I don’t remember if I ever told you about what happened to
me after my ventriloquism career ended… Shortly
after emerging from rehab, I found myself adrift. My so-called celebrity “friends” wouldn’t
take my calls, or even acknowledge my existence. At the time I was devastated to find myself
so abandoned by what I thought of as my social support system. Now looking back, I can understand why Sandra
Bullock had security remove me from her property as I wandered around outside
in the rain with no pants screaming “Sandy!
Sandy! Come outside and have a
drink with me you crazy fuck!” Even Iggy
Pop avoided me. Shannon Hoon blocked my calls. I had become unmoored as
“The Second Golden Age of Ventriloquism” ended as quickly as it had begun. I never saw it coming. I had no skills and no plan. Rehab provided me with a much needed reset,
but I had no direction.
I can’t explain now why I thought my future was in
Wingwalking and forming a barnstorming troupe.
You need to understand what it was like in America in 1994. The war had just ended and the streets were
filled with men like myself looking for adventure. We were young and addicted to adrenalin, used
to having our nerves on edge facing death while fighting The Hun. Risk was our food. The crazier the situation, the more we liked
it. It was at a logging camp outside of
Coeur d’Alene when I first fell in with Danny “Hipshot” Hamilton, a former RAF
pilot that was supporting his drinking by crop-dusting his way across America. Hipshot had a biplane which he had won in a
poker game in Minsk after the war on an inside straight on what could only be
called “stacked odds” thanks to his proclivity for dealing from the bottom of
the deck. He was a hell of a
character.
Hipshot and I were cut from the same cloth in that neither
of us was in much of a hurry to embrace an anchored life of a house, wife and
1.8 kids. We were both broken in a
sense. Hipshot had just flown too many
missions while I had never gotten over a blonde I had met backstage in an Edinburgh
club while on tour with Temple of the Dog.
We were fast friends. It was over
the course of many bourbons at The 44 Club that we hatched our plan. The idea was to make enough money on the small
town air show circuit to finance an eventual trip to Hawaii where we would
permanently perform for open mouthed tourists and make love to Island girls on
the beach while drunk on rum. In theory
it was a great plan. We really should
have investigated the air show circuit more thoroughly.
In the mid-1990s America was interested in two things: The Macarena and Wingwalking. It was just like the newsreels show it. There wasn’t a bar you could walk into
without running into a bunch of folks doing the Macarena talking about
Wingwalking. It was a mania. Everyone was getting into it. I remember seeing Ed Asner hanging off a tail
section in Duluth in 1995. Now here
comes Hipshot and I trying to break into this circuit with absolutely no cred
while big time acts like The Gates Flying Circus, Tex Rankin’s Flying Circus
and The Wood Brothers Air Thrill Show are taking all available budgets. We knew we had to come up with a competitive edge. We were on the outside looking in.
I can’t recall which one of us came up with the idea of
trying to train the wolves to wingwalk.
Hell, I barely knew what I was doing.
Our “show” at the time consisted of me being strapped onto the plane
like Hannibal Lechter while Hipshot did various barrel rolls and loops while I
barfed all over the place. We were
confident that there wasn’t a booking agent in the circuit that wouldn’t book
us at top dollar if I could somehow get the wolves to jump through hoops on the
wings while we roared over the crowd. It
was just a question of being able to train the wolves…
I will be honest. Mistakes
were made. The first five or six wolves
totally freaked out once I released them from their cage on the wing and
immediately plunged to their deaths. We
couldn’t figure out how to get it done and were almost broke from the expense
of wolves. That was when we came up with
the foot harness that kept them on the wing while I made a big show of tossing
them scraps of meat while cracking a whip theatrically. It wasn’t the trick show that we initially
envisioned, but it was a hit. We played
them all. Boise, Lincoln, Norman,
Wichita… the entire circuit. We were
flush with cash. Even the wolf didn’t
have to be tranquilized as much as before as he had gotten used to chomping on
Slim Jims at 8000 feet while being inverted.
Hawaii and our dreams were within reach.
It was probably inevitable that Danny “Hipshot” Hamilton
would leave with the money. It’s like
the story of the scorpion that stings his friend the frog. It was just in his nature. I wasn’t even that mad. I woke up on a Sunday morning in Springfield
Missouri with $9, a wolf and no sign of Hipshot. I let the wolf go in a park outside of
town. He’s still in Springfield as far
as I know. As for Hipshot, I’ve heard
some rumors about him. I’d heard he was
a tattoo artist in the Philippines. A
tilt-a-whirl operator on the Georgia carnival circuit. That he died diving for pearls in
Indonesia. He could be selling insurance
here in town for all I know. I will tell
you this. Whenever I hear the roar of a
propeller plane I look up, just to see if it’s him. Even after all that’s happened, I miss him.
No comments:
Post a Comment