Chapter 1 #2
In those days, books were my salvation, a window on the fullness of life that I would never otherwise know.
Indeed, books remain so precious to me that I am unable to put into words how I feel each time that I open a new one to begin the tale it offers.
In the back seat of the car, I had a lot of time to read.
In spite of his hard heart, Captain acquired books for me. He never bought them. His larcenous nature and related skills enabled him to visit libraries and bookshops along the way and walk out with a volume or two under his coat. He was never caught.
We stayed in “motels,” which was a new word in those days.
Often the establishment was a collection of small cabins arranged in an L or semicircle.
I was always provided with my own room or cabin.
Captain brought my favorite foods from local restaurants.
As he said without irony, “A good farmer would never starve those animals he intends to bring to market.”
If anyone caught sight of the Gothic figure I presented in my hooded robe, the Captain explained that I was a nun excused from the monastery to be taken to the bedside of our father, who was in his last days on this Earth.
Or he said I was his sister, tragically disfigured in a fire and mortified to be seen in my diminished condition.
He was a natural-born liar, and his native talent for deception was polished to a high gloss by years on the pitchman’s platform, conning the marks into paying out their dimes—and later quarters—for the experience of a lifetime.
That autumn, Captain and I left the carnival when it was still in season, with the nine biological oddities having agreed to look after the business, allowing us to undertake a longer and more ambitious road trip.
And so it was that on Thursday, September 4, in my seventeenth year, we motored south from Los Angeles to San Diego, after three weeks of engagements at clandestine supper clubs in the City of Angels from which Captain had profited greatly.
The Cadillac V-8 provided a roomy and almost plush back seat compared to that of the previous Ford Model T.
The smooth ride was ideal for a reader who wanted nothing more than to remain happily submerged in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
We were booked into twenty-nine speakeasies operated by the same syndicate. Our tour had begun in San Francisco. After we had completed two performances a night for five nights at a place called Blue Mood in San Diego, we would move on to Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, finishing in New Orleans.
However, that wouldn’t be the end. Loath to remain idle through the month of February, Captain had arranged a shorter second tour at upscale speakeasies in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee.
Those were among the states where bootlegging and gambling were controlled from Chicago by the Capone gang.
Al Capone was reputed to be making sixty million dollars annually, an almost incomprehensible fortune in those days.
One year had passed since he solidified power in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
Captain admired the gangster and hoped that, if audiences responded well to us, we’d be booked throughout Capone’s territory when the forthcoming carnival season ended and winter was again upon us.
Being exhibited in Captain Farnam’s Museum of the Strange with nine other biological oddities was so degrading that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but that was nothing compared to the indignities to which I was subjected on many speakeasy stages.
In movies featuring these secret supper clubs, lead characters and their friends are often lighthearted fun-loving individuals who are merely rebelling against government oppression in a spirit of adolescent naughtiness.
I never took the stage in front of a crowd as innocent as that, although I’m sure there were a few such people among the rabble.
On Friday, September 5, my first night on display in Blue Mood, I endured lacerating and prolonged humiliation more painful than any beating could have been.
Throughout the ordeal, Captain never came to my defense.
The exuberance of the audience excited him, because he thought it guaranteed a booking with the same syndicate for the following year and at a much higher price.
Although I sometimes longed to be done with this life, I never considered suicide.
Because of books, especially those written by the wonderful Mr. Dickens, I believed this was a made world with profound meaning.
I kept faith that each of us has a purpose and that if we fulfill it, we will rise from even the lowest position as surely as a night mist rises from a lake in the morning sun.
After my two sets on the Blue Mood stage, however, after Friday became Saturday, as I was lying abed in my room, I spent time contemplating how one might kill oneself in a painless fashion.
Six years were to pass before Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald would write, In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning. When I read those words in 1936, I was conveyed by a vivid memory to that motel room in San Diego.
Long before Blue Mood, I had read The Great Gatsby.
The novel was too acerbic for my taste, but I identified with Gatsby.
He might have been a shady character, even a bootlegger, but I sympathized with his yearning to be accepted in a higher social strata than the one into which he was born, to be thought respectable.
In the real dark night of the soul, where I found myself at three o’clock on that San Diego night, I thought of the ill-fated Jay Gatsby.
His problem was that he tried to lift himself with the wrong hoist, by accumulating wealth and mimicking the attitudes and fashions of those who presumed to be his betters.
He did not believe this was a made world with profound meaning or that he had a purpose greater than his own needs and desires if only he could find it.
Had he believed as much, he would have understood that the only chance we have of being lifted ourselves is by lifting others.
Although I was a biological oddity, a freak, I had been waiting all my life for the opportunity to lift others and thereby rise with them.
That dismal California night, I could not know that my purpose was soon to be placed before me and that the challenge of fulfilling it would be the work of a lifetime.