let you know when the suits figure out how to clean this mess up.”
XXXX
When Ringling Bros played in New York, just like in most of the other cities where we performed, I would stay on the circus train with the other performers, but not that night. After all that had happened, I needed to escape from my home away from home. I couldn’t bear to face my friends. I was ashamed and humiliated at how badly I’d lost control. So I checked into The Algonquin Hotel in midtown.
Later that night, I remember stepping toward an open window in my hotel room. I leaned out of it, a bit too far. Feeling the muggy coolness, I looked down. Despite what had happened a few hours before, it wasn’t like me to be impulsive. What am I doing? I thought. More numb than alarmed, I carelessly leaned farther out of the window. Just a little bit more and you’ll lose your balance; top-heavy, you’ll tumble into space. That would be an easy solution to my troubles, I thought. The sight of the street twelve stories below made me shaky. Even so, something compelled me to climb out onto the ledge. I looked down and asked myself unanswerable questions. Why wasn’t I born a man of normal dimensions like all the others? Why can’t I just step into a store and buy a pair of shoes or a shirt like every other man? Why can’t I ever sleep in a normal size bed? Why can’t I find a woman to love me?
In the moonlight I saw the shadowed wood and steel skeleton of a new art deco building going up across Forty-Fourth Street. I wondered what kind of a drunken architect designed me. Was there some kind of a mistake in my blueprints? How could any architect possibly have expected me to stand up? I thought that it was just a matter of time until my flawed foundation would crack and, in an awful crash, my girders would collapse.
In those days, I could never get enough of the Manhattan skyline. Looking back on it, as big as I am, I must have been fascinated and comforted by things like tall buildings that made me feel small. But that night, so long ago, the view from the open window of my hotel room in The Algonquin was dangerous. The bottomless sadness that from time to time terrified me had disappeared for a while, but that night it came back with a vengeance. I couldn’t think my way out of it or ignore it. Like those massive structures that surrounded me, it demanded my attention. I willed myself to step back from the danger. I did. But that had the opposite effect of what you might think. Moving backward, the image in my mind transformed. I was no longer passively falling into space but running to the window and jumping to my death.
Well it was as if Thanatos, the god of death, had devoured my fear and left me horribly energized with an overpowering will to die. How long would it take me to hit the ground? I wondered. I imagined the grizzly thud my eight-and-a-half-foot frame would make when it shattered on the sidewalk. Since I was seven years old I’d always been a spectacle. Would my death be just another show, and a free one at that? Would my giant body lying on the sidewalk in a bloody heap draw a crowd like I did in the sideshow?
That wasn’t the first time I had seriously thought about suicide. I originally contemplated killing myself when I was sixteen, shortly before I moved to Hollywood. It had been a terrible summer what with all the taunts and teasing, and that horrible experience down by the river.
In the past, something always stopped me, someone, some twist of fate. But that night, in my empty hotel room, I was alone. No one would intervene. No one from Ringling Bros even knew I was there. I did that deliberately. In the past, I could never go through with it. I would think about my parents and how hard they had worked when they first arrived in this country. I’d think of my big brother, Ben. If I ended it all, he’d try but wouldn’t be able to use that sharp mind of his to make sense of anything so senseless and tragic. He’d end up dropping out of college to care for my distraught parents. My baby brother, Myer, would lose that cheerful innocence of his. No one in my family would ever be the same. They would all be devastated by my death. Suicide would bring shame upon my family. If I killed myself, Rabbi Roth wouldn’t even allow them to bury me in the B’nai Zion Cemetery.
But there in that lonely hotel room I was immune to fear of shame. Looking back on it, that awful night my emotions were raw and my racing thoughts were more lethal than ever. I knew that at any second they had the unrestrained strength to hurl me out of the window. I wasn’t sure if any concerns and hesitations I had about taking my life really mattered anyway. The storm that was raging in me did not allow me to see beyond the pain I was experiencing that moment; that there might possibly be more to my life than I could have imagined. At that time, all I could think about was what had taken place earlier that night and if I would be fired from my job in the sideshow, the only place a freak like me came close to fitting in. If I lost that job, what would I do? What could I do? I’d be a burden to my family. Without work, depending on them like I did when I went blind . . . I would never let that happen again.
If Clyde Ingalls canned me, I’d have no choice. Sooner or later, one way or another, I knew I’d end it all. Why put off the inevitable? I asked myself. I felt trapped. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air in the damned hotel room. I stepped toward the open window again. Now I was outside of myself, watching the whole scene unfold as it were a film starring someone else. The sound of a ruthless voice coming from somewhere in my room frightened me. A freak like you doesn’t deserve to live. All you do is cause problems. I couldn’t block out the blood-thirsty thoughts. Then I reached for the open window frame with both my arms, the way someone does who is trying to escape a burning building. I pulled myself closer. There was no turning back. It would be so much easier for everybody if you were dead.
XXXX
Not wanting to believe what almost just happened, I slammed the window and stepped away. When I finally got back into the two beds the hotel staff had pushed together for me, I was too confused and exhausted to be terrified. Willing myself to sleep wasn’t an option. I kept flashing back to the awful incident a few hours earlier. I still couldn’t believe what I had done. I worried that after all those years, a dangerous, rogue gorilla in me that I always feared but didn’t really understand had finally broken free from his cage. When would I attack again? Who else would I hurt?
Lying there in bed, the memories of what had happened started to come back in intrusive staccato bursts: the feel of my shoulder crashing into the drunk’s spine; the sickening smell of whiskey coming from his bloody mouth as he laid there, half-dead in the sawdust. I decided to get up and take a walk. I dressed quickly and made my way downstairs.
It was about three a.m. when I turned left out of the hotel lobby onto Forty-Fourth Street. I moved as if in a dream toward Madison. A ghostly breadline materialized out of the steam that escaped from manhole covers and the shadows cast by dim streetlights on the sidewalk in front of St. Andrews. The whole thing was haunting; a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life on a three-dimensional concrete canvas. The ragged ones stood three abreast, a tattered army crusading for soup. The line of hungry, vacant eyes waiting for the rescue mission to open at sunup snaked almost around the block. Some of those standing there were bums in patched clothing. Some were wearing shabby business suits and ties. Here and there one of them held a child by the hand. I looked at them with sympathy for their plight while several of those poor specters looked up at me with what I assumed was envy. I imagined they would have longed to sleep in a secure and comfortable place like The Algonquin, to dine in its fine restaurant, and to wear the clean, new clothes I sported, even if the price they would have to pay for those luxuries was to live and work as a freak of nature. At that moment on the chilly sidewalk, I don’t think it was so much my height that created the chasm between me and the people in the breadline. Rather, it was money and the food, shelter, and security it buys in a world haunted by hard times.
I turned left on Sixth Avenue and headed toward the park. About half way down the block I passed an Apple Annie selling fruit for a few pennies.
“Won’t you buy an apple, mister?” she pleaded. I reached in my pocket and gave her a dollar.
“Keep
