LITMIR.BIZ

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moustache, red-frocked velvet coat, white pants, calf’s skin gloves, black top hat, and the silver drum-major’s whistle he wore around his neck. Although Bradna was a small-framed, short man, he was born with natural gifts you would assume were the birthright of a bigger person; great charisma and a booming voice that could silence a Big Top full of thousands or get a circus crew jam-packed with egotists to march in time and perform on cue.

      When I walked by him, Bradna looked me up and down with the same critical eye he employed with Ringling’s prized Percherons. The Ringmaster carried a clipboard to ensure that all the acts assembled in the backyard lined up in the right order.

      “I was beginning to wonder if you were gonna make it or not today, Erlich. Please don’t tell me you’re turning prima donna on me,” he said, looking for my name on his list.

      I just nodded and kept walking, searching for my assigned position in the multitude of performers and animals that, if placed in a straight line, would have stretched for several city blocks. Looking back on it, one of the things that kept me in the circus was how well-ordered things were and that I knew just where I belonged.

      As I approached, my eye was immediately drawn to a dozen or so regally robed elephants and a company of drummer girls in gorgeous purple satin costumes. In those days, we were Madison Square Garden’s biggest moneymaker, and from the looks of the elaborate Durbar spec we were about to present, you could easily see why we drew such large crowds. I knew my station in the lineup: just in front of Gaspaux’s rhinestone- and-feather-clad Arabian Show Ponies and behind Lew Jacobs and the other clowns. My place in that assembly of men and beasts was at least one point of certainty in my circus life. I nudged myself into position and felt a tug on my trouser leg.

      “Where the hell have you been, Jake? Do I have to worry that you’re hitting the bottle?” I heard Harry Doll ask.

      I looked down at him.

      “Harry, it’s been many years and I’ve never let you down yet, have I?”

      “No, you haven’t. But there is always a first time,” he shot back. “Even before you decked that rube last night, you’ve been acting stranger than a one-legged man in a sack race.”

      There was a long, uncomfortable pause. I felt that I had offended him earlier that day in the dressing room and hoped he would forgive me. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. Then, bridging the growing distance between us, Harry broke the silence. “You know, this is sort of an anniversary. It was ten years ago, here in the Garden, when the circus started their 1926 run, that I first met you. Do you remember?”

      “You’re so romantic,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood. The serious look on Harry’s face let me know he didn’t appreciate my levity.

      I didn’t say it, but I would never forget that night. The unpleasant experience I had during my first performance with the circus was inscribed in indelible ink in my memory. Clyde Ingalls, whom I’d only met a few weeks before in El Paso, dressed me up in an outlandish, scratchy wool outfit that included gold buttons, gold epaulets, a red satin hat that was sixteen inches high, and patent leather platform shoes. I was so damned high in the air that I had to keep moving my toes to make sure it was my feet down there. That first night, standing in the sideshow tent, when I heard the talker holler “Doors!” and the stampeding crowd approached, my knees started knocking. Every fiber in my being had screamed “Run!” Then, for the first time, I heard the voice of the man who would become my best friend.

      “Take it easy, Jake!” I had looked high and low for the source of the thin yet vibrant sound. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I dropped my gaze a very, very far distance down to the sideshow platform next to mine and Harry had smiled up at me. “Welcome, Jake, and don’t worry. There are more freaks out in the crowd then there are up here,” he had said with the authority of the well-seasoned trooper that he was. I smiled back at him. Though he was a little man, there was something powerful about his presence and his words that calmed me down and helped me to face the onslaught.

      That first performance in the sideshow was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that had lasted for years. You can see why the thought of telling him I was about ready to leave the circus was eating me up inside.

      “Okay, big man, enough with the nice memories. The show’s about to begin so assume the position,” Harry ordered. Like one of the finely trained, plume- and sequin-clad equine specimens just behind us in line, on command I bent down on my right knee. Resting my right elbow on my knee, I spread my fingers wide and turned my open palm to face the ceiling. I looked like a waiter who forgot his tray. In some kind of bizarre scene from Gulliver’s Travels, Harry sat squarely in the middle of my hand.

      Two shrill calls from Bradna’s whistle pierced the early afternoon air. The animals in line, sensing the excitement, roared, neighed, growled, and announced their presence however they could. Though most of the troopers had done this dance so many times it was second nature, they were never nonchalant. An adrenaline-generated murmur filled the backyard. The show was about to begin and everyone was keyed-up. Over my years with the circus, I think I must have gotten addicted to that adrenaline. That was something else that kept me hooked on the place.

      I carefully stood up, hoisting Harry over my head. He looked like a little emperor, enthroned next to my right ear. One minute later, Bradna blew his whistle again. That was the cue for Ringling’s big brass band to begin the show’s drum and bugle overture. Like Hannibal’s Legion, the colossal collection of costumed performers and beasts that was to be the circus’s opening Durbar Spectacular slowly moved forward through the arena entrance.

      Once inside that space, I immediately felt the thrill of it all. There was so much stimulation in that place: perfume of peanuts and popcorn, heat from the multi-colored spotlights, heart-walloping music, the explosion of what seemed to be a million photographers’ flashes, murmuring applause, and a blurring of faces all whooshing by on an absolutely electric current of excitement.

      Marching around the circus’s three rings was special for me. There was something otherworldly; for lack of better words, something sacred about it. When I marched in the spec I felt connected to primitive mask-clad Indians dancing around a winter campfire and to Romans racing their chariots in the Colosseum. In the spec, we carried on a timeless, trance-inducing choreography by tramping around and around in circles.

      More often than I’d like to remember, I’d been painfully bruised when one of Gaspaux’s ponies stepped on my Achilles. So that night as we started to move out and one of those Arabians stepped a little too close for comfort, I picked up the pace.

      Harry and I marched along in uncharacteristic silence. He knew that something was wrong and I wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about it. Trying to escape the tension, I looked away from him, up at the rigging for the trapeze. In just a few minutes, my friends the Codonas would be flying high above the crowd doing death-defying triple summersaults. The audience’s attention would always be glued to them. I think that’s because trapeze artists fulfilled the need we humans have to be free of our limitations, including gravity, time, and thought. In just a few years, the overwhelming danger of that pursuit would hurl Lillian Lietzel, Fred Codona’s wife, to her untimely death. She would take her husband’s sanity along with her. After Lillian fell to her death, Fred became terribly depressed. Finally he married another flyer. That was a disaster. The marriage ended up on the rocks. At a meeting in Long Beach at the divorce lawyer’s office, Codona pulled out a gun. When it was over, he had killed his ex-wife, her mother, the divorce lawyer, and himself. I’m not proud to admit it, but when that all went down I understood just how down Fred Codona must have been.

      During that afternoon’s spec in Madison Square Garden, after I looked at the rigging for the trapeze artists, I turned my attention to the center ring. There I saw the huge steel cage that housed Frank Buck’s big cats. The lion tamer was another death-defier, sure to grab the rubes attention. I imagined his Bengals as our deadly passions; Buck’s whip, chair, and gun our meager will.

      That afternoon I must have looked at the acts with different eyes; the eyes of a man who knows his time somewhere is limited. The reality that I would be leaving soon either

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