Captain Pike's Ship Log II

I remember when I was a kid, the carnival would come to town. Or maybe they called it the circus, I don't know whether there was a distinction made or not. I remember feeding the elephants though. An elephant's trunk is an amazing thing; it has a fingerlike projection to help curl around food that the elephant wants to eat. If I held my hand out with a peanut in it, the elephant could sort of scoop up and vacuum in, this peanut and curl his trunk around, sending the peanut into his mouth. The elephant could execute this procedure and be ready for another peanut just about as fast as I could reach in the small, paper bag to produce another peanut. Obviously, the elephant had had a lot more experience with this than I. After all, there are all kinds of me and only one of him.

I remember feeding the elephant in this way once with the elephant standing inside of his semi trailer -- his side door open enough for him to see out and reach out with his trunk. It seemed incredible: this great big animal capable of such fine movements. It kind of tickled a little bit even, the little "finger" finding and then gingerly prodding the peanut into the stream of air being drawn up his nostrils. He didn't inhale the peanut; instead, just creating enough vacuum, I suppose, to suspend the peanut while curling his trunk downward, into his mouth, at which time he must have supplied enough air pressure to encourage the peanut outward, to its final destination.

It was also a sad thing to see the animals tied down or caged up. The elephant having a great chain around his foot, the other end hopelessly shackled to a iron stake driven deeply into the ground. The elephant trainer/keeper too, a wretched creature, seemed in every way like a convict, oddly instead, a jailer of sorts. He was hideously thin, with such old alkie skin and a tank top so stained that its original color would have been impossible to discern. Even though the circus came to town during the dog days of summer, his tired old suspenders held up impossibly thick woolen trousers which could have held two of him.

One time, I think I was with my father, we sought out the old keeper of elephants, only to learn that the elephant was not feeling too well and could not be fed at this time. The old carnie spoke on in his heavily accented, poor English, indicting the management for their ignorance. But I couldn't hear him. While he talked fast and blinked slowly, my mind wandered, effectively muting his audio. His teeth were stained and darkened. I began to worry about what might be wrong with the elephant. As my mind wandered, so did my eyes until they latched upon a terrible finding. About midway down the old man's trousers, not quite down to the knee level, there was a terrific bugery-snotty, phlegmy mass which was so horrible and disgusting to look at that my eyes could not be pulled away. The magnitude of this object was unthinkable! Its appearance was so singularly snot-like, that there was no mistaking what it was. There is nothing that is kind of like snot or that looks kind of like snot, so that when you do see it, there's no question of what it is.

Then my mind took the next leap. Whose, or rather, what's snot was this? I mean, this couldn't have been, couldn't have come from, this, or any man's nose. Could it? Somehow? Even though I was a little kid, I had seen men sneeze out things on purpose in a most disgusting way, not caring where the results wound up, only taking care to protect themselves. Could this man have done this, and then not have noticed where it wound up? Could he be the type of man who didn't even care? This kind of thought pattern was a young boy's imagination running out of control. Maybe it was the elephants snot! Now that made sense. After all, he hadn't been feeling very well, so said the carnie. I began to imagine an elephant sneezing. An elephant with a bad cold, sneezing. All over the place. Of course they couldn't allow young kids to feed him. Probably their insurance didn't cover that.

I was being pulled on. "Phil, Philip!" My dad was now yelling. Finally. Finally something had intervened! I looked at my father, relieved. Still in my mind though, it remained. I shook my head. Still, it was there. The idea of it. "What?" I couldn't seem to hear right. "Cotton candy". Did I want some cotton candy? No, not just now, not ever. Not eating again, ever.

So, why am I talking about this? This seems a terrible, and surely inappropriate subject to go into detail about. It's just that this memory is getting to be about, possibly 40 years old. It comes into my mind at the wrong times, it seems. Once I was in Japan for almost 2 months. I ate in the company cafeteria. All kinds of strange things. Sometimes things weren't cooked at all. You don't see a lot of fat people there. It could be a tool. A tool to use to help stop eating. Or to elicit the results of non-ending nausea. There's a point for me when I've been feeling really sick and then make up my mind, that "okay, let's puke -- get it over with" -- a kind of commitment. Perhaps the image could be used there.

I'm writing it as if it were a loathsome contagion: something I have to pass on to get rid of. If I can get somebody else thinking it, then, maybe it'll leave me alone. Mark Twain wrote about this in a story about annoying little catchphrase "Punch Brothers punch, punch with care; Punch in the presence of the passenger". Look it up. All for now, enjoy.