softening to a flylike buzz.

Evening thunderstorms, cooling and greening, occasionally enlivened the scene, yet no sooner had the last raindrop plunked, the last lightning bolt kicked its spastic leg, than heat and humidity, ever sure of themselves, once again assumed office, and by midmorning the countryside would have gone back to looking as if it had been fried by Colonel Sanders.

Considering that there was no air-conditioning to evaporate the sweat, considering that there was no television to relieve the tedium; considering that the church, while dominant in the life of the community, was not exactly a barrel of fun; it’s hardly surprising that when a circus or traveling carnival hit town, a great many residents (one needn’t be a hard-core show fan or Bobbi enthusiast) shared in my delight. Sure, there were a few righteous citizens (Pentecostals or Hard-Shell Baptists) who’d snort, frown, turn their backs, quarantine their children, and take refuge in their clapboard bungalows, praying against the threat of contamination by godless frivolity. But if you’d spy at night from behind the hydrangea bushes or broken-down clunkers in their yards, you’d catch them at the window, lace curtains pulled slightly aside; ears cocked, nostrils twitching, unable to resist stealing a look, a listen, a sniff at just how gleefully the Devil had transformed an innocent schoolyard or disused field.

Well, maybe it was the Devil, maybe it was God, maybe it was a bunch of otherwise unemployable guys and girls from down in Florida somewhere, but “transformed” is the proper verb. What had been a dusty, forlorn acre, carpeted in clumps of half-dried grass, bestrewed with clods, empty beer cans, and tumbling tumbleweeds of crumpled newspaper; inhabited by shabby sparrows and lazy grasshoppers, that unappetizing pasture would have been alchemized in less than a day; transformed into a strange but beguiling pleasure park; a rollicking incandescent oasis of otherness, promising rewards outside the range of normal expectation.

It’s no wonder that transformation was to become a fairly prominent theme in my novels. The way that colored lights and bouncy music, Ferris wheels and performing elephants, could temporarily turn an empty Virginia field into an encampment of marvels was not unlike the way an affluent summer migration periodically turned Blowing Rock, North Carolina, from Dogpatch into Swankville. The lesson was the same: This program is subject to change — often unexpectedly, sometimes in the batting of an eye. It’s the best argument I know against suicide.

Regularly each July, there was a carnival in Blowing Rock. It was not, however, a professional touring outfit with thrilling mechanical rides (Zipper, Loop-the-Loop, Tilt-A-Whirl); or with freak shows, hootchy-kootchy reviews, and crooked games of strength and skill at which a hayseed stud might spend half his paycheck trying to win a twenty-cent plaster Kewpie Doll for a girl in whose pants he may or may not ever get. No, this was one of those old-fashioned amateur community carnivals — in this case thoughtfully organized by the summer gentry — to raise money for local charities, of which there was, in Depression-era Blowing Rock, a fairly considerable need.

Our carnival took place in our park, a pleasant block-long stretch of trees and grass in the center of town. It was a one-day event but it could generate at least two weeks of excitement. The pony rides were popular with kids, and for a dime you could also take a ride on the municipal fire engine, complete with flashing red lights and sirens; and/or go for a spin in a tiny British sports car (probably a forerunner of the Swatch). There was outdoor bingo (bingo was something of a novelty in a town without a single Roman Catholic), a band concert, a pet show, and a pie-eating contest. There was even a kissing booth, although I was too poor and considered too young (Oh yeah?!) to patronize it. The prime generator of excitement however was the raffle.

For several weeks prior to carnival, raffle prizes were prominently displayed in shop windows downtown. It was shortly before my eighth birthday when, passing such a display, I laid eyes on an object of manifest marvel: a portable radio. This was 1940, mind you, when a portable radio was the size, weight, and general shape of a piece of luggage. Today, you’d be charged thirty-five bucks to carry a radio such as this onto a plane.

This was no cheap plastic ghetto blaster. Not one polymer had been killed or injured in its manufacture. Its frame and handle were made of polished hardwood; its facade, around the speaker, was covered in a tough but tasteful tan fabric resembling a kind of upscale burlap. (Think Louis XIV’s personal potato sack.) It was elegant, it was… well, mysterious, magical even; and it was mine.

That’s right, it was mine. Of that I was absolutely sure. All I had to do was to buy a lottery ticket. The problem was that a ticket cost a quarter: five times my weekly allowance.

Day after day, I begged my father for an advance. To no avail. It wasn’t that he was stingy. He just wanted to spare me an inevitable disappointment, not to mention the loss of funds. He did the math for me, patiently explaining the odds against a single ticket among so many winning the prize.

I persisted. And I pestered. Finally, on the Saturday of the drawing, Daddy capitulated and took me to the store to buy a ticket. There were just two left. Fine with me. I only needed one.

That evening, Daddy and I walked the few blocks to the carnival, me serenely confident, he a trifle sad. Again and again, he cautioned me against unreasonable expectations. Unreasonable? That argument made no sense. Fate had promised me that radio.

It was nearly past my bedtime when the drawing for the radio finally occurred. Our mayor’s daughter reached into a top hat, pulled out a number, and handed it to the emcee to read aloud. The number was not mine.

If I was shattered, I don’t recall. In any case, I hadn’t long to react, because it was quickly announced that the drawn number was that of the single ticket, the only one, that had not been sold. A second number was then pulled from the hat. And minutes later, I walked back home in the soft summer night with my new radio blaring at the end of my arm, exactly as I’d expected.

In all the years that have slid into the history pit since the 1940 Blowing Rock carnival, I’ve never won another raffle. Why? Did I use up a lifetime’s allotment of lottery luck on that one classic occasion? Or is it that I’ve never again entered a contest or game of any kind with that level of belief? Was it testimony, on a peewee scale, to the power of faith? And did I lose my faith in raffles about the same time and for approximately the same reasons that I quit believing that virgins can have babies; or that if I slay only those people the government encourages me to slay, I’ll be allowed to spend all of eternity in some vaguely located puffyland sipping milk and honey with a huzzahing throng of cheery nonthinkers? (As the painter Ad Reinhardt said when asked if he was an Abstract Expressionist, “To Heaven — but not with them guys!”)

Saint Paul defined faith as “a belief in things unseen.” Well, I believe in unseen things. Don’t you? Love. Electricity. Flatulence. Moreover, a great many of us seem to experience an innate longing to interface somehow with powers and forces we sense but can never fully identify or comprehend: such yearning is the impetus for all spirituality (as opposed to organized religion), and can be intensified and even temporarily actualized under the influence of deep meditation or LSD. If that’s faith, Paulie, we’ll take a half pound on spec and get back to you Monday. But I digress.

Maybe, on the other hand, I never won another prize because I sold that damn radio ten days later.

My parents questioned why I coveted the radio in the first place. It wasn’t as if I listened to a whole lot of music. Neither the Grand Ole Opry nor the Carolina Hayride were my cup of tee-hee (rock and roll hadn’t been born yet) and Captain Midnight came in just fine on the family console. True enough, but that portable box of tubes and wires was beautiful, it was sophisticated, it was sexy; it was totally, aggressively, unspeakably cool. (Not that anybody south of the Harlem jazz scene would have used the word “cool” in that context in 1940.) For more than a week I basked in its consummate coolness. Then one day an encyclopedia salesman came through town.

In addition to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the man was peddling six-volume sets of the works of Mark Twain, leather-bound; handsome ten-volume sets of Children’s Classics, whose titles included Fairy and Wonder Tales, Folk Tales and Myths, Tales From Greece and Rome, and Animal and Nature Stories; and a world atlas. Oh, fickle me! In a fickle heartbeat, those books had trumped the once-adored radio, which I then proceeded to sell to a tourist for twenty-eight bucks in order to buy everything except the encyclopedias.

There were no regrets. Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book. I still believe that today. To quote another famous painter, this time Robert Motherwell, “The best toys are made of paper.”

Incidentally, speaking of paper toys, that soon-to-be-tattered atlas became a favorite plaything, another trough at which I might water the wild horses of my imagination. It also had a practical application. Not only did I ace geography classes in junior high, years later in taverns I won many a beer betting that Reno, Nevada, was farther west than Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon, farther north than Portland, Maine. (You can look it up.)

On the blazing, bustling midway of the Northern Neck State Fair (in Warsaw, Virginia), the sideshow barker (now an obsolete term: for years, show people have called them “talkers”) was enticing crowds of gawking rubes with ornate, exaggerated descriptions of the oddities and wonders allegedly assembled inside his tent. Among the attractions was a “genuine living” midget, a rosy-faced, tuxedo-attired gentleman of somewhat less than normal height who had joined the talker out front to personally demonstrate that there truly were “startling examples of Mother Nature’s cruelties” to be seen inside by those rubes who accepted the invitation to step right up and lay their money down.

Talkers obviously talk, and this one talked so rapidly, so incessantly, that when he died I’m sure they had to beat his tongue to death with a stick. In the midst, however, of explaining that despite the midget’s deficiency in stature, he was an intelligent and talented human being (as if to prove the point, the midget lit a cigar), the talker abruptly stopped talking. He stammered a few incoherent words. Then fell mute again.

From the booth where I sold tickets for rides on the Whip, I had a good view of the sideshow tent, and I knew what had silenced the talker. I’d been expecting it.

The tidewater village of Warsaw resembled the mountain village of Blowing Rock in that no persons of color resided there. Unlike Blowing Rock, however, there were scores, perhaps hundreds, of African Americans living in what amounted to rural shantytowns within a couple miles of the municipal limits. While during the week, a scattering of black faces might be seen in Warsaw — cleaning women and laborers mostly — on Saturdays there was an ebony tide. They came into town to shop and to socialize, hanging around the Texaco station talking, laughing, drinking soda pop and brown-bagged whiskey, listening to the soul sounds (called “race music” back then) that blared from the countertop radio until the place closed around 11 P.M. The loosey-goosey Texaco station was the only establishment in Warsaw where Jim Crow constraints went unenforced. As a result, its owner, a white man, was a bit of a pariah in town, but that’s another story.

Residing somewhere in the unlit, unpaved, hoe-chopped, chigger-scratchy environs of Warsaw was a family of black midgets. There were four, maybe five of them: male and female, siblings possibly, though the precise nature of their kinship was impossible to know. They always came to town together, never singularly, accompanied by several full-size chaperones or protectors, and they didn’t come in very often: maybe a half-dozen Saturdays a year. It seems they didn’t appreciate being gawked at, which, though understandable, sprinkles a fine pepper of irony over their visit to the Northern Neck State Fair.

Now, let me emphasize that when I say “midgets,” I mean midgets. I’m talking extreme midgetry. Midgets among midgets. Jaw-dropping diminutive. Seriously, I’ll eat this page and wash it down with raw kerosene if any one of Warsaw’s little people was so much as a mouse hair taller than Michu, for years a star attraction with Ringling Brothers, billed as “the World’s Smallest Man.” Michu’s height was thirty-three inches.

So, when from my fairground vantage point I witnessed the Warsaw midgets slowly approaching the sideshow tent, I fully anticipated the talker’s shock and embarrassment. There he was, raving on in cascading hyperbole about what a rare specimen of humanity his midget was, how privileged were the rubes to behold such a phenomenon, when he — and eventually the rubes — caught sight of a whole troupe of beautifully formed chocolate miniatures, not one of whose head would reach as high as the sideshow midget’s nipples.

Was it pure coincidence, were the gods having sport, as is their wont? Or had our midget family planned the whole thing, either as a silent protest against both the commercial exploitation of the physically peculiar and the dishonesty of ballyhoo; or despite their customary shyness, as a prank, an uncharacteristic display of mischief and fun? Had they gone back to their shantytown that night and laughed their tiny butts off?

We’ll never know, although the gossip among the midway carnies was that the show boss had followed them home, returning there the next day and the day after, ever sweetening his offer to make the lot of them rich and famous if they’d just sign on with him. To their credit, they did not. Meanwhile, back at the fairgrounds, I watched the talker wax visibly nervous each time he was joined out front by the upstaged fellow some of us had taken to calling “the World’s Tallest Midget.”

In 1972, an odd little circus rolled into the fishing village of La Conner, Washington, and erected its big top, which was not very big, on what was then a vacant lot in the center of town. Although I can’t remember the show’s name (a poster in the grocery-store window had only four days earlier announced its arrival), certain other aspects of it are lodged in the folds of my brain like a pressed blossom; still faintly perfumed, still faintly colored, as if reluctant to relinquish its charm. And it did have charm. It was simultaneously the most pathetic and the most engaging circus I’ve ever known.

To begin with, it traveled with but two live animals. Considering the cruelty to which many circus animals have been subjected, that could be judged two too many, although this unlikely pair — a half-grown elephant, and an unusually large parrot — seemed robust.

As for human beings, there were in the entire company exactly seven: four men, three women. Three of the men were roustabouts: workers who put up the tent and did the heavy lifting. The other man (he might have been the owner) served as ringmaster, played the organ, and at one point performed what passed for a trapeze act. Middle-aged, with a beer belly, he struggled mightily to swing in a complete loop. As he perspired, huffed, puffed, and turned rooster red, my girlfriend and I surely weren’t alone in fearing we were about to witness a medical emergency. “The Greatest Heart Attack on Earth.” He persisted valiantly, however, and eventually managed to flip all the way over. The applause he received was motivated more by relief than admiration.

Sometimes solo, occasionally in pairs, once in triplicate, the women assumed a variety of roles: acrobats, tumblers, balancers, contortionists, jugglers, elephant trainers, ropedancers, etc. What’s interesting is that each time a performer left the tent, she returned with a different name. For one act, a woman might be announced as “the fabulous Madame Yvonne”; the next time she entered the ring she would be “the amazing Madame Dianne.” There was Madame Natasha, Madame Sophie, Madame Elena, and so on, as if spectators might actually come to believe there were dozens of them. Each female performer wore multiple identities — but always the same tights. And virtually every pair of tights had runs in it!

This raises the question: does a woman in pink circus tights hold all the secrets of the universe if her tights have runs in them? The answer I think is emphatically “yes!” — although I wouldn’t go so far as to declare it a prerequisite.

The multitasking and name-changing; the frayed, unraveling tights; the effort and exuberance exhibited in an obviously distressed show whose performances might easily have been perfunctory and forlorn, was endearing enough, but what broke the needle on my charm meter was the grand finale. Picture this:

Spotlit and sparkling, a spinning mirrored disco ball is slowly raised to the top of the darkened tent. As it ascends, a live parrot, twirling round and round, is hanging from the ball by its beak. And all the while an organ, fully amplified, all stops out, a panting, red-faced ringmaster at its keyboard, is playing “The Impossible Dream.” Ta da!

Well, I guess you had to be there. I’ve attended many a circus, major and minor, in America and abroad; seen many a performance, thrilling and routine, but it is the one just described — kind of cheesy, sort of dumb, falling so audaciously and yet so sweetly on the far side of reason — that will forever occupy the center ring in my heart.

Incidentally, the following morning I stopped by the market and asked for the poster, wishing to add it to my meager collection of circus memorabilia. The poster wasn’t there. According to a clerk, someone from the show had picked it up earlier so that it could be displayed in another town. Turns out, this circus with one elephant and one parrot also had only one poster.