Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (28 page)

Those who lacked it were desperate to get it. Workers, for example, regularly hounded performers for money. One went so far as to steal money from one of the clowns while we were doing the firehouse gag. Another, more innovative, purchased a metal detector and staked out dibs to be the first person to search under the seats after each performance. Those who had it, meanwhile, were desperate to stretch it. One senior staff member, realizing the need workers had for cash, offered to pay an advance to every worker on the Wednesday before payday. He would give them seventy-five cents for every dollar of their paycheck, then claim the full dollar for himself from their salaries five days later. In the Middle Ages, this noncompounded annual interest rate of 1,300 percent would probably have made usury the eighth deadly sin.

Still, one of the things that amazed me most about the circus was how these workers—who by the time they took their draws might make only fifty dollars a week—could live in complete harmony within inches of the show’s owners—who in a good year could split nearly a million dollars in profit. In stationary America, fences, guardhouses, zoning laws, and approval boards usually make sure there’s a greater distance between the haves and the have-nots. Without these barriers, the owners were almost compelled to be generous with their money, if for no other reason than to preserve the loyalty of their workers and the safety of their possessions. In the first half of the year alone Doug personally loaned out close to $25,000 to various people on the show, including $12,000 for Michelle and Angel Quiros to buy a new truck when the one they had purchased from a Pentecostal friend in Florida broke down during its second month on the road. The couple was teary-eyed with gratitude. “No other owner in the world would do that,” they sobbed. “Anyone else would have fired us on the spot.”

For all the equilibrium on the lot, however, and for all the profits the show was making in the first half of the year ($153,000 in April alone, twice as much as the year before in the midst of a recession), Doug could still rarely manage a smile. First he had the problem of dispersing all that cash. Most banks will not accept large deposits of cash from out-of-towners, he noted, because they have to report every transaction involving over $10,000. The process became even trickier in the early 1980s, he said, when Florida banks were accused of laundering money from drug dealers. Even today Doug and Johnny receive an average of one or two calls a year from people seeking to launder money. Instead, they take the equally risky approach of driving long distances with hundreds of thousands of dollars in small bills. Like political correctness, gender equality, and racial tolerance, the much-heralded cashless society has yet to reach the circus.

The second and much more serious problem Doug faced was the skyrocketing cost of protecting the show. In 1983 the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus paid a total of $80,000 for insurance. Ten years later that figure had ballooned to just under half a million—over $200,000 for trucks and general liability, and an equal amount for workers’ compensation. In the weeks leading up to his leaving the show, Doug spent much of his time trying to renegotiate these rates. The show had produced only $50,000 in claims in recent years, he argued, surely his rates were exorbitant. Safety was up, he asserted, risks were down. By late May he thought he had a breakthrough when suddenly the show was battered by a series of mishaps—Danny fell from the swing, Henry chipped his teeth, Big Pablo was told he needed knee surgery—followed by a series of freak accidents—man killed by an elephant, woman slashed by a bear, worker drowned in a pond. “We are not liable for these incidents with the animals,” Doug said, “especially the one in Fishkill. But when you bring ten elephants into a small town you make a pretty big target.”

By early July, when Doug was ready to leave, business was up, but morale was down. The show was ready for its old captain at the helm. On the morning of July 4, Doug hopped into his maroon Cadillac with the EDH plates and headed south down I-95. The same day Johnny arrived in his matching white Cadillac with BIG TOP on the plate. The show breathed a collective sigh of relief. Little did anyone realize, however, that within a week the show would have its first genuine financial crisis of the year.

KEEP OUT THE CLOWNS
, blared the headline in
Newsday
on Thursday, July 15.
ISLIP BARS CIRCUS, CITING COMPLAINTS
.

The news from Long Island stunned the show. In the nine-month season of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus the seven weeks the show spent in New York were considered the highlight of the season, a core stretch of dates when business was usually good enough and the crowds generally enthusiastic enough to make up for the grit and grind of the City. The New York engagement was also the pearl of Doug and Johnny’s revived marketing strategy. The circus didn’t merely play New York City, it played the City’s parks. The invitation came about after years of intensive lobbying of the Parks and Recreation Department. As soon as a creative profit-sharing agreement was reached, the show moved first to Forest Park, then to Shea Stadium, Staten Island, and the Bronx, and finally this year into Marine Park in Brooklyn, a grassy lot off Flatbush Avenue not far from Coney Island. Business overflowed in most of these areas, but the red tape was nearly overwhelming.

In most towns along the route the show would pay around fifty dollars for a building permit and maybe twenty-five dollars for a health inspection. Police and fire departments were usually willing to provide complimentary protection just so their members could stand in the wings and watch the show for free. In New York nothing was free. In fact, the circus was forced to pay more than $2,000 a lot in surcharges: $200 for building permits; $100 for food handlers’ permits; $250 for fire guard licenses; and $1,500 for fire permits covering the tent, the welding machines, the generators, the truck repair shop, and the two carbonic drink dispensers. To make sure these rules were followed, an inspector sat in the front of every show taking notes like a court stenographer. “In the past we used to resort to bribery,” Johnny recalled almost fondly. “The fire inspector would come on the lot and say, ‘I sure would like to bring my family to the show.’ We’d give him some tickets; he’d sign the sheet and leave. These days we can’t do that anymore. If they don’t like that and want to cause trouble, I’ll just follow them all over the tent and agree to the changes they suggest. They’ll usually tire of the process and leave.”

Sometimes, however, they don’t. Early on in the show’s stay in New York one fire marshal was so peeved that he decided to shadow the ringmaster throughout the performance. “It was awful,” Jimmy recalled. “He was standing next to me and between every act he would slap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Make another no-smoking announcement.’ Finally, after about ten no-smoking announcements I got so sick of listening to the man that I turned to him and said, ‘Go fuck yourself!’ You can imagine what happened. He stormed off in a huff and went looking for one of the managers. The one he found was napping in his trailer. The fire marshal pounded on the manager’s door, waking him from his sleep. ‘Sir, your announcer just told me to go fuck myself.’ ‘Well, what do you need from me?’ the manager shouted. ‘Directions?!’”

Despite occasional breakdowns like this, the
aboveboard
bribes that the City demanded hardly hurt the circus’s bottom line. As soon as we hit New York the show stopped its policy of giving out discount coupons; it added a third show on Sunday evenings (though salaries were not increased); and it raised ticket prices by a dollar. Still we couldn’t keep people away. In Marine Park the community was so overjoyed that a circus would venture into its isolated neighborhood that families thronged the lot at all hours of the day and we turned back nearly a thousand people every night. All fears that New Yorkers would be hostile and cynical were, for the moment, laid to rest. In fact, several days after we left the City the following letter appeared in the
Daily News
:

CAN’T (BIG) TOP THIS

Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages, I witnessed a miracle in Brooklyn! I saw families sitting together, laughing, having good clean fun—no violence, no nudity, no dirty language. Where was this rare occurrence? At the circus in Marine Park. A
big
thank you to the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus and N.Y.C. Department of Parks and Recreation.

E. Francis

The show was still savoring this unexpected bouquet when the bombshell arrived from Long Island.

“Where does a two-ton elephant sit?” quipped
Newsday
in the opening line of its article about the circus being banned. “Anywhere it wants to—except Islip.” The article went on to report that the Islip Town Board had voted 4-1 to deny a permit to the circus “based on pressure from animal rights activists and a recent incident where a man was killed in a freak accident at the circus.” “Animal lovers have come out of the woodwork,” said the town clerk, whose office received a reported one hundred letters and thirty phone calls protesting the show’s alleged cruelty to animals. Complaints included inadequate food and the use of cattle prods, the report said. Also, protesters cited the incident in Fishkill as proof that animals are potentially dangerous. “God forbid [the elephants] should break loose here,” one board member was quoted as saying. “About fifteen years ago at a Republican parade here, an elephant was scared by a car that backfired. It broke loose and trampled the car.” The one dissenting vote came from a member who said stories of animal abuse are “greatly exaggerated,” much like the story of the Islip elephant. “Every time I hear that story the elephant gets bigger,” he reportedly said.

By the time the news arrived on the lot the elephant had gotten even bigger and the impact even larger. Johnny Pugh was irate. Meltdowns this serious weren’t supposed to happen on two weeks’ notice, especially on Long Island. Johnny had even hired a fixer for the area, a man with widely touted connections, who was supposed to escort the show effortlessly through its three-week stay on the Island—a place with well-known political and family rivalries. Now the system had broken down. In the days after the incident was first reported the details became clearer. Johnny believed that one particular animal rights activist from Islip was behind the circus being canceled. She had been bothering the show for years, he said. This year she demanded that she be allowed to speak before zoning boards in Commack and Yaphank. In Commack she was denied because the flea market where the circus plays is zoned for circuses. In Yaphank she reportedly stood up and read for twenty-five minutes from Rudyard Kipling’s
Just So Stories
.

“Listen, I’m concerned about animal rights, too,” Johnny griped. “Hell, my wife spends a lot of time running after stray cats and dogs. But this is going too far. When I was a child I used to have an original copy of Kipling with gold on the pages and a piece of tissue paper over every drawing. I wish I’d never given it away. Maybe that would show them I care.”

At this stage it probably wouldn’t do much good. The debate itself had already become part of the absurd theater of American political life, with each side posturing, sloganeering, and even threatening legal action over the other’s head. In one corner were the protesters. “We welcome the clowns and acrobats,” one mother in Islip had said in the meeting, “but please spare us and our precious children the spectacle of animal torment.” In the other corner was the circus. Johnny and Doug told their lawyer to consider bringing suit against the organizers for slandering the circus, disrupting business, and generally being a nuisance. In the middle were the politicians. Worried it might have failed to give the show due process, the town of Islip began bending over backward to appease the circus. The media, of course, were all over the story. Radio stations in the area began blasting the town board, especially after they learned that proceeds from the show’s three-day run were to benefit the Talented Handicapped Artists Workshop, known as THAW. Several lawyers in the area who regularly took their children to the circus went so far as to contact the show and offer to sponsor a class-action lawsuit against the town. The circus is supposed to bring its own entertainment to town, but with bumbling local officials, grandstanding lawyers, bleeding-heart protesters, and heroic handicapped artists, the cancellation of the circus brought out a far more interesting sideshow of modern American freaks and gold diggers. The publicity was priceless.

“We didn’t want it to happen this way,” Johnny said after he extended our stay in Staten Island for three days and then booked the same lot in Islip for the following year. “But in the end this case may bring us more good than harm. The truth is, I’d hate to see the animals disappear. Look at the audience. When they think of circuses, they think of animals. They can see acrobatics or gymnastics on television. They can see sports anywhere they want. But they have no chance to see trained animals. Even the ones at the zoo don’t do anything. That’s why they come to the circus, and that’s what they remember when they go home. A circus without animals is just not a circus.”

For all his breathless enthusiasm, Johnny knew those days might soon be over. Animal acts, like the circus itself, are being pressured out of business. Human acts, even the interesting ones, can hardly fill the void. People are much less reliable than animals…and much harder to control.

Second Half

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