Joey Circus

“One of my earliest memories,” he says to me, “is of looking out of my crib and seeing these chimpanzees walking around on all fours.” And with that he starts loping around the roof deck, in a hunched over and drawn out sort of manner the way a monkey walks, as I cackle with more laughter, the only sound within earshot that’s disturbing the quiet and chilly San Diego evening.

I wipe the tears from my eyes as I try to settle down, and he goes on to tell me about Uncle Pete and Aunt Norma, the baby sitters with the monkeys, and about the bearded lady and the elephants, and about those brief, formative years he experienced as a little boy, traveling around the country and living amongst the wagons and the animals and performers, coming into consciousness in this life on the road with the Big Top. Somehow, knowing him as I did, it was all beginning to make sense - too much sense, maybe, and I could barely settle down before another fit of belly laughter would overcome me.

I’d known Joe for several years at this point, first as a client, then more of a colleague, and finally as a friend. He’d been introduced as a former “King Shit of the Town”, his face and name had been all over billboards and TV ads at one point in time. He’d made a few fortunes, lost a couple of them, been through a dazzling array of romances and adventures, and somehow managed to land on both feet, out here in this little slice of paradise. The fact that he’d come from a long line of acrobats was beyond fitting to me.

“Second only to Barnum and Bailey, they used to say,” he went on, recounting more stories from the past, that seemed less like a time gone by than another plane of reality. Which, of course, it was - in a certain sense. “When they went to Alaska they had thousands of people coming from hundreds of miles away to see the show,” he said. “They were filled up for every show, and still they kept coming.”

My mind shifted gears to try to imagine what it must have been like back in mid-century America, where everything was rural and disconnected, and anything foreign to your everyday existence would be such a novelty, a time before the rush to push the magic of the real world behind us in favor of convenience and comfort and TV shows and microwaves. A time when the idea of something like the internet was just spooky science fiction. I imagined an agrarian landscape of natural beauty, endless toil and plain women; one where little boys bloodied each other’s noses to protect their family honor, and people traveled miles and miles once a year to see some monkeys, a bearded lady and a lion-tamer show off his death defying tricks.

It was a world that seemed so bizarre and foreign to this day and age, and yet tugged at parts of me in a very real way, that reminded me that this distant memory of our history actually wasn’t so long ago. And that, I think, was what made the moment such a trip. We’d been drinking wine all night and smoked a little pot (hence the uncontrollable giggles) but diving deep into the past (not just Joe’s, but as a society on the whole) is something we’d never done before, and it was making my mind race.

After we went back inside we settled on the couch and he pulled up some Youtube videos of old black and white reels featuring his family from the early years. It was like turning on a portal to the Vintage Americana Museum from the comfort of a lazy boy sofa. We laughed some more, and drank a little more too, and talked about girls and life - mainly life. Joe and I came from very different places, and didn’t always see things the same way, but about life we always managed to see eye to eye. Talking with Joe about the bigger picture always had the comfortability and insight of two travelers comparing notes about their journeys, and never failed to remind me that everyone was just trying to figure it all out as they went.

And then a huge rush of gratitude swept over me for the moment, sitting there on the couch, drinking wine with old reels of the performers and animals playing on the flat screen ahead of us. The circus was a brilliant moment in time, a dazzling flash in the pan in the kitchen of history, maybe the most colorful and outlandish and entertaining you could ask for, and there sat my friend, on the next sofa cushion over from me, a direct descendant of all that, beaming a brilliant smile as we dove through all that.

He may not have been there but for a tiny bit of his life overall, but it was an extremely formative one, and I could see how he carried a little part of that circus with him, wherever he went and whatever he did. The laughs, the thrills, the suspense, the joy. It seemed like there was always a little sliver of life under the Big Top with Joe, out in the bright lights, making bold moves with complete confidence, not because fear doesn’t exist but because he knew that fear is a luxury of the crowd. And Joe was anything but a passive onlooker in life. That’s the magic of the circus; it’s a life lived in full color through the experience, not just by watching from afar or through the TV. And if he inherited nothing else from his forbearers at all, then at least he made sure to end every performance with a smile.