It was a painful time in my life, the circus, and I don't talk about it much. In some ways, those circus days were the greatest days of my life. My dreams were closer then, within reach, than at any other time. Those dreams were not to come true. I know that now. In those days, though, I still believed.
Lest you imagine something terribly glamorous, like most circus lives, I should describe my circus life to you. It was my job to clean up after the elephants. This was not my dream, as you might guess, but it was a job that I could do. In the world of dung management, elephants are actually a great work partner. Rabbit waste can be difficult to spot, for example, and numerous. Elephant dung is pretty obvious and can easily be managed with just a shovel and a wheel barrow. The presence of elephant dung is so intrusive, also, that people are instantly appreciative when it is removed, and not nearly so demanding about little details as they are when you're dealing with, oh, parakeet waste, for example.
Despite these positive aspects, the job was fairly dismal as jobs go. I performed it only to be close to my dream job. Every night, show night or not, I would watch the trapeze acrobats flying high above. They were so confident and graceful as they sailed above, knowing that the strong and soft trapeze net would catch them if they fell. I loved to watch their dismounts, tumbling through the air into the net, bouncing up and over to the side of the net, lowering themselves down. I wanted so badly to be a part of that. Ever since I was a child I had known: I wanted to be a circus trapeze net.
As a child, I would practice for hours under the kitchen table. I would press myself between the four table legs and try to hold myself above the ground, like a good trapeze net. I also practiced being soft and bouncy, letting cats jump from the table onto my stomach. On those long circus nights, when everyone was asleep, I would lay on the ground under the net and stretch out my arms and legs as far as I could toward the four large tent support poles.
In spite of my determination, however, I never got any closer to reaching those poles. I thought about just using ropes to make up the distance, but then the acrobats would have such a small target to aim for. What if they fell to the ground? I'd be a failure as a net.
I used to try to talk to the acrobats about how one becomes a net, but they would just call me a Romanian name that I later found out meant "crazy elephant shit boy" (I don't think it was a common name). My boss, the head of dung management, always just yelled at me to get back to work whenever I tried to share my dreams with him or get any advice. Only one guy, a old clown everyone called Bumpo, ever listened to me talk about my dream. He used to sit there drinking and staring into night, tears running down his face, as I told him everything I'd learned about being a net. He never spoke back to me. He just sat there and drank and cried. I think he might have been deaf.
Eventually I gave up and left the circus. I decided to get into computer programming instead, a career that proved far more lucrative than dung management. I'm happy now, I really am. It took a while to accept that some people just aren't cut out to be nets. All people, in fact. Sometimes at night, though, in my dreams, I see them flying above me, twisting and swinging like playful gods. When they finally turn and fall, I call out to them. "Don't worry," I say, "I'm here."
