by Rich Wright
When I was six, my father took me to the circus. My father drank a lot, and drunk or sober he seemed the same to me, loud and energetic and thrilled, except I remember that when he drank, he’d spit a lot. On our drive there, I remember my father had the square bottle of Jack Daniels, green label, between his legs and he was spitting out the window, almost continuously.
The circus was held in the County Coliseum, a big barn like building that at the time to me seemed the size of Africa, hollowed out. The tiers of seats rose like Mount Kilamanjaro. Our seats were up near the top, where the snow never melted, despite Kilamanjaro’s location on the equator.
My father had brought in a little glass hip bottle of Jack Daniels, green label, or maybe two or three, and he made no secret of his drinking. He took long hard guzzles till the booze ran down his chin and he ignored the spot light operator who was also exiled with us above the snow line.
My father spit on the floor next to where he sat, and soon a little river was running down the steps like the spring melt.
The circus was great fun. The motorcycles whizzed around the sphere of death. Marlene spun forty feet above the ground hanging onto a rope by her teeth. The Molotov brothers swang through the air with the greatest of ease, executing, successfully, the never before seen mid-air double somersault. A tiger jumped through a ring of fire.
My father bought me cotton candy, and peanuts, and popcorn.
At one point the elephants marched around the three rings of the circus, each elephant holding the tail of the elephant in front of it with its trunk. My father thought this was great fun, and he started to whoop and holler.
“Hey yaw, Simba,” he yelled. Simba was the name of Johnny Weismiller’s elephant, when Johnny Weismiller was Tarzan. “Hey yaw, Simba.”
I think the spot light operator was a little intimidated by my father’s unbridled enthusiasm. He edged to the other side of the light, which reminded me, at the time, of some kind of a cannon. The spotlight operator had started to operate the spotlight with one hand, in order to put as much space as possible between my father and himself, and he was starting to miss his mark. Far below us, in the center ring, the ringmaster was dodging around, trying to stay in the dancing light.
“Hey yaw, Simba,” my father yelled, even though the elephants had long since left the continent, or at least the coliseum. The absence of the elephants had in no way bridled his enthusiasm. Since then I myself have discovered it is great fun to yell “Hey yaw, Simba,” even when there are no elephants on the continent.
“Hey yaw, Simba.”
I should mention that my father was employed as the driver of a mobile tire repair truck. His job was to respond to calls from trucks on the highway that had suffered flat tires. This mobile tire repair truck lacked the equipment the shops had, and my father would take tires off the wheels of disabled trucks with a hammer and a tire iron and brute strength. He looked like a bull in his blue black coveralls. His forearms were as big around as Easter hams. His knuckles were cut and scraped and black, from the tires.
He finished his glass hip flask of Jack Daniels, green label, and with a grand underhand sweep, sent it scooting down our row of seats, so that the people sitting next to us, and all the way down the row, had to lift their feet to keep from getting hit by it.
“Hey yaw, Simba,” he yelled.
By that time, with the yelling and the dancing spotlight, my father had drawn the attention of the circus officials, and a couple of county sheriffs had begun to mount the steps up to the snow line, but when they got halfway up, they got a look at my father and went back down for reinforcements. Next there were four of them, coming up the two aisles on either side of us, but if they’d have been smart they would have left him an avenue of egress and just tried to run him off.
The smart sheriffs were all out regulating the whorehouses outside the city limits.
At last my father became cognizant of the predicament he’d placed himself in as the sheriffs approached him, and he gave the two sheriffs closest a shove and wheeled to face the other pair, but as he turned, he slipped in his river of spit and fell with a thud on the concrete step up above the snow line. The sheriffs set upon him with their billy clubs and ended up carrying him out on a stretcher.
And that is how I came to join the circus.