In the late spring of 2014, I became a father for the second time. Around the same time, my father lost his gig at a faire that he had been doing since I was a child. There was no real explanation given to him. With the strength of his fan base, the success of his various shows, and deep roots in the local community, my theory has been and always will be that my brother slept with the wrong person in the organization, and they cut our dad as retaliation. 

Whilst the prodigal son skipped merrily off to a prestigious circus in Peru to later come back with dashed hopes and a deviated septum, I was left to pick up the pieces stateside. 

“I got a gig at the Ohio Renaissance Festival,” my dad said between bites of whatever he was chewing. He loves to eat on the phone. 

“I was wondering if you’d do the Knife Throwing Show with me?”

Ah yes. The Knife Throwing Show. A thing of legend and lore. The story goes that back in the ‘80s he and his early partner, Frank, promised their director at Trump Castle in Atlantic City that they could do a Knife Throwing Show. 

They could not. But that’s show business. Promise you can do something to get the gig, and then figure it out. Opportunities are too precious to squander.

Once they got hired to do it, they were given an office and there in Trump Tower, they practiced in secret, filling the drywall with hole after hole with stray gashes of thrown knives. To hide their misdeeds, they covered the wall with posters. 

I, like my brother, had performed in the show in the past, but it had been a long time, and it was only for a stray week or two here and there when his main partner at the time needed a sub to fill in. There was never a great deal of pressure or expectation put on us.

This was different. This was an 8 week gig, three shows a day, with a man who had not started over at a faire in a long time. This was a serious situation. I’d need to throw knives, pass clubs, pass knives, and do a solo juggle routine

I shifted my newborn son from one shoulder to the other. My summer prospects looked bleak. I had just returned to Florida after crashing out of the Video Game Industry in Austin spectacularly. Defeated, I lied to U-Haul and said I needed a one-way truck to San Antonio (the cheapest rate they offered), then loaded my family up and drove back to Florida before dropping it off at a U-Haul somewhere in South Florida in the dead of night, stinking of failure and shame. After some time, I found myself back in St. Pete, working under the table at the coffee shop of a man who was slowly being radicalized by Facebook. This once-rational man began bandying about phrases like “Jade Helm” and “False Flag Operation”, much to my consternation, and desire for him to provide for his family with a successful business. My morning routine consisted of brewing coffee for irate retirees and gently steering the owner away from political talk before he inevitably alienated yet another long-time customer. 

Then there was the Dip Guy, an ex-baseball agent whom I met at a farmer’s market while slinging lemonade under a Walmart brand EZ-UP. He was the sort of employer that I often attracted with my work ethic, charisma, and aversion to asking difficult questions. He had set up a summer schedule for me to sell pre-packaged dips for him at state fairs. It was a rough gig at times. I’d get flown out or drive to the ass-end of the country, set up a storefront in some fairground warehouse, and work 18-hour days for 12-20 days in a row, before tearing it all down and doing it again. 

Tiffany had just squeezed a newborn out and I was staring down the barrel of a 21-day stand in Alameda County, California. Neither of us was happy about it. I had no choice but to go, as I had just turned down what would be my last Game Industry job offer working at EA Tiburon on NBA 2K Whatever for $10.00/hr, but it would be nice to extricate myself from the grueling state fair schedule, which was lucrative, but untenable, and the local coffee shop gig, which I enjoyed, but also bummed me the fuck out.

I looked at the calendar. The last gig I had selling dips was in mid-August. I could do it. The show could buoy me into the next fiscal quarter, which recruiting agents kept insisting would be when my fortunes would turn around. They never did, but I didn’t know that yet.  

“Sure,” I said. “I’d love to do the Knife Throwing Show with you.” 

The months rolled by, with me going off to California, New Jersey, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania. An undue amount of pressure hit early into the summer season when the Dip Guy called me from jail. He told me that he got arrested at the US/Canadian border trying to visit Niagara Falls on charges of Grand Larceny. The pressure of keeping the business running fell largely on me, with duties such as ordering the product, texting his ex-wife in Spanish pretending to be him, and sending him money to order snacks at the Prison commissary.  At the final show of the season in State College, Pennsylvania, I suffered a tooth infection, record-low sales, and a broken front end that totaled my 2004 Dodge Durango. 

With the bulk of my Dip Guy money still being owed to me, and the Dip Guy being let out of jail on bond, I felt things would start to go my way. I could buy a new truck and make it to the Ohio Renaissance Faire with plenty of time to rehearse for a few weeks.

I arrived in Ohio in a rental car and set up the tent that would be our home for the next 10 weeks. Tiffany and I didn’t know it yet, but the crisp and cozy autumn we imagined spending in the shadow of an idyllic midwestern farm town would be the coldest and wettest autumn on record, and we’d be crammed in a dank, freezing tent with a screaming newborn and a confused but well-intentioned 5-year old.

All this could have been made better with the money the Dip Guy owed me, but true to his name he Dipped on me and never got me what I was owed. He made some very convincing arguments as to why it was my fault that he didn’t pay me everything I was supposed to get, and by the time the whole thing was over my ass was sore and I had more questions than answers. 

Dad and I began practice in earnest, with no money in my pocket, no car, and the knowledge that putting my entire family into a shitty tent for 10 weeks maybe wasn’t the best idea. 

My head wasn’t in the game. We practiced for hours. My brain was wracked by anxiety and doubt. Hunger in my belly and a tremor in my hands. My dad was wondering if losing his 20+ year contract was a harbinger of things to come. Was he over? Was he obsolete? Would all the dominos fall now, and if so, what would he do? 

Most Renaissance Faire performers don’t have retirement plans. How could we? We don’t make that much. We mostly just don’t think about it and work till we die. Which, to be frank, is too young. A lot of us die too young.

Juggling is hard. It may look easy. It is not. There are certain people with a specific type of autism who can excel at the craft and make it look easy. I do not believe a neurotypical can be a successful juggler.

The thing about juggling is this. You must throw the object you are throwing incorrectly in every permutation of incorrectly so many times until you can intuit how to catch the incorrect throw. You can not practice fucking up. You must juggle until your spirit is broken. You will bend over thousands of times, chasing after skittering clubs or bouncing balls. And you will juggle again.

Passing clubs, knives, or torches with a partner compounds this difficulty. Especially if the person you are learning to pass with is a seasoned juggler. 

I’d often look down at the holes detritus of dropped juggling clubs and then back up at Dad and say “Can we be done?” To which he’d give me a sad shrug and say “Look, I already know how to do this.” 

I got the point. We weren’t practicing for him. And I’d pick the clubs up and we’d go back to it. 

We’d go to a coffee shop and drink a cup of coffee, then go into the back alley and pass clubs, counting up to 100 passes in a row in Italian. We’d do it with clubs, and we’d do it with knives. And then we’d do it again. And again. And again. 

And when we weren’t juggling I was throwing knives at a target, each time the knife zinging from my hand a vision of it burying deep into my Dad’s thigh. My ears rang with what I thought his scream might sound like, and my face flushed red with the image of the audience gasping at me in horror.  

We juggled until our hands were raw and the thwack of the club landing in our palms sent electric shocks through our bones. One day I told Dad the story that my brother Caleb had told me many times from a Hungarian Circus family we knew, about how the father made the sons juggle heavy wooden clubs in the bitter Budapest winter, each rotation cracking into their hands with a sharp, brutal clack. They were made to juggle day in, and day out until they were perfect. 

“Jeez, that guy sounds like a dick,” Dad said, oblivious to what felt to me an obvious parallel, before picking the clubs back up and starting again. 

Caleb told me that practicing with Dad was like being in a pool with a shark, and he was right. He radiated a strong desire to never practice again, and that came across as aggression, where it was simply just a lust for sitting in coffee shops and chatting with the locals. At the same time, I radiated incompetence and laziness. An unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. On one end, a man facing the obsolescence he long feared, and on the other, a man trying to hold his life and family together with nothing but bailing twine and duct tape, with neither truly listening to the other. 

We practiced and we practiced and my improvement was slow. Dad was patient but I could sense the anxiety sitting heavy on his chest. A day or two before opening I under-rotated a juggling knife pass and the tip of it dug deep into the meat of his palm. The knives were dull at the blade and the tip, but moving metal is still moving metal and a tip is a tip. A flash of fury seized him and he screamed in frustration, throwing a knife straight down, its dull, rounded tip sinking deep into the stage floor and for the first and only time in my life I saw a fit of naked anger from the man who cried when Obama was elected and wrote and sang songs about peace, love, and understanding. 

We opened the show, and we survived. It was hard. Over time, I got better. 

Over time, I got good. I never went back to the Video Game Industry. You travel through life not by road, but by forest. By rivers and mountains and blizzards and oceans. And I love where the wilderness has taken me.

Dad said, and still does say, that the goal is for a skill to become so rote that you don’t even have to consider it, so you can focus fully on your performance. 

For a show that hasn’t changed barely a line in over 30 years, you’d think the performance would be the thing that would be rote but that’s where you’d be wrong. The skills are the reason the audience sits down. The performance is the reason they stay. 

Ten years later, we’re still doing the Knife Throwing Show together. It’s one of the great privileges of my life, to share such an iconic show with a man I love so dearly. My brother and I have also done it together, with me holding the honor of being the only other person in the show’s history to perform Dad’s role. 

It’s a powerful thing, to know that one day if I’m lucky, I’ll perform this show with my sons or my nephew. That one day I’ll watch them perform it without me. God willing, I’ll see them perform with my grandchildren. 

Remember when you sit down to watch a band, or a juggler, or, god forbid, a magician, you’re watching not just the performance, but every moment that has led to your sitting in front of them. You’re watching struggle, pain, and legacy manifest. I write this not to condemn the process, but to exalt it. You can not be good at something until you have been bad at it for a very long time, and when it comes to live performance, the nature of the deployment is that you literally must suck in front of strangers for years before it returns dividends.

I think that’s special. It’s a beautiful thing, to want to be good at something bad enough to subject strangers to your failure. 

The other day Dad asked if I wanted to warm up in the morning, after not having done the show together for a year. I just shrugged at him and shot him a smirk. “Look, I already know how to do this.”