I was afraid Ginny was becoming like my mother in the TV department and I told her that life did not exist in My Three Sons and The Family Affair Show. I kept running down TV all that summer, criticizing it and laughing at it evilly until she finally came around a bit and agreed that TV was not where it was at. She actually started listening to my rock records on the stereo and drawing pictures with me or making animals out of clay.
On Saturday nights for years our neighborhood association showed movies at the neighborhood pool. That September Mom told us she really wanted to go to The Creature of the Black Lagoon, because she wanted to see the male actor in it, not the creature, of course. Everyone went but my old man, who was real busy with his late-night work on engineering plans. We sat across the pool sucking on Pixie Sticks and watching the moon reflected on the pool water. You could see the palm tree fronds where they blocked out the twinkling stars. The monsoon rains were over, so there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
After the show, the neighborhood association gave out door prizes and Ginny won a container of Lincoln Logs, which those dumb wooden logs you can build miniature cabins with. I could see right away that she didn’t want the toy. She was just too old, eleven that month, but she took the tube of them anyway. She was teary-eyed on the way home. All sorts of cars had parked on our street and the headlights were pulling away in all directions. Our shadows were big and leggy, moving places around us, travelling away in all directions. It was kinda weird but I could see that Ginny was proud that our street was somehow popular.
But she didn’t like her prize.
“Be glad you got those Lincoln Logs,” I told her.
“Why should I?” she asked.
“Just be glad!”
“I don’t want to be glad. Don’t tell me what to be.”
“Well, you ought to be.”
“I don’t see why, Mr. Smarty-Pants.” She was walking on the side of the curb. We had curbs that you could drive over to reach the gravel drives. They were like waves, and the gravel from front yards on the curbs was making her slip a little; she kept falling sideways which was making her more furious.
“Think about the poor kids in Vietnam,” I suggested.
“What do they have to do with it?”
“They might step on bamboo with ox pee or poop on it and die of blood poisoning! That’s what Ho Chi Min is doing to them.” I’m not sure if I believed this, but a lot of people said it was true.
“One minute you’re telling me to grow up and then another minute you’re telling me to be glad I have Lincoln Logs!”
“Just be glad. Stay a kid for as long as you can, that’s what I think.” I told her this in absolute seriousness as it seemed to be my best advice to her. Doing the circus bit had made me think about how good I’d had it when I was a kid. Shit, everything had been done to make me happy.
I was called again by Gluey a month later, in between lessons, and told the Shriners needed me that weekend. This time they were travelling to a circus which was being held outside a town on the border with Mexico.
That summer I’d learned to drive. My mom rode with me as my teacher and when I got to the parking lot of the Shriner Temple I got out and Mom did too, to take the car home.
I boarded the bus happily. By then I was beginning to crave more Shriner adventures, which had been really bitchin’ and crazy so far. Who knew spending time with a bunch of drunken Methuselahs would be so boss. I was in a sleepy state when I reached the top of the steps and there was Moses, happy to see me and saving me the seat beside him again near the back of the bus. As usual he was already smashed, having visited the private bar inside the temple. Drinking at six a.m. Can you dig it?
“I saw you driving, James,” said Moses.
“Oh, yeah, I’m doing that now. I gotta practice some more before I can think about taking the test.”
“You nervous?”
“Ah, yeah.”
“Time for another circus, huh?”
“Right on.”
“Which do you think are better, James, parades or circuses?”
“Oh, I don’t know. That parade with the Bastards was pretty crazy, man. I’m finding them both to be a blast.”
“Wonderful.”
“Where exactly are we going today, Moses?”
“To an old bullring. We’ve brought a circus there for the last three years. They don’t use it for bullfighting much anymore. We’re bringing buses up from Mexico. A lot of crippled kids are in little towns with no doctor and no circuses.
“Ah, that’s nice,” I said. I thought an abandoned bullring would make a good place to set up a Shriner circus tent, especially near the border. Moses told me that the Shriners rented the old bullring for a cheap price.
“The place is very old, though, James. A little scary.”
That didn’t sound too good, but I kept my trap closed. I wondered why we were always travelling south anyway. At first I thought it was because the chapters north of us were coming south to a lot of little towns and were more active than us. I think that was kinda true, but the real reason the Shriners went south was that Gluey wanted to do good deeds there and saw that the need was great for surgeries south of the border. He was always paying out of his own pocket for a bus to go across and pick up kids to see the circus. I found that out by listening when the musicians were talking. Sometimes he opened the snack bars for free and gave out toys, too.
On the way down to the bullring, Moses and I talked about many things. He especially wanted me to appreciate a funny bar where he used to take his grandkids when they were little. A long low building had this enormous cow head made of plaster on the roof. Like something from the Greeks, Moses said. A giant bullhead for sacrifice. Real authentic pagan Arizona cowboy junk. The building was a restaurant/bar with hand-lettered signs in the window. “No hippies, please.” And “No shirts, no service.” Across from this cow skull dump, there was a small lake with muddy edges and a few mesquite trees threatening to go swimming. I hate to say it, but I think Moses must have liked that place because the drinks were cheap. There wasn’t much else that was nice about it.
We passed the old mission Tumacacori. Think of a filthy brown crumble cake. Shot full of holes and melting into the desert. It was the scene of a bunch of Indian rebellions and slaughters of priests. Moses told me about some of those battles.
And then we passed the high banks of Pena Blanca Lake. I told Moses about a time I’d been stung by a yellow jacket there. He was real interested in my memories. That’s the way a good friend is, no matter what age they are.
When we reached the bullring, I discovered it looked like one of my great-grandmother's old teacups, chipped and cracked and stained. It had brown lines from water leaks streaming down the plaster of the Ionic columns that were stuck around the outside. It was a rinky-dink bullring, sad in almost every way. Some architect had tried to fix it up in the 1950s. That just made it more horrifying. Bullfighting wasn’t very popular anymore. People were saying the bulls didn’t have much of a chance against the bullfighters. So the ring wasn’t used much, except for rock concerts. Mexican rock concerts were really weird. The fans probably wrecked the place more. The sewer was backed up most of the time. And any engineer would probably say the structure was unsound.
“This place is more of a dump than it was last year,” said Moses when our bus parked in back.
“It’s real shabby,” I admitted.
“I hope it’s safe for the kids,” said Moses. “It looks like it’s going to have a hard time not falling down today.”
Moses and I walked forward with all the drunken Shriners. We wrestled our instruments out of the bus luggage compartment, taking our cases with us. I saw circus posters flopping in a steady wind. Leaflets blew in the parking lot. A gray canvas tent had been set up inside the center of the bullring. This big top could fit in, with the side panels stretched over the seats which left room for the animals to come out of the bull entrances and walk into the single circus ri
ng. The top floor of the bullring had broken and boarded up windows all around the outside. As we went in, I looked up at these desolate windows, reflecting puffy white clouds across a bright blue sky.
“Look at all the broken windows,” I said to Moses.
“Shoot, this place is a wreck. Hope we get a good crowd.”
The once grand bullring really showed its age on the inside, too. The concrete seats were crumbling. The edges broken on the steps. Paint was peeling off the inside walls, the bullring sides which had been painted red.
“It’s scarier inside,” I said.
We found our band location, put up our own chairs and got out our instruments. We sat in the empty arena, practicing our merry music, hearing the canvas swaying and watching brilliant light flash at times through the openings in the canvas. It was about noon when we were in there. We all ate some hot dogs and drinks.
A strange sucking sound of the wind as it caught the canvas pulled on my brain like waves at the ocean. I thought my hair was lifting too. The inside of the canvas big top was gray and had odd stains on it as though it were plastered. The sections of canvas didn't meet, so slashes of light fell down onto the arena ground where the circus would be. Moses said the grinds went up row by row as though students would file in for a lecture. He also thought the whole thing reminded him of gladiators and the Coliseum, he said. Sounded right to me.
“Strange place, huh?” said Moses.
“You said it.”
I’d never felt afraid of light before. When the big top moved it was like knives of fire shooting out. I hated the noise of the canvas ripping in the wind and the light stabbing where the audience would be sitting.
“The noise is frightening,” Moses agreed.
I excused myself shortly after we played a few tunes. I needed to use the bathroom, which was really hard to find. I had to ask about six people for it and they weren’t even sure. I was gonna give up, but I figured this might be my only chance until we got back on the bus. I found the whole arena to be scary and hated the idea of walking around alone.
It turned out the bathrooms were at the end of a long tunnel, a horrid gloomy tunnel with gory red walls and hideous, dirty cracks. This hall was like a bloody channel. It echoed strange hooting wind and the creaking noise of the canvas blowing above. Near the end of the passageway I found a door marked “hombres.”
I can’t explain what happened then, but I had a creepy feeling that somebody was already in there. I don't know how to describe it, but I knew that something terrible would happen to me if I went in. Someone was hiding in the closed stall or behind the door. Of that, I was certain. Holy shit, I didn’t want to go in!
The instant I opened the door, I smelled something like a dirty swamp. One of the toilets had flooded the room. The mirrors were old and showed filthy walls. The light bulb was missing from the ceiling.
Without going farther, I shut the door quickly.
A second later, I wondered why I had done that. I was reconsidering my decision, when the urge to urinate was more than I could bear. Again I started to touch the doorknob, to go use the toilet, but I felt so strange and afraid that I stopped without going further.
Since I was a very little boy, I’d never deliberately urinated on a wall rather than go into a bathroom. But I went a ways toward the circus, down the red passage, and then the urge was too strong and I peed against the wall. I looked in all directions before I did it, and felt very guilty, but there was no way I was going into that dark bathroom.
I felt my hot pee leaving my body and watched it splash against the bloody red wall. I was finishing and about to zip up my fly when I thought I heard the sound of the bathroom door opening behind me. I couldn’t stop urinating, because I was in mid-stream. I looked nervously in the direction of the bathroom and I began to flee, running a little crazily toward the arena, urine splashing on my shoes. Of course, I had opened the door myself, and heard the sound of it and that was what I heard behind me. I couldn’t have been wrong. It meant that someone had been inside the bathroom after all.
Then I heard steps behind me in the long passageway. They were moving slowly, but gaining on me steadily. The steps wouldn’t stop!
At first the blinding winter sunlight at the end of the tunnel made it impossible to see who was coming. I looked behind again, after thirty seconds or so, and then I saw the absurd figure of a clown: big shoes, false bald head, and twin gobs of flaming orange hair. A clown!
I tried to hurry up and get back to the band before the clown reached me, but he was gaining on me too fast.
He was right behind me, more quickly than I had realized, and he reached out and grabbed my collar!
My forward progress stopped. I fell against the tunnel wall and he was in front of me. He had me cornered.
“Hey!” I protested.
Freaky yellow eyes in a sad white face. Long yellow teeth. Strong hands with popping veins. This clown had strange, horrid eyes that glittered. I hadn’t seen him before, but I hated him right away.
“Whaddaya think about the Shriners?” asked the hideous clown. He poked my shoulder with the same hand that held a burning cigarette. I’ve always hated people when they did that. I didn't want the hot tip of the cigarette near my body, and I didn't want smoke in my eyes. I tried to pull away from him when he brought the cigarette close to me. But he wasn’t going to let me get away. He put a hand on the other side of me and squeezed my arm. His grip was like a vise on me. I felt him enjoying my pain. He was squeezing my arm tighter and tighter by the second. I tried to pull away again.
“Huh?” I asked faintly and yet irritably. I wanted to get back in order to warm up with Moses and the band. This creepy clown was keeping me from getting ready.
“I have to practice with the band,” I explained.
“How about growing up to be a clown?” he asked, returning to the subject.
“I'm just helping the band get filled out,” I explained. “I don’t want to join Shriners.”
“You would like being a clown better than being in the band. We have a lot more fun. You look like you like having fun.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone who seemed to be having less fun than that creepy clown who was hurting me. I wondered what he was doing there anyway. Clown Alley was on the other side of the bullring. I’d seen the clowns go there as those of us in the band had been setting up.
“We need... some young blood,” he said.
That might have been closer to the truth. No one wanted to join the clowns, but he might have meant something else. I had the unmistakable impression that he was dangerous. This was no happy clown wanting to recruit me to the Shriners. In fact I had the feeling that maybe he wasn’t a Shriner, either.
“It’s not my kind of thing,” I said. “I don’t like makeup and costumes.” This was a lie, since I’d wanted to be in theater classes, but why not lie when you were being held against your will? I didn’t owe this weird man the truth.
“Oh, whaddaya saying? You really don’t like to make kids happy? A clown’s job is to spread joy. You should be doing that,” said the clown, pushing on me again with his cigarette hand. Shouldn’t there be some kind of rule against clowns smoking in their costumes? It made them scarier than hell.
I heard footsteps approaching.
I turned my head toward the arena.
Just in time, Moses came up the hall, on his way to save me.
The clown narrowed his eyes at the skinny figure of Moses as though he were sizing him up to see if he could beat him up or something. I was scared shitless.
“You! Leave the boy alone,” Moses hollered.
The clown pulled back with a start. “Hey, whatever...”
“What’s going on? James, we need you back at the band. We’ll be playing an opening in a few minutes,” said Moses.
“I was trying to get back!” I glared at the creepy clown who dropped his hold on my arm, pretending to scratch his shoulder casually. He acted uninterested in me now, when
he had been intense a moment before.
“Get out of here,” said Moses to the clown who’d let go of my arm. Moses actually seemed to be shaking a bit, but I didn't think this was from drink. He was angry and maybe afraid, too. I’d never seen Moses in either of those moods.
“I was just talking to the boy about clowning.”
“He said he doesn’t want to be a clown. Leave him alone.”
The clown strolled off. “Can’t blame me for trying...” he complained weakly.
Moses watched him walk away.
“Are you all right?” he asked me finally.
“I don’t know. I guess so. That guy really scared me. I remembered what you said about clowns. I was trying to get rid of him. He wouldn’t let me go.”
“Really!”
“Maybe we should tell someone. He shouldn’t be in the Shriners.”
We were hurrying back to the arena by then. We could hear the noise of the tent and see the vertiginous heights of the billowing canvas vault above. I felt sick.
“You know, I don’t think he is a clown. I’m pretty sure he isn’t one of ours. I don’t know him,” Moses said ominously, studying his retreating figure. “It’s a good thing I came back here when I did. I think I’ll call you my little lost one from now on.”
Whether that clown planned to hurt me or not, I didn’t know. But I was thankful that Moses thought to look for me.
Moses and I agreed that empty and derelict bullring gave off some kinda potent evil. But once the children came in, it was an entirely different place. It became gay and funny. The kids dashed down to their seats soon after the buses arrived.
Moses nudged me. “Here they come,” he cried at the sight of them flowing out of the entrances all around the arena.