Текст книги "Under the Big Top: A Season with the Circus"

Автор книги: Bruce Feiler

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Triple Whammy

The best trick of the show begins the second act. It’s magic in the air. It’s hell on the shoulders.

At the end of intermission four jugglers appear—Kris Kristo; his brother, Georgi; Marcos; and Danny Busch—who perform for several minutes while the audience returns to its seats. At the end of the routine the ring lights go out and these youthful veterans, like a barbecue quartet, juggle among them a dozen burning clubs. The darkness, the fire, and the sizzling pop music all provide cover for a surreptitious entrance by the grandest artists of them all.

“Introducing…those celebrated stars of the flying trapeze…the Pride of Meeexico…the Flying Rodríguez Faaaaamily…”

With a flourish of sequins, the team of flyers—Big Pablo, Danny, Little Pablo, and Mary Chris—toss off their capes, kick off their clogs, and begin to climb the two flimsy ladders that lead into the darkness above ring three. As they clamber toward the top of the tent, the lights gradually illuminate their rigging, their breathtaking scaffolding sky. Stretching fifty feet long and ten feet wide, the cantilevered rigging that supports their act looks like a giant bear trap suspended upside down in midair. On one end, hanging eight feet down, is a single trapeze with an aqua-blue wrap where Big Pablo, the catcher, finally sits. On the other end hangs a giant multitiered platform covered with blue carpet where Danny, Mary Chris, and Little Pablo convene. Below them, stretching the entire width of the tent, is an enormous all-cotton net; while in front of them, dangling twelve feet from the top of the tent, is the somber means of their flight, a three-foot-long solid-steel bar, one and a half inches in diameter, and fifteen pounds in weight.

“It’s my baby,” Little Pablo said. “It’s my life. It’s more important than my pillow.”

It’s also subtly patriotic. The bar that hangs thirty-two feet from the ground and vaults the flyers through the sky is wrapped entirely in white gauze with two inches of red tape on the right fringe and two inches of green on the left. “Red, white, and green,” Little Pablo boasts. “The colors of the Mexican flag.”

“Hey!”

As soon as the entire family is in place they shout a mutual salute. Then the warm-up begins. The first on the bar is Little Pablo himself. Like his brothers, he is wearing neon-pink tights with flaming sequins on the side and a pink see-through vest that barely covers and in truth only accents his well-sculpted upper body. The look, sort of Mr. Universe meets the Sugar Plum Fairy, is an homage to the inventor of the flying trapeze and, after Robin Hood, probably history’s most famous man in tights, Jules Léotard. In further homage to Léotard and his effete French aerialist tradition, Little Pablo and his brothers have shaved their underarms. In deference to their own Mexican macho background, however, they have not shaved their chests. “A bush under my arms would not look good,” Little Pablo said. “But my chest, that is manly.”

The manly Little Pablo, actually a boyish twenty-three years old despite his grown-up muscles, grabs the bar in his well-powdered hands, jumps from the pedestal with a slight flutter of his feet, and begins the gradual pendulum swing that is both the basic syntax and the lofty poetry of the flying trapeze. “As a boy, the first thing I learned was the swing,” he told me. “It’s really quite simple. As you leave the pedestal you swing your feet up, then on the way back you arch your back forward, swing your feet under, then throw them forward as fast as possible. It’s just like riding a swing when you’re little—that little snap of the legs is what gives you all the power. Once you get that down the rest of it just follows.”

The rest of it follows, at least for the audience, in somewhat of a confusing blur. The first trick is performed by Mary Chris. She does an initial swing to gain power and then on her second pass through the air, instead of hanging beneath the bar, lifts her body onto the trapeze itself and does a forward somersault that takes her over the bar, through the ropes, and into the outstretched arms of her husband, who has miraculously appeared above the ring at the precise moment she arrives. Catch. Once they complete their follow-through and are back in the middle of the tent, she releases his hands, spins halfway around, and once again grabs on to the bar, which she then rides safely back to the pedestal. Though few in the audience could describe what they just saw, they still burst into applause.

The next trick, a double layout, is Little Pablo’s. After completing his swing, he releases the bar in a swan-dive position, does two complete revolutions of his body, and then at the last possible moment grabs his brother’s arms. The trick after that seems even more perplexing. Danny, who is tall and shaggy compared to Little Pablo, never mastered the art of catching with his hands. Instead, after his warm-up swings, he performs two and a half revolutions through the air and is caught by his legs. The trick is impressive, a gradual escalation, but like a piece of music that takes place in different themes, the act needs a memorable climax that gives meaning to the disparate early movements. That responsibility falls to Little Pablo; the climax comes from a single trick, arguably the most famous trick in the previous century of the circus. More important, it’s a trick that everyone in the audience can understand. Everyone can count to three.

The music stops when Juan Rodríguez, alias Little Pablo, steps to the center of the carpeted platform. Not even a drumroll fills the air. It’s the first time since the show began that no sound at all is heard in the tent. All eyes turn toward the platform. Jimmy James enhances the scene.

“Introducing…the Master of the Legendary Triple Sommmersault…Fox Television Star, Juaaaan Rodríguezzz…”

A quick slap of the snares accompanies the applause. Juan raises his hand in a salute, plucks a piece of chalk from his waistline, and climbs three steps to the very top of the platform. There he prepares his body for flight. After stretching his back and clapping his hands to remove the excess dust, he grabs the fly bar held up by Danny, calls to Big Pablo on the far side of the tent, and tightens his hold around the trapeze. On his wrists he wears a three-year-old strip of cotton gauze to make it easier for his brother to grab him. On his hands he wears a small leather palm guard to prevent open sores from weakening his grip. On his fingers he wears a layer of Cramer Firm Grip to make sure he doesn’t slide off the bar. In a moment he launches his swing.

“As soon as my brother passes the center I go. I jump up, kick my feet up into the air, and begin my forward swing. On the way back I try to go as high as possible—I’m almost in a seated position by the time I reach the top of the tent. Coming down for the final time I have to let go just before I reach the top of the swing. If I let go too early, I’ll smash into the catcher. If I wait too long, I’ll fall into the net. It’s all a matter of timing.”

Like time, somersaults are measured in revolutions. Each spin marks not only the passage of time but also the passing of a generation. Indeed, as Little Pablo explained, the history of ascending somersaults is as closely followed in the circus as the number of home runs is worshipped in baseball. One historian has even compared the question of who would turn the first triple somersault from a springboard in the 1840s and 1850s to the early-twentieth-century anticipation over which aviator would first fly across the Atlantic.

The enthusiasm over somersaults switched to the air in the 1850s after Jules Léotard first leapt from one wooden bar to another over his father’s swimming pool in France. The first double somersault was thrown by Eddie Silbon in Paris in 1879. The first triple was actually thrown by a teenage girl, Lena Jordan, though her technique (being thrown from one person to another) was slightly unconventional. Instead, the glory for turning the first consistent triple somersault from the trapeze falls to lithesome Alfredo Codona, who performed the trick regularly from 1920 until he dislocated his shoulder and shredded two muscles during a performance in April 1933.

After Codona few people were able to perform the triple consistently, and the trick was considered an unattainable dream. The speed of up to sixty miles an hour, the risk of crashing into the catcher, and not least of all the mental instability that comes from spinning so quickly in the air all kept the dream out of reach. All that changed, however, in the 1960s with the advent of Tito Gaona, who not only consistently performed the triple but also performed it blindfolded. Gaona even attempted—though he ultimately failed—to catch a quadruple somersault in the air. Suddenly the standard had been raised. With the new benchmark came a new crop of performers eager to inherit the mantle of Codona and Gaona. One of these was a group of flyers from Mexico City, the Flying Vázquezes. Another was their cousins the Flying Rodríguezes.

“The first time I threw the triple was in 1980,” Little Pablo recalled. “I was ten and I made a bet with my cousin Miguel Vázquez. It was the last day of the first year we had ever worked the flying act. He and his brother came to help us. We were in Evansville, Indiana. Before the last show I told him, ‘I’ll go up and throw a triple to the net if you throw a quad.’ He had never done a quad, and I had never even done a double. I went and threw a triple, and he went and did the quad. It was an incredible moment.”

Within a year of that moment Miguel was attempting to throw the quadruple to his brother’s hands. In 1982, a year and a half after his experiment with his cousin, he tried to throw the quad on opening day for Ringling Brothers in front of Irving Feld, Kenneth Feld’s father, who had purchased the show from the Ringling family in 1968. Like Tito Gaona, Miguel failed. For two months he tried and repeatedly fell short. The dream seemed out of reach. Still, the Vázquez brothers never stopped trying, and on July 10, 1982, in front of 7,000 people in Tucson Community Center, Miguel Vázquez left the bar, turned four complete revolutions in the air, and turned yet another generation in history by catching his hands with those of his brother and completing the first quadruple somersault in circus history. The following day his feat was reported on page one of The New York Times.

“It was amazing,” Little Pablo recalled. “It was the start of a run. You have to understand, in the circus everyone has his time. Tito Gaona had his time in the sixties and seventies. In the eighties it was Miguel. But now his time is passed. Now there’s almost no one left who can even catch the triple every show, not to mention the quad. That’s why our time is now.”

His timing perfect, Juan Rodríguez leaves the bar high above the ring and immediately tucks his body into a ball. “The first thing I do is grip my knees, then right away I spread them open. When you throw your head back and pull your legs open that’s what gives you the speed. It’s called cowboying, from the cowboys, who always have their legs open. It feels like riding a roller coaster.”

By the time his arms have gripped his knees Little Pablo has already completed one turn. Since the trick starts with his head facing the catcher, every time his head returns to that point it counts as one somersault. The pace of the turns is marked by the drummer—snare! bass! crash! catch?—but Little Pablo himself doesn’t hear the count.

“I actually don’t count the spins; I just feel them. Just before completing the third somersault I break: I remove my hands and kick out my legs, sort of like doing a back dive into a pool. My eyes are open but I still haven’t seen my brother. Not until I’m ready to give him my hands do we actually make eye contact. At that point his hands are like a gift from God. Sometimes he catches my elbows, sometimes just my fingers, but as soon as we grab each other I just slide into place. If I’m late there might be a jerk on my shoulders. If I’m early I might bash into his face. But when it’s perfect nothing hurts.”

Hanging by the arms of his brother as the two of them complete their arc of triumph, Juan Rodríguez epitomizes the glory of the circus: he’s defied gravity, he’s defeated fear, he’s done what few others have done before—and done it consistently. He’s a symbol for his country, a beacon for his family, a hero to children everywhere.

And yet.

“Flying is one of the hardest acts in the business,” he lamented, “and we’ve been doing it since we were small. It’s rough. It’s hard on the shoulders; it’s hard on the mind. It’s like gymnastics. The kids start when they’re eight or nine, and by the time they’re twenty or twenty-three they get burned out. It’s the same thing here, except we work every day. Every day, every day. And for what? When Miguel first landed the quad Irving Feld gave him fifty dollars every time he caught it. Later he offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he caught two hundred quads in a year. He caught two hundred quads. Eventually Kenneth Feld stopped the bonus because it was costing too much money. By the time I was ready to try it the incentive was gone. We slapped hands a few times, but we never caught it. As long as you do the triple and catch, the owners don’t really care. Let’s face it, the quadruple somersault doesn’t put people in the seats. Why should I risk my life?”

Back at the pedestal, Juan accepts his applause with an unassuming wave. As Mary Chris and Danny prepare for the finale, a crossover leap in which the two of them pass each other in midair, Juan has already turned his mind forward—to another act (he must return in ten minutes for the high-wire act), to another day (a long drive awaits), and ultimately to another life.

“To be honest I don’t think I’m going to be doing this much longer. I like show business all right, but it’s rough. If you look at our salaries, then you look at baseball players and people like that…they don’t do shit compared to us. Not only do we have to work every day, but then we have to set up, tear down, drive, and do it all over again. Maybe I’ll stay in the business another two or three years, but then I want to buy a house. Go to school. Maybe learn to weld or something. Get a town job. Relax. That’s what we want to do, my wife and I. If you ask my dad, back when he was young the circus was great. Now it’s starting to go downhill. It’s not like one big family these days. There’s no love in the circus anymore.”

I certainly could understood his point, but welding? What about the glamour? The lights? The tent? The glory of being a “Fox Television Star,” even if it’s all just Barnum humbuggery? Ask any welder in America if he would trade his blowtorch for a shot at stardom and what would the answer be? Ask any young circus star if he wants the reverse and the answer would be surprisingly clear.

“I’m doing this because it’s what I know how to do. But for me the future is elsewhere. I can still go to school. I can still get an education. I’ve always wanted to do welding or mechanics. As long as you make enough money to pay the food bills, the light bills, the phone bills, I’ll be happy with that.”

In the circus, as in America, each generation no longer expects to jump higher, or turn more somersaults, than their parents did. Like so many others, young performers in the circus today have upward desires and downward mobility. Juan Rodríguez could fly through the air, but in the end all he wanted was to land on his feet.

His younger brother was just the same. Only he did something about it.

10

Without Saying Goodbye

Before there was Danny, there was Buck.

I spent Friday afternoon at Buck’s place, or what Arpeggio referred to as “Bucky’s Workshop.” The reason was my trunk. For four months the props department had loaded and unloaded my wardrobe trunk in each new town, a service for which I was obliged to tip them five dollars a week. Now, as a result, the wood on top was splintered, the lock on the front was broken, and the bottom was splitting its seams. Near Shea I had purchased four elbow brackets at a hardware store on Roosevelt Avenue, along with sixteen nuts and bolts. Now on Staten Island, I emptied out my mildewed assortment of dress shirts, baggy trousers, juggling balls, grease rags, makeup containers, powdered socks, dismembered roaches, and melted pieces of candy and carried the trunk over to Buck’s red van. There I spent the afternoon slowly repairing the ruptured bottom and listening to stories of Buck’s latest adventures on the nude beaches of the Northeast. Just that morning, while I was visiting the Statue of Liberty with Danny, his sisters, and their mother, Buck had driven from Staten Island to New Jersey for a few hours of total body tan.

“That’s a long way to go for a tan,” I said. “After all, you can go to the beach right behind the tent for free.”

“Well, the bridges are free when you leave the City,” he said. “Plus, they want four dollars and twenty-nine cents for a twelve-pack of Coke around here. I can buy the same thing for two forty-nine in Jersey. Plus gas is only a dollar seven. I filled up on super before I came back.”

I should have known better than to quibble about pennies with the World’s Most Frugal Clown. I asked him instead how he got started sunbathing in the nude.

“I’ve always liked going to the beach,” he said, still dressed in his skimpy jogging shorts and ratty thrift-store thongs. Folded into a wobbly director’s chair, he looked like a giant hermit crab who had long since outgrown his shell. “Years ago a friend suggested I go with him to a secret place he knew. Well, I couldn’t believe it when I first saw it: nobody had any clothes on! I decided to give it a try, and—boy!—you can really get a good tan. Then another friend told me you could buy a book of all the nude beaches in America, even the world. I still use it today.”

Buck pushed back on his heels and smiled: a life on the road, a barrel of laughs, and, as always, a hint of mystery.

When my trunk was repaired I headed back to the Alley, where the boys were just beginning to settle into their chairs and apply the first halting strokes of greasepaint. Just as I sat down Jimmy appeared in the entranceway. His reddened face had the stern demeanor that usually suggested a rebuke was imminent. Maybe we were bunched too closely in spec. Maybe he was upset that so few clowns had signed for the following year.

“Okay, boys, here’s the deal,” he said, leaning up against the entrance pole in anguished resignation. “When you make the bangs, no more shooting the shotgun behind the seat wagons. You must shoot it behind the fourth center pole, closest to the band. Plus, no more playing with the kids during autograph party. You can shake their hands. You can sign their books. But don’t touch them anyplace else…”

Some of the boys started to complain, but their pleas came out rather muted. I could feel impending doom. One of the things that had saddened me most about being a clown was all the things I couldn’t do: I couldn’t hug a child or put an infant on my lap. If a mother asked me to hold her toddler for a photograph, I had, politely, to decline. What if that child goes home at night and tells his mother he was touched by a clown? What if that child begins to cry?

“And that reminds me,” Jimmy said. “Who was playing tug-of-war with a kid during autograph party?”

The boys looked around and mumbled at one another, in the process hinting at what everyone knew. He was probably talking about Buck.

Jimmy slapped his hands together in despair. “Well, make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he insisted. “Somebody called the office and complained, and now we have an incident. I’ll have to have a talk with him.”

Jimmy left the Alley and the show began. Later that evening I passed Buck walking back toward his van. His head was drooped and he was talking to himself. He was holding his clown wig in his hand.

“Goddamned parents,” he said. “All they want to do is complain. I tell you, it’s no fun anymore. Once you take away the contact with the kids, you take the fun out of clowning. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I certainly don’t want to clown anymore.”

I brushed off his remark as another one of Buck’s low-grade grumblings. Later, when he took back his red, white, and blue barker’s jacket I had been borrowing for the stomach-pump gag, I took his comment at face value that he wanted to have it cleaned. The next morning when I saw him just before we were paid and he had a frustrated grimace on his face, I took it as a sign of the upcoming “six-pack” weekend with three shows on Saturday and three more on Sunday. That afternoon when I heard Buck had taken the day off and that I would be asked to fire the gun during the firehouse gag, it didn’t even occur to me that his absence was out of the ordinary. But by that evening I began hearing comments from some performers. A few of the workers started asking questions as well. And finally, during the second show as I was sitting in the Alley with the other clowns, the unspoken truth finally sank in: Buck had blown the show.

Immediately I felt the loss. Sure, we had lost workers during the year. Sure, I knew that in the circus people come and go all the time. But Buck seemed like such a fixture to me. He had been with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus off and on for close to forty years. He was one of the first people I met on setup day in DeLand, when he stepped into my camper, stretched his legs halfway across my floor, and told me the meaning of slukum juice—the syrupy precursor to Sno-Kones. And now he was gone. I wouldn’t have anyone to recommend whether to eat in the cookhouse (Buck’s favorite was the country-fried steak). I wouldn’t have anyone to suggest alternate routes to the next lot that were shorter than following the arrows. I wouldn’t have anyone who could direct me to the cheapest gasoline, the largest thrift store, or the best homemade pie in any city east of the Mississippi, and a few on the other side as well. I had no source for duct tape either.

And why? What drove Buck from the circus was not health, or money, or even a desire for a normal life. It wasn’t even one of the many mysteries he had been eluding all his life. Instead it was the times. Buck Nolan was the epitome of an old-fashioned clown—indeed an old-time circus man. He joined the show because it kept him on the run. He could live his life and pursue his predilections through the immunity of travel. Outside the tent he might engage in indiscretions, but inside the ring he was always professional, despite his sometimes gruff demeanor and often corny jokes. Unfortunately the distinction between public performance and private life seems less possible in America today. These days every public act is viewed as an expression of private demons.

Ultimately this is what chased Buck from the ring: a pernicious climate of mistrust, a kind of sexual McCarthyism that seems to be spreading across America. I had felt it from my earliest days on the show. In my first week as a clown a teenage boy came up to me during autograph party and asked me if I would sign his hand since he couldn’t afford a coloring book. I happily obliged. A mother who was waiting nearby snatched her daughter’s waiting hand and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “Never let a strange man do that to you.” The girl looked up at me and burst into tears. Now, for her, clown equals pervert. In Virginia several weeks later, as Big Pablo was trying to coax his four-year-old son inside the trailer, the boy started throwing a tantrum. When Pablo reached down and started tugging his arm, several high school students who were passing by started yelling, “Child abuse! Child abuse!” at the top of their lungs. Maybe it was just bad manners, maybe bad luck, but I feared it was a sign that we are starting to believe that behind every strange face—even the face of a clown—is a serial rapist waiting to pounce.

To make matters worse, no one outside of Clown Alley seemed to miss Buck at all.

“Good riddance,” one band member said.

“He was a horrible clown anyway,” said one of the performers.

“I saw him play that handshake game,” one of the butchers complained. “Usually the kid fell down when it was over.”

“So is that all there is?” I said to Jimmy, surely Buck’s closest friend on the show. “No one seems to care that he’s gone.”

“Are you kidding?” Jimmy asked. “This is the circus. I warned you, Bruce. The circus just eats you up. It sucks your blood and spits you out on the floor. If I dropped dead right now from a heart attack, I would probably lie here for several hours and then they would carry me out of the tent and red-light me from a truck tonight.”

“Red-light?” I repeated.

“Throw me from a moving vehicle. That’s what they do to people they don’t want. You’ve got to realize that. Even if we die they don’t stop for a minute. The truth is, they don’t really care.”

The next day few people talked about Buck. Some of the clowns speculated he might jump to another show. One person suggested he might just go home. Before the first show Arpeggio found one of Buck’s old size-sixteen vermilion shoes and hung it from the center pole in Clown Alley. After the firehouse gag he found a bunch of dead daisies and stuck them in the heel. Before autograph party he sketched a sign on the back of a magazine that said: WE WANT BUCK BACK.

The next day the entire effigy was gone. The World’s Tallest Clown was not mentioned again.

A week later it happened again.

“You see, I told you the circus was killing its stars.” Little Pablo was sitting on a beach chair in front of his trailer late on Friday afternoon. His dog, Jordan (named after Michael), was scratching and digging in the sandy grass behind the flea market in Commack, Long Island.

“What are you talking about?” I said. Several members of the Rodríguez family were gathered in a circle around the door, drinking iced tea and looking somber.

“Danny,” he said.

“Danny?” I repeated. “What about him?”

“He left.”

“Left?”

“In the middle of the night.”

I leaned against the open screen door. His sister looked up from the ground. “Without even saying goodbye.”

I sat down. For several moments the group was silent. A series of images from the last several weeks went skidding through my mind. Just a week earlier, after riding the ferry to Manhattan for our long-planned trip to the Statue of Liberty, Danny decided that he would rather be by himself and wandered off alone toward Chinatown. On Monday, during our first stop on Long Island, Danny and I went across the street one night for a snack and he took the unusual step of buying me a pizza. “I’m feeling rich,” he said. “Soon I’m going to have lots of money.” And then the previous night, after our first day in Commack, Danny said he was sick and stayed behind when Kris, Marcos, and I went out to a nightclub. Sean stayed behind moping over lost love.

When we came back at around two in the morning, Kris and I went to knock on Danny’s trailer. There were muffled sounds within, then clanging, and finally whispered shouts among Danny, his girlfriend, and her husband—who unfortunately had just discovered what all of us had known for the last several months. I hurried back to my camper.

“Of all the problems in the world,” Little Pablo said. “If he had stolen some money. If he had hurt somebody. Then I could understand his feeling that he had the world on his shoulders. But a girl?”

A few hours after the incident in his room Danny was seen wandering down the trailer line looking for a ride off the lot. He asked Mary Jo, but she turned him down. Finally a member of the band agreed. Danny brought his suitcase, slipped into the truck, and, before the first blush of morning awakened the tent, drove off to the Farmingdale Airport. Several hours later Johnny Pugh was just dropping off his wife at the same airport when Papa Rodríguez and his wife, Karen, came rushing into the departure lounge. “Have you seen Danny?” they asked. Johnny hadn’t. The three of them hurried to the information desk, where they learned that their worst fears had come true: minutes earlier Danny had taken off on a flight for Los Angeles. Standing in the middle of the airport, Danny’s mother started to cry.

“You know what bothers me most,” Antonio Rodríguez told me later. “Beyond what he did to his brothers, his friends. It’s what he did to his mother. She’s been crying all day.” Antonio, Danny’s cousin, was changing clothes in his room in the back of Big Pablo’s truck. The flying act would be starting momentarily. “I’m not blaming the girl, or anything—she’s married; she has her child to think about; she’s been on this circus most of her life—but last night he told his parents he would stay. They offered to give him more money. But it was the girl who wanted him to leave so he could make more money, and it was she who was the last to see him. There was all that talk about their relationship after his accident. Everybody thought he fell because he was looking at her. But he was prepared to stay. He was just worried about his plane ticket. He had already paid for it. I told him I would buy it from him and use it to go to Mexico this winter.” They had agreed that this morning at ten o’clock they would go to the travel agent and swap the ticket. “This morning he was gone.”

“And he didn’t say anything to you?”

“He left a note.”

“A note? What did it say?”

“I didn’t read it. I just put it away. If I see him at Christmas I’m going to hand it back to him. He never should have lied.”

In silence the rumors quickly spread. By evening they had turned malicious.

“They say a pussy pulls stronger than an elephant,” Big Pablo said. “Now I know why. But you know what? He can’t blame it on her. He can’t blame it on the circus. He can’t blame anyone but himself. He’s the one who got into this mess and now he has to get himself out of it. And he can forget coming to me for help. As far as I’m concerned, he’s out of the family. Anyone who breaks a contract doesn’t have any place here. And anyone who treats his own mother like that doesn’t deserve respect. He told everyone in the family he was thinking about leaving but he never came and told me. He knows I wouldn’t have tolerated the idea. I have no sympathy for crybabies. Now, I have no respect for him.”