Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (11 page)

“Oh my God,” I said. “I look like a clown.”

Elmo smiled. “But you’re not a clown. You’re just a person in makeup. I’m afraid there’s a big difference. Only a child can decide who is a clown. The key is persona. A persona is what distinguishes a person in makeup from a clown.”

Thus chastened, I closed my eyes and held my breath as Elmo blasted my new face with his powder sock. Even before I could work on my persona, the first step to being a clown, I realized, would be getting used to this onslaught of powder. The second step would be getting used to the onset of mud.

As the end of the gag approaches, the clowns gather themselves together and move one last time to save the lady, who at this point is standing on top of the house wailing and flailing her arms and screaming for the firemen to save her baby. “Don’t worry!” Arpeggio calls. “We’re trained professionals.” “I hope you have insurance,” Rob adds. The audience cannot hear these lines, they are just for our own amusement. “Hurry up,” Henry says, “I have to fart.”

“
Firemen, firemen, save my baaaaby
…,” Jimmy cries over the microphone.

Our first task is to save the baby. Christopher, who is playing the old lady, holds the blond baby doll above his head and tosses her in one giant arching motion toward the top of the tent. As the audience gasps, the baby comes somersaulting toward the firemen’s net, where the clowns bounce it with a grunt and send it back into the air. Sometimes Henry would catch the baby at this point, at other times it would land on the ground. When this tragedy happened I would run to the side of the baby and give it one last chance at life with a desperate rendition of clown CPR.

All eyes turn back toward the lady. She powders her cheeks, looks down at her house, and bends over in preparation for a final dive to safety. When she is just about to make her leap for life, a bright red fireball of nearly nuclear dimensions comes blasting up from inside the house and nearly consumes her exaggerated rear end. The audience shrieks in delight. Now greatly alarmed, the lady bends over one more time as another burst of flames, this time even brighter, fills the ring with terror and the clowns with fright. The audience cheers again.

“It’s the danger,” Elmo explained. “Look at some of those old Charlie Chaplin movies. He’s walking on a high wire with a monkey on his shoulders that has its hands over his eyes and there’s a banana peel thrown on the wire. People love to watch others challenge death. The fire emphasizes that.”

In truth, the fire itself was hardly dangerous. It came from a substance called lycopodium, a dried Mexican fern processed in New Jersey that American midwives used to put on umbilical cords to dry them after birth. In the container lycopodium is not flammable, but when it is blown into the air and comes into contact with a flame (in our case a lighter) it makes a dramatic fireball that looks real but doesn’t burn. Magicians discovered it, Elmo said, and it was used in
The Wizard of Oz.
In our gag it received the biggest laugh.

“People don’t expect it,” Elmo said. “Also, it hits the lady on the behind. The tushy is very funny, especially for little kids. Where do they get punished? Where do they get spanked? A behind is a sacred thing for a kid. It’s never shown to others. It’s never touched. Therefore we want to make fun of it.”

After two bursts of fire the lady is desperate. The audience is crying for her to jump. The clowns holding the net begin sprinting toward the house. The lady bends over one last time, when out of nowhere a deafening blast jars everyone in the tent, one last fireball spurts out of the roof, and the lady jumps for her life, hoping against hope to be caught in the net, but only to land miserably in the mud. Just as she lands, a clown appears from the house waving his hands in distress: his pants have caught on fire. This is the ultimate defeat. Not only could the clowns not put out the fire or catch the baby or save the lady but we also managed in our bungled confusion to set
ourselves
ablaze. Undaunted, we jump to our feet in unison and run out of the ring to the traditional romp “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

4

Outsiders Always Make Mistakes

Kris Kristo had a certain way he went about preparing to go out. First he pulled on his skintight white jeans, his white T-shirt with the pack of Marlboros in the sleeve, his satin tiger-skin vest. Next he slicked back his hair, lightly spritzing it with Brut and gently tugging a few strands over his dark brown eyes and the small seductive scar across his left eyebrow. Finally, on special nights like this, he applied another layer of black spray paint on his well-worn biker shoes, giving them a five-cent patent-leather shine. Once primped, he would slowly make his way down the trailer line collecting his posse for the evening prowl: first Sean, in a neon-pink shirt and cowboy boots; then Danny in purple silk top and black Ferragamos; finally me in orange Gap button-down and shiny penny loafers. On the surface I looked as if I didn’t belong with this group, yet I had two things that Kris Kristo usually needed for a night out. First, transportation; and second, prophylaxis.

“Hey, Bruce,” Kris said when he arrived at my RV, “mind if I borrow a condom?”

My first week on the show I was overcome by the grind. With no day off and no break from the routine, all I could talk about was how tired I was, how much work there was, how hard this life was to lead. I got sick. I didn’t know when to sleep. I lost several pounds. My life was turned upside down. By the second week, when we moved from central Florida to the seaboard coast of Georgia, I noticed that when people asked how I was doing I no longer spoke only about the grind. I developed a routine. I ate breakfast in midmorning, my milk no longer frozen. I ate lunch in early afternoon, with my makeup to follow. I ate dinner after the 7:30 show. By the third week, when we jumped to North Carolina to play the Azalea Festival in Wilmington and Camp Lejeune around payday, I began to look forward to performing. I no longer missed my
New York Times
or
MacNeil/Lehrer
. I felt naked without my makeup. In short, I began to feel at home.

The real reason was my neighbors. Any fears I had about not being accepted because I was a writer were quickly quelled. First, instead of trying to conceal their true identities, many people on the show flocked to my trailer in those opening weeks anxious to confess their deepest vices and gravest misdeeds (not to mention a few federal crimes). Their motivation, it turns out, was simple: they were worried that someone else would tell me first. In the span of several weeks, from mid-March to early April, I had intimate, almost confessional conversations with nearly every performer on the show and had already begun to develop a sense of the multilayered and sometimes dark personal fabric that ties members of the circus world so closely to one another.

Second, instead of viewing me as an intruder, the people on the show reached out to embrace me once they realized I was prepared to do the show alongside them every day. Nellie and Kristo Ivanov, Bulgarian aerialists and parents of nineteen-year-old Kris and his younger brother, Georgi, lent me aspirin, fed me soup, and laughed along with me as I stumbled, eyes agog, from one shocking circus discovery to another. Pablo Rodríguez, fifth-generation acrobat and retired father of Danny and all his seven siblings and half siblings, put his arm around me every afternoon and told me how much I was worth that day: sometimes I was merely a twenty-five-cent clown, other days a million bucks. Dawnita Bale, Elvin’s twin and owner of the show’s largest collection of wigs, shared her daily complaints about the weather, the drive, or the general agony of deciding what shoes to wear in the ring.

The closer I got to the people around me, the more I discovered the unspoken social order that dominated their lives. In the 1950s, Dawnita told me, married performers were kept away from single performers, single men were kept away from single women (“accidental meetings at the picture shows were not tolerated”), and all performers had to sign back in by 11
P.M
. Performers were not allowed to socialize with “roustabouts” (the former name for workers), and roustabouts were not allowed even to speak to performers unless they were spoken to first. On our show, the rules were less rigid, but still firm. Performers were advised to be friendly with the workingmen, but not to become friends with them. Animal people tended to socialize with animal people; performers with performers; clowns with clowns. Particularly crimped by these rules were the single male performers. Since there were few single women in the circus (and none in their late teens or twenties), since most of these guys easily tired of watching borrowed videos with their parents, and since all they seemed to want to do anyway was get out, get drunk, and get laid, the single men in the show banded together most evenings in one common pursuit: chasing townie girls. It was on one of these nights in Camp Lejeune that I ended up in an unlikely clash of wills with the Human Cannonball on the grounds of the Marine Corps base.

As it happened, I didn’t want to drive my RV that night. The ground was muddy and I didn’t want to get stuck. The day had already been unlucky. Earlier, two hundred Marines had come to the lot to challenge two elephants to a tug-of-war in a mammoth publicity stunt and battle of the sexes (though referred to as bulls, all the elephants on the show were female). At the start of the face-off the two hundred Marines lay flat on the ground on either side of the rope just inches from Pete and Helen, the pride of Fred Logan’s herd. As soon as one of the clowns ordered the bout to begin, the leathernecks popped to their feet and started grunting, straining, and pulling the rope with admirable esprit de corps. Within seconds, just when the GIs seemed to be gaining the advantage, the rope suddenly split in the middle of the Marines and ricocheted up the line, sending the entire company to the ground, singeing the hands of nearly two dozen men, and burning off large chunks of the neck and face of eight unfortunate USMC warriors, who had to be sent to the emergency room. For their part, Pete and Helen hardly flinched but forwarded their regards.

Instead of driving in my RV, we took a cab to a place called Club 108, an unassuming cinder-block building on the outskirts of town just past the longest strip of machismo—auto-parts shops, gun dealerships, dirty-magazine outlets—that I had ever seen. It was four dollars for members, six dollars for nonmembers. Kris tried to talk our way in by offering free circus tickets, but they refused. “Show us your IDs and give us your six bucks,” the manager barked. As we did, one of the bouncers, a man with steroid-inflated arms, tight blue jeans, and suspenders (no shirt), pushed through the line. “Get the fuck out of the way,” he said. “I’ve got a knife.” Two particularly burly guests were herded out of the bar, followed by a third with blood spewing from his nose, which in the course of the evening had been thoughtfully relocated alongside his ear.

Inside it looked as if we had suddenly been transferred from eastern North Carolina to downtown Tokyo. There was a three-tiered sound system climbing the wall like aluminum ivy, covered with multicolored lights, a fog machine, and rotating sirens. A towering scaffolding structure, a sort of jungle gym for grown-up GI Joes, stretched from one end of the playpen to the other, from the ceiling to the smoky sky. Inside, outside, and all around this metallurgic monstrosity stood four hundred freshly shaven, freshly paid Marine neophytes and no more than fourteen scantily clad young ladies. The whole scene looked like a beer advertisement gone berserk. We walked in, bought drinks, and surveyed the scene. Sean and Kris sat down and started moping because there were not enough girls. I got up and started dancing by myself; soon Danny followed. In this menagerie no one seemed to notice that the circus was in town.

Even though I wasn’t able to put it to much use myself, in the annals of pickup lines there can’t be many opening remarks that receive a better response than “So, did you see me in the circus tonight?” Kris Kristo, a master of lines himself, also had devised one of the best closing lines that I had ever heard: “So, would you like me to give you a tour of the animals?” Elephants, it seems, make a great aphrodisiac. Tigers are even better.

As I had observed from my first days on the show, there is a curious, almost palpable sexual energy surrounding the circus. The costumes, the music, the drumrolls are all part of a gradual seduction that performers play out on the audience, trying to satisfy every dream, daring to titillate at every turn. In Henry Miller’s Paris, circus performers lived and performed in the red-light district, among the vaudevillians, strippers, and prostitutes. In some ways the association is fitting. The ringmaster, king of the cathouse so to speak, leads the customers through the show—building tension, enhancing the excitement, and finally releasing the performer for his or her climactic trick. The word “trick” itself, from the French “to deceive,” is applied equally to streetwalkers and wirewalkers, harlots and harlequins. At the end of the night the customers float out of the house with their dreams fulfilled—their fantasies realized—and return to their daily lives.

For many of the performers and audience members alike the show is just a tease-and artificial exposition removed from reality. But for others the tease is irresistible. Many of the young men who grow up in the circus are particularly seduced by their magical power. “Circus people are performers,” Jimmy James said to me. “They know people are looking at their bodies. They know people are fantasizing about them. When they get out of the ring they are no different. They tend to enjoy themselves.” Kris Kristo, who was one of the first performers to befriend me and welcome me into his family, was a well-traveled, well-toned, well-endowed performer equally at home in the ring and on the dance floor. Born in Bulgaria, raised in Western Europe, and now coming of age in America, he had established a peerless seduction routine. In the show he would use his muscleman juggling routine or his motorcycle-on-the-high-wire act to pique the fantasies of women in the audience; then afterward he would use his innocent-waif-wronged-by-an-ex-girlfriend story or his Italian-wine-connoisseur-Romeo pose to win over their hearts. The outcome was a different girl almost every night and a lot of borrowed condoms.