A drifter stumbled across a circus that had come to town.  He  treated it like a freight train and he asked the owner if he could come along  for a ride.

“We always have room for people looking for a new life”, and they  hired him at a penny’s wage to do odd jobs around the circus.

He had a place to sleep and he always had food to eat but he wanted  to make some money.

He asked the ringmaster, “How can I make some  money?”

“Well, you need to have an act.  You need to do something that the normal man would not do.   They will live through you in whatever you do.  We have tightrope walkers.  Do you think that each person in the audience isn’t  wishing they could do that?

I can’t do that.

“Would you like to bite the heads off of live chickens?  We have an  opening for a circus geek.”

“No, I can’t do that either”.

“Well, you need to have an act if you want to make any money, and it has to be visual.  Think about it.”

When the circus passed through Rantool it happened to be junk day.   Everyone who had anything to throw out left it on the curb.  The drifter saw an old iron ball-and-claw bathtub and he had to have it.  They threw it on top of the lion’s trailer.  He picked up all kinds of wood and  two-by-fours.

He told the ringmaster that he wanted to jump off a platform into the  ball-and-claw bathtub. The ringmaster thought about it and he thought that that could be the beginning of a great act.  The drifter got fifty dollars for each time he jumped off the platform into the bathtub.  The drifter used to  bang his head on the side of the tub but he learned how to fall so he only hurt his body and not his noggin.

The Circus was not doing well.  The ringmaster told the drifter that he needed to jump from a higher platform.  The circus people doubled the height of the platform and on the first night the drifter hit his head on the tub  really bad, but he was ok.

The circus made the drifter a headliner.  He was jumping thirty feet into a bathtub full of water.  Each and every time the drifter wondered what he got himself into but he was making fifty bucks a jump and that was great.

When the circus passed through the town in Dundee, the other drifters  found a large ladder and they added it to our jumper’s platform.

On the night of the performance he was anxious about the jump from his new height.  It was no longer a choice to jump,  he was TOLD to jump.

He brought a beer up the ladder with him.  He stood looking at the bathtub and wondered if he would live through this one.  He also wondered if he should jump.

I have always wondered if he jumped or if he turned around and quit  this stupid business.  The fact remains; he either jumped and died, jumped and quit or retreated down the ladder and gave up his career as the Great Garbonzo  Beans.