Water For Elephants Clown Tells His Story

Back to the Circus

It began in 2008, that improbably toxic year: an endless search for almost-jobs; the completion of an expensively worthless degree; a lying, cheating girlfriend; a crashed stock portfolio (bought with money from the Brooklyn home I flipped as a successful subprime borrower). I had to get away. I flew to Los Angeles, bought a motorcycle and rode for weeks as far as Seattle, only to be summoned overnight back to L.A., where my deaf aunt was dying of the leukemia she had managed for 23 years. According to her friends, she was dying because she quit her medical treatments after a Gypsy psychic convinced her that the doctors were lying to her.

Over the ensuing months in L.A., I discovered that the psychic had hustled my aunt for almost half a million dollars over three years. Her house was bled away through credit-card cash advances and annual refinancing, all at crazy rates, all of which left my aunt penniless when she died a 70-something-pound skeleton in my arms. I felt I had no choice but to buy another motorcycle (the other one was still in Seattle) and bounce from sublet to craigs list sublet, more or less homeless, as I sought contingency-fee lawyers to sue the psychic and formulated a plan to outsmart the predatory lender who demanded her deed.

Before my aunt died, she used her last lucid day to antagonize my mother, in a way that was true to their 65-year relationship. My mother in turn went back East and refused to return for the funeral, leaving me to sort out my aunt’s sordid estate. Luckily, I reunited with a cousin (first cousin to my mother and aunt) whom I lived with 20 years before, after I came back from Japan, where I worked as a clown for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. I felt some symmetry because my cousin helped me move onto the circus train when I first joined, and now he was again my companion as I reconnected with an itinerant past — one not so different from that of the Gypsies, or the Sephardim, which was our blood.

That heritage was bequeathed to me by my grandfather; he was a self-made man who in the Great Depression began to make the modest fortune that would later allow him to buy homes with cash for his two deaf daughters. My grandfather was the world to them, and when he died in 2003, my aunt crashed, spiraling into a great depression of her own and into the psychic’s seductive web. It was the house he bought for her that was mortgaged to the hilt just as the great recession broke.

Inspired by my grandfather’s wiles, I plunged into the task of selling my aunt’s upside-down house, which begged to be made whole. I seduced a mystically inclined California family into lashing itself to the mast of a ferociously complicated sale, fraught with exploding septic systems and squatters. Later the buyers told me they were drawn by my very name, which echoed with the biblical Aaron as the one who could lead them home.

Just as I was celebrating the inconceivable completion of the sale this spring, a sublet roommate who had just scored a job on a Hollywood movie invited me, though I am not an actor, to audition for a part. The movie was based on a successful novel set in an American circus in the Great Depression, and even though I had not clowned in two decades, I was cast. So for weeks this past spring I drove my motorcycle to a set replete with authentic period trains, tents and costumes, where I performed for packed stands of extras who looked just like those who would have come during the Depression, people like my grandfather.

I was home again in the downside-up life of Clown Alley, and just as it did back then, the best clowning happened when it shouldn’t have, offstage or off-camera, much to the irritation of one famous movie actor who accused the clowns of “unfocused chaos.” The complaint reminded me of one made years ago by Ringling management, accusing us of “an attitude problem.”

This pretend life of the movie felt more real than my real life, and it made me whole. It was a gift, but perhaps not the greatest gift, which had to be that I walked away after being rear-ended on my motorcycle on the highway by a car going 80 on the morning of Independence Day. Two days after being sent flying to the highway with the greatest of ease, I returned to the set to film the climactic disaster scene, where characters die, though not the lead. At the story’s outset, he accidentally joins the circus after his relatives die in a freak auto accident, which leads to the loss of his home to predatory Depression-era bankers. All of which, it now seems to me, was inevitable, or at the very least, predictable and probably foretold.

New York Times

via TwilightNinjas