The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
© James C. Hess
When I was growing up a sure sign summer was not far off was the arrival of the circus.
The circus: A one-ring, flea-bitten, rag-tagged, frayed, worn, and fraudulent effort whose redeeming feature was the sideshow barker, who attempted to con people into believing in the impossible: The bearded lady, the unicorn, the monkey boy, the fortune teller, etc.
No one believed anything he said, by way of his quicksilver banter, but more than a few people were more than willing to believe in the possibility of the impossible.
I recall the year I stopped believing in him: I ran into him, the sideshow barker, at the gas station a block from the empty lot where the circus had set up. His greasepaint had run because he was sweating, he reeked of cheap booze and cigarettes, and there was the distinctive stench of recent puke about him. He looked at me with red-rimmed eyes, coughed around the coffin nail seemingly stuck to his lower lip, and offered me a free pass to the circus.
I shoved it into my front pants pocket without thanking him, and was about to turn and leave when the gas station attendant suddenly produced a wretched looking towel that he handed over to the sideshow barker. As I watched the barker was transformed: The greasepaint came away without concern or difficulty, the cigarette disappeared, the stench, the foul smell, the wretchedness he had been was wiped away.
He looked at me, and smiled, showing perfect white teeth. Then he slicked his hair back, shook the stress from his shoulders and neck, tossed the towel to the attendant, and said, simply, 'Until next time.'
And then he was gone.
Years later, after I had finished with college, I found myself in a bookstore in Boulder, CO., jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with nearly a thousand other people, waiting. Waiting for a sideshow barker to appear, to welcome us to his circus.
And then he did.
But this time he wasn't sweaty, nor did he reek of cheap booze and cigarettes, puke, and the certain smell of fraud. He was well-dressed, well-groomed, well-mannered, and perched rather precariously atop a wooden table, making him sufficiently higher than everyone else.
That he was taller than almost everyone else in the room, owing to his natural height and the stacked-heel cowboy boots he then wore was incidential to the occasion. He was taller, higher than everyone else because he was, simply, Douglas Adams.
