Revoltingly Young (26 page)

4:18 p.m. I got into serious trouble today with Endre Kanavos, the boss’s nephew and the Greek in charge of the midway crew. (All our crew bosses are Grecians, as the second President Bush called that ethnicity.) Some local lowlife sneaked behind the bounce house when I wasn’t looking and slashed it with a knife. Apparently, soft air-filled structures are irresistible targets to vandals–like giant balloons they feel compelled to burst. All the kids started screaming when it collapsed on them, but I think they were more disappointed that the fun was over than scared. I got my ass chewed while Endre applied a patch to the gash. According to him, my job is to take tickets, manage the kids in line, prevent any roughhousing inside, toss out kids when their time is up, and guard the entire perimeter. Also alert patrons that tempting treats are available at the snack trailer, help lost children find their parents, pick up stray litter, and generally Stay Alert. Most important: I must do all that with a big friendly smile!

Yeah, right. I thought it was the Greeks who invented logical thought. What fantasy world is he living in?

10:27 p.m. Circus people like to hang out after the last show and shoot the breeze, but tonight I headed straight back to my tiny roomette. I think I overdosed on people this past week. Too many new faces to deal with. Big change for a kid who grew up in a lonely trailer on an isolated road in the middle of nowhere. Not much quiet and solitude in a circus, where everyone is piled up on top of each other. People say circuses are “just one big family,” as if that were a good thing. You could say the same thing about high school, where the rigid hierarchy calls the shots, everyone competes for attention and status, and the weak or unconventional get forced to the fringes. At least in high school you can go home at 3:30. Here you have everyone in your face every waking hour of the day–not to mention a guy sleeping three feet under your butt at night.

TUESDAY, August 30 – School started in Winnemucca yesterday. How odd not to look forward to seeing Uma in class every day. The rest of the experience I may not miss so much. There are kids in this circus who have never been to school a day in their lives. An example of this are Nerea and Miren Lurrieta, who dress in flashy leotards and hop around on a neon-lit trampoline. Seems like an odd thing to do daily with one’s parents (and little brother Iker), but they accept turning somersaults in midair and landing on their dad’s brawny shoulders as perfectly normal. They’re petite twins about my age and seem quite intelligent despite being entirely home-schooled. Miren, especially, always has her head in a book. They’re from Bilbao, a city in northern Spain on the Bay of Biscay–though they regard themselves more as Basque than Spanish. They speak English with slight but very endearing accents and are virtually identical. Fortunately for identification purposes, Nerea now dyes her light brown hair a vivid tangerine. Both are somewhat intimidating as they’re quite attractive, amazingly fit from a lifetime of exercise, and, I think, rather conceited. Walking around between shows in their silver and gold satin capes, they look like costumed heroines from some adventure video game. Much too haughty to notice the new janitor, although lately I’ve seen signs of a thaw.

So far the friendliest of the performing kids are a couple of Korean brothers, Sam and Jin Pak. Sam’s 14 and Jin’s 16 (they both seem younger though). They do a very nervous-making aerial act with their father and two uncles on a network of oversized bungee cords. Lots of plunging from high platforms and bouncing back up to grab tiny handholds or each other. Quite exciting, to be sure, though I think I’ll stick to cleaning toilets. They like to practice juggling in their spare time, so are always eager to discuss my famous brother. Both are secretly stuck on the Lurrieta twins, which is not surprising considering how those girls fill out a leotard. I notice Randy pants after them too in his crude and offensive way. What a loser, yet somehow these rednecks always seem to achieve reproductive success.

5:42 p.m. Big crowds today for a Tuesday. Mrs. Patsatzis says they have a very competent advance man, who arrives a few days ahead of the circus in each town to stir up interest and promote ticket sales. The guy doing that job is her very own daughter Syna. I’m not likely to meet her, since she’s always on the road ahead of us. Mrs. Patsatzis claims her daughter is a great beauty, but has trouble meeting men because she’s never in one place for more than three or four days. She used to have a thing going with Mr. Barker (the pug balancer), but he got tired of never seeing her and recently married Mrs. Patsatzis’s niece Dorcas (another knockout), who does a cloudswing act. This has created some bad blood between Syna and Dorcas, who are cousins and once were as close as sisters. It also pissed off some relatives back in Greece because Dorcas married a non-Greek. God forbid, says Mrs. Patsatzis, that they should ever find out what Dorcas’s husband does for a living. Interestingly, Mr. Barker changed his name from Parker (as more fitting for his act), but his wife hates being called Mrs. Barker.

Mrs. Patsatzis also divulged that Señor Nunez has been agitating to have the new janitor canned. Fortunately for me, her husband doesn’t believe in firing employees unless they prove incompetent or do something wrong. She thinks that clown is getting “too big for his britches,” which would not be difficult since they started out so abbreviated in the first place.

Yeah, Mrs. Patsatzis is a chatty person. She spends long hours every day in the office trailer counting money and doing the books, so she loves to talk when she finds a willing listener. She says if I stick around and work hard, she may marry me off in a few years to one of her younger nieces (right now there are 11 to choose from). If any of them look like Dorcas, I may take her up on the offer.

11:27 p.m. I had an interesting talk after dinner with the tall clown Marcel. It turns out he knew my brother years ago when Nick was traveling with that circus in France. In fact, Marcel claims that he was the one who taught my brother how to juggle. It sounds like Nick had an even worse job than mine. He had to clean all the animal cages and sleep in a truck with two smelly camels. And to duck the French cops, he was shoveling all that shit while trying to pass himself off as a little old lady. Marcel didn’t know anything about Sheeni Saunders and her alleged baby, but he warned me that Alfredo Nunez hates my brother and therefore likely has it in for me as well. He says I should watch out for that dwarf, as those little guys can sometimes be ruthless. I thanked him for the advice, and then he asked me what Nick was doing now. When I told him that my brother was off to Paris to live with Reina Vesely, he turned white as a sheet. Then he muttered something I didn’t quite catch and abruptly left the table. Very weird. This Reina must be quite a babe to have all these guys so stirred up. And Marcel is really old too–I’d say at least 50.

Most of the occupants of the bunkhouse trailer have little TVs in their rooms, but I’ve been making do with my pilfered poetry book. These lines from “The Vagabond” by Robert Louis Stevenson seem to apply to us circus folk:

Give the face of earth around,

And the road before me.

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,

Nor a friend to know me;

All I ask the heaven above,

And the road below me.

I hear we jump to a new town tomorrow. It’s a little odd being in Idaho, a state I almost never thought about, even though it’s right next door to Nevada. I came up with the first line of a poem about prostitution here: “There once was a ho from Idaho.”

This poetry business is not as easy as it looks. Will work on line two tomorrow. Very tired, so I will now say “See you all down the road.”

WEDNESDAY, August 31 – We’re in Moscow. No, not the one in Russia. We drove an hour and a half down the highway over endless rolling hills and are still in Idaho. A sign by the city limits welcomed us to the “Dry Pea and Lentil Capital of the Nation.” Some college is also located here, although no cute coeds turned out to watch the tents go up. Might be a nice town, but all we ever see are the same fast-food joints and big-box chain stores out by the fairgrounds. Not much variation in the outskirts of cities these days. There’s a semi-tall hill looming in the distance which a little boy with pink cotton candy in his hair informed me was called Moscow Mountain.

My brother is in Paris and I’m in Moscow. Yes, we Twisps do get around, except my brother doesn’t have to travel with toilet brush in hand. I hope this cleaning toilets all day doesn’t permanently prejudice me against humankind. So far I’d estimate I’ve swabbed up a ton and a half of stray pubic hair and other nasty surprises. Too bad people can’t just expel waste products out their noses while they breathe. Or produce tidy little packages–hermetically sealed in natural plastic–that emerge ready for sanitary disposal. I believe this area is ripe for some creative genetic engineering. Just think of all the forests that could be saved by eliminating the need for toilet paper. Nor do I feel it is healthy for an impressionable male youth to handle bulky bags of used tampons. Don’t blame me if this job warps me for life.

6:05 p.m. I was cleaning up litter in the vicinity of the trampoline, when Miren Lurrieta asked me if I wanted to try it out. I said sure, tore off my shoes, and hopped aboard. She showed me how to jump up and down in the center and warned me not to get too close to the edge. Now simple bouncing is fun, but it turns out that doing anything fancier like landing on your knees or back is much more challenging. My body has had 15-1/2 years to get used to gravity telling it that if I tried something like that it would hurt like hell. So it’s very hard to overcome your instinctual resistance to such maneuvers. Despite Miren’s coaxing, I found I just couldn’t do it. She smiled and said not to worry because such fear was natural, and I could overcome it with practice. I did enjoy sitting on the metal trampoline edge and watching her demonstrate her mastery. I couldn’t help marveling how her state-of-the-art jogging bra let her leap about with virtually zero bounce. I wouldn’t mind examining its construction someday if I got the chance.

Miren told me that she and her sister already have taken and passed their GEDs (high school equivalency exam). They’re thinking of leaving the circus and going away to college in a year. She concedes doing so would be a difficult step, since traveling with circuses is the only life they’ve ever known. She wants to study literature, but her sister thinks they should get business degrees so they can run their own circus someday. Miren was most impressed when I brought my poetry book into the cookhouse tent yesterday. I told her I was writing a poem, but insisted it was much too personal to show to anyone.

Miren seems the shyer of the two sisters. She has a very cute way of sneaking peeks at you while she talks: little flickers of intelligent interest that dart out at you from her lovely blue eyes. Most enchanting. Amazingly, she also applies glitter to her toenails just like Uma. It appears I have a serious weakness for such foot adornments. Of course, Miren decorates her toes in her professional capacity as a circus performer. As they say in this business: “Flash is cash.” Uma, on the other hand (or foot), merely does so to ensnare susceptible youths for the purpose of breaking their hearts.

10:52 p.m. I got two surprises at dinner tonight. First, as I was passing along in line, loathsome Randy leaned forward over the steam table and whispered that if I didn’t stop “messing with Miren” he was going to slip rat poison into my eats. I felt like carving him up with my butter knife (he has a prominent Adam’s apple that cries out for stabbing). But I told him to cool it and “leave me the hell alone.”

Then, as I was finishing my excellent dessert, Alfredo Nunez plopped his be-accordioned self down near me for another chat. “Any requests?” he inquired. I asked if he knew “Razor Blades in My Socks” by the Pickled Punks. He didn’t, so he played another doleful dirge from his vast repertoire of mournful melodies. When that weeper was over, he took out his cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head, he shrugged, lit up, then asked me if I had been sent here by my brother. I said no, that I rarely saw Nick and was entirely on my own. He pondered that while puffing away, then squeezed out another depressive’s lament.

“
You know, Jake,” he said at last, “I was more the father of that baby than Nick was.”

“
Oh, really? How did you manage that?”

“
Because if it wasn’t for me, that baby would never have been born. I’m the one who talked Sheeni into having it.”

“
Then you admit Sheeni had the kid?”

“
Did I ever deny it?”

“
I seem to recall you did.”

“
I gave Sheeni a sanctuary–a place to hide out from Nick and her parents. I could have got in trouble for that. Wound up in jail even. No?”

“
If you say so. So where’s the kid now?”

“
It’s a sad story, Jake. I wanted to spare you the details.”

“
I can take it.”

“
My brother’s family was taking care of Sarah on their farm near Albi. That was the
nina’s
name: Sarah Nunez.
Muy bonita
. But there was a bad flu going around the next winter. Little Sarah died.”

Señor Nunez produced an authentic tear to accompany that statement.

“
She died, huh? That’s convenient. Have you got a death certificate to prove it?”

“
What?”

“
A death certificate. I’m sure they must issue them in France when someone dies. Show me the death certificate, and I’ll believe you.”