The tiny girls who came had little cardigan sweaters and dresses, black shoes (not patent leather, which American girls could afford) and pink, blue or green anklets. The boys had slacks and white shirts, their outfit for Mass, which, I guess, was their best clothes. Gluey had arranged to give the orphans fezzes, like the type I wore, made of red felt with tigers and elephants painted on them and the name of the local Shriner Temple. A circus was something special to them and I was catching the same fever that Moses and Gluey had. I never thought making a dumb kid happy would affect me that way. I guess I was surprised that there was so much I could do that would make another person happy.
Shit, every kid there was wide-eyed with wonder. They had bused these kids in from lots of little towns in Sonora. Their smiles covered the bottom half of their faces. They pointed and screamed at the Shriner clown cars. Bags and boxes of hot dogs, popcorn and cotton candy covered their laps. Courtesy Gluey, probably. They eagerly filled the seats. They seemed to feel they had entered a shrine, had the worshipful faces of the crowd at Mass. The roof of the circus tent was a bit similar to the top of a Mexican cathedral. It had its billowing curves, was both convex and concave and was the color of gray plaster inside. I wasn’t afraid of the light flashes anymore.
The conductor at the circus this time was a new gentleman and he wore Shriner regalia, a sash and a strange robe with glittery golden stars on it. At first glance he seemed to be nothing more than a merry man who enjoyed band conducting and had mischievous blue eyes above a large handlebar moustache. I was nervous about performing and after I met another trombone player that was a local Shriner, I mostly looked at my music and tried to practice a little. Then I noticed something a little off about the conductor.
As I mentioned before, I’ve never liked to stare at people and that day I really didn’t want to stare at the conductor, so I tried to ignore what I thought seemed odd, but I kept studying him out of the corner of my eye to see what it was that bothered me. His head and face were normal; the fez the same as any other. His body was the right shape, but it suddenly struck me that the problem was down at the end of one of his arms. As I examined him in secret, I could see that he had a fake limb. Not the one he conducted with, of course, but the one that hung free at his side. It had a stiff thumb and the joined-together fingers of a fake arm.
“Moses,” I yelped.
“Yeah, he has a fake arm, right?”
“Uh huh, but it’s….”
It wasn’t just a fake arm. It was much, much worse than that. This arm, I’m telling you, was like no other you’ve ever seen. It was the most wrong size fake arm that anyone could ever have ordered. For a grown man this thing was crazy. Shit, there's no other way to put it. The guy’s arm looked like a doll arm had been hung on him. And it was the wrong color fake doll arm. It was like Crayola colored it from the worst flesh tone imaginable. A crazy person’s idea of the look of normal flesh. And I don’t think this fake arm was attached right or something, because it was too short. If you get the picture, there was about everything wrong with this arm that there could be. I don’t think it was a question of them making this arm wrong or something. This man had deliberately picked an arm which made you aware instantly that it was fake.
I saw all this and swallowed hard. It was one of those things that you see and think “this is going to be a disaster.” It wasn’t that I thought he couldn’t conduct, because obviously he could and I admired his style of conducting, however with an audience of kids, a fake arm, I say, a ridiculously fake arm that was like a doll arm, was simply tempting fate.
And it gradually dawned on us that the worshipful crowd of kids had changed into a big crazy crowd of lunatics that day.
“Shoot, this crowd is like the one on the banks of the river when David slew Goliath, James, and by that I mean it’s getting rowdy,” he said.
I was already rattled by the clown who’d harassed me. Now it was hard to see so many wild kids. I knew they were going to make a huge amount of noise when the circus started, so I was prepared to play loudly.
A bank of lights went out, which didn’t change the arena much because we were outside, and we began with a rousing entry number, a Souza march followed by ‘Entrance of the Gladiators’. A curtain parted and out bounded the announcer in a top hat and tails. He wore a large black moustache, which had obviously been pasted on his face, and spoke in Spanish, which was a good chance for me to not remember very much of what I’d learned. He made the standard circus announcement to ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, in Spanish. As he spoke, he waved his arms around. Very few kids paid any attention to him. They were waiting for the show to begin. I was busy playing and could barely pay attention to what happened myself in the first minutes. Moses was right; I was having trouble with the noise and the audience.
Mostly the audience were school kids, but as I mentioned some of them were orphans who had been brought in big groups. Holy shit, a lot of these orphan kids were poorly managed when the circus started. They were tossing candied apples and pumpkin candy slices at each other like bombs and some of them were slugging each other and ripping clothes. There was a real skinny little kid sitting under a folding chair, and he stayed there through the whole circus.
The circus parade began and we really had to play and play hard. The clowns drove their cars in as a noisy mass. (I looked for but didn’t see the clown who had bothered me!) Llamas strolled by in boredom and anger. The kids screamed and pointed at the clown cars and ponies and some noisy fuming motorcycles with brown bears riding them. Elephants strode by, holding each other’s tails. Girl elephants had bows on their tails. Some trapeze people were riding the elephants and waving to the crowd of wild kids, who hadn’t let up from throwing popcorn and stuff at each other and into their mouths. A set of fancy ponies trotted by, stepping in unison, with big pink feathered plumes on their heads. The ringmaster called for the kids to wave goodbye to the circus parade. The clowns did a crazy imitation parade.
The children kept their eyes up in the air for the next part of the circus. People on swings were flying, linking up with the arms and legs of their fellow artists and flying off together. We were playing along on one of the Souza things, when I noticed a little boy who seemed to be taking a special interest in the band. Moses noticed him, too.
“Watch that boy,” Moses said.
“Oh yeah,’ I responded. “What’s he up to?”
After a while I noticed that he was coming right out of the audience, down some steps, and heading straight toward our conductor. What happened next was all in slow motion, like some bad nightmare taking place in a weird fishbowl. I suppose I sensed right away that the boy was heading in a beeline for the little fake, wrong-colored doll arm hanging at the conductor’s side.
Well, shit, I tried to be kind at first. The fact that he was heading for the conductor didn’t have to mean anything bad. Maybe that kid wanted to get closer to the sound or maybe he was just going to dance around to the music. I thought he might be some sort of attention hog, the type of kid who wanted to take a big bow in front of an audience and get some applause.
“Somebody needs to stop him,” Moses said, as he noticed what the boy was doing.
“I know. I think he’s gonna do something awful to the arm.”
“James, I believe you are correct, my lad, my little lost one,” Moses said.
And yeah, I was right.
As I recall, he sort of oozed toward the conductor. He probably was with a group of orphan kids that we were playing for. No one had been paying a lot of attention to him. No one came after him to retrieve him. No one even noticed that he was gone, apparently, until the shout, probably from someone in the crowd.
“Hey, ay, carumba! Look at the boy! Watch out!”
Hey, they probably knew that kid all right.
The kid kept right on coming toward us.
He snuck right up to the conductor and he sorta smiled faintly for a while, a mysterious and evil smile, the most mischie
vous I’d seen in years. He had dark impish eyes, a thin body, and black hair, cut short to his skull. His shoes seemed too large for him, but they never fell off while I saw him. He held one of his little fingers on his mouth like he was contemplating whether he should do what he was about to do or not and he was looking straight at the little fake doll arm. And then he reached up. I knew something terrible was going to happen.
That was when he took the fake doll hand into his and after looking at it for a moment, he started shaking the fake arm in greeting. The boy had an enormous grin on his tiny face, he took the little hand in his and he shook it, all the time grinning and looking up at the conductor’s face.
The conductor never stopped keeping time with his baton, but he seemed to be turning his upper body so that the fake arm would pull away from the boy. Also, he shooed the kid away with a movement of his knee, which didn’t mess the band up too badly, but did nothing to stop the boy. The conductor’s face showed the strain of the situation, even if his conducting didn’t. He was obviously distressed. It was hard to watch. He couldn’t pretend to be enjoying having his fake arm shaken like that.
I noticed that Moses had lost control and was giggling out of the side of his mouth, but his trombone was still playing quite well.
The conductor then went on without stopping. I suppose he thought the kid would get tired and go away. But this wasn’t the type of kid to get tired easily. No sir. The conductor looked down momentarily. He didn’t want to stop conducting, but he wanted to shake the kid off. He tried to step sideways and I suppose he hoped the arm would be pulled away from the kid, but the little boy held on, and stretched his arm as the band director stepped away. The conductor couldn’t shake the kid off. Every time he tried to take back his arm, the kid managed to grab it back again. Pretty soon there was a real battle for the arm between the owner and the boy!
Eventually some adults who must have been the ones who brought him in a group realized that it was their charge who was up there creating a disturbance with the band.
“Porfirio. Come on. Back here. Porfirio. Porfirio, hijo!” a large woman began calling.
A man came out of the crowd. He was crouching and bowing and scraping to hide himself in his task of getting the kid out of there. By bending down, I suppose he thought fewer people in the audience would notice him, but in fact the opposite happened and more kids glanced away from the trapeze act to watch the bent-over nut who looked like he thought he was going to be struck. Then they noticed the funny boy shaking the conductor’s fake arm.
The audience began laughing. Loudly.
Then a battle ensued to get little Porfirio, if that really was his name, away from the little fake arm, which he had taken quite a fancy to. He adored that arm. He wasn’t going to leave it willingly. The conductor went on conducting though you knew he was feeling very irritated by having a boy run around and around and come back to tug on his arm.
Porfirio happened to be a wily little kid. Nobody could catch him. He was the kind of kid that in ancient times would have survived perfectly well in a cliff dwelling. I used to wonder how any of those kids in the cliff dwellings ever made it to adulthood without falling and breaking their skulls, and obviously some of them must have been made like this boy, wiry and agile as could be. This was the way they make little boys sometimes, strong and lean, wiggly and sneaky, and he could run extremely fast and dodge anyone trying to grab him and suddenly, lemme tell you, there were lots of people trying to grab him. Holy shit, it was the craziest, wildest scene ever imaginable with people running at him and him squirting away from them, under their arms, through their legs, around the bullring. He was the kind of imp who is fixated on his goal, a sort of one-track mind that returns again and again to the ridiculous desire of its heart. This kind of kid, wherever they exist in the world, could grow up to easily colonize the Moon or Mars or something, I mean he was a real survivor and intent on doing exactly what he wanted to do. You have to praise him for stick-to-it-ness. Parting the boy from the fake arm was not going to be easy. This was the type of person you ought to give complex and challenging tasks because they didn't understand the meaning of the word “no.” They liked the word “no” for the opportunity it gave them to excel at determination. He could probably kill a whale or level Mt. Everest if he had that on his mind. What this odd little boy really wanted was to shake the fake hand of the conductor. God only knows why he wanted such an absurd thing. There was nothing on the earth that could stop him in his quest to do this. It helped that he was extremely skinny, intelligent and ruthless. There was nothing he wouldn’t do, no chair he wouldn’t knock over, no music stand too sacrosanct, and no shin that he wouldn’t kick. The poor people who were attempting to stop him learned this to their chagrin.
“It’s hopeless,” Moses cried. “This is the funniest thing ever!”
“Shit, why are they bothering? There’s no stopping him!” I replied.
That kid just kept shaking the fake arm. He kept following the conductor, persistently grasping and shaking his little hand. Boy, it was so funny!
“Oh, my gosh, he got away again!” Moses cried.
“There he goes. They can’t catch him.”
“He’s off.”
“That is the slickest kid.”
“What, did he escape again?” Moses asked.
He ran around the back of us, behind the tubas.
“Please catch him!” shouted one of the men who were chasing him. I don’t suppose he realized that the band members were older than sin. The tubas shook their heads. We couldn’t stop playing long enough to try to stop him. Our band was overwhelmed by the crowd noise as it was.
“Here baby, come on,” said one of the coaxers. The lady was leaning over with some food, maybe a hot dog or something, trying to tempt the kid away from the out-of-sight fake arm.
“Porfirio! Son!” shouted the doubled-over man, not pretending to be happy about what was happening. “Get over here and leave the band alone.”
I could barely play; the whole thing was so crazy. Moses laughed so hard his old blue eyes were tearing. What a gas. The kid was crazy.
Moses and I somehow kept our eyes on the conductor and played our music and watched this crazy kid and all his antics and we laughed, too. The conductor was good; he never flinched, nor changed a bit of the music, but he didn’t look exactly happy about what was happening.
“Oh! God!” said Moses once when the little boy was back at the fake hand shaking it and the music paused for a moment, “I can’t believe this. It’s too much, I’m going to burst! I’m laughing too hard to go on.”
The pursuers began again by rushing him, but he led them in a wild chase around the conductor to the far side of the bullring and back all the way around the band. Some of the audience screamed to see what the little boy was doing. It was as good as a second ring of the circus!
“Will the party or parties who brought Porfirio Diaz please come to the music pit and retrieve him,” said a droning announcement in Spanish, and then English.
But people who could control him didn’t arrive. Or maybe he’d been brought in a large group without an adult who didn’t really knew anything about him. Or maybe they were off buying beer, soda and hot dogs, with a whole bunch of other kids. I don’t think there was anyone with him who he would have listened to anyway. He was too in love with the fake arm.
The attacker wore out the people who were trying to chase him. The conductor couldn’t beat him off and continue conducting. Finally, the people chasing him got smarter and didn’t leave the side of the conductor. That blocked off his access to his little arm.
When they dragged Porfirio away, he fought to get free. He looked wistfully back at the baby arm hanging at the conductor’s side.
“Let me go back,” he screamed.
“No, no, Porfirio, no,” one of the ladies was saying shaking her head in disgust at what the boy had done. She looked as though she had glimpsed a foul part of human nature and was disillusio
ned forever.
Gluey and Moses and I were hysterical with laughing, but, eureka! The lessons had worked. During the whole thing, I was still playing.
I laughed and laughed, all the time playing the trombone as loudly as I could. Moses looked over at me approvingly. Gluey looked over at me approvingly. I guess I was playing all right while laughing, too, and it wasn’t going to be the last time I laughed while I was with that band.
The woodwinds and other brass? Well, they also cracked up, especially the clarinets, who really can never control themselves. But for them, laughing wrecked their tone and they had to stop or risk destroying our screamers.
But the trombone section? We laughed. We’re the lucky ones in a band. The trombones can sneak a little gasping laugh out of the side of their mouth and still manage a decent note and good wind out of the big brass bell. Yeah, the trombones could laugh, and we did. You might find being able to laugh while playing an instrument nothing to shit at, or maybe not. I don’t know where you're at in your life, man, but laughing is important to me. Not just in life in general, of course, but especially if you’re ever in a band. And if you’re in a Shiner band you are really going to need to laugh. The reason for this being that so much crazy crap happens around you whether you’re on a stage or in a parade or at a circus playing the music. At least it did in the places around me last year. I don’t think I was special or anything, so if you’re open to it, a lot of crazy crap will probably happen to you.
CHAPTER TEN
How do you tell your parents about a kid trying to shake the phony arm of a band conductor? And is it even worth your while to tell them about a berserk clown that pins you against a wall? I, who was trapped in Parental Weirdsville, U.S.A., knew better than to try. Some things are best left unsaid.
When the call came for the next Shriner job, it was a parade in the town of Tough Cuss, Arizona and it was the highlight of my time with the Shriners.
It took about three hours to reach Tough Cuss by bus. Along the way we passed a country store, still operating, with a collection of wrecked cars and tractors behind it and a bunch of old harnesses hanging on the porch. The store windows showed piñatas and Mexican candy for sale, a sure sign that we were nearer the border. Past that store, lone cacti ran into dense patches, flowing into the smaller canyons, covering old rail lines, growing right to the edge of road cuts so that the roots hung out over our bus; they skittered along the roof when we drove underneath. We passed quiet horses grazing a field of weeds beneath a vulture sailing in the cloudless sky. At one point a mangy coyote stared with yellow eyes at our bus rolling toward the border.