Free The Best American Essays 2013 by Robert Atwan

revealing this information to my esteemed colleagues. Why I leave the segment of my life called “Circus” off my curriculum vitae.
    My plan, desperate, idiotic, or otherwise, did work. Two weeks after spotting that alluring white train in the grimy Providence train yard, I arrived in Albuquerque. It wasn’t easy dodging my landlord; in fact I spent the final two nights before departure sleeping at the airport. I landed in Albuquerque with $7—and here is where luck kicked in; here is where a truly romantic notion surfaced, a notion that there is a benevolent God somewhere watching over idiots, drunks, children, innocents of all types. Certainly I fit the category. If the circus people had turned me away in Albuquerque that day, I don’t know what I would have done with $7 and no return ticket. As it was, I had been worried about where the circus building was located and how I would get there, and lo and behold, divine intervention, the old Albuquerque civic auditorium, long since torn down, was within sight of the airport. The circus was in full view when I stepped off the plane into the dry New Mexico heat.
    You are thinking here,
This is where it turns romantic, right? Now we get the story as seen on TV:
My Season Under the Big Top. But no. I did get a job that day. I found Bobby Johnson. He seemed only mildly surprised to see me, and he turned me over to a Mexican who handed me a heavy red board with twenty-five puffy beehives of cotton candy stuck to it. “Fifty cents,” he said. “Come back when they’re gone.”
    “Come back?” He pointed to blue doors leading into the arena. I heard the music blasting, the ringmaster’s garbled exclamations, the applause and exhortations of the crowd. I headed out,
in
actually, to the beginning of my circus career. I stayed ten years. That first day I earned about $2, and it was harder than brick washing. My last day, just shy of my twenty-eighth birthday, I declined a contract guaranteeing me six figures over ten months where I would work a total of sixteen minutes a day. By then I had had about every circus job available except animal training. I was on concessions, wardrobe, ring curb, transportation, rigging. Finally, high-wire walking was as high as I cared to go. I could have gone for a management position, show director, or a job at the main office in Washington, D.C.; I could have made a life of it. Ringling is a solid organization, the core of Feld Entertainment, the largest producer of live family entertainment in the world. They own all the ice shows you have ever heard of, as well as Disney on Parade, plus permanent shows in Vegas and Atlantic City and two traveling units overseas. Working for them is not much different from working at AT&T or Walmart. They have benefits and retirement plans, a credit union, organizations to protect retired animals and performers, and lobbyists to check the PETA people. But I had had enough of it. In ten years on the show, I had saved enough money to pay for a college education, and that was what I wanted. So I ran off to join a school. It has worked out. I am still here. After fifteen years, I am no longer a first-of-May teacher: I have tenure, people call me “Professor,” and I no longer succumb to the allure of white trains.
    It is not that romantic notions didn’t crop up along the way, especially with the wire walking; it was just that when they did, I found them hard to relate to, absurd even. Once, being interviewed by a young blond newspaper reporter, I let it slip that my wire-walking days were nearing an end. The poor girl, wide-eyed, wouldn’t accept it. “No,” she said. “It’s your life!” Well, okay, if that was what she wanted to believe. When seeking to charm young blond newspaper reporters, any romantic notion will do. But it wasn’t my life. It was something I learned by steadfast practice, worked at for seven years, got paid well for, and quit.
    About romance there are a lot of