THE JUGGLER

They say politics is a circus. I say life’s a circus. Because I work in a circus.

All my life has been a performance.

I work with the lions and the clowns and the elephants. I work with the acrobats. Sometimes they ask me to light the ring of fire for them. Sometimes I’m asked to walk the elephants. Sometimes I end up cleaning the elephant shit.

I’m a clown. And what I do best is juggle. Because I started as a juggler. I’ve been doing it every day since I was seven. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I never thought I’d end up making a living doing it. And it’s a good living. I get to travel with my friends. I get to entertain many different people. I get to entertain the kids.

I wish I had my own kids. It’s hard to date when you’re a clown. You’d think God would be able to make a lady clown for me. But that’s not the case. I’d take a goofy lady with a clown nose like mine. Or even no nose at all.

 

After work, I sat in front of the tent after the crowd walked their way home. Olga the ringleader sat down next to me. I handed her a cold beer from the cooler.

“Jacob, you do good today,” said Olga. “You do best when you juggle the balls. No one do it as good as you.”

“Thanks.”

“I tell you my life? Before I was ringmaster?”

“No.”

“I came to America as a mail-order bride. My husband, he fucked me three times a night. It was good. But then one day, he told me he found new woman. And then we not married anymore. And so, I work in circus. And now I ringmaster of circus. You see?”

“Yeah.”

“Ha ha. It’s so funny. You like all other clowns. You happy when you perform, but you sad when you alone.”

 

I turned on the TV when I got to my motel room. I heard a couple having sex through the walls. I made the TV louder to drown out the noise.

 

I walked into the convenience store next to the gas station. The clerk was at the front reading a newspaper.

“You watched the football game last night?” I asked.

“Nah. Haven’t been watching sports too much lately.”

“What do you like to watch?”

“The news.”

“What’s been going on in the news?”

“The news is always the same.”

“Yeah. Why do they call it the news? They should call it the olds.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good. You a comedian or something?”

“I’m a clown.”

“Ha ha.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Crazy.”

“I never wanted to be a clown. I wanted to be a juggler. But my mother said I couldn’t pay the bills from juggling.”

“We can’t always get what we want. I’m a clerk.”

“Yeah, you’re a clerk. And I’m a clown.”

I left the convenience store. I walked back to my motel room. The couple next door was done having sex. I ate my beef jerky and fell asleep.

 

The next morning, I awoke. My dick was hard. I reached for my clown horn on the dresser. I pressed it.

Honk honk

 

THE SUICIDE GUY

I was living in a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen several years ago where I knew this middle-aged guy named Vincent who constantly told me that he didn’t think that life was worth living. Naturally, I was concerned for him. He lost his wife to cancer a year ago and was struggling to find work and I felt that any day he would off himself. He kept telling me about how Buddha said that all life is suffering, how we’re all just souls trapped in vessels trying to get out. He told me about how all the bad in the world points to one certainty: that humanity was a mistake.

“I mean, just look at all the wars—all the newspapers ever talk about is wars. And unemployment, and the greedy politicians. It’s not that people don’t care about each other. We live in these selfish vessels that make us lustful and greedy and vain. Our souls aren’t like that. Before we’re born and after we die, that’s our true state. This world, as we know it, is a temporary nightmare. Or maybe it’s a test. But how long can we endure it? Better to kill yourself now and find out what the other side is like.”

We’d have these conversations late into the night. We’d both get really high. I was working as an accountant and needed to be responsible at my job the following day. Vincent didn’t need to be responsible for anything. He said he was working on a novel and trying to put all of his spiritual ideas together into something that a publisher might be interested in. I’d come home and we’d smoke more weed and I don’t think he was actually making any progress on his novel.