After my junior year at MIT, I decided that I’d had it. I was off to see and save the world. The first part of the story, in which I hitchhiked to Chicago and spent a whole day looking for the perfect job will appear someday. A link to the draft, in Google Doc form, is at the end of this post, just case I die before I get around to it.
At the end of my day in Chicago, I had no job and no place to sleep. I’d been hoping that I would have run into a generous prostitute like Jamie Lee Curtis in “Trading Places,” who’d give me a place to sleep so that I didn’t have to confront finding a place myself. Plus sex. But she never appeared. Desperate, I called a fraternity brother who lived in Indiana, got an invite, and hitchhiked to his place.
I don’t remember much about getting there or the night I arrived. I think there was some conversation, a good meal, and some needed sleep. The next morning I was back to seeing and saving the world. First, I needed a job.
I was too lame to find a job in Chicago with millions of jobs available. So how was I going to find one out in the Indiana sticks?
Luckily the circus was in town,
Circus, circus
In those days, “the circus” meant the one-of-a-kind Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus that played for weeks in big cities.
But that wasn’t the only circus around. There were a bunch of smaller circuses that played smaller towns, and as luck would have it, the Mills Brothers’ Circus was right where I was—and looking for talent.
The Mills Brothers circus visited towns in and around BFE. Unlike Ringling Brothers, which played for weeks in each venue, Mills Brothers put up their tents in the morning, did a show or two, took them down after the last show, and headed off to the next town overnight.
The circus! The circus!
The circus! The romance of the circus! When I was a kid our rich uncle Jack would treat Mom and us kids, once a year, to a fabulous day in New York that usually included the circus. Once we went to the then-famous Trader Vic’s restaurant—and when the Maitre d’ welcomed Uncle Jack by name, I knew I was in the presence of royalty. “My Uncle Jack is the president of GMC,” I’d tell my friends in grade school, not mentioning that GMC was Ginsberg Machine Company, one of the largest suppliers of sewing machines in New York. Never mind that! Uncle Jack got us front row, center, balcony seats for The Circus (Barnum and Bailey was ‘The Circus’ he way New York was ‘The City.’) The circus! I’d be living a dream.
So we headed down to the fairgrounds to see if they would hire me. And they did! I had all the necessary qualifications to work for the Mills Brothers’ Circus: I wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t in jail.
The Mills Brothers’ Circus was an old-time circus: we worked under the big top, a new city nearly every day. Here’s a page from their 1961 route book, located here.
We worked six days a week every week. On Sundays, I heard people would chip in and rent a hotel room so that we could get showers. It sounded romantic, but only because I was really stupid.
I imagined my new life starting with my lowly job in the circus. I’d rise from there to unimaginable heights.
Right.
I didn’t last to Sunday.
The pay was kingly: I got 35 cents per hour, a place to sleep, and three “meals” a day. The meals were nutritious enough to sustain life, and you could eat as much as you wanted because you didn’t want that much.
The cooks were creative and economical. Lunch was soup made by dumping whatever people hadn’t eaten the night before in a big pot of water and boiling it. For all I know, they also boiled whatever had ended up in the trash or was left on peoples’ plates.
If you stuck with them then entire season and traveled back with them to their winter quarters in Florida, you’d get a bonus. I don’t remember what it was, but it was significant. And it had to be because no one who had a better choice would ever want to spend an entire season working for the Mills Brothers Circus.
Getting outfitted
When I left Boston, I didn’t pack clothes for working at the circus. I’d been anticipating a job in an office environment, and shirts and suits made no sense. So we went downtown, and I got a workman’s uniform—the kind that delivery truck drivers used to wear back in the day before hippies and rock bands caused the dress code to deteriorate to the point that people could wear whatever the fuck they wanted.
All duded out in my new work uniform.. I joined the circus.
They put me to work right away on props. As each act came on, we had to haul out what the act required, then haul back the stuff they left in the ring after they were done. Some acts needed special equipment—like trapeze or high wires. So we’d haul out the contraptions, attach them to cables that hung from the top of the big, then haul on the other end to lift up the gear and get it into position, check for safety, and then the act went on.
Here’s what things looked like when the show was on:
Yes! We had elephants. For more pictures of the Mills Brothers Circus, amazingly enough from 1963, check this out.
The parade
The show started with a parade. Beautiful young women in sequined costumes! I was sure that one of the beautiful women would eventually fall in love with me, and we’d travel the road of life together. But then reality set in. I learned that the beautiful women were the daughters of circus families from traditional cultures, and they didn’t let their daughters talk to any of the lowlife scum that did the dirty work. I was a lowlife scum.
So one more naive dream went down the tubes. Maybe that big-hearted prostitute would come to a performance and take pity on me.
Elephants galore
We had elephants!
Elephants meant two things: beautiful women riding them and never talking to me and elephant shit for me to clean up.
We had horses! With beautiful women who would never talk to me riding them and horse shit for me to clean up.
There were clowns and acrobats. There was no clown shit or acrobat shit. So that was a win.
Lions and tigers and no bears, oh my
The big event was the wild animal act. We assembled a metal cage that filled the center of the ring, then lined up the animal cages outside in a big train. It looked like this:
We’d roll the animal cages into the ring and attach the first one to a gate in the center ring and each to the next behind it. Each of the rolling cages had a gate each end. We’d raise the gate in the cage nearest the ring and poke cat if it didn’t run out. Then we’d open the back gate in that cage and the front gate for the one next in line, and prod the next cat forward and into the ring. After the act was over, the cats would be released from the ring in reverse order, and we’d lock them into their individual cages, then pull the whole train back to where the cats lived when not performing.
Oh yes, very important. Right before the show, we fed the cats. A lot. We didn’t want hungry cats dining on lion tamer in the center ring of the Mills Brothers’ circus.
Wrap up and bedtime
At night, after the last show, we’d take down the big-top, collapse all the poles and stick them in trailers. By then, it would be dark. Time for bed.
Bed was a hard wooden pallet covered with a quarter-inch mattress in the back of a semi. I had six truck mates. One of them seemed to have tuberculosis and coughed all night. It was hot out, and the trucks didn’t have fans for circulation much less air conditioning. Just open doors at the back of the truck to let in the night air. And the mosquitos.
Around two in the morning, the big doors were closed (and presumably bolted), and the circus left for the next town.
There is a big difference between the springs in a bus or a car and the springs in a truck. Basically, it’s the difference between springs and no springs. Add bumps to no springs and a wooden pallet with no mattress and stifling summer heat and a tuberculotic bunkmate and no windows, and you have a perfect recipe for no sleep.
The next day
We arrived in the next town just before dawn—about 5AM. The truck doors were opened, and the long workday started. Now we had to pull out all the crap that we’d packed away the night before, raise and guy the main poles, lay out the tent. Hook it up. Then out came the elephants who pulled the big top up. No shit. Elephants.
Then we had to put up the small poles, fasten the bottoms of the tents to spikes that we’d driven into the ground with sledgehammers, and finally, we got to eat. Or rather ‘eat.’ Circus’ food’ deserved quotes.
I remember two other things about my short time working there. One was the guy who was in charge of all us roustabouts (great word that)—a guy called Mother John. Mother John was gay and not effeminate and submissive, but aggressive and a scary to the pretty boy I was back in those days.
Mother John, the Internet tells me, was (Mother) John Makinson, who assisted John (Louisiana) Lewis and worked with John (Shorty) Walker. Don’t remember Louisiana or Shorty, but Mother John clearly left an impression on the internet. For more history, see here.
I stayed to take the tents down that night, but I couldn’t face another night in the truck. I collected my meager pay from Mother John and decided that—well, maybe I should finish school. So I hitchhiked back home to Baldwin.
Hitchhiking back
The outbound trip took one ride. The return trip took many. I’d hitchhiked to school and back for a couple of years, so I knew the do’s and don’ts. I always tried to get let off near a busy ramp where cars are going slowly enough to be willing to stop, and there were enough cars that I didn’t have to wait all day. But somehow on that trip, I caught in the middle of some nowhere place where there were damned few cars and none willing to stop.
I landed there because one of the guys who picked me up started talking and asking about sex too much, and I asked to be let out without considering the difficulties of getting my next ride.
I got picked up by another guy who either had the most fantastic career of anyone I’d ever met, or who was a pathological liar. I think the latter. I got out of his car at a rest-stop on the Pennsylvania turnpike.
I remember two other rides, neither from that trip. One was a trucker who shared some of his life experience with me and gave me advice that I thought was good, and that stuck with me: no matter how upset I got, never to walk out on my lady unless it was for good and forever. There were times when I got angry with one girlfriend or another, and his advice always came back to me, and I hung in.
The other was a guy in whose car I left my wallet, and who had the grace to put it in the mail and send it to me, cash intact. Some people are awfully good.
When I got home, my Dad and Mom were glad to see me and didn’t make me wrong for taking off, wasting the investment that they’d made in my education, and spoiling their dream of seeing me graduate from MIT.
Ingrate that I was, I found a way to spoil part of that dream. I graduated a semester early, and they didn’t get to see the ceremony,
Excerpted from this document
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