"There may be no place left in this country for real circuses anymore, Phil," I said evenly. "People just don't have the time, or maybe the patience, to spend walking around circus grounds. They're not interested in watching animals being fed. They want packaging, shows they know will start and end at a certain time; they want to be able to get reserved seats, and they want to be comfortable. Once you saw that you weren't getting the people to come out anymore, why didn't you follow along after the other big players and book indoor arenas?"
He shrugged. "Even if I'd wanted to, by that time it was too late. The other shows were already in place in the arenas, and they had exclusive contracts-as far as circuses were concerned- with all the best sites. Besides, it would have meant cutting loose the freaks and getting rid of more than half the animals."
"And you wouldn't cut back on operations."
Phil glanced at me sharply, smiled without humor. "Cut back on operations? Is that what you'd call it, Mongo?"
"Phil, I know-"
"What was I supposed to do with people like Roger, Harry, and Lisa? Give them a pink slip? Where were they going to find work? Some of those freaks had been with me since they were teenagers, just like you; they weren't just employees, they were family. You know freaks can't just go out and find some other job. I wouldn't go on welfare myself, and I wasn't going to put any of my family on welfare; cutting them loose would have meant just that for a lot of them. And what about the animals? Zoos don't like circus animals, even when they have room for them, because circus animals don't do well in zoos. Hell, put Mabel in a zoo, and she'd end up killing some keeper. Sell them off cheap to some mud show or carny operator? I'd rather shoot them myself and save them the misery. We took in Mabel from a carny man, Mongo, remember? You remember what kind of shape she was in?"
"I remember, Phil. So the bottom line was that you couldn't bring yourself to lay off anyone, or cut loose a single animal, if you weren't sure they'd be well taken care of. But there was no other place for them, as you saw it, so you had no choice but to try and keep going."
"That's right; I had to try and keep going. It was a bust, but I don't regret it even now. I'm a circus man, Mongo. I don't know anything else-and, to me, those shows you see sitting in a steel shed in the middle of some goddamn city aren't really circuses. I sank everything I'd saved over the years into the circus to try to keep it together. It took everything I had. Then I started losing my best acts, because I no longer had the money to pay them what they could get elsewhere-with Cole, Clyde Beatty, or Ringling. Finally, in the last couple of years, we became just another mud show, although I hated to admit it."
"Some mud show," I said, and sighed. "It had to be the only mud show with a full complement of freaks, a herd of animals no other show would take, and enough acts to fill three rings."
He spent a few minutes idly stirring the ounce or so of coffee left in his cup, finally said: "I'd always been a pretty hard driver, Mongo, as I'm sure you recall, and a heavy drinker. Now, when the troubles began coming down, I really started hitting the sauce. It was the only way I could find to fight the worry and the pain. I couldn't stand to see what was happening to the circus, or think about what was going to happen to my people and animals if it folded. I ended up drunk most of the time. Toward the end I got an offer from somebody to buy it. It was a good offer-more, really, than the circus was worth. But the buyer wouldn't agree to keep all the freaks. I was told they had no interest in sideshows and that they'd bring in all their own acts.
All they wanted from me was the equipment, the animals, and the rights to our permits around the circuit we did."
"Who made the offer?"
"The guy I talked to was some tight-ass lawyer type in a pinstripe suit who wouldn't tell me the name of the buyer. I was drunk at the time. I think I cursed him out when he said the freaks and performers couldn't be part of the deal. I told him I wouldn't help kill my own circus, and I threw him out.
"By then, I'd run out of operating expenses. We were just outside of Chicago, so I drove in and managed to get a bank loan, with the semis and all the rigging as collateral. That was a stupid play, I suppose, but I didn't know what else to do. I was hoping it could still be like it used to be and that there'd be throngs of people waiting for us in the next town. What I got instead was a notice from the bank that I was in default on the loan and that the circus had been auctioned off. Christ, I can't blame them; I was so drunk all the time that I'd missed five payments and hadn't even known it. The next thing I knew there were marshals on the grounds ordering everyone off. I think whoever had wanted to buy it in the first place had managed to pick it up at the auction, because the only things the new owner or owners wanted were the semis, the rigging, and the animals."
"Did you ever find out who bought it?"
"No."
"Didn't you ask the bank?"
"They wouldn't tell me; they said it was confidential information. I was too drunk to argue."
"Maybe it was Cole, or Clyde Beatty, or even Ringling; one of the big boys trying to gobble up the competition."
Phil shook his head. "No. I checked. I swear I'd have killed somebody if I'd found it was circus people I knew who'd taken my show away from me." He paused, swallowed hard, continued, "After the marshals threw me out of my own circus, I just walked away. Right now I don't even recall where I walked to. As far as I was concerned, my life was over; I'd lost everything. I had no money, no place to go, and I just wanted to die. I can't even remember how I eventually ended up here, in New York. I ate at soup kitchens as long as they'd let me wash dishes to pay for it, and I collected soda cans off the street and out of garbage cans to pay for my booze. I was busy drinking myself to death, and I guess I was pretty close to succeeding until you had to come along and butt your nose into my business. Now I owe you, and I always do my best to pay my debts. I don't even dare take a drink until I manage to pay you back."
"Well, if you only plan to stay alive and off the booze long enough to pay me back, you're going to find from my itemized bill that private hospital rooms and private nursing care in New York City are very expensive commodities. So you'd better plan on staying around a long time. But let's stop talking nonsense. There's something else I want to ask you, because something about this business strikes me as curious. By your own account, you were running an operation that couldn't even pay its way as a mud show. And even if you had dropped the sideshows and cut back on everything else, you'd still have been left out in the cold because the other shows had exclusive contracts with all the big indoor arenas on the circuit. Right?"
"Right."
"Even at the bargain-basement price the circus must have gone for at the bank auction, who would want it?"
"Beats me, Mongo."
"And then the new owner gets rid of all the performers and only keeps the animals. Christ, Mabel alone eats nearly a ton of hay a day, and that can get expensive. Buying that circus in the first place, and then keeping only the animals, doesn't seem to make any business sense at all. If people aren't going to come out to see a full-rigged circus, I doubt they'd come in any numbers to see a traveling zoo."