Elvis has left the building

Many people in show biz get monickers hung on them for one reason or the other. I met many people and never knew what their real name was. Like, Mudcat, Big City, Bad Attitude, Butterfly, Holy Water, Jimmy Bad Breath, E Flat, Iowa and Dry County, just to name a few. Some of these guys were on the lam, others liked their nicknames.
 There was a guy working for Pico making special events who called himself  Elvis, I guess because he had long sideburns. We would all get rooms at the same motel and I noticed that Elvis would sometimes get up at wee hours of the morning and leave the room for a couple of hours. What he did I don't know and probably don't want to know...maybe he went to a bar or was a serial killer, who knows??
Anyway one day I asked him , "Elvis, What's your real name?"
Elvis glared at me... "Why? he asked.
"Because one of these nights you're going to get pinched and I cant go to Police headquarters to bail you out asking them, Do you have Elvis here?"
 But Elvis wouldnt reveal his real name.
 He was a strange looking dude also apart from the sideburns he wore a baseball cap that said, "I will lick you all over for 25 cents".
One night Pico and I were rooming together in St. Louis and Elvis had a room on the next floor of the same hotel . Pico and Elvis went out to find a place to eat, I stayed in the room to watch TV. About twenty minutes later they came back and Elvis said , I'm going to my room", and left. Pico got in his bed  and about five minutes later the door flew open and it was a girl with an apron on and a policeman. She looked at me and Pico and said, "No thats not them." And they left.
 It was so fast, I said, "What the fuck was that all about?"
Pico told me, " we went three blocks away to a Restaurant but as we got there they closed the door in our face and said, "we're closed". So I took out a five dollar bill and told them, "Open up, I've got more money than God." And I tore up the fiver and threw it at the glass door. But they wouldnt open up and I said, "C'mon open the door"... and started pounding on the door and suddenly...it cracked... and I said...lets get out of here Elvis and we screwed back here. I guess the waitress got a good look at Elvis but not me. She mustve followed us back here and called the fuzz.
 So when the waitress saw me instead of Elvis she figured she had the wrong room, If Elvis had been there they would've been buying a glass door.

As weird as Elvis was he proved the adage that there is someone for everyone in this world...he got married a couple of years later. Yes she was as weird as he was.
We were working a Fair in Columbia South Carolina and there was a supermarket across from the hotel we were in, on the way back from the lot Pico says, lets stop in the super so I can get some cigs. So we went in and as we were standing in line waiting for the cash register I told Pico... Hey Pico... check out the group in front of us"... I recognized  them as game jointees from the carny, two guys and a girl.
They had a cart with a case of beer and a can of whip cream in it. We all started laughing, even the cashier and the carnies.

When Tempers Flare

Tempers flare over the smallest things. One of the cheapest attempted murders I ever witnessed was over a bucket of hot water. Let me explain:
The cookhouse was always on the lot before anyone, they would tear down after supper at 6:30 and go to the next town and set up to be ready with breakfast the next morning at seven. So they always had hot water going to wash dishes with. The cooks helpers, there were two of them had a side business going to make a few extra bucks by selling a bucket of hot water for 15 cents. One day an argument broke out between them as one had caught the other selling a bucket of water and pocketing the money instead of sharing it. So he pulled a shiv and stabbed the guy. Attempted murder for , since it was a shared deal, seven and a half cents, I don’t know what else you could call it.
Summer would come along and first of May college boys would show up, the seasoned butchers had been busting their backs for four months and these guys were all fresh and sometimes they wanted to bend the rules to suit themselves, like run up an aisle with you and grab your customers, it was an unwritten rule that this was prohibited. And some would brown nose the management trying to get favors and sometimes it worked. My buddy Jack the Ripper and I had a Dirty tricks squad that we would use if they started getting out of hand. In the mornings when the stake driver started up I would wake up and get out of bed. Once the four center poles were raised the boss butcher would bang on the side of the trailer and yell “four poles…out on the canvas”. If you weren’t out in five minutes it was a five dollar fine…double if it was a Monday morning and triple if it was raining.
Jack or I would find the troublemaker and tie his shoestrings in hard knots, a sure five dollar fine that went to hire kids to help on teardown.
They gave one of these punks a fast truck to drive and Jack was steaming, so he went to the mechanics helper and asked him if he would like a beer from the blue room every day, he said “ sure what do I have to do for it?”… Jack told him, “This punk is reckless and speeding, slow him down”. So the Mechanic governed him down to 35 miles an hour and it took him all night to get to the next town. That lasted a week and he blew the show.
It just doesn’t pay to not follow the rules boys !!!
We closed the show one fall but the owner decided to put out a smaller one ring show just to make dates in Florida, Georgia and Alabama. Since several other shows had closed for the season we had the cream of the crop for perfomers and butchers. Everyone was well seasoned and knew what to do, the bigtop flew up in the mornings and by ten AM all the flags were flying.. But like paradise theres always a snake around.
The owner stayed in winter quarters and left the superintendant and office manager in charge. His nephew came on the show to do a low wire act and to give credit where credit is due it was one of the best I’d ever seen, he also was in the elephant leap act in which he would run down a long ramp and from a springboard leap over three elephants and land on a rubber mattress on the other side of them. Since it was the Fall of the year he had to agree to a price cut in his normal salary, he said he would if he could work concessions also. The owner said OK. But immediately suspicion entered our minds. I have seen nepotism on other shows and usually it meant the nephew, brother, sister or whatever relative got cut in on the butchers money but didn’t have to do chinese. So we went to the boss butcher and asked him if the wire walker was going to do chinese. He talked to him and the kinker said yes he would do everything that we did if he and his wife could eat in the cookhouse. So it was agreed. We went on the road and about three weeks out we were in Georgia and the kinker started coming in late enough to miss putting up the bigtop and grandstand.
So we discussed this, since he was the owners nephew we weren’t sure just how to confront this situation , he always had an excuse, traffic, or one thing or another but for butchers there really is no excuse for leaving your work for someone else to do so the pressure cooker was boiling.
One morning the tent was up earlier than usual and the guys decided to go downtown and shoot some pool, which just shows how casual things had got on the show, the kinker hadn’t shown up. We had unloaded the concession equipment and most of the joints were up and I decided to stay and wash down my popcorn stand. My friend Patrick paid a bigtop hand named Congo to put his stand up. Congo called me and asked “How do you put this center peak pole in the stand?”. I said, “here let me do it”. And I climb on the stands counter to put it in when suddenly the kinker came charging down the midway yelling, “Why the Fuck isn’t my stand outside of the concession wagon?” I told him, “ If you were here to do your part of the chinese maybe it would be.” Now this guy was built like a raging bull and did a forward somersault on a low wire every day, I was a 120 pound skinny kid. “Screw You” he said, My temper started flaring, “ If you wouldn’t act like a kinker asshole maybe we would be willing to help you”. I should’ve counted to ten.
He turn red and lunged at me. I raised myself up on the bar at the top of the stand and he went under me, so I kicked him in the back of the head and jumped to the ground, he hit me and knocked me down, I got in about three punches to his mid section but it was like I hadn’t touched him he knocked me down again when Congo jumped in, Congo was a big tough guy who had been in Detroit Prison so he really wasn’t someone you wanted to mess with. Congo said, “Stop hitting my friend”, and grabbed him in a bear hug. After a few seconds he calmed down and left saying “I’m talking to the manager about this”.
I was pretty ruffled up but no real damage had been done. About an hour later the butchers showed up from downtown and when they saw me the word of the rampage had already gotten to them and Patrick said, “We heard what happened and we thought you might be dead”. I had recovered my self esteem by then and had a sledge hammer handle under the popcorn stand counter in case of a recurrence.
The Kinker came out and went into the Road Managers office screaming as how he had been mistreated. The road manger chased him out of the office with a ball bat and told him stay off the midway, stay out of concessions and shut up.
At lunch time he showed up at the cookhouse, Wacky Mack the cook glared at him and said, “you jumped that skinny kid this morning, now try some of this fat mans ass.” And he started throwing frying pans and pots at the kinker. Wacky Mack yelled at him as he hurriedly left the cookhouse, “Only butchers and office personell eat here and you’re not either one anymore, so keep out”.
That night as the kinker was leaping over the elephants the matress had been spotted wrong and he broke his leg. The next day he left the show. I never could figure out if it was an accident or if somebody had done it on purpose.
Bad case of the red ass….. there were some home remedies for redass …. Talcum powder…if not available, corn starch… a piece of rock alum in each pocket or a styptic pencil broke in two in each pocket. But the only real remedy was a good hot shower. Bucket baths were no match for a hot shower. One day I heard one of the show girls say, “it’s almost show time, I’m going to take a P.T.A. Bath”. “ What’s a P.T.A. Bath?”, I asked“She said, “Pussy, Tits and armpits”.
The aisle jumper was working cokes in the seats, the guy making cokes in the ice tent was wobbly John, he could fill 40 cups at a time then heat seal a plastic cover over them. Then on busy days he would stack several trays in preparation, we would come out grab a tray and tell him one tray john, If I saw the aisle jumper was coming out of the tent behind me I had a straight pin stuck in my jacket collar and if John turned his back I would stab 4 or 5 cokes in paper cups in the next tray then take my tray and go in the bigtop. The aisle jumper grabbed the next tray and it was slowly leaking the pricked cokes, his jacket was getting wet, a few cups were half empty and the purchasers would complain and slow him down, one guy threw the empty coke cup that had nothing but ice in it, when he got back to the coke tent he bitched at wobbly John and told him, “You dumb ass drunk you don’t know how to cap the drinks”. Wobbly John jumped out of the trailer and whacked him.

It just doesn’t pay to break the rules boys !!!

Not all the fun is in center ring

One thing about being on the road is that something different happens every day and everything is always the same....sounds like a contradiction right?  On the mud show usually about mid july tempers start to flare amongst the kinkers... A friend of mine commented,  "they start getting the red ass", that is they get chapped between their legs and lose their tempers. Indeed its a pleasure to see the kinkers fighting amongst themselves instead of bitching about how much money the candy butchers are making.
 Things happen like, they get on the lot and start fighting for position for the only shade tree on the grounds.
I saw the French and Mexican acts tossing garbage cans at each other for several minutes just for that reason one day.
I was working a mud show and one day as I went in to work the seats the low wire act came in to do his act went to the wire and turned around and stormed out. I asked the Equestrian Director, Roger about it..."Why did he walk out like that?" He said, "Someone buttered the wire."
 There was a group of tumblers from Hungary I believe their names were Hugbarris or something like that,but everyone called them the "Hug A Bears". There were several good looking women in the troupe, wives and sisters, and the guys were very jealous and hotheaded.
One day while working a Shrine date in Chicago one of the butchers came in as we were fixing to hit the seats with snowcones and told me , "hey the Hug a bears and the prop crew are punching it out in center ring". Really", I said,"Who's winning?" He said, "Well, as of the moment it's Hug a Bears....one and Prop hands zero".. During that same spot a few days later as I was going up to the second level seats I saw some shriners had bored peepholes in a plywood panel that happened to look into the the girls dressing room, three days later as I passed the same shriners One of the Hug a Bears was pointing a 45 caliber pistol at them and saying, "You wants to look through a hole you sons of the beetches, look at this hole".
The next day there was a large piewce of laminated metal over the plywood and some very very elderly shriners guardind the stairway.
 Speaking of Shriners, Why do they have to block you when you're trying to vend in the seats? Pico use to ask them, "Have youy burned any crippled children today??" just to piss them off.
My buddy Jack the Ripper liked to remind them that the serial killer John Wayne Gacy was a Shrine Clown.  The first thing they do when they promote a circus is to put up a bar.
 There was an act that I always liked watching on the show because you never knew what would happen called Uncle Heavy's Pork Chop Review,  Uncle Heavy  was a big guy and he had trained hogs, Uncle Heavy was also a two fisted drinker which made him an OK Guy with the candy butchers, but the other Kinkers ostracised him. Sometimes he would get to drinking and yell at the other performers... "I know what you bastards are saying...you say I smell like pig shit...well fuck you kinkers!!!"
Once Uncle Heavy passed out in center ring with his hogs running circles around him, the prophands drug him out by the feet and the audience thought it was part of the act.  Great Guy!!!

The hazards of eating fire

 My friend Pico and I went to make an indoor circus date in Pittsburgh and arrived 5 days before the opening. While waiting it out in a hotel room we were bored to death and I asked Pico how he got started in Show Biz. He told me he had gotten married at the age of sixteen when his girlfriend had told him she was pregnant but the baby came around 11 months later. After a rocky marriage and no work to be had in Butte, Montana he decided to hitchhike out of town and look for a better economy elsewhere.
 After a day on the road a Circus truck came by and picked him up and introduced him to the wonderful world of circusdom. I believe I recall he said it was Birnam Brothers. Even back then at that tender age he was a two fisted drinker. The shows manager had him doing everything from putting up the big top to juggling and they decided he could learn how to eat fire in the sideshow. However one day after imbibing a fifth of Wild Turkey he went to do his fire eating act and instead of aiming the fire upward he sprayed it towards the town suckers and caught 6 of them on fire. That was the end of his fire eating act, just as well I guess, I hear that every time you eat fire you get a trace of gasoline in your system no matter how cautious you are and mixing it with Wild Turkey Whiskey probably doesnt help your system either.

 Playing with fire is risky business, I saw an act in Mexico where this guy would get in a 50 gallon drum filled with water, submerge himself completely, then the assistant would pour a cup of gasoline on top of the water and ignite it. After about 15 seconds of flames he would spring out of the barrel with enough force to put out the flames.... usually... the owner told me it´s not 100 % effective thats why he has a shaved head and no moustache.