13

I am that kid
Standing at the mouth of a suburban-sidestreet,
looking down the
tree-lined block.

Memories of past
Summer-adventures
as insistent
as the blazing sun
over my head.

A block of silence.
My generation. Turned.
New kids being born.
Still in the nest.

The concrete friends of
summer yesteryear
evaporated
as they
have started
combing their hair,
and giving a shit about
looking-, "neat".

Cars burst out of bycicle's-
coccoon.

I am the
last
boy standin.

Mad-Maxxin'...

American Nightmare

It was just an accepted fact, that Black people had to eat shit, as a matter of survival. Accepted by the black people who had to eat that shit.  Whereas white people have sheltered themselves from the awareness that a lot of people have to eat shit to survive. All those people eating shit, so that there could be such things as, whiteness, racially pure suburbs and schools,  a legal system that supports them, and unlimited beef on the grill.

School shootings, President Donald Trump, code-spewing talk radio Nazis (playing a verbal game of "I'm not touching you!", just to sell gold, vitamins, and survival-rations to stem the inevitable tide of brown DNA) are all symptoms of what happens when white people taste shit. They've done all of that, and they haven't even gotten a good mouthful, yet... The proof being, in that I have to qualify this statement with saccharine words like "in general", just so supposedly strong, and righteous, white-people will listen, and not run off in an hysterical tizzy, because their fragile reality was tilted.

There is a chasm between how white people see themselves, and what they really are. For generations, they managed to fill that chasm full of dead Indians, stolen-land, tortured, enslaved and mutilated black flesh, (and even the collateral of poor, dumb white "trash"), all floating in the river of red blood, drained from the corpses of yellow and brown babies.
They filled it with John Wayne, Elvis, Shirley Temple, Corvettes, Pilgrim-myths, Bibles, and other clean, heroic, overblown-bullshit. But now that abyss is too wide for them to ignore. They now see that the world is seeing them; stripped-naked.
It is this abyss of reality, this void of truth, screaming like Bloody Mary from the mirror, that is fueling all the sad-but-horrific acts of White-terrorism, that get ticked off as "mental-illness".  These tantrums of Trump-rage, are filling the campus-bloodbaths.

There are none so blind... The Germans were quick to denounce the Nazis, after the war, and they have remained ever-vigilant. Let's see how long it takes, until the mixed-blood descendants of Europe, denounce Whiteness.

Knight School

From re-watching these Speed Racer cartoons, through my third-eye, It has become apparent to me; that a good chunk of Gen-X, were programmed daily, in Eastern ideals of honor and self-sacrifice. The kids that were outside with the sportsballs, are the ones that learned to compete, and win. They own this America, we live in. But their competition, and therefore gain, is without honor, and has led us to a reality of President Trump, just being an accepted-thing.
This is the core of nerd vs jock. The jocks have hunger, but the nerds are self-aware, and therefore able to distinguish between honorable and dishonorable actions. More plainly, the nerds take psychic punches, from the jock world, and at their core, the nerds still prefer discomfort and ridicule, to outward material-gain that has been taken dishonorably.

The kids that werent paying attention, are now the mass, that fuels the mindless sportsball-competition, and thoughtless consumption of goods.

Punk-rock poetry, or philosophy, or something else? Please enjoy a photo of a car, decked out for the dishonorable, and bloody sport of "car-wrestling". Driven by a man who wears a lucha-mask and is known only as "X",  that still retains his honor, because the proceeds go to feed his family.

Ps:
Which brings us to out final meta moment:
Speed and Sparky are stranded in the desert, during the final race, because speed gave a can of their gas to an opponent that had run out earlier (involved story). Sparky notes that if Speed hadnt given gas, they wouldnt be stranded. Enter Racer X, who stops and repeats the mistake to Speed, telling him that as a professional his responsibility is to win a race, not to enable others. He then says, "You will remember this day for as long as you live." and drives away.
Speed falls to the ground and admits his weakness and that he is ashamed.
Sparky notices, a can of gas in  sand, left by Racer X.
Speed, raises his head, and vows to X "or whoever you are", that he has learned, and vows to make X proud in the future.

As  child, i didn't get this. I think I may have blocked it out because it conflicted with Western pre-programming from the Christian Church, (teaching that eternal suffering is honarable) and therefore created dissonance.
Had I taken that lesson to heart, in conjunction with the earlier lessons, my life would have been a lot more smooth.

Family-Weekend, 1978

Forced to watch fish
Slowly suffocate on the ice
in the
Styrofoam cooler, my
breath
Became labored.

I mentioned it once
but they
Told me i was acting like
A "damn-sissy".

Which served as the
Bell, beginning
 another class in
Outlasting  sissy-horror
101.

Engineering

Some of you, know.
Everyone else
doesn't matter.

But I can remember hearing
spurs
in the jingling of
my boot-buckles
and horse's-hooves
in the echoing
"tock"
of my heels
bouncing between
the brick-streets and
adobe-walls.

How many miles did
those boots take me
before I
unceremoniously
cut out the steel-toes
to see
what they looked like?

And trying to walk
in boots
without toes, is
like knife-fucking;
It doesn't last long.

I had them for 10 years.
I walked through
high-school and
University
in that pair of
boots.

I walked past a thousand
shoulda-suicides, by
looking down at
the cool-assed boots
on my feet,
which other people
(the turds in my punchbowl)
were too dimwitted
to recognize.
Listen...
...the sound of broken
windshield-glass
when you step on the
bits,  sometimes they
"SKWEEK!"
...

The quick-release of
snow, that's
 clumped-on there
freezing your
toes,
cause you can just
kick a wall
dead-on.
Snow..?
What kind? How much?

If it's the slushy-stuff
that's been thawed
and refrozen, a few times over
then you tuck your pants
in
to keep off the salt.
Powdery stuff is
fine, until it
 acccumulates,
then you gotta
fold your jeans
over the top of
your boots
so you don't wind-up
with snow in your
socks.

Sand...

The sand on
Chicago's
North-Shore Beach, is
coarse
mostly pale-colored
with
smatterings of
brown and black bits.
just like the
people.

In Lubbock, Tx
sand is
red.
Red like the back
of a knot-headed
cotton-Farmer's
creased neck.

And there, they
call it
"dust".
But it ain't.
it's fine
red
sand.

Hourglass-sand.

I spent an eternity
 in
West Texas
once.

JC Penney
Engineer-boots
can provide a bit
of support, when
you start twisting
your ankles
from stepping-in the
prarie-dog holes that
lattice the
campus.

And when you
get to them, (because of
your art-major)
you can scrawl-

FUCK YOU

with your boot-heel
on the off-white walls
so that when you
finish
talking to that guy
and walk-away
he will finally
understand what
"Meta"
means.

It's really
 a damn
shame
that it's taken
this long,
to recognize something
I've been stepping-over
for so many
 years.

The forgotten war: Alpha-male sociopaths, their authoritarian Beta-male Followers, and their Passive-aggressive War Against the Wildboys

 

The forgotten war: Alpha-male sociopaths, their authoritarian Beta-male Followers, and their Passive- aggressive War Against the Wildboys

(by Casanova N. Frankenstein PhD)

Wildboy Theory In brief:

In the life of every American male, around age 13 or 14, he is forced to make a harsh decision. The decision whether to remain the person that he has been, and knows himself to be, or to take on a new (false) identity which leads him into the completely contrived identity of "man".

Most fold to the force of societal pressure and leave behind their true interests as being kid-stuff, or "gay". This societal-pressure is enforced by threat of isolation and/or violence by their robust (jockish) male peers. However, there exist males falling outside of the robust/authoritarian mindset, who also make the choice, but it is a more dire choice to them because they realize that they will have to go against their true nature, set morals and conscience. 

To become a "man", a boy must make a break with his true self and adopt/develop an external ego- "man" identity, which he henceforth uses in place of his true personality.

Those boys lacking any desire to abandon themselves and become "men" are shunned and shamed by the majority of society. Many develop emotional-problems, attempt suicide or adopt self-destructive behaviors. Those that survive become outlaws. They become Wildboys. 

They are wild because they must develop into puberty and maturity without a societally-approved behavioral template. They are often seen as loners and rebels. They become people like Salvador Dali, Johnny Depp, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, etc.

These are the strong ones, who overcome being labelled "weirdos" and "faggots", by those that choose the easy route of “manhood”.

There has been a silent war between the Wildboys and the Men, since the dawn of American civilization. This war is enforced through outright violence in the larger society, by the Beta males, who become cops, soldiers, politicians, judges and other mid-level authority figures. 

On the employment-front, the war is carried out through the passive-aggressive actions of the Beta-males who because of their adherence to Alpha-male authority, are promoted to middle and upper-level positions of employee management.

Wildboys, in contrast, become society's free-thinkers, musicians, artists, and other creative types. Ironically, the mythic-hero of the Beta-male is represented in media by the Wildboy archetype; the mysterious loner with his own moral-code and a disdain for authority. This may go to explain much of the anger against Wildboys as displaced,  actually being an unspoken jealousy or admiration of the Wildboy's independence.

There's a popular movie-trope about how Beta-males  (usually teens) have tomboyish female friends that would love to date them, but the guys are usually too fixated on a popular-girl, who fits perfectly society's notion of proper femininity. If these archetypes were to date tomboys,  their families, Alpha bosses and Beta co-workers/peers, would be vocal in their  distaste for her "lezbo"-looks, and lack of "big tits". 

This patriarchal template of arbitrary "normality", based on fundamentalist religious dogma,  (enforced by society at large) is equally damaging to women, as it is the cause for the predetermined standards for female beauty and behavior, based on a fairy-tale 1950's style vision.

Some males are born sociopaths, who skip boyhood altogether. When puberty hits, they take over as the Alpha males. These are the leaders, whose actions become the template for manhood.

The Beta males are the ones perceiving their masculinity to be in a spotlight of continual scrutiny.  They often blame women, minorities, queerfolk and other handy scapegoats, for their neurotic shortcomings. They complain about being Betas and their ignored "male-rights". (Note: this is not an indictment of the Men’s Rights Movement as a whole. The movement is comprised of both lunatics and persons with salient arguments.) They see women as

ignoring them and their (self-defined) "nice-guy" ways. They blame women for choosing “assholes” over them. Ironically, these Betas don't recognize that the "assholes" that get the girls are the same Alphas they wish to emulate, and keep in power over them with their praise, toadying, labor, and votes.

Wildboys usually wind up struggling in the workplace because of the cognitive dissonance that their presence engenders in their Beta-male peers, and bosses. Because the presence of a Wildboy amongst Beta-followers usually causes excitement in the form of disruption of order, the bosses usually wind up trying to "break" the Wildboy- employee through passive-aggressive action or isolation. Failing that the Beta-bosses find some pretense to terminate the  Wildboy's employment, in order to reinstate the status-quo.

Wildboys are literally forced to conform to Beta behavior-norms concerning dress and mandatory bonding. The Wildboy's style, actions and mindset is seen as "inappropriate" for the workplace. The only condolence, offered Wildboys comes in the form of passive-aggressive right to work laws, which give them the choice of either conforming to the banal social-norms of the workplace, or termination of their "at-will" employment with "Company X", if they are not satisfied with the working conditions. Wildboys are thus given the choice of conformity or starvation, and outside of more secure forms of public- service jobs (ie, Government employment) they usually wind up going from job to job, because of their inability to conform.

All of this is allowed to continue as the status-quo because of the idea that  becoming a man was a decision that is without choice. 

I believe that most Betas look upon Wildboys and subconsciously have to suppress their own Wildboy nature, while simultaneously, reinforcing their falsely created and desperately-held male-ego, in order to avoid the disconcerting and psychologically/emotionally uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that this internal rift creates.

One of the best short-stories ever written!

That Old Dog Lying in the Dust
by Ray Bradbury

 They say that Mexicali has changed. They say it has many people and more lights and the nights are not so long there anymore and the days are better. But I will not go see. For I remember Mexicali when it was small and alone and like an old dog lying out in the dust in the middle of the road. And if you drove up and honked it just lay there and twitched its tail and smiled with its rusty brown eyes. But most of all I remember a lost-and-gone one-ring Mexican circus.
In the late summer of 1945, with the war ending beyond the world somewhere, and tires and gas rationed, a friend called to ask if I would like to ramble down past the Salton Sea to Calexico. We headed south in a beat-up Model A which steamed and seeped brown rust-water when we stopped in the late hot afternoon to skinny-dip in the cool irrigation canals that make the desert green along the Mexican border. That night we drove across into Mexico and ate cold watermelon in one of those palm-fringed outdoor stands where whole families gather happy and loud and spitting black seeds. We strolled the unlit border town, barefoot, treading the soft brown talcum dust of its unpaved summer roads. The warm dust blew us around a corner. The little one-ring Mexican circus lay there: an old tent full of moth holes and half-sewn wounds, propped up from within by an ancient set of dinosaur bones. Two bands played. One was a Victrola which hissed “La Cucaracha” from two black funeral horns buried high in the trees. The second band was mortal flesh. It consisted of a bass-drummer who slammed his drum as if killing his wife, a tuba player sunk and crushed in brass coils, a trumpeter with a pint of sour saliva in his horn, and a trap-drummer whose effervescent palsy enabled him to gunshot everyone: musicians quick or musicians dead. Their mouth-to-mouth breathing brought forth “La Raspa.” To both calamities, my friend and I crossed the warm night-wind street, a thousand crickets frolicking at our pants cuffs. The ticket-seller raved into his wet microphone. Volcanoes of clowns, camels, trapeze acrobats waited just inside to fall upon us! Think! We thought. In a mob of young, old, well-dressed, poor, we hustled to buy tickets. At the entrance a tiny lady with great white piano-teeth fried tacos and tore tickets. Under her faded shawl, starlight spangled. I knew that soon she would shed her moth wings to become a butterfly, eh? She saw my face guess this. She laughed. She tore a taco in half, handed it to me, laughed again. Pretending nonchalance, I ate my ticket. Inside was a single ring around which were tiered three hundred slat-board seats cleverly built to kill the spines of plain meadow-beast folk like us. Down circling the ring stood two dozen rickety tables and chairs where sat the town aristocrats in their licorice-dark suits with black ties. There also sat their proper wives and uncomfortable children, all meticulous, all quiet as behooves the owners of the town cigar store, the town store that sells liquor, or the best car mechanic in Mexicali. The show was to start at eight p.m. or as soon as the tent was full; by rare luck, the tent was full by eight-thirty. The extravaganzas lit their fuses. A whistle shrieked. The musicians, outside, flung down their instruments and ran. They reappeared, some in coveralls to haul rope, others as clowns to bounce across the ring. The ticket-seller lurched in, bringing with him the Victrola which he banged onto a band platform near the ring. In a great shower of sparks and minor explosions, he plugged it in, looked around, shrugged, spun a record, poised the needle. We could have either a live band or live acrobats and trapeze artists. We chose the latter. The huge circus began—small. Now a sword-swallower choked on a sword, sprayed kerosene in a gout of flame, and wandered out to applause from five small girls. Three clowns knocked each other across the ring and bounded off to aching silence. Then, thank God, the little woman leaped into the ring. I knew those spangles. I sat up swiftly. I knew those vast teeth, those quick brown eyes. It was the taco-seller! But now she was— The beer-keg juggler! She rolled flat on her back. She shouted. The sword-swallower tossed a red-white-green keg. She caught it deftly with her white ballet-slippered feet. She spun it, as a John Philip Sousa record beat hell out of the tent canvas with a big brass swatter. The tiny lady kicked the whirling keg twenty feet up. By the time it fell to crush her, she was gone, running. “Hey! Ándale! Vamanos! Ah!” Out beyond in the dusting night I could see the colossal grand parade corseting itself together, girding its gouty loins. A small mob of men was leaning against what looked like an irritable camel out by the watermelon stands. I thought I heard the camel curse. I knew I saw its lips move with obscene belches. Were they or were they not slipping a stomach belt on the beast? Did it have multiple hernias? But now one of the sweating rope-haulers jumped on the bandstand, crammed a red fez on his head, mouthed the trombone in a great wail. A new record trumpeted like a herd of elephants. The great parade dusted in, led and followed by ten million crickets who had nothing else to do. First in the parade was a donkey led by a fourteen-year-old boy in blue overalls with an Arabian Nights turban over his eyes. Then six dogs ran in, barking. I suspected that the dogs, like the crickets, had gotten tired of the nearest street corner and came every night to volunteer their services. There they were, anyway, dashing about, watching from the corners of their eyes to see if we saw them. We did. That drove them wild. They cavorted and yipped and danced until their tongues hung out their mouths like bright red ties. This, for the first time, stirred the audience As one, we burst into shouts and applause. The dogs went mad. They bit their tails on the way out. Next came an old horse with a champanzee on his back, picking his nose and showing results to all. More applause from the children. And then, the grandest part of the sultan’s vast parade.
The camel It was a high-society camel. Which is to say that while it was patched at the seams, needled and glued together with bits of yellow thread and old hemp, with floppy turrets, torn flanks, and bleeding gums, it nevertheless had one of those looks which say, I smell bad but you smell worse. That mask of utter disdain which only rich old women and dying dromedaries share. My heart leaped. Riding on the back of this beast, in charge of tinsel, was the tiny woman who had taken tickets, sold tacos, juggled beer kegs, and was now— Queen of Sheba. Flashing her lighthouse-smile to all, she waved a salute as she rode between the coming-and-going tides of camel-humps, jolting. I shouted.
For, half ‘round the ring, the camel, seized with an earthquake of arthritis, collapsed. It fell as if its tendons were chopped. With a ridiculous leer, with a grimace that begged our pardon, the camel crashed like a wall of canvas and dung. It knocked one of the ringside tables flat. Beer bottles shattered amidst one elegant funeral-director husband, his hysterical wife, and two sons made joyous by this event which they would tell about for the rest of their lives. The tiny lady with the big teeth, waving bravely, smiling her own pardon, went down with the ship of the desert. Somehow she retained her seat. Somehow she was not rolled on or crushed. Pretending that nothing whatsoever was wrong, she continued to wave and smile as the various rope-haulers, trombone players, and trapeze artists, half-in half-out of their new-old disguises, ran to butt, kick, pummel, and spit on the eye-rolling beast. Meanwhile the rest of the parade circled the ring, making a wide detour around this point of collapse. Getting the camel put back together this leg here, that joint there, and the neck, so! was like putting up an Arab tent in a hurricane. No sooner had these sweating architects established one leg and nailed it to the earth, than another leg creaked and broke apart. The camel’s humps flopped in opposite directions, wildly. The little woman stayed bravely sidesaddle. The phonograph brass-band pulsed, and at last the camel was reassembled; the great homely jigsaw of bad breath and Band-Aid-covered pelt reared up to shamble, walking wounded, drunk and disorderly, threatening to crack yet other tables flat, one last time around the ring. The tiny lady way up there on the smelly dune of beast waved a final time. The audience cheered. The parade limped out. The trombone player rushed over to the platform to shut the fanfare off. I found that I was standing, my mouth open and aching, my lungs raw with shouts of encouragement I had not heard myself give. I saw that there were dozens of others, like myself, who had been caught up in the despair of the woman and the embarrassment of the camel. Now we all sat down, giving each other quick proud looks, glad for happy endings. The band shuffled back in, wearing gold epaulettes on their work-coveralls. They struck a brass note. “The Great Lucretia! The Butterfly of Berlin!” cried the ringmaster, appearing for the first time by the very proper tables, his trumpet hidden behind his back. “Lucretia!” Lucretia danced out. But of course it was not just Lucretia who danced, but tiny Melba and Roxanne and Ramona Gonzales. With many hats, many costumes, she ran with the same vast piano smile. Oh, Lucretia, Lucretia, I thought. O woman who rides camels that fail, O woman who juggles kegs and rips tacos— O woman, I added, who tomorrow will drive one of those flimsy tin locust-scourge trucks across the Mexican desert toward some lonely town inhabited by 200 dogs, 400 cats, 1,000 candles, and 200 forty-watt bulbs, plus 400 people. And of those 400 people, 300 will be old women and old men, 80 will be children and 20 young women waiting for young men who will never come back from across the desert where they have vanished toward San Luis Potosí, Juárez, and sea-bottoms dry and empty and baked to salt. And here comes the circus, packed in a few grasshopper-plague cars, flicking, rattling, jouncing over the pothole roads, squashing tarantulas to strawberry phlegm, crushing slow dogs to tarpaulin papier-mâché shapes left to flake at high noon on an empty turnpike, and the circus, not looking back, gone. And this small woman, I thought, why, she is almost the whole thing. If she ever dies … Ta-ta! said the orchestra, calling me back from reveries of dust and sun. A silver buckle flew down out of the tent sky on a fishing line. It had come to fish for—her! She attached the silver buckle to her smile. “Oh my God, look!” said my friend. “She … she’s going to—fly!” The tiny woman with the biceps of a truck driver and the legs of a six-day bike-rider jumped. God, on his long fishing line, drew her whizzing into the brown flapping-tent sky. The music soared with her. Applause shattered the air. “How high would you say she is?” whispered my friend. I would not answer. Twenty feet, maybe twenty-five. But somehow, with this tent and these people and this night, it seemed a hundred. And then, the tent began to die. Or rather the Smile began to collapse the tent. Which is to say, the teeth of the tiny woman attached to the silver buckle pulling one way, toward the center of the earth, caused all the tent-poles to groan. Wire hummed. The canvas boomed like a drum. The audience gasped and stared. The Butterfly spun and whirled in her bright unfurled cocoon. But the ancient tent gave up. Like a hairy mammoth despairing of his bones, the tent leaned, wishing to roll over and sleep. The men holding to the rope, which had yanked the Smile, the Teeth, and Head, the Body of the brave little muscled woman fifteen and then twenty feet into the air, these men now also gazed up in terror. The poles would crush, the canvas smother their insignificant lives. Their eyes flicked to the ringmaster who snapped his whip and cried “Higher!” as if there was somewhere yet to go. She was almost to the top of the tent now and all the poles were vibrating, shaking, leaning. The orchestra brassed out a single note as if to summon an evil wind. The wind came. Outside in the night, a very dry Santa Ana indeed arrived, picked up the skirts of the tent, let the night peer under, blew a vast whiff of hot oven air in on us with dust and crickets, and fled. The tent boomed its canvas. The crowd shivered. “Higher!” cried the ringmaster, bravely. “Finale! The Great Lucretia!” Then he hissed in an explosive aside: “Lucy, vamanos!” Which translates to: “God sleeps, Lucy. Down!” But she gave an impatient shake, twist, ripple of her entire muscled Mickey Rooney body. She shed her wings. She became an angry hornet cutting swathes. She spun faster, divesting herself of silks. The band played “Dance of the Seven Veils.” She whipped off layer on layer of red, blue, white, green! With a series of amazing metamorphoses she spellbound our uplifted eyes. “Madre de Dios, Lucretia!” cried the ringmaster. For the canvas heaved, exhaled. The tent skeleton groaned. The angle-pullers, the rope-haulers shut their eyes, moaning, afraid to see that insanity in the air. Lucy-Lucretia snapped both hands. Zap! A Mexican flag, an American flag sprang from nowhere into her fingers. Crick!
The band, seeing this, played the Mexican national anthem (four bars), and ended with Francis Scott Key (two). The audience clapped, yelled! With luck, that midget dynamo would be down on the earth instead of the tent down on our heads! Olé! The three ropemen let her drop. She fell a full ten feet before they remembered she had no net. They seized the smoking rope again. You could smell their burning skin. Devil’s fire leaped from their palms. They laughed with pain. The little toy lady hit the sawdust, her smile still attached to the buckle. She reached up, unplucked the rope, and stood waving the two bright flags at the gone-mad crowd. The tent, relieved of 110 pounds of mighty muscle, sighed. Through the many moth holes in the gray-brown canvas skin, I saw a thousand stars twinkling in celebration. The circus was to live for yet another day. Pursued by a tidal wave of applause, the Smile and the tiny lady who owned it ran along the sawdust shore, gone. Now: the finale. Now, an act which would put out our lives, blow out our souls, destroy our sanity by its beauty, terror, weight, power, and imagination! So said a rope-hauler over the lilyhorns! The rope-hauler waved his trumpet. The band fell in a heap of super-induced affection upon a triumphal march. The lion-tamer, in a banging cloud of pistol-fire, bounded into the ring. He wore a white African hunter’s helmet, a Clyde Beatty blouse and puttees, and Frank Buck boots. He cracked a black whip. He fired his pistol to wake us up. The air was filled with an immense bloom of scent.
But under the shadow of his white helmet, and behind his fierce new mustache, I saw the face of the ticket-seller out front an hour ago, and the eyes of the ringmaster. Another pistol crack. Ta! The round lion-tamer’s cage, hidden until now under a bright tarpaulin toward the rear of the tent, was revealed as its brilliant cover was yanked off. The ring-attendants came trudging in, pulling a crate inside which we could smell a single lion. This they pushed up to the far side of the cage. Doors were opened. The lion-tamer leaped into the main cage, slammed the door, and fired his weapon at the open door of the lion’s shadowy crate. “Leo! Ándale!” cried the tamer. The audience leaned forward. But … no Leo. He was asleep somewhere in that small portable crate.
“Leo! Vamanos! Ándale! Presto!” The tamer snapped in through the small crate door with his whip, like someone turning meat on a tired spit. A big fluff of yellow mane rolled over with an irritable mumble. “Gah!” The pistol was next fired into the deaf old lion’s ear. There was a most deliciously satisfying roar. The audience beamed and settled back. Leo suddenly manifested in the crate door. He blinked into the damned light. And he was— The oldest lion I have ever seen. It was a beast come forth from a retirement farm in the Dublin Zoo on a bleak day in December. So wrinkled was his face, it was a smashed window, and his gold was old gold left out in the long rains and beginning to run. The lion needed glasses, this we could guess from his furious blinking and squinting. Some of his teeth had fallen out in his breakfast gruel only that morning. His ribs could be seen under his mangy pelt which had the look of a welcome mat trampled on by a billion lion-tamers’ feet. There was no more outrage in him. He was angered out. There was only one thing to do. Fire his pistol into the beast’s left nostril—bang! “Leo.” Roar! went the lion. Ah! said the audience. The drummer stirred up a storm on his snare drum. The lion took a step. The tamer took a step. Suspense! Then a dreadful thing … The lion opened his mouth and yawned. Then an even more dreadful thing … A small boy, no more than three years old, somehow freed from his mother’s clutch, left the elite table at the edge of the ring and toddled forward across the sawdust toward the monstrous iron cage. Cries filled the tent: No, no! But before anyone could move, the small boy plunged laughing forward and seized the bars. No! came the gasp. But worse still, the little boy shook not just two bars, but the entire cage. With the littlest move of his tiny pink-brown fists, the boy threatened to topple the whole jungle edifice. No! cried everyone silently, leaning forward, gesticulating at the boy with fingers and eyebrows. The lion-tamer, with his whip and pistol upraised, sweated, waited. The lion exhaled through his fangless mouth, eyes shut. The small boy gave the bars a last rattling shake of terrible Doom.
Just as his father, in one swift run, scooped him up, half hid him under his Sunday coat, and retreated to the nearest formal table. Bang! The audience exhaled, collapsed in relief, the lion roared, circled round after its own tail, and leaped upon a flake-painted pedestal, there to rear up on its hind feet. By now, the shaken cage had stopped trembling. Bang! The tamer fired into that vast yellow-sun face. The lion blazed a real scream of anguish and leaped! The tamer ran pell-mell. The lion raced. The tamer reached the cage door, with the lion not one pace behind. The audience shrieked. The tamer flung the door wide, spun, fired, bang, bang! then out, clang! and the door locked safe, he whipped his toupee off, flung his pistol to earth, cracked his whip, and smiled a smile that swallowed us all! Roar! That’s what the crowd did. On its feet, it imitated the lion-beast. Roar! The show was over. The two bands were playing outside in the watermelon-eating dust-blowing cricket-jumping night and the audience was going out and my friend and I sat for a long while until we were almost alone in the moth-eaten tent through which the stars moved yet new bright constellations into place and would continue to move their small strange fires during the night. The tent flapped its wings in a hot wind of ancient applause. We went out with the last of the crowd in silence. We looked back in at the empty ring, at the high line at the tent-top where the silver buckle waited to be attached to the Smile. I felt a taco in my hand and looked up. There before me was the tiny lady who rode disorganized camels, juggled kegs, tore tickets, and changed from moth to butterfly each night in the small sky. Her Smile was near, her eyes searched to find the cynic in me, and found but a friend. We both had hold of opposite ends of one taco. At last she let go. With my gift, I went. Nearby, the phonograph hissed “La Galondrina.” And there stood the lion-tamer, perspiration falling from his brow to make a suit of lights where it touched his khaki shirt. Lips pressed to his horn, eyes shut, he did not see me pass. Under dusty trees, we turned a corner, and the circus was gone. All night the wind blew warm up out of Mexico, taking the dry land with it. All night the crickets rained on our bungalow windowpanes. We drove north. For weeks after, I beat the hot dust out of my clothes and picked the dead crickets out of my typewriter and luggage.
And still nights, twenty-nine years later, I hear that one-ring circus playing its two bands, one real, one hiccuping on records, a long way off on a warm Santa Ana wind, and I wake and sit up in bed, alone, and it is not there.