Читать книгу The Long Shadows - Andrew Boone's Erlich - Страница 5

“Hey, you gigantic, ugly son of a bitch.”

The menacing voice stopped me in my tracks. More frightened then enraged, I clenched my fists and slowly spun around to face him. But there was no one there. I must be losing my mind, I thought.

Then I heard it again, louder and more threatening. That time, as if dragged by a tiger into the brush, the raspy voice yanked me across the dimly lit menagerie, all but vacant at that late hour. That’s when I saw the rube, looking like a drunken lunatic, shouting at a seemingly empty, hand- carved red and blue animal cage. The whole scene was eerie and strange. I knew he was asking for trouble, because I recognized whose cage it was. He continued to scream but there was still no response from the darkened confines. Then, out of the shadows, as if from another dimension, Gargantua lunged at the bars with such force that he would have broken through them if his leg wasn’t chained. The gorilla shook those bars with all his strength, hurling primate invective at his tormentor, like it was feces: “Oooh, oooh, aaah, aaah,” Gargantua roared. Then he pounded his chest.

The rube taunted him again, mimicking his cry. “Oooh aaah, I’ll give you something to holler about, you flea-bitten monkey.”

I was incensed at the rube for tormenting Gargantua, but I didn’t know what to do. I had an ominous premonition he was planning to hurt the gorilla. Still, I was shocked and couldn’t believe my eyes when he reached into his pocket and took out a baseball-sized rock.

What kind of a maniac would do something like that? I thought. Then the rube wound up and hurled the rock between the bars, into the cage, striking the gorilla on the arm. Gargantua shrieked. I felt an overpowering need to protect him. I knew what it was like to be hit by rocks. That’s when I charged him. I don’t remember much after that. Everything went black.

The whole episode was like a bad dream. They told me I smacked him hard—really hard. They said that at a full gallop, I planted my left shoulder squarely in his upper back, just below his neck. The next thing I knew, Clyde Ingalls, Frank Buck, and two roustabouts were pulling all four hundred pounds of me off him.

“He could have taken his head off!”

“The rube crumbled like a paper doll.”

“You should have seen it. He hit him like a freight train!”

From every direction a chorus of anonymous accusers filled the air.

“Now . . . in the backyard!” Ingalls ordered, slamming his half-smoked stogie into the dirt. He was furious. He had my contract, now torn and bloody, in his right hand. The two of us hurried out of the menagerie. I looked back at the figure crumpled on the ground and wondered if he was dead. As we walked away from the scene of the crime to whatever my fate would be, my left shoulder and my neck ached. My head throbbed. Under my torn pants I could feel that I had scraped and bruised both of my knees when I crashed down on the ground with the rube.

“What in the hell has gotten into you, Jake? You could have killed him,” he thundered as we walked. “For your sake and ours, you better hope to hell that son of a bitch’s okay.”

“He hurt Garganatua. He threw a—”

“I don’t give two shits what he did. It’s not your place to protect that gorilla. It’s not your place to protect anyone. All you’re paid to do is sit on your keister and let the fans gawk. If that’s not enough for you I’ll give you your walking papers right now.” He stopped to glare at me. “You could have maimed that guy, or worse! What the hell were you thinking?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I said, stopping and looking down at him. Ingalls kept moving. I hurried to catch up. “I just lost control. I blanked out. It’s never happened like this before.”

What’s happening to me? I thought. I felt frightened and guilty. What have I done?

“There’s no excuse for what you did,” Ingalls said as if reading my mind. “We’re hurting. We’re hurting bad. We can’t afford a lawsuit. Do you want to put the nails in our coffin? The Gentry Brothers, Sparks, Cole, Robbins, 101 Ranch, and Sells-Floto and in the past two months, Al G. Barnes and The Hagenbeck-Wallace Show; they’ve all gone belly up. If it wasn’t for that snarling simian, the biggest thing since Jumbo, we’d be on the street as well, eating in soup kitchens.” Ingalls shook his finger at me.

“Gargantua doesn’t snarl, Clyde,” I said nervously. It was easier for me to defend the gorilla than myself.

“Just shut up!” Ingalls shouted. “I have to think about what to do now.” He paced back and forth in front of me, took his hat off and began nervously running his fingers through his thinning hair.

Ingalls and I stood alone just outside the empty, three-ringed arena where the main acts performed in the old Madison Square Garden. That space, which had been packed with circus performers, animals, clowns, musicians, and fans just a few hours before, was like a graveyard. I hung my head, wishing I could melt into the grimy sawdust and peanut shells that lined the floor. My knuckles were raw and my knees must have been bleeding because my pants were sticking to them. My head felt like it had been hit with a roustabout’s sledgehammer. As if I’d been living in one of those cages in the menagerie, I couldn’t get the smell of urine-soaked hay out of my nose.

“That’s just what we need—a full-on scandal. I can see the headlines now: ‘The Great Gargantua Goes Wild as Freak Cripples Fan.’” My boss kicked the dirt and sent fragments of sawdust flying in every direction. Clyde was about five and a half feet tall with a big beer belly, dressed in his signature seersucker suit and straw hat. To anyone who watched as he scolded me, it must have seemed comical. I bit my lip and didn’t say a word. Clyde Ingalls, who the public knew as the colorful and always-affable manager of Ringling Bros, Barnum and Bailey’s sideshow, the largest and most famous freak show in the world, could be very scary. In nine years with the circus, this was the scariest I’d ever seen him.

“What’s gotten into you?” he asked, pacing back and forth in front of me again. “First you disappear for three days in Milwaukee. Then you’re a month past due to sign your contract for next season. Now you attack a customer.” He shook his fist up at me. “Should I call the men in white coats to take you to Bellevue in a straitjacket? Or maybe you want to end up in a mud show, or worse? You’ve got a home here. You’re a flea’s dick away from losing it.”

I felt numb. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just shook my head mechanically, as if I agreed with him.

“You goddamned better straighten up,” he said, slamming his hat into his thigh. “I’ll let you know when the suits figure out how to clean this mess up.”

XXXX

When Ringling Bros played in New York, just like in most of the other cities where we performed, I would stay on the circus train with the other performers, but not that night. After all that had happened, I needed to escape from my home away from home. I couldn’t bear to face my friends. I was ashamed and humiliated at how badly I’d lost control. So I checked into The Algonquin Hotel in midtown.

Later that night, I remember stepping toward an open window in my hotel room. I leaned out of it, a bit too far. Feeling the muggy coolness, I looked down. Despite what had happened a few hours before, it wasn’t like me to be impulsive. What am I doing? I thought. More numb than alarmed, I carelessly leaned farther out of the window. Just a little bit more and you’ll lose your balance; top-heavy, you’ll tumble into space. That would be an easy solution to my troubles, I thought. The sight of the street twelve stories below made me shaky. Even so, something compelled me to climb out onto the ledge. I looked down and asked myself unanswerable questions. Why wasn’t I born a man of normal dimensions like all the others? Why can’t I just step into a store and buy a pair of shoes or a shirt like every other man? Why can’t I ever sleep in a normal size bed? Why can’t I find a woman to love me?

In the moonlight I saw the shadowed wood and steel skeleton of a new art deco building going up across Forty-Fourth Street. I wondered what kind of a drunken architect designed me. Was there some kind of a mistake in my blueprints? How could any architect possibly have expected me to stand up? I thought that it was just a matter of time until my flawed foundation would crack and, in an awful crash, my girders would collapse.

In those days, I could never get enough of the Manhattan skyline. Looking back on it, as big as I am, I must have been fascinated and comforted by things like tall buildings that made me feel small. But that night, so long ago, the view from the open window of my hotel room in The Algonquin was dangerous. The bottomless sadness that from time to time terrified me had disappeared for a while, but that night it came back with a vengeance. I couldn’t think my way out of it or ignore it. Like those massive structures that surrounded me, it demanded my attention. I willed myself to step back from the danger. I did. But that had the opposite effect of what you might think. Moving backward, the image in my mind transformed. I was no longer passively falling into space but running to the window and jumping to my death.

Well it was as if Thanatos, the god of death, had devoured my fear and left me horribly energized with an overpowering will to die. How long would it take me to hit the ground? I wondered. I imagined the grizzly thud my eight-and-a-half-foot frame would make when it shattered on the sidewalk. Since I was seven years old I’d always been a spectacle. Would my death be just another show, and a free one at that? Would my giant body lying on the sidewalk in a bloody heap draw a crowd like I did in the sideshow?

That wasn’t the first time I had seriously thought about suicide. I originally contemplated killing myself when I was sixteen, shortly before I moved to Hollywood. It had been a terrible summer what with all the taunts and teasing, and that horrible experience down by the river.

In the past, something always stopped me, someone, some twist of fate. But that night, in my empty hotel room, I was alone. No one would intervene. No one from Ringling Bros even knew I was there. I did that deliberately. In the past, I could never go through with it. I would think about my parents and how hard they had worked when they first arrived in this country. I’d think of my big brother, Ben. If I ended it all, he’d try but wouldn’t be able to use that sharp mind of his to make sense of anything so senseless and tragic. He’d end up dropping out of college to care for my distraught parents. My baby brother, Myer, would lose that cheerful innocence of his. No one in my family would ever be the same. They would all be devastated by my death. Suicide would bring shame upon my family. If I killed myself, Rabbi Roth wouldn’t even allow them to bury me in the B’nai Zion Cemetery.

But there in that lonely hotel room I was immune to fear of shame. Looking back on it, that awful night my emotions were raw and my racing thoughts were more lethal than ever. I knew that at any second they had the unrestrained strength to hurl me out of the window. I wasn’t sure if any concerns and hesitations I had about taking my life really mattered anyway. The storm that was raging in me did not allow me to see beyond the pain I was experiencing that moment; that there might possibly be more to my life than I could have imagined. At that time, all I could think about was what had taken place earlier that night and if I would be fired from my job in the sideshow, the only place a freak like me came close to fitting in. If I lost that job, what would I do? What could I do? I’d be a burden to my family. Without work, depending on them like I did when I went blind . . . I would never let that happen again.

If Clyde Ingalls canned me, I’d have no choice. Sooner or later, one way or another, I knew I’d end it all. Why put off the inevitable? I asked myself. I felt trapped. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air in the damned hotel room. I stepped toward the open window again. Now I was outside of myself, watching the whole scene unfold as it were a film starring someone else. The sound of a ruthless voice coming from somewhere in my room frightened me. A freak like you doesn’t deserve to live. All you do is cause problems. I couldn’t block out the blood-thirsty thoughts. Then I reached for the open window frame with both my arms, the way someone does who is trying to escape a burning building. I pulled myself closer. There was no turning back. It would be so much easier for everybody if you were dead.

XXXX

Not wanting to believe what almost just happened, I slammed the window and stepped away. When I finally got back into the two beds the hotel staff had pushed together for me, I was too confused and exhausted to be terrified. Willing myself to sleep wasn’t an option. I kept flashing back to the awful incident a few hours earlier. I still couldn’t believe what I had done. I worried that after all those years, a dangerous, rogue gorilla in me that I always feared but didn’t really understand had finally broken free from his cage. When would I attack again? Who else would I hurt?

Lying there in bed, the memories of what had happened started to come back in intrusive staccato bursts: the feel of my shoulder crashing into the drunk’s spine; the sickening smell of whiskey coming from his bloody mouth as he laid there, half-dead in the sawdust. I decided to get up and take a walk. I dressed quickly and made my way downstairs.

It was about three a.m. when I turned left out of the hotel lobby onto Forty-Fourth Street. I moved as if in a dream toward Madison. A ghostly breadline materialized out of the steam that escaped from manhole covers and the shadows cast by dim streetlights on the sidewalk in front of St. Andrews. The whole thing was haunting; a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life on a three-dimensional concrete canvas. The ragged ones stood three abreast, a tattered army crusading for soup. The line of hungry, vacant eyes waiting for the rescue mission to open at sunup snaked almost around the block. Some of those standing there were bums in patched clothing. Some were wearing shabby business suits and ties. Here and there one of them held a child by the hand. I looked at them with sympathy for their plight while several of those poor specters looked up at me with what I assumed was envy. I imagined they would have longed to sleep in a secure and comfortable place like The Algonquin, to dine in its fine restaurant, and to wear the clean, new clothes I sported, even if the price they would have to pay for those luxuries was to live and work as a freak of nature. At that moment on the chilly sidewalk, I don’t think it was so much my height that created the chasm between me and the people in the breadline. Rather, it was money and the food, shelter, and security it buys in a world haunted by hard times.

I turned left on Sixth Avenue and headed toward the park. About half way down the block I passed an Apple Annie selling fruit for a few pennies.

“Won’t you buy an apple, mister?” she pleaded. I reached in my pocket and gave her a dollar.

“Keep the change,” I said. When she handed me the small bruised fruit it got lost in my massive hand. She never looked me in the eyes but gazed down at the sidewalk as if she could see through it. She must have been hitting the bottle pretty hard, I thought. The Apple Annie’s one-time fine clothing, now gray, told a sad story of better times. Her cheeks had circles of pink rouge on them. She was a tragic caricature of a Ringling clown.

“You take care, ma’am,” I said quietly. Walking away from her, I stashed the apple in my coat pocket and imagined what her life must have been like before the Crash. I thought of my mother. I imagined if life had taken a few other tragic twists and turns and she, God forbid, was forced to sell apples on the street to strangers in order to survive. The image made me cringe. After another six blocks, I couldn’t walk any farther. Emotionally spent and completely drained, I sank into a bench at a bus stop.

It’s funny how memory works. You look back and remember some oddball things and not others. But I recall, as clear as a harvest moon over Waco Tanks, sitting there and staring at my long legs and huge feet resting in the gutter. Then I fell fast asleep.