The catcher is the base of the team… The person who everyone depends on for their very lives. The catcher has to be absolutely trustworthy. Not someone who screws around, or drinks, or goofs off on the ropes. Some of the most intense parts of my training to become a catcher weren’t in the ropes at all—they were sitting at the kitchen table while Papa paced back and forth lecturing. His hair was growing gray in those days, but his teeth remained the same gleaming white exposed by his grin whenever he jumped. During his night lectures, he had an intense energy about him—it was impossible to look away.
“Your brother might have been a catcher, if he wasn’t so scrawny. And if he didn’t screw around so much. Not you—you, Matty—you will be the catcher of the family.”
And so, the spring and summer before my junior year in high school we toured. For the first time I had an actual role in the family’s act. Papa had put me in a real role, a role of intense responsibility. We practiced every morning for hours, breaking in the early afternoon to rest up before we went in the ring. Then I performed with the family. If I continued to do well in the ring, and in practice, then I would begin catching during the show the year after.
I hadn’t spoken with Carlina since that awful day in Middle School—not until three days before my 16th birthday.
It was August and we were somewhere in Tennessee. Jackson I think. I’m not ashamed to say I was hiding out—that morning I’d received an intense tongue-lashing from my father for some offense or other, and I’d taken my Nintendo DS—I’d won it in a raffle—to go sit in the very top of the stands, alone. I slumped down into the seat and stayed out of sight.
I might have missed the sound if I hadn’t lost my earbuds a few days earlier. As it was, I just kept the volume down low so no one would notice me up there. In the center ring, Frank and Marina Kurtz were practicing the partner adagio. Along with the Flying Paladinos, they were one of the star acts, and the audience always hushed in awe at the beautiful dance.
During practice it wasn’t so beautiful. With no music playing, and the sound of their coach simultaneously counting and clapping his hands in rhythm, it was clear that this was a grueling, difficult act. I’d seen it hundreds of times, but even I paused the game to watch as they began their final round of practice.
That’s when I heard the sound of someone crying. Muffled, but clear enough to identify.
I sat up in my seat and looked around. I couldn’t see anyone nearby. So I stood, stretching up on my toes. Then I saw her.
It was unmistakably Carlina, even though she was curled up in a seat, face to her knees, not many rows below and one section over from me. She must have come up here—like I had—to be alone, and almost certainly hadn’t seen me.
For almost two minutes I stood there frozen.
Normally my instinct if I saw any girl crying would be to offer help and assistance. But even though several years had passed, I still remembered the sting of being dumped for Red. I still remembered the misery of sitting at the diner during the dance. Carlina had been... cruel. Looking back, there’s no way she didn’t know how infatuated I had been with her. Why did she string me along for so long? Maybe if Red hadn’t shown up, it might have happened. No way to answer those questions. I didn’t know Carlina at all.
I wanted to believe that I was over her, but Carlina was the sun I revolved around through my adolescence.
I slipped through the stands until I came to a crouch next to the weeping girl. This was the closest I had been to her since middle school… Now she was seventeen and astonishingly beautiful. Without thinking I put my left hand on her knee and said, “Hey. What’s wrong?”
She jerked at the touch, raising her face up and staring at me wildly. “How did you know I was here? Were you spying on me?”
The question didn’t make any sense. Why would anyone be spying on her? I shrugged it off. “I was up here myself. Sometimes I need some quiet and to get away from my family.”
“Leave me alone,” she said. Tears were still streaming down her face.
Was I always going to let her stab me in the heart? “All right, if that’s what you want. I was just checking to see if you were alright.” I stood up, intending to walk away and never look back. I made it four steps.
“Matt. Please… I’m sorry. Don’t go.”
I didn’t turn around right away, because I didn’t dare let Carlina see my face. Because the rush of emotions that went through me was a storm of confusion, joy, vindication and hope. I took two seconds to compose myself and turned around.
I didn’t know what to make of her expression. Grief stricken? I took a step back toward her. “Tell me what’s wrong, Carlina.”
Her eyes started to water again. “Red… He…”
I tried to suppress the immediate feeling of anger and disgust.
“I broke up with him.”
I knelt back down, facing her next to the row of seats. “If you broke up with him, why are you crying?”
She shrugged, her face a picture of misery. “He’s an ass. I should have dumped him two years ago.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that. What did I know? I’d never had a girlfriend. I’d never kissed a girl. I’d never even been out on a date. This freakish life limited my circle of acquaintances to less than half a dozen girls even remotely near my age. None of them had ever interested me… except her. None of them meant anything. So I didn’t know anything about relationships, or why a girl might break up with a guy and cry about it the same day. I did know that I wasn’t going to let myself get sucked into her orbit again, only to flame out and crash. I’d be her friend if that’s what she needed, but nothing more.
So I did something that seemed the right thing to do. I reached out and took her hands, placing them between mine. Then I permanently put myself in the friend zone. “It’s okay. You can talk about it with me.”
With that, Carlina began to unravel a tale of white trash soap opera bullshit. She’d thrown herself at a bad boy, and he turned around and acted just like what he was. He’d slept around behind her back, and when she confronted him about it, he shoved her and walked away.
“I was such an idiot. I chased after him. I told him I forgave him. I made him promise to never do it again, but I knew in my heart that that’s who he is. He did it again, and I went back anyway.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why would you go back to somebody who treated you badly?”
She looked hopelessly confused at the question. She moaned the answer, “I don’t know.” Then she started to cry again.
I’m physically not capable of ignoring when a girl cries. My mother taught me to take care of women like they were more precious than diamonds. So I did the only thing I could. I put my arms around her and let her cry.
***
And that’s how my junior year of high school began. I promised myself I wouldn’t fall for Carlina again. All the same, I began to spend most of my non-working hours with her. I would meet her in the afternoons after practice, and we would sit near the paddock watching the trick riders practice under her father’s tutelage. For a while, Red kept his distance. I knew better than to think that problems with him were over. Three or four times over those few weeks, I saw him hanging around the lot glaring at Carlina and sometimes me. In mid-September we had a week long hiatus. At the time, we weren’t far from Louisville, Kentucky, though I can’t remember the name of the town. Being stopped in camp didn’t stop our normal practice hours, of course. However, it did mean we weren’t spending time setting up or breaking down camp, moving, or doing shows in the evenings. I found myself with an unusually large amount of free time.
I spent all of the time that I could with Carlina. I was stunned the first time I saw her jumping from one side of the horse, bouncing on the saddle, then down to the other side as the horse galloped at full speed. It looked terrifying.
That day she rode back up to the fence, reined her horse in and said, “You want to learn how?”
&n
bsp; And that’s how I learned to ride. As the remainder of the fall continued, I spent afternoons learning how to saddle the horses, how to groom them, how to canter, trot and gallop.
It was a fantastic time. Carlina’s father Nick, who trained the trick riders, said I was a natural. He was helpful and seemed pleased by Red’s absence. “Call me Nick,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder on the third day I was around.
The next few weeks, every waking moment when I wasn’t practicing was spent with Carlina and Nick. I learned to ride, pleased by Nick’s encouragement and comments that I was a natural rider. By the end of the third week, he began to teach me some basic tricks—how to ride facing backward, how to drop to the ground while the horse was moving, then regain the saddle. It was exhilarating.
I’d been in the rigging all my life, and I’d been doing increasingly complicated stunts in the last year or two. But catching—it was … boring. Not like Papa, who was famous for being the first aerialist to ever perform a quadruple. He did it in 1982, and the feat had made headlines all over the world. And no one would ever let me forget that he’d done it when he was seventeen—the same age I was now. Papa had never suggested I even try such things. It was Tony and Messalina he taught the acrobatics—I was to be a catcher. No one ever asked if that’s what I wanted to do. He simply pronounced it one day, the way he pronounced everything as word from on high, not to be argued with or trifled with.
My whole childhood I’d dreamed of being like my father. And he wouldn’t even let me try.
So learning to ride was—fun. It was exciting. And, probably more than anything else, it wasn’t under Papa’s watchful eyes, it was free, it was something I was doing.
And there was Carlina.
I loved watching her. When she rode, the curve of her hips and butt, the arch of her back, her hair flying out behind her. I loved seeing her teeth shine when she smiled and looked over her shoulder at me. I loved when we laughed together. I loved every moment we spent together, so much so that I ignored all the warning signs.
I was as happy as I’d ever been. But it wasn’t to last.
It came to an end on a Sunday evening close to the end of the season.
The circus was nearly packed up, everything on the truck beds and ready to go first thing in the morning. Our last show had been at 5 p.m. that afternoon and we would be departing before sunrise.
That night, I had eaten dinner with Carlina and Nick. It was very different from dinner in our trailer. For one thing, Carlina and her dad had an entire trailer to themselves. It wasn’t as large as ours, but even so it was far less crowded. Carlina actually had her own bedroom. She cooked the dinner, a meaty lasagna. As we sat down to eat, her father had his first drink of the night—a straight up shot of gin. It wouldn’t be his last.
I found the drinking to be a little scandalous. Because timing and coordination were so important on the trapeze, no one in my family ever drank except on Christmas or other major holidays when there was no practice. Horror stories abounded of aerialists families who had suffered major tragedies because of a single drink.
Of course there was no reason for Nick not to drink… He was the trainer for the trick riders, but he would never get in the saddle again. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I could never get on the trapeze again… I couldn’t imagine. Plus, except for his daughter, he was alone—I never got the whole story of where Carlina’s mother was, because they didn’t know.
Maybe I would drink too much too, if I were in his shoes.
After dinner, we’d gone back out to the paddock. I didn’t have practice that night, so there was no reason I had to go right away. We rode for a solid hour, practicing dismounting and mounting while at a canter.
I was sweaty, exhausted and happy when we returned to the gate.
My father stood there, a storm on his face. The second I saw him, my stomach lurched.
“Matty. Come with me.” I felt queasy. I didn’t know what was wrong. The anger in his tone made me afraid.
I slid out of the saddle and to the ground. A small cloud of dust raised to the air when my feet touched down. “I need to help put the horses —“
“You’ll come now.” His tone brooked no argument.
Carlina looked troubled. “I can take care of the horses, Matt.”
I swallowed, fearing the worst. I followed my father as he stomped away.
Don't You Know That's Dangerous? (Matt)
You’ll come with me.
Those words marked the beginning of the war between me and my father.
I know that it’s a little bit of a cliché. Young man, extending his boundaries; conflict with father who wants to keep him under control. It’s the subject of a thousand plays and novels, it’s the core of every good coming of age story (well, the ones about boys anyway). All of that is because there’s a certain core truth to it. We read it in stories and believe because it reflects and is shaped by the reality we see every day.
In my case, Carlina was secondary to the conflict. It was all about the rigging and the spotlight, it was all about Papa being the star of the circus and wanting his children to continue that, it was all about his expectation and his pride.
As we walked back to the trailer that day, Papa didn’t say a word. I could tell how angry he was, because I had trouble keeping up with him. His back was rigid in an unnatural way and occasionally the side of his neck twitched. I followed along, just to his right and one step behind, waiting for the moment he exploded. He turned on me just as we reached our trailer.
“Matty. You’ve been learning trick riding.” The words shot out one at a time, equally emphasized, each of them angry in its own way.
I swallowed. “In my free time. I’ve been doing my practice and chores and school.”
“You’ll stop today.” He phrased it is a simple statement of fact. But I was done being pushed around. I was done having Papa tell me what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
“I’m not quitting.”
“You defy me? While you live under my roof, you do as I say!” Papa punctuated each word with a finger pointing at my chest. The last four words this finger made contact, pushing me back a few inches.
“Papa, I’m at practice every day. I’m never sick. I never tell you I’m too tired. Every day I work hard for the family. Why won’t you let me have something for me?”
His nostrils flare, and he shouts, “And what will I do when you break your stupid neck jumping off of a horse? Don’t you know that’s dangerous?”
He couldn’t possibly be serious. The first person to ever do a quadruple somersault in the air, setting an extremely dangerous world record when he was 17 years old, was telling me that riding an old horse was too dangerous?
“And flying through the air isn’t? Do you think I’m immune to getting hurt up there?”
His face flushed. “At least I can control safety up there. Nobody defies me up there. I won’t lose another family member. Not on my watch, young man.”
Bitterly, I spit out my response. “Your caution didn’t save Uncle Mario from being crippled.” I turn away from him and began walking away. He grabbed my shoulder.
“You think I don’t know that? Don’t you think maybe I see my brother falling to the ground every night when I try to sleep? You’ve never lost a family member right there in front of your eyes, Matty. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I shrug away from him and step back. I know better than to bring that up. In August 1996, just a few months after the Flying Paladinos were covered in Life Magazine, the family suffered a horrible tragedy. During a performance in Nashville, Dad’s brother and his wife hit the wrong way and went careening to the ground. Ordinarily the worst they would have suffered might have been some bruises and rope burns, but the safety net failed; she was killed and Mario crippled. I barely remember the accident and the aftermath—I was still very young when the family was in its heyday.
I veered away from that subject and just res
ponded quietly, “I’m not quitting Papa.”
He takes a deep breath, as if trying to calm himself. “It’s that girl isn’t it? The one who dumped you right before the dance.”
I wouldn’t have been more staggered if he had thrown a bucket of ice water on me. He knew that she’d blown me off? He knew that I hadn’t gone to the dance? All that time ago? I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand him at all. For the first time in this discussion— for the first time in a couple of years—I felt myself wanting to cry. “You knew? Why didn’t you say anything?”
Papa’s shoulders sagged, a deflated balloon, all the anger flowing out of him in a rush of air. “Matty,” he said in a low tone. “We could see how bad you were hurt. I didn’t want to make it worse for you.”
I didn’t understand him. All the anger was gone out of me too, replaced with a roiling sea of confusion. “Papa, please. Please don’t make me quit.”
He sighed, looked up at the sky, and muttered, “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.” He looked back at me. “Fine. Keep risking your neck. But don’t let it interfere with school or your practice. You’re shaping up to be the best catcher this family ever had, Matty. That may not matter to you, but it does to me. It does to your grandfather and great-grandfather, looking down on you from heaven.”
Aggravated all over again, I sighed. He’s got to bring in the ancestors, he’s got to lay on the guilt. Whatever. I had gotten what I was asking for. “I won’t, Papa. I promise.”
I kept my promise. There were two weeks left of the touring season before we returned to Florida, and during that time every day after practice I walked to Carlina’s and we rode together. I kept up with my chores, with my school work, and almost every night performed with the family. Then I would collapse into a deep dreamless sleep.
***
The last day of our tour for the season was a few weeks before Thanksgiving in Tuscaloosa Alabama. It was late afternoon when Carlina and I had finished riding, grooming the horses and led them to their cars. As we walked out of the second car, she touched my sleeve.