Barrett The Caney Kansas Jail Break

A Memoir
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5439-3332-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 168 Seiten

An American adventure story set in the 1950s and 1960s that follows the life of Paul Barrett, a working class kid from Queens, New York, who falls in love with the rodeo at a matinee performance in Madison Square Garden. The story details Paul's freewheeling journey, along with the smooth-talking RJ Christy, and other young boys from New York City who also have big rodeo dreams. They roam New England as hired hands in wild west shows, and travel west in hotel Chevrolet as rodeo competitors in the days of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. It's a life where hard work and perseverance are relentlessly trumped by lady luck in determining Paul's fate, and whether or not he can make his championship bull riding dreams come true.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barrett, Paul

Leseproben

Wild West Shows Back in those days, any event with horses that wasn’t a circus was called a rodeo - even wild west shows. The difference between a wild west show and a rodeo was that at a wild west show a cowboy was paid to mount out bulls and bucking horse and do all the events. A rodeo, on the other hand, is a competition. Money is put up for each given event, with the pot being split among the winners. In the 1950s there were still a few wild west shows left over from the early days. There was a wild west show at the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. I was a young teen when I went to see it and it was a hell of a show. It belonged to a guy named Jackie Westcott from South Jersey. Jackie looked like a Salvation Army worker. He had black, horn-rimmed glasses and he was a good all-around hand. He was a trick rider, and a trick roper and a pick-up man. Jackie ran the wild west show with his sister and his niece. His niece was freckled with a good body. They also had help from another family from South Jersey. Jackie had four trucks: three semi’s for the livestock, and a bobtail truck for the chutes and the arena. I walked down to the hole of the Kingsbridge Armory where they were watering horses and asked them if I could help. They undid some horses and walked them over. That was when I met Billy Arnold and RJ Christy. Billy lived in a better part of Long Island and he wanted to be a bull rider, but he also understood the importance of education. He came from a family of Russian Jews. His father was an architect but I think he made most of his money at the race track. I went over to Billy’s house all the time and we became good friends. I remember his father told me once, “You know what? You’re a natural storyteller. You ought to be a storyteller.” It would be another fifty years before I actually became one. RJ lived in the Bronx and hung out in Pelham Bay Park at the riding academy with some other guys. RJ was Italian, and he was an egomaniac. He lived in an apartment with his parents and he had two sisters, one younger and one older. He was slim built, about five-foot-ten with long eyelashes and thick, dark hair. He sounded like George Carlin when he talked, mostly because all people from the Bronx sound like George Carlin. RJ told me that his dad had been a driver for the Mafia in the late thirties and early forties. The three of us had a common bond in that we all wanted to be cowboys. We wanted to run away with Jackie Westcott’s wild west show, so off we went. It was a hell of an adventure for us, we were just a bunch of snot-nosed kids. We got to drive old Rio trucks, big, sixteen-wheelers with governors on them. We’d pull the throttle out and drive them up and down the hills of New England and Virginia. Help was always needed at these shows so we went to work. We got two-dollars-a-head for mounting out bulls and bucking horses. We also had to set up and tear down bucking chutes and arenas. When it rained, we would have a “mud-eo” because the contractors wouldn’t shut down the show if the performances were already booked. A mud-eo was a rodeo where the people would pay fifty-cents to sit in a covered stand and we’d be out in the pouring rain, cracking gates. You would have to drop down on bulls and bucking horses in the rain. Sometimes their legs would go out from under them and they would go out from under you, and sometimes they would slide ten feet. When the gates opened, the bucking horses and bulls would try to buck but they would slip and slide sideways and front ways and their legs would get all tore up. It was a hell of a learning process for us. Wild west shows sometimes played alongside contract acts like hell drivers which consisted of people like Irish Herran and Jack Kochman. Irish Herran had white cars with green shamrocks on them, and Jack Kochman’s hell drivers had orange cars with black stripes. Three or four drivers in these car acts would drive around a race track at about a hundred-miles-an-hour. They would cock the wheel and slam on the breaks, spinning their cars around in tight donuts. In another version of the show, they would get old cars from wrecking yards and pile them high. Then cars would speed up on ramps and crash into the piles. The goal was to earn points by causing the biggest crash and doing the most damage. County fairs were something else back in those days. They still may be, but I don’t think that they are quite like they used to be. Nothing is. One summer, we went to George Hamid’s Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Everybody called him Uncle George. He had booked entertainment for the owners of the Steel Pier since 1925, then he purchased the Pier in 1945. He had a woman in his show who rode a white horse up a ramp to jump off a high tower into a tank of water there in Atlantic City. A movie was made in 1991 about one of the first riders to perform the dive, a girl named Sonora Webster. I remember when we went to the Steel Pier to set up the chutes on the race track. It was a macadam blacktop racetrack where stock cars raced. They still use macadam tar on runways at airports, which is why it’s called a “tarmac.” We were setting up the chutes on the track when Jackie Westcott asked Uncle George, “So are you gonna put sand down or tear this up?” George responded, “Hell no! We’re gonna have stock car races here in two or three days after you guys leave. We ain’t tearing anything down, but I’ll pay for any livestock that gets hurt.” I overheard the conversation and laughed to myself, “Yeah, ‘any bulls or livestock.’” So we built the chutes on top of the blacktop. Boy, it was something to see. The bulls and bucking horses jumped out of chutes and their feet would slide every which way. They got all that black stuff on them and skinned up their knees and raised a lot of hell. It was quite an adventure. We drove semi-trucks with Alabama license tags because you could tag those semis for seven dollars in Alabama. We drove them up and down the mountains and all over the country. RJ didn’t want to do much work because he was a promoter and a ladies’ man. His concept of life was sex and money – not necessarily in that order. He was supposed to be responsible for watering the grand entry horses, and a few days before a show one time he neglected to do it. As they were making the second turn into the arena, those horses saw the water trough in the corner and they galloped straight for it. Some fell down on one knee trying to get to the water and some of the girls who were riding the horses fell off. Those horses gulped the water down through their bridles. It was RJ’s fault that they were so thirsty, he was always screwing up. Another time we were in Virginia and a bunch of steers got loose. We saddled up some horses to go find them in the woods. We looked half the night and were able to gather most of them up but some of them got away. While I was hunting for them in the dark, I came across a little shack with smoke coming out of the chimney, just a little ol’ shack in the woods. Tied up outside the shack was the paint horse that RJ had been riding. I went inside the single room and saw two black women and RJ sipping some wine. They were drinking wine and having a party. Jackie called RJ “Lightning” because he damn sure didn’t want to do anything that involved work, at least not anything that was physical. There was one show where RJ was running around with a girl for the first two or three days of the performance. By the last performance, her old man was sitting in the stands with a shot gun lying across his lap. He never found out who RJ was. We slept in dugouts in baseball fields or in the back of bobtail trucks. We would wash our clothes in a big, old washtub and dry them out in the bobtail. I can’t quite remember for sure, but I think it was in Galax, Virginia. He just kind of appeared. He was tall with a slouch cap and an old, corduroy suit jacket that was too short for him. His arms cleared it by six inches. He was wearing high-top shoes. I asked him if I could help him, and he said, “I would like to go with you guys.” I said, “You mean you want a job?” He replied, “If I can get one.” I asked him about his parents and he said he didn’t have none. I asked him, “What’s your name, kid?” “They call me ‘Coltrane.’” We went to find Jackie. I spoke up and said, “Jackie, he needs a job.” Jackie peered through those black, horn-rimmed glasses, looked Coltrane up and down and said, “Okay. Now go set those mud sills.” Money was never mentioned. I don’t think that Jackie gave him much but he became one of us. He didn’t ride any bucking horses or bulls but we all accepted him. He was a hard worker. He never said a bad word or complained about anything. Like the rest of us, he just wanted to belong. Now in the South in those days, some restaurants would let coloreds eat in the back and others didn’t, but if they didn’t we would bring him sandwiches. One night at a ballpark somewhere in the South, the bobtail was backed up to a dugout. I slept in the bobtail and looked over at Coltrane sleeping on a bench. There was a full moon that night and the moon shone down on him. His cap was...