Felony Juggler, page 3
I didn’t need to spend money. I’d just meet someone who would let me sleep on the couch or I’d fuck someone and sleep with them, or, in rare cases, I’d use my sleeping bag. I’d lie down somewhere outside and wait for lawn sprinklers to rudely wake me up and I’d laugh. I was that kind of hippie. I made friends quickly and easily, and I fucked a lot, so I usually had a place inside to sleep. I didn’t need money for smokes, drinks, or drugs because I never did any of that. I was six foot seven and weighed 180 pounds so food seemed optional, and nothing seemed dangerous.
I’d pull out my clubs and balls on any street or campus, put out my metaphorical hat, do some juggling, tell some jokes, and I’d make more than enough for a slice of apple pie and a chocolate milkshake before the police or security threw me out. That jingle would last me until at least the next day, sometimes for a week. There was always leftover pizza in the dorms people snuck me into. I had more money than the college students I was crashing with and fucking. I had no expenses.
It’s easy to get on college radio. They had more time to fill than they had albums by Can and Magma. I would find the station and show up and let them interview a real peripatetic street juggler. I’d try to be funny (I had started to respect that skill), and I’d say that anyone who called in to the station, I’d teach them to juggle in exchange for pizza. People would call in. I got good at teaching juggling, sharing stories, and eating pizza.
My hitchhiking developed into just going from college to college. I often got picked up by college students who were on their way back to school, so I went along. It’s easy to travel when you have no destination. I could juggle anywhere for a few bucks, and colleges were where there were women my age. The women were all reading or listening to people who lied about hitchhiking, and I was doing it for real. I didn’t have a guitar, but I had balls. I’d stay a few days. Usually until I met someone driving somewhere interesting, or sometimes just driving somewhere else. Once you get to the middle of the country, it can be several miles between interesting. While I was on campus, I’d sign up for a shrink study (that’s why I don’t trust those studies), go on the radio, even sit in on a class or two. I’d go to any bar that had live bands in the evening and see if I could do ten minutes before the music set to warm up the crowd. I often sucked, and the patrons liked booing me. But every time I did a show, I sucked a little less. I was getting better.
Someone called in to a radio show I was on one day and said they’d buy me a pizza if I taught a whole party to juggle. They wanted me to teach everyone they knew how to juggle. I got the address and headed over. It was a big house close to campus. I don’t remember what campus. I don’t remember what state. I probably didn’t know where I was at the time. I might have thought I was in Sortie. I showed up and they told me it was a nude party. Oh boy. I took off all my clothes immediately and pulled out my balls. Naked is the only way to look more hippie than tie-dye. Long hair, super-skinny bodies, and big hairy patches (this was the seventies).
There were a few dozen people, and they were all naked. It was nice. There were a lot of drugs involved, and that did make my students more difficult to teach. I don’t know what drug they were indulging in, but it was a drug that diminished both hand-eye coordination and focus. Some people still learned.
My mom took me to a juggling convention when I was about fifteen and I met my first real professional juggler. He was Southern and shy and had one joke he told over and over: “I had a girlfriend back home who used to juggle topless … looked like she was doing five … it was an optical illusion of course.”
If that joke is told with good delivery and timing, it’s not a good joke. If it’s told with bad delivery and timing, it’s a great joke. I was teaching college women to juggle naked … so I had visual reinforcements. I told that topless-juggling joke carefully badly and exactly out of rhythm and it killed. Told like that while everyone is nude, the joke is fucking Lenny Bruce at Carnegie Hall. The bad thing about naked parties is that unless it’s billboarded on the invitations as an orgy, there’s often less sex than at a clothed party—everyone is trying to prove that nudity doesn’t have to be about sex. That’s like trying to convince me dinosaurs played table tennis; I don’t buy it. But I taught juggling and ended up having a great time, even though it was a shitty frozen pizza. Funny what a fellow remembers. Any good conversations? What state was it in? Did I fuck that night? Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know. Was it a good pizza? No.
I continued to live like Bob Dylan didn’t. I made very few decisions. I got picked up by a guy in Nebraska, in a big fancy car. He said, “Set the cruise control for ninety and wake me up when we’re near LA.” So, I went to LA. There was an attractive woman in LA who wanted to hitch to Florida, but she was afraid of being a woman hitchhiking alone, so I traveled with her. I got rides a lot faster with her. By being together, I looked less scary to drivers, and she looked less of a whore. Together we were a loving young couple out to see America.
The second time a gun was pulled on me was because of her. We got picked up by a real outcast. Today he would be an incel, and he would have a supportive peer group to belong to, but back then he was just a creep on his own, not part of a more dangerous creep society. He offered us a place to stay and when we got there, he pulled a rifle on me and said he was going to sleep with Cindy. I think if you’re using a gun to commit rape, you shouldn’t have to use a euphemism, but what the fuck do I know? I said no he wasn’t and that I would attack him with a knife. It was a complete bluff—I couldn’t fucking attack an annoying housefly with an old newspaper, let alone attack a man with a knife. That remains true today even after my brushes with the law. All a bluff, but I puffed up like an impotent puffer fish. He dropped the gun. Unlikely that he had any real intention of using it anyway, but it didn’t feel that way to me. To me it was a gun pointed at me. I grabbed his dropped old rifle off the floor and went fucking nuts. I checked to make sure the weapon wasn’t loaded and then used it like a baseball bat to smash up his house. There was some adrenaline I needed to burn off. I sure wasn’t going to hurt him, I’ve never hurt anyone, but I smashed up his gun and smashed the shit out of his house. The gunsight cut my hands and I didn’t even feel it until the next day. I had a bloody gun, and this was before what I’d end up doing a few years later. I put him in a room, or maybe a closet, I don’t really remember, and put things in front of the door so it would be hard and loud for him to get out of there.
Cindy and I slept in his house, with him right there in a room behind a refrigerator covered in pans with his TV on top. That night I earned the Cindy strain of herpes. Cindy and I got up the next morning and had a romantic breakfast from his dented refrigerator while he screamed and cried behind the same fridge, then we left the dirty dishes and him behind the refrigerator and I got Cindy to Florida safely.
During those couple years on the road, with my clown sabbatical in the middle, I went back and forth and up and down the USA a few times in each direction. I saw America. I saw the inside of biker clubhouses. I was part of weird psych experiments on college campuses. I went to jail for a night. I even saw the inside of Scientology. Why did they let me in there? Scientology rips people off, that’s what it was designed for. Why would you try to rip off a hippie? Why beg a dirty hippie to come into your center? Why try to scam him? The street grunt told me I could take an IQ test, do some filing for them, and they’d give me lunch. I could have just juggled and bought my own fucking lunch, but I wanted to hear the whole crazy-ass Scientology sales pitch firsthand—I like crazy, and I always enjoy the opportunity to arrange files in random order to fuck up a cult. I ate their food, messed up their files good, and laughed at their jive. I guess that means I passed their intelligence test.
CHAPTER 4
By 1976 I was still street performing but now I was a very successful street performer. How successful can you be as a street performer? You might be surprised. I’d cut my hair. I now wore white pants and a Hawaiian shirt when I juggled on the streets. Many street performers think their job is related to begging and they should look like they need the money. I thought the opposite, I thought I’d make more money if they believed I was very successful. If I made them embarrassed to give me change. I thought looking well-off would make the value of the bills go up.
I wore a Hamilton Pulsar P1, the first digital watch to hit the market. It showed the time on a red light–emitting diode display, with a synthetic ruby crystal and a real gold case. I had to push a button to get a flash of the time and for a moment my wrist glowed like a robot from way in the future, like 2029. We didn’t really have to wait that long. Within a few years digital watches were given away in cereal boxes. But in 1976 that watch cost me over two grand, which in today’s dollars would be over two grand. It’s the same goddamn number! If numbers changed with time, our universe would make even less sense. But in terms of buying power, two grand was about fifteen grand. I was a street performer with the same watch James Bond wore in Live and Let Die, and I hadn’t boosted it. I bought it, in cash. That cash was over two thousand one-dollar bills. I collected lots of twenties and even a hundred now and again with my juggling, but I liked to buy the most expensive things in dirty one-dollar bills. At some level it was a fuck you to all the squares. It represented that I was a sibling to the strippers and pole dancers, even though my crumpled folding money didn’t smell as good as theirs. I bought that Pulsar even before I started making serious do-re-mi. I bought it before I was working Philly. The biggest change since my hitchhiking days was that I’d lost my voice. I could still scream and do shows, and I was still about thirty logarithmic decibels louder than fuck, but I couldn’t talk in a normal voice anymore. I had a raspy whisper, and I had a big strong scream, but nothing in between. My throat was sore all the time. I carried Chloraseptic local anesthetic with me. I had the lozenges too but mostly I used the spray and sometimes I drank the spray. It was a disgusting and very unhealthy habit, yet it came with the job of screaming like a nut.
I had rented a house in Trenton with a couple guys I’d met. We wanted to start a small theater company in Philly. We weren’t ever going to make money doing theater, so I would support us doing street shows. I wouldn’t be traveling anymore, so I wanted to find a good place to settle in, do shows, and bring the bacon from every week.
I’ve always had weird rules for myself. I had worked a few small Renaissance faires (thou must add the “e”), carnivals, and arts festivals, but I didn’t like that anymore. I had decided to only juggle on the streets where it was illegal. “To live outside the law you must be honest”—something else Bob Dylan sang and maybe didn’t live. I wanted to be an outlaw. That’s easier than I thought at the time; I could have gotten there even without doing a show.
I was sniffing around for a place where street juggling was not legal but where I could still make a lot of money. Head House Square was a historic site in Philly, and they’d just built New Market. It was a place with upscale yuppie stores (people were in the market to buy yuppies back then), fancy bars, and restaurants. They had water features with a stage for fluffy-haired women to do adult contemporary covers, along with a guy with a beard and glasses on a Fender Rhodes. I didn’t want to work the stage, there was no money there, but there was a prime place where people came in out of the shopping/restaurant area. A big grand entrance with open space. There was a construction wall I could use as my backdrop to make me look a little funky, and there were big stairs where people could stand and see me over the heads of the closer people. I figured I could do a few hundred people there, maybe five hundred a show, and probably do five shows on Friday, ten on Saturday, and five more on Sunday. Twenty weekend shows for yuppies would make me more than enough jingle. Is there such a thing as “more than enough” money? I thought so, but the rest of the story will show I didn’t totally believe that.
There were a couple problems to overcome in Head House. First the police. I didn’t want it to be legal, but I wanted to get away with it. The reason police bust street performers is local businesses rat them out. Shop owners call the police to take out the street trash. I nipped that in the bud. I went to every store and restaurant and bought stuff. I bought yuppie bullshit trinkets and threw them away. I bought flowers and gave them to the woman working the hot dog stand hoping it would help get me laid. I took friends to supper at all the restaurants.
I introduced myself to every owner and manager I could find: “My name is Poe, I’m a street juggler and I want to start doing shows right over there. I’m hopeful I can get big crowds moving through here and help us all out. But I want everyone to be happy, so please, if you feel I’m hurting your business in any way, you just let me know, and I’ll move or do whatever else I can do to help.” I said that and then checked with each of them after all my early shows. I could make them happy. No complaints to the police, all complaints to me—that was the goal. It was easier than I thought. They seemed to like me and understand.
Then there were the police themselves. Whenever I saw cops I’d go over: “Hi, I’m a street juggler. I know that begging and vagrancy is illegal. I’m going to be doing a show right over there and I’d love you to stop by and watch. I think I do a good show and I hope you like it. Please watch the show and if you think I’m begging, please bust me, that’s your job. But if you think I do a good show, well, pay me, tip me, because I deserve it. I’m not a beggar. And here’s my driver’s license as ID.” It was ballsy, but a lack of balls was never my problem. One officer said that his child was into juggling and magic. The next day I showed up with a couple of magic tricks that I had bought at a local shop. Is that a bribe? Yes. It was the cost of doing my business.
Once the businesspeople and police were all fixed, there was the bigger problem. There was a gang that hung out there. “Gang” is the wrong word. They were children. Latino boys, tweens, and young teenagers. Other street performers had tried this prime area (we can all smell yuppie coin), but this gang of children harassed them during the shows, yelling, swearing, and grabbing focus. That wasn’t all they grabbed; they stole props whenever the performers turned their backs even for a second. They made it impossible to work.
I had a plan for dealing with them. It was at least risky, probably stupid, but who cares? My act then included juggling huge knives. I carried them stuck in a big rustic log. My show ended with me juggling knives blindfolded and then juggling knives around a blindfolded audience member. She was blindfolded with the same opaque (yeah, sure) black bag I put over my head as a blindfold, so everyone knew I couldn’t see (I could) and was juggling blind (I wasn’t). Putting it over the audience member’s head showed that the blindfold was legit (nope), and it gave me a big black bag that would soon be filled with money. I couldn’t pass a hat; I needed more money than would fit in a hat. I wanted big bags of money. I knew that as soon as I started my first show (which started with ball juggling), my beautiful, custom-made, expensive juggling knives and the blindfold would be gone to the modern Latino equivalent of the Spanky and Our Gang clubhouse with the No Girlz Allow3d sign.
My plan was stupid, but I thought it just might work. As I set down my props for my first show, the children immediately started gathering around to fuck me up. I turned to the one who looked like the leader. I took my watch off and whisper/croaked, “Hi, my name is Poe, what’s your name?”
“José. Why you talk like that?”
“Nice to meet you, José. I don’t have a choice; my voice is fucked. Hey, could you do me a favor? I’m going to be doing a juggling show here and I don’t like to juggle with my watch on and I can’t have stuff in my pockets. It’s an expensive watch, and I don’t have anyone I know around here to take care of it while I juggle.” I took my watch off and held it out. “Could you just hold on to it and keep it safe while I do my show?”
It was quite a gamble. I placed James Bond’s watch in José’s hand. He pushed the button, and it lit his face up with the time. This might be the last time I’d see the watch, but on the streets, you gotta gamble to make money.
With José holding my watch, I smiled, said thanks, and turned away to start my show. At the end of it, all my props were there, and José ran over with my watch—“Here you go. Good show, Poe. You’re funny.”
By the third show of my second night, I’d finish my money collection and just throw the whole bag of money to José and his troops, so I could talk to folks with my hands empty. They would take the money, separate it out, sort it, and keep it safe. It turned into our groove. My final show every night I’d reach into the bag of my last take before it was sorted, and pass them a handful of money as their pay for helping me out. They bought (stole) the apples I used for every show in my act and always had all my props ready. They stored my props somewhere, took care of the money, and held my watch. I like to feel a watch on my wrist when I juggle, but I had to keep that naked-wrist lie going for all my time at Head House.
I ran all the street performing at Head House. There was Fat Jake, who played harmonica and spoons. He was way older than me, covered in tattoos before they were fashionable: sailor and jailhouse ink. He didn’t make a lot of coin, though he also didn’t stop traffic, so he could work between my shows easily without a problem. He blew harp okay, yet Jake was a drunk and very unhealthy. Twice I had to 911 his ass and ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital. He lived through both of the heart attacks he had on my watch. I looked out for Fat Jake.
