“A magic book,” I said. “It can’t never use itself up.”
“That’s it, squirt. It’s inexhaustible. You drink down the wine, put the glass back on the table, and lo and behold, you reach for the glass again and discover it’s still full.”
“And there you are, drunk as a skunk for the price of one drink.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said, suddenly turning from me and gazing out the window. “You get drunk on the world, boy. Drunk on the mystery of the world.”
Christ but I was happy out there on the road with him. Just moving from place to place was enough to keep my spirits up, but when you added in all the other ingredients—the crowds, the performances, the money we made—those first months were hands down the best months I’d ever lived. Even after the initial excitement wore off and I grew accustomed to the routine, I still didn’t want it to stop. Lumpy beds, flat tires, bad food, all the rainouts and lulls and boring stretches were as nothing to me, mere pebbles bouncing off the skin of a rhinoceros. We’d climb into the Ford and blow out of town, another seventy or hundred bucks stashed away in the trunk, and then mosey on to the next whistle-stop, watching the landscape roll by as we chewed over the finer points of the last performance. The master was a prince to me, always encouraging and counseling and listening to what I said, and he never made me feel that I was one bit less important than he was. So many things had changed between us since the summer, it was as if we were on a new footing now, as if we’d reached some kind of permanent equilibrium. He did his job and I did mine, and together we made the thing work.
The stock market didn’t crash until two years later, but the Depression had already started in the hinterlands, and farmers and rural folks throughout the region were feeling the pinch. We came across a lot of desperate people on our travels, and Master Yehudi taught me never to look down on them. They needed Walt the Wonder Boy, he said, and I must never forget the responsibility that need entailed. To watch a twelve-year-old do what only saints and prophets had done before him was like a jolt from heaven, and my performances could bring spiritual uplift to thousands of suffering souls. That didn’t mean I shouldn’t make a bundle doing it, but unless I understood that I had to touch people’s hearts, I’d never gain the following I deserved. I think that’s why the master started my career in such out-of-the-way places, such a rinky-dink collection of forgotten corners and crevices on the map. He wanted the word about me to spread slowly, for support to begin from the ground up. It wasn’t just a matter of breaking me in, it was a way of controlling things, of making sure I didn’t turn out to be a flash in the pan.
Who was I to object? The bookings were organized in a systematic way, the turnouts were good, and we always had a roof over our heads when we went to sleep at night. I was doing what I wanted to do, and the feeling it gave me was so good, so exhilarating, I couldn’t have cared less if the people who saw me perform were from Paris, France, or Paris, Texas. Every now and then, of course, we encountered a bump in the road, but Master Yehudi seemed to be prepared for any and all situations. Once, for example, a truant officer came knocking on the door of our rooming house in Dublin, Mississippi. Why isn’t this lad in school? he said to the master, pointing his long bony finger at me. There are laws against this, you know, statutes, regulations, and so on and so forth. I figured we were sunk, but the master only smiled, asked the gentleman to step in, and then pulled a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his coat. It was covered with official-looking stamps and seals, and once the truant officer read it through, he tipped his hat in an embarrassed sort of way, apologized for the mixup, and left. God knows what was written on that paper, but it did the trick in one fast hurry. Before I could make out any of the words, the master had already folded up the letter and slipped it back into his coat pocket. “What does it say?” I asked, but even though I asked again, he never answered me. He just patted his pocket and grinned, looking awfully smug and pleased with himself. He reminded me of a cat who’d just polished off the family bird, and he wasn’t about to tell me how he’d opened the cage.
From the latter part of 1927 through the first half of 1928, I lived in a cocoon of total concentration. I never thought about the past, I never thought about the future—only about what was happening now, the thing I was doing at this or that moment. On the average, we didn’t spend more than three or four days a month in Wichita, and the rest of the time we were on the road, bee-lining hither and yon in the black Wondermobile. The first real pause didn’t come until the middle of May. My thirteenth birthday was approaching, and the master thought it might be a good idea to take a couple of weeks off. We’d go back to Mrs. Witherspoon’s, he said, and eat some home cooking for a change. We’d relax and celebrate and count our money, and then, after we were done playing pasha, we’d pack up our bags and take off again. That sounded fine with me, but once we got there and settled in for our holiday, I sensed that something was wrong. It wasn’t the master or Mrs. Witherspoon. They were both lovely to me, and relations between them were particularly harmonious just then. Nor was it anything connected to the house. Nelly Boggs’s cooking was in top form, the bed was still comfortable, the spring weather was superb. Yet the moment we walked through the door, an inexplicable heaviness invaded my heart, a murky sort of sadness and disquiet. I assumed I’d feel better after a night’s sleep, but the feeling didn’t go away; it just sat inside me like a lump of undigested stew, and no matter what I said to myself, I couldn’t get rid of it. If anything, it seemed to be growing, to be taking on a life of its own, and to such an extent that by the third night, just after I put on my pajamas and crawled into bed, I was overcome by an irresistible urge to cry. It seemed crazy, and yet half a minute later I was sobbing into the pillow, weeping my blinkers out in an onrush of misery and remorse.
When I sat down to breakfast with Master Yehudi early the next morning, I couldn’t hold myself back, the words came out before I even knew I was going to say them. Mrs. Witherspoon was still upstairs in bed, and it was just the two of us at the table, waiting for Nelly Boggs to come out of the kitchen and serve us our sausages and scrambled eggs.
“Remember that law you told me about?” I said.
The master, whose nose was buried in the paper, glanced up from the headlines and gave me a long blank stare. “Law?” he said. “What law is that?”
“You remember. The one about duties and such. How we wouldn’t be human no more if we forgot the dead.”
“Of course I remember.”
“Well, it seems to me we been breaking that law left and right.”
“How so, Walt? Aesop and Mother Sioux are inside us. We carry them in our hearts wherever we go. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”
“But we just walked away, didn’t we? They was murdered by a pack of devils and demons, and we never did nothing about it.”
“We couldn’t. If we’d gone after them, they would have killed us, too.”
“That night, maybe. But what about now? If we’re supposed to remember the dead, then we don’t have no choice but to hunt down the bastards and see they get what’s coming to them. I mean, hell, we’re having a fine old time, ain’t we? Barnstorming around the country in our motor car, raking in the dough, strutting before the world like a pair of hotshots. But what about my pal Aesop? What about funny old Mother Sioux? They’re moldering in their graves is what, and the trash that hung them’s still running free.”
“Get a grip on yourself,” the master said, studying me closely as the tears sprang forth again and started running down my cheeks. His voice was stern, almost on the point of anger. “Sure, we could go after them,” he said. “We could track them down and bring them to justice, but that’s the only job we’d have for the rest of our lives. The cops won’t help us, I’ll guarantee you that, and if you think a jury would convict them, think again. The Klan is everywhere, Walt, they own the whole rotten charade. They’re the same nice smiling folks you used to see on the str
eets of Cibola—Tom Skinner, Judd McNally, Harold Dowd—they’re all part of it, every last one of them. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. We’d have to kill them ourselves, and once we went after them, they’d go after us. A lot of blood would be shed, Walt, and most of it would be ours.”
“It ain’t fair,” I said, sniffling through another rush of tears. “It ain’t fair, and it ain’t right.”
“You know that, and I know that, and as long as we both know it, Aesop and Mother Sioux are taken care of.”
“They’re writhing in torment, master, and their souls won’t never be at peace until we do what we’ve got to do.”
“No, Walt, you’re wrong. They’re both at peace already.”
“Yeah? And what makes you such an expert on what the dead are doing in their graves?”
“Because I’ve been with them. I’ve been with them and spoken to them, and they’re not suffering anymore. They want us to go on with our work. That’s what they told me. They want us to remember them by keeping up with the work we’ve started.”
“What?” I said, suddenly feeling my skin crawl. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“They come to me, Walt. Almost every night for the past six months. They come to me and sit down on my bed, singing songs and stroking my face. They’re happier than they were in this world, believe me. Aesop and Mother Sioux are angels now, and nothing can hurt them anymore.”
It was about the strangest, most fantastical thing I’d ever heard, and yet Master Yehudi told it with such conviction, such straightforward sincerity and calm, I never doubted that he was telling the truth. Even if it wasn’t true in an absolute sense, there was no question that he believed it—and even if he didn’t believe it, then he’d just turned in one of the most powerful acting performances of all time. I sat there in a kind of feverish immobility, letting the vision linger in my head, trying to hold on to the picture of Aesop and Mother Sioux singing to the master in the middle of the night. It doesn’t really matter if it happened or not, for the fact was that it changed everything for me. The pain began to subside, the black clouds began to disperse, and by the time I stood up from the table that morning, the worst of the grief was gone. In the end, that’s the only thing that matters. If the master lied, then he did it for a reason. And if he didn’t lie, then the story stands as told, and there’s no cause to defend him. One way or the other, he saved me. One way or the other, he rescued my soul from the jaws of the beast.
Ten days later, we picked up where we had left off, driving away from Wichita in yet another new car. Our earnings were such that we could afford something better now, so we traded in the Ford for Wondermobile II, a silver-gray Pierce Arrow with leather seats and running boards the size of sofas. We’d been in the black since early spring, which meant that Mrs. Witherspoon had been reimbursed for her initial expenditures, there was money in the bank for the master and myself, and we no longer had to pinch pennies as we had before. The whole operation had moved up a notch or two: larger towns for the performances, small hotels instead of rooming houses and guest cottages to flop our bones in, more stylish transportation. I was back on the beam by the time we left, all charged up and ready to roll, and for the next few months I pulled out one stop after another, adding new wrinkles and flourishes to the act almost every week. I had grown so accustomed to the crowds by then, felt so at ease during my performances, that I was able to improvise as I went along, actually to invent and discover new turns in the middle of a show. In the beginning I had always stuck to the routine, rigidly following the steps the master and I had worked out in advance, but I was past that now, I had hit my stride, and I was no longer afraid to experiment. Locomotion had always been my strength. It was the heart of my act, the thing that separated me from every levitator who had come before me, but my loft was no better than average, a fair to middling five feet. I wanted to improve on that, to double or even triple that mark if I could, but I no longer had the luxury of all-day practice sessions, the old freedom of working under Master Yehudi’s supervision for ten or twelve hours at a stretch. I was a pro now, with all the burdens and scheduling constraints of a pro, and the only place I could practice was in front of a live audience.
So that’s what I did, especially after that little holiday in Wichita, and to my immense wonderment I found that the pressure inspired me. Some of my finest tricks date from that period, and without the eyes of the crowd to spur me on, I doubt that I would have mustered the courage to try half the things I did. It all started with the staircase number, which was the first time I ever made use of an “invisible prop”—the term I later coined for my invention. We were in upper Michigan then, and smack in the middle of the performance, just as I rose to begin my crossing of the lake, I caught sight of a building in the distance. It was a large brick structure, probably a warehouse or an old factory, and it had a fire escape running down one of the walls. I couldn’t help but notice those metal stairs. The sunlight was bouncing off of them at just that moment, and they were gleaming with a frantic kind of brightness in the late afternoon sun. Without giving the matter any thought, I lifted one foot into the air, as if I were about to climb a real staircase, and put it down on an invisible step; then I lifted the other foot and put it down on the next step. It wasn’t that I felt anything solid in the air, but I was nevertheless going up, gradually ascending a staircase that stretched from one end of the lake to the other. Even though I couldn’t see it, I had a definite picture of it in my mind. To the best of my recollection, it looked something like this:
LAKE
At its highest point—the platform in the middle—it was roughly nine and a half feet above the surface of the water—a good four feet higher than I’d ever been before. The eerie thing was that I didn’t hesitate. Once I had that picture clearly in my mind, I knew I could depend on it to get me across. All I had to do was follow the shape of the imaginary bridge, and it would support me as if it were real. A few moments later, I was gliding across the lake with nary a hitch or a stumble. Twelve steps up, fifty-two steps across, and then twelve steps down. The results were nothing less than perfect.
After that breakthrough, I discovered that I could use other props just as effectively. As long as I could imagine the thing I wanted, as long as I could visualize it with a high degree of clarity and definition, it would be available to me for the performance. That was how I developed some of the most memorable portions of my act: the rope-ladder routine, the slide routine, the seesaw routine, the high-wire routine, the countless innovations I was heralded for. Not only did these turns enhance the audience’s pleasure, but they thrust me into an entirely new relationship with my work. I wasn’t just a robot anymore, a wind-up baboon who did the same set of tricks for every show—I was evolving into an artist, a true creator who performed as much for his own sake as for the sake of others. It was the unpredictability that excited me, the adventure of never knowing what was going to happen from one show to the next. If your only motive is to be loved, to ingratiate yourself with the crowd, you’re bound to fall into bad habits, and eventually the public will grow tired of you. You have to keep testing yourself, pushing your talent as hard as you can. You do it for yourself, but in the end it’s this struggle to do better that most endears you to your fans. That’s the paradox. People begin to sense that you’re out there taking risks for them. They’re allowed to share in the mystery, to participate in whatever nameless thing is driving you to do it, and once that happens, you’re no longer just a performer, you’re on your way to becoming a star. In the fall of 1928, that’s exactly where I was: on the brink of becoming a star.
By mid-October we found ourselves in central Illinois, playing out a last few gigs before we headed back to Wichita for a well-earned breather. If I remember correctly, we’d just finished up a show in Gibson City, one of those lost little towns with a Buck Rogers skyline of water towers and grain elevators. From a distance you think you’re approaching a hefty burg, and then y
ou get there and discover those grain elevators are all they’ve got. We’d already checked out of the hotel and were sitting in a diner on the main drag, slurping down some liquid refreshments before we jumped into the car and took off. It was a dead hour of the day, somewhere between breakfast and lunch, and Master Yehudi and I were the only customers. I had just downed the last bits of foam from my hot chocolate, I remember, when the bell on the door jangled and a third customer walked in. Out of idle curiosity, I glanced up to take a gander at the new arrival, and who should it turn out to be but my Uncle Slim, the old chinless wonder himself? It couldn’t have been warmer than thirty-five degrees that day, but he was dressed in a threadbare summer suit. The collar was turned up against his neck, and he was clutching the two halves of the jacket in his right hand. He shivered as he crossed the threshold, looking like a chihuahua blown in by the north wind, and if I hadn’t been so stunned, I probably would have laughed at the sight.
Master Yehudi’s back was turned to the door. When he saw the expression on my face (I must have gone white), he wheeled around to have a look at what had so discombobulated me. Slim was still standing in the entrance, rubbing his hands together and surveying the joint with his squinty eyes, and the moment he zoomed in on us, he broke into one of those snaggletoothed grins I’d always dreaded as a boy. This meeting was no accident. He’d come to Gibson City because he wanted to talk, and sure as six and seven made thirteen, the unluckiest number there was, we were staring at a mess of trouble.