The Dog Says How (7 page)

circus

When I was twenty-six,
I ran away to the circus, toward the marvelous adventure that awaited anyone who answered the newspaper ad for auditions. What was promised was six months creating a circus and performing in towns down the Mississippi River, from Brainerd, Minnesota, to New Orleans. What it foretold was adventure—Huck Finn–style, lazy days, and hanging out with river folk, and the wild and romantic life of a circus performer.

I called the number. “I’d like to audition.”

“Oh, alright.”

“Are there animals?” I asked.

“No animals, we’re not that kind of circus. It’s a puppet circus,” said the man.

“Okay. Do we live on the boat?”

“No boat, we have buses. We’re looking at a boat.”

“Oh.”

“The pay is $25 per week.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“We will provide housing; tents mostly.”

“Oh.”

“And food. All you can eat.”

Say no more. I’m there. This is better than I hoped.

At the audition I told them I could puppeteer, walk stilts, and play the baritone horn, and they were thrilled. I left confident enough to quit my job at the chow mein noodle factory, find a horn, and someone to teach me how to walk on stilts. And that’s how I became part of the Heart of The Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre Company and the “Circle of Water Circus.”

One morning in May we all met in a church to move supplies to a farm outside of Alma, Wisconsin. There we would build the circus. I looked about the room at my fellow performers. They looked like people from another time. “Hippies,” we had called them. I thought the last one had died of the disco fever in 1978. But here they were, probably the largest gathering of their kind in the area. Except for one man, dressed in a suit on a hot day. He sat directly across from me, hunched over, smoking, his “Type A” leg shaking violently. Did he have to come? These hippies were one thing, but this man scared me.

I discovered he was married to the trombone player, who seemed very kind. Maybe she knew how to calm him with kind words, a song, or a cookie if he got agitated. Still, I would keep a watchful eye on the man with the shaky leg.

We spent the morning loading gear, and then we had our first meal. I was starved. Then out came what I call the “terrible Ts”: tofu, tahini, tabouli, and tamari. When we finished I was starved. What, a vegetarian circus? My God, we’ll die.

We were told to start loading equipment and I noticed the man with the shaky leg loading a Weber bar-b-que grill. I imagined he was going to cook up bar-b-que along the river—pork shoulder and seasoned ribs, steaks and chops and brats. He turned to me and said, “Just in case we see any wild monkey.” I didn’t care, and I realized suddenly I would have to befriend the scary man.

And I did . . . on the farm. During the day, we built puppets and rehearsed the show. At night we took bike rides to the local tavern trying to stretch out our twenty-five dollars. It was after one night at the tavern that the shaky-legged man and I found ourselves walking along the dirt road back to the farm. My bike had a flat tire so we were pushing the bikes. He told me he and his wife, the trombone player, were expecting a baby. They were going to name her Alma if it was a girl, after the town in Wisconsin. Actually, her name would be Alma Marina, taken from the beautiful waters and high bluffs. He hoped they would have a girl, because if it was a boy, he would be called Nelson Cheese Factory, in honor of the local industry.

One day it was announced we had a boat. Well, sort of. It was a houseboat from Lake Minnetonka, and there was some question as to its sea worthiness. Navigating a lake is one thing, but river currents and eddies and barge traffic is another. One solution was to hire a captain to reduce our risk. We put it to a vote and narrowly agreed to hire the captain and buy the houseboat. Those of us who voted for the boat would be reminded of this time and again.

We celebrated that night by firing up the Weber. Thirty bratwursts hit the flames and thirty brats were gone. Somewhat of a miracle considering there were only four claimed meat eaters. I think in the Bacchanalian frenzy there was some backsliding, but who could blame them with the news of a boat.

Our captain arrived shortly. He was rough and tough, hard as nails, a Vietnam vet. Every other word was something like my grandpa said when a tractor fell on his toe. This swabby could get us through, no doubt. We got the houseboat. Before we left he said he hoped it would be no inconvenience but during the trip he would be making the change from a man to a woman. He’d never felt comfortable as a man and now he was making the change. I knew I started to love this group when no one batted an eye.

Fine with us, let’s hit the river.

We performed in Brainerd, St. Cloud, the Twin Cities, La Crosse, Wisconsin, and Clinton, Iowa. Every couple weeks the Captain would head back to the Twin Cities for counseling or injections—or charm school. Charm school was the worst because for a week he wouldn’t open a door for himself or steer the boat. They had turned him into a 1950s starlet and we had barges and eddies. One foggy night the Captain was creeping us down the river. We heard a low horn.

“Good Lord,” he said. “That’s a barge. Try and see it.”

But the fog was too thick. We heard it again, the horn blaring through the soup.

“Go up top and see if you can see anything.”

I scrambled up to the top to find a musician practicing the bass clarinet horn. I told the Captain it was a guy practicing his horn. He opened his mouth and a few hundred dollars worth of charm school went out the window.

When we hit St. Louis a great surprise awaited us. Jacques Cousteau was there filming a special on the Mississippi. We really wanted to meet him. There was his magnificent boat, the Calypso, its bowsprit graced with a beautiful mermaid leading the way. Our boat had deteriorated quite badly. Someone needed to constantly bail. The engine was acting up. We spruced it up as best we could, got some paint, and wrote “Calapso” on the side in huge letters. I got a woman’s bowling trophy from a thrift store and we lashed her out front as our bowsprit. Jacques Cousteau was not amused. We tried to meet him several times but were informed he had wine tastings and research that took precedence.

I was upset, or “bummed out” as my fellow travelers would say. I wanted to meet the man, inventor of the aqualung and French voiceovers. Not long after that our poor Calapso sank where the Ohio River meets the Mighty Miss and our captain went back to Minneapolis for his operation to become a woman. We were now traveling in school buses. The close quarters, lack of protein . . . I started to lose it.

We all had meltdowns. Sooner or later, everyone lost it on the trip. This was mine. I decided this was it. I was quitting. I had about five dollars on me, so I went to the Greyhound station and started begging to let me ride. I was pleading to the ticket agents like they were the American Consulate.

“Please, just please, put me on a bus.”

I figure once on one, I could stow away, get into a compartment, anything. But I’m not going back to lettuce sandwiches.

Then I saw the trombone player in the station. In her hand was a spare rib—meat with sauce. It looked incredible. Linked to her arm was Shaky Leg, and then a friend who was visiting them who said he was running for mayor of Milwaukee. He had treated them to a rib dinner, and when they heard I’d made my break, they’d come looking for me, with bait. They handed me the rib and I took a bite. Unbelievable. Ambrosia. Then I noticed she had another one. What I didn’t notice was we were walking out toward the car, and by the time I’d finished my third rib, I was snuggled in my tent.

We did finally make it to New Orleans. The show was well received and I met a group of lifelong friends, family really. And like family it was certainly a group I wouldn’t have chosen as my people but one to which I now count my blessings I belong. I’ll never look at the river the same either. Every time I cross it I have a feeling for its power and beauty. That river lived up to every metaphor written. At times sitting on the deck of the Calapso, surrounded by high bluffs, passing a barge or swimming kids or a fisherman, it was impossible to tell what decade, what century held our journey. The gift of that river, as Shaky Leg would say, lies deep in the “ever changing, never changing muddy waters.” That said, one day I will get the trombone player and old Shaky Leg for tricking me with a rib.

czech

I was in college
when I told my dad, “I’m going to be an actor.” He didn’t say anything; instead, every two weeks I would get these letters in the mail. Well, actually, they were newspaper clippings. Clippings with headlines like,
“ACTOR STARVES TO DEATH IN NEW YORK.”
There was another one that read,
“ONLY TWO PERCENT ACTORS’ UNION EMPLOYED.”
And another one:
“BOB CRANE, STAR OF HOGAN’S HEROES, FOUND STABBED TO DEATH.”
At the top of the article, in red pen, was the handwritten line “Georgette, send to Kevin.” Georgette was the name of my dad’s secretary. No return address, no written letter, just “Georgette, send to Kevin.” At first I thought that was my dad’s way of saying, “Don’t get into the theater. I do not want my son in the arts.” Later I wondered if Dad knew more about being an artist than I thought. No one goes into the arts on purpose.

In 1987 I got a job with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. They were going to Czechoslovakia and would be the first American company to tour that country in fifteen years. They hired me not only as an actor but they also wanted me to perform one of my own plays. So I flew down to Louisville and we rehearsed for two weeks, and then one day they sat us down around a table in this huge room. We were all sitting there—the actors, the technicians, and the stage manager—and we were to be briefed by a member of the U.S. State Department. The INS. He was going to tell us the dos and don’ts of visiting a communist country.

This man walks in wearing a blue suit and a blue tie, and he slams his briefcase down and says, “We’re not going to have another Moscow incident here, are we?”

“What?”

“We’re not going to have another Moscow incident, where Sergeant Lonetree let those prostitutes into the American Embassy and they took photographs of our secret documents. We’re
not
going to have another Moscow incident here, are we?”

And I’m thinking, “Jeez, we’re a bunch of actors. What are we going to do, give away secrets on O’Neill?”

He says, “No drugs!” And he points right at me. “No drugs! I know about you actors!” And I’m thinking, “How does he know about the seventies?”

Then he points to the woman next to me. He says, “No fraternizing. No fraternizing—and I think you know what I mean by fraternizing.” His eyebrows are going up and down, yoing-yoing-yoing. I try to lean over into Fraternizing.
I
want to be a fraternizer.

“No drugs!” He shouts me back, “No drugs! And no illegal literature! Don’t try to sneak in any Kafka. It’s been banned.”

No Kafka? What are we going to do for fun?

“And
you!
” he’s pointing at me again. “
You
can’t do your play,” he said. “It’s been banned in Czechoslovakia.”

I’d been looking forward to doing my play. I’ve been banned? Wait a minute, I’ve been banned? Hey! I must’ve written something important. I’ve been banned! I’ve been banned!

Then the man said, “And I know you actors. There are no homosexuals in Czechoslovakia. No homosexuals in Czechoslovakia.”

One of our company members is gay. When we all finally got to Czechoslovakia, we were there only ten minutes when he walked up the street, came back, and said, “Seven.”

We get on this bus that would take us from Prague to Brno. I take a minute to read a pamphlet given to us by the INS. It’s a booklet titled
Common Czech Phrases
and on the first page it says, “I’ll have a pageboy haircut, please” and “This room smells of vermin.”

Where are we going? We’re on the road when all of a sudden, “BEE-DO-BEE-DO-BEE-DO.” There’s this official car behind us. So our bus pulls over and this official gets on. He says, “Does anyone speak Czech?” Nobody says anything but I know there are at least three people on the bus who speak Czech. He repeats, “Does anyone speak Czech?” Nothing. Finally he shouts, “WHO HERE SPEAKS CZECH?” And Michal Z. raises his hand.

Michal Z., our interpreter. I’ll never forget seeing him for the first time—waiting in the Prague airport, chest out, wearing this leather jacket. Michal’s standing there smoking a cigarette. Michal Z.

So Michal and the official get off the bus and I see them go to the official’s car. They stand there—the official is talking and Michal’s got this cigarette in his mouth . . . his hand shakes as he lights it. As it burns, the ashes drop down onto his shirt and pants. Then the official gets back into his car and leaves, and Michal gets back on the bus.

He comes back and sits down, and turns to me and says, “I’m a member of the Jazz Club.”

I say, “What, you’re in a band, you play an instrument?”

He says, “No, I am a member of the Jazz Club. We are a group of artists who are going to change the country. Václav Havel, the playwright, is our leader. You know who Václav Havel is?”

I didn’t at the time.

Michal says, “He is in prison now. When he gets out, we will change this country.”

WE ARRIVE IN BRNO
and set up in a museum where the Actors Theatre of Louisville is performing. Michal was positioned with a microphone in this little glass booth behind the audience. As we acted onstage, he would translate what we said through the microphone—and through headsets to people sitting in the audience. He was a great interpreter. The place was packed. We sell out every show because on the first day we got a bad review in the communist paper. They just slammed us. People said, “Bad review, communist paper: got to be a good play!” Packed.

After the show one day, Michal said, “You have to come meet my friend Rostyov!” So we went to meet Rostyov in his little, tiny apartment. Big Rostyov, little apartment. We get inside and he’s lined up these two long rows of shot glasses. He takes his Slivovitz, this plum brandy, and he pours the shot glasses full down one side. Then he pours the shot glasses full down the other side and hands me one. Michal takes a shot glass for himself and Rostyov says, “Each one of these is a soldier. Tonight we drink an army.” And we start drinking through our respective armies.

After a while I say, “Rostyov! This is amazing. This is the strongest stuff I’ve ever had!”

He says, “You like it? I made it myself!”

“Ah!” I say, “Rostyov, you can go blind on homemade stuff!”

And he says, “Yes, but the store-bought stuff will kill you!”

Finally I had to quit. I say, “You guys, I can’t keep up with you. I can’t believe how much you can drink.”

“Oh,” they say, “we don’t drink anything like the Poles. And they don’t drink anything like the Russians.”

And I’m thinking, “Oppression can sure put a liver on a man.”

Rostyov told me the secret to handling great quantities of alchohol.

“Eat a lot of pork.”

I say, “Rostyov, that’s all there is to eat.”

“Exactly,” he says. Another soldier drops.

LATER THAT NIGHT
I said to Michal, “You speak English so well. Better than I do. How come?” And he told me, “I studied in your country. I lived in your country, but they banned my work in Czechoslovakia. So I decided to move back here. Now they can make my life miserable, but they can’t stop me from reaching my people.”

I said, “Hey, I wrote a play that was banned here. I wrote this play and it was banned in Czechoslovakia.”

And Rostyov said, “Then we have to do your play.”

So we do my play in Czechoslovakia . . . underground. Michal invited all these members of the Jazz Club and I invited all the people from the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Michal was such a good interpreter that by the audience response you couldn’t tell where the Americans were sitting or where the Czechs were sitting. The laughter would come at the same time. I remember watching him up in the booth. I’d see Michal gesturing wildly. And I thought, “Well, I gotta keep up with him.” So I started gesturing wildly. Back and forth, back and forth, and finally at the end of the play, the audience didn’t even applaud. Instead, they rushed the stage and we had this massive hug right there in the middle of the floor.

And that’s when I remembered something the guy in the blue suit back in the States had said: “You will be followed. You
will
be followed.” I looked around that massive hug and I wondered if somebody there had followed me and was now taking down names. I went back to my room and took the receiver off the phone and sure enough, there was a bug.

And that night when I went to bed, people’s faces from the Jazz Club kept coming at me and I’d wake up in cold sweats.

And the next night I couldn’t sleep at all and when I went to the museum, I thought, “Oh, good, that woman was at the play and she’s here. Oh good, he’s here.” And I would start counting the heads of people I knew had been at the play. Counting their heads, then asking, “Where’d that guy go? Where’s that guy?” And they’d say, “He’s at lunch now.” And I’d be a nervous wreck until he came back.

On most nights I couldn’t sleep at all but every time I nodded off I’d wake up in these cold sweats again. Finally I thought, “Okay, that’s it. I’ve got to do something about this.”

So I went to the Embassy in Prague and I told the American ambassador: “Look, I did my play. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. But I did my play and I put these people in jeopardy. What can I do about it?”

And he said, “Well, first of all, stop worrying about the Czechs. They didn’t ban your play. We did.”

“Why?”

He said, “We don’t like the way your play portrays America.”

WHEN I WAS
in Brno every once in a while the Jazz Club would put on a performance, sometimes music, sometimes theater, but always in the middle of the night. To be associated with “unsanctioned” art could be costly. One could lose a job or an apartment or worse. So these events were kept quiet. One night we drove to a secluded spot in a forest to see a performance artist. He came highly recommended. We arrived at three in the morning to find a mound of dirt. Everyone turned their cars so the headlights illuminated the mound. Then we waited. At five past the hour a nervousness set in—because of the risk involved, nothing started late. At ten past, nervousness turned to panic. “Something has happened.” “Go, go.” “Let’s get out of here.” People scrambled for their cars and everyone sped away wondering what had befallen the performance artist. We learned the next day that he had been there. He was under the mound of dirt breathing through a straw. That was his piece.

Before I left Czechoslovakia I was approached by a man who worked at the theater. He said, “You have to get these pictures out. They’re of the performance artist you saw.” There were several pictures of the mound of dirt. I carefully rolled them up and wrapped them around my leg. I had other pieces of art wrapped around my other leg as well. My legs looked perfectly cylindrical, like the Tin Man from
Wizard of Oz.
Somehow the angels were with me; at the airport, security men were frisking every third person and I was a two. I flew home a nervous wreck because I had a photo of a mound of dirt strapped to my leg.

I remembered something Michal had said to me before I left Czechoslovakia: “One day we will be free. It will be a large transition but we’ll be fine. It’s your country I worry about. As long as there is communism you have some place to put your fears. When we change you’ll have no more place. Your fears will then come home.”

Communism fell in the Czech Republic in 1989. Michal had said that after they elected a Polish pope it was just a matter of time. However, the artists were at the forefront of the final push. The Czechs hold the arts close to their hearts. It has been a tonic and a hope in desperate times. In the market I remember the only line longer than the one for bananas was the one for new books. The first people to stop performing were from the symphony and they were followed by the theater performers. They all announced that their next performance would only be for a free country. Then the people joined in what is now called the “Velvet Revolution.”

In 1989 the wall separating East from West came down. That same year the U.S. Congress added the anti-obscenity clause to all funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. The fear had come home.