Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (31 page)

It’s also subtly patriotic. The bar that hangs thirty-two feet from the ground and vaults the flyers through the sky is wrapped entirely in white gauze with two inches of red tape on the right fringe and two inches of green on the left. “Red, white, and green,” Little Pablo boasts. “The colors of the Mexican flag.”

“Hey!”

As soon as the entire family is in place they shout a mutual salute. Then the warm-up begins. The first on the bar is Little Pablo himself. Like his brothers, he is wearing neon-pink tights with flaming sequins on the side and a pink see-through vest that barely covers and in truth only accents his well-sculpted upper body. The look, sort of Mr. Universe meets the Sugar Plum Fairy, is an homage to the inventor of the flying trapeze and, after Robin Hood, probably history’s most famous man in tights, Jules Léotard. In further homage to Léotard and his effete French aerialist tradition, Little Pablo and his brothers have shaved their underarms. In deference to their own Mexican macho background, however, they have not shaved their chests. “A bush under my arms would not look good,” Little Pablo said. “But my chest, that is manly.”

The manly Little Pablo, actually a boyish twenty-three years old despite his grown-up muscles, grabs the bar in his well-powdered hands, jumps from the pedestal with a slight flutter of his feet, and begins the gradual pendulum swing that is both the basic syntax and the lofty poetry of the flying trapeze. “As a boy, the first thing I learned was the swing,” he told me. “It’s really quite simple. As you leave the pedestal you swing your feet up, then on the way back you arch your back forward, swing your feet under, then throw them forward as fast as possible. It’s just like riding a swing when you’re little—that little snap of the legs is what gives you all the power. Once you get that down the rest of it just follows.”

The rest of it follows, at least for the audience, in somewhat of a confusing blur. The first trick is performed by Mary Chris. She does an initial swing to gain power and then on her second pass through the air, instead of hanging beneath the bar, lifts her body onto the trapeze itself and does a forward somersault that takes her over the bar, through the ropes, and into the outstretched arms of her husband, who has miraculously appeared above the ring at the precise moment she arrives. Catch. Once they complete their follow-through and are back in the middle of the tent, she releases his hands, spins halfway around, and once again grabs on to the bar, which she then rides safely back to the pedestal. Though few in the audience could describe what they just saw, they still burst into applause.

The next trick, a double layout, is Little Pablo’s. After completing his swing, he releases the bar in a swan-dive position, does two complete revolutions of his body, and then at the last possible moment grabs his brother’s arms. The trick after that seems even more perplexing. Danny, who is tall and shaggy compared to Little Pablo, never mastered the art of catching with his hands. Instead, after his warm-up swings, he performs two and a half revolutions through the air and is caught by his legs. The trick is impressive, a gradual escalation, but like a piece of music that takes place in different themes, the act needs a memorable climax that gives meaning to the disparate early movements. That responsibility falls to Little Pablo; the climax comes from a single trick, arguably the most famous trick in the previous century of the circus. More important, it’s a trick that everyone in the audience can understand. Everyone can count to three.

The music stops when Juan Rodríguez, alias Little Pablo, steps to the center of the carpeted platform. Not even a drumroll fills the air. It’s the first time since the show began that no sound at all is heard in the tent. All eyes turn toward the platform. Jimmy James enhances the scene.

“
Introducing…the Master of the Legendary Triple Sommmersault…Fox Television Star, Juaaaan Rodríguezzz…
”

A quick slap of the snares accompanies the applause. Juan raises his hand in a salute, plucks a piece of chalk from his waistline, and climbs three steps to the very top of the platform. There he prepares his body for flight. After stretching his back and clapping his hands to remove the excess dust, he grabs the fly bar held up by Danny, calls to Big Pablo on the far side of the tent, and tightens his hold around the trapeze. On his wrists he wears a three-year-old strip of cotton gauze to make it easier for his brother to grab him. On his hands he wears a small leather palm guard to prevent open sores from weakening his grip. On his fingers he wears a layer of Cramer Firm Grip to make sure he doesn’t slide off the bar. In a moment he launches his swing.

“As soon as my brother passes the center I go. I jump up, kick my feet up into the air, and begin my forward swing. On the way back I try to go as high as possible—I’m almost in a seated position by the time I reach the top of the tent. Coming down for the final time I have to let go just before I reach the top of the swing. If I let go too early, I’ll smash into the catcher. If I wait too long, I’ll fall into the net. It’s all a matter of timing.”

Like time, somersaults are measured in revolutions. Each spin marks not only the passage of time but also the passing of a generation. Indeed, as Little Pablo explained, the history of ascending somersaults is as closely followed in the circus as the number of home runs is worshipped in baseball. One historian has even compared the question of who would turn the first triple somersault from a springboard in the 1840s and 1850s to the early-twentieth-century anticipation over which aviator would first fly across the Atlantic.

The enthusiasm over somersaults switched to the air in the 1850s after Jules Léotard first leapt from one wooden bar to another over his father’s swimming pool in France. The first
double
somersault was thrown by Eddie Silbon in Paris in 1879. The first triple was actually thrown by a teenage girl, Lena Jordan, though her technique (being thrown from one person to another) was slightly unconventional. Instead, the glory for turning the first consistent triple somersault from the trapeze falls to lithesome Alfredo Codona, who performed the trick regularly from 1920 until he dislocated his shoulder and shredded two muscles during a performance in April 1933.

After Codona few people were able to perform the triple consistently, and the trick was considered an unattainable dream. The speed of up to sixty miles an hour, the risk of crashing into the catcher, and not least of all the mental instability that comes from spinning so quickly in the air all kept the dream out of reach. All that changed, however, in the 1960s with the advent of Tito Gaona, who not only consistently performed the triple but also performed it blindfolded. Gaona even attempted—though he ultimately failed—to catch a
quadruple
somersault in the air. Suddenly the standard had been raised. With the new benchmark came a new crop of performers eager to inherit the mantle of Codona and Gaona. One of these was a group of flyers from Mexico City, the Flying Vázquezes. Another was their cousins the Flying Rodríguezes.

“The first time I threw the triple was in 1980,” Little Pablo recalled. “I was ten and I made a bet with my cousin Miguel Vázquez. It was the last day of the first year we had ever worked the flying act. He and his brother came to help us. We were in Evansville, Indiana. Before the last show I told him, ‘I’ll go up and throw a triple to the net if you throw a quad.’ He had never done a quad, and I had never even done a double. I went and threw a triple, and he went and did the quad. It was an incredible moment.”

Within a year of that moment Miguel was attempting to throw the quadruple to his brother’s hands. In 1982, a year and a half after his experiment with his cousin, he tried to throw the quad on opening day for Ringling Brothers in front of Irving Feld, Kenneth Feld’s father, who had purchased the show from the Ringling family in 1968. Like Tito Gaona, Miguel failed. For two months he tried and repeatedly fell short. The dream seemed out of reach. Still, the Vázquez brothers never stopped trying, and on July 10, 1982, in front of 7,000 people in Tucson Community Center, Miguel Vázquez left the bar, turned four complete revolutions in the air, and turned yet another generation in history by catching his hands with those of his brother and completing the first quadruple somersault in circus history. The following day his feat was reported on page one of
The New York Times
.

“It was amazing,” Little Pablo recalled. “It was the start of a run. You have to understand, in the circus everyone has his time. Tito Gaona had his time in the sixties and seventies. In the eighties it was Miguel. But now his time is passed. Now there’s almost no one left who can even catch the triple every show, not to mention the quad. That’s why our time is now.”

His timing perfect, Juan Rodríguez leaves the bar high above the ring and immediately tucks his body into a ball. “The first thing I do is grip my knees, then right away I spread them open. When you throw your head back and pull your legs open that’s what gives you the speed. It’s called cowboying, from the cowboys, who always have their legs open. It feels like riding a roller coaster.”

By the time his arms have gripped his knees Little Pablo has already completed one turn. Since the trick starts with his head facing the catcher, every time his head returns to that point it counts as one somersault. The pace of the turns is marked by the drummer—
snare! bass! crash! catch?
—but Little Pablo himself doesn’t hear the count.

“I actually don’t count the spins; I just feel them. Just before completing the third somersault I break: I remove my hands and kick out my legs, sort of like doing a back dive into a pool. My eyes are open but I still haven’t seen my brother. Not until I’m ready to give him my hands do we actually make eye contact. At that point his hands are like a gift from God. Sometimes he catches my elbows, sometimes just my fingers, but as soon as we grab each other I just slide into place. If I’m late there might be a jerk on my shoulders. If I’m early I might bash into his face. But when it’s perfect nothing hurts.”

Hanging by the arms of his brother as the two of them complete their arc of triumph, Juan Rodríguez epitomizes the glory of the circus: he’s defied gravity, he’s defeated fear, he’s done what few others have done before—and done it consistently. He’s a symbol for his country, a beacon for his family, a hero to children everywhere.

And yet.

“Flying is one of the hardest acts in the business,” he lamented, “and we’ve been doing it since we were small. It’s rough. It’s hard on the shoulders; it’s hard on the mind. It’s like gymnastics. The kids start when they’re eight or nine, and by the time they’re twenty or twenty-three they get burned out. It’s the same thing here, except we work every day. Every day, every day. And for what? When Miguel first landed the quad Irving Feld gave him fifty dollars every time he caught it. Later he offered him a bonus of ten thousand dollars if he caught two hundred quads in a year. He caught two hundred quads. Eventually Kenneth Feld stopped the bonus because it was costing too much money. By the time I was ready to try it the incentive was gone. We slapped hands a few times, but we never caught it. As long as you do the triple and catch, the owners don’t really care. Let’s face it, the quadruple somersault doesn’t put people in the seats. Why should I risk my life?”

Back at the pedestal, Juan accepts his applause with an unassuming wave. As Mary Chris and Danny prepare for the finale, a crossover leap in which the two of them pass each other in midair, Juan has already turned his mind forward—to another act (he must return in ten minutes for the high-wire act), to another day (a long drive awaits), and ultimately to another life.

“To be honest I don’t think I’m going to be doing this much longer. I like show business all right, but it’s rough. If you look at our salaries, then you look at baseball players and people like that…they don’t do shit compared to us. Not only do we have to work every day, but then we have to set up, tear down, drive, and do it all over again. Maybe I’ll stay in the business another two or three years, but then I want to buy a house. Go to school. Maybe learn to weld or something. Get a town job. Relax. That’s what we want to do, my wife and I. If you ask my dad, back when he was young the circus was great. Now it’s starting to go downhill. It’s not like one big family these days. There’s no love in the circus anymore.”

I certainly could understood his point, but welding? What about the glamour? The lights? The tent? The glory of being a “Fox Television Star,” even if it’s all just Barnum humbuggery? Ask any welder in America if he would trade his blowtorch for a shot at stardom and what would the answer be? Ask any young circus star if he wants the reverse and the answer would be surprisingly clear.

“I’m doing this because it’s what I know how to do. But for me the future is elsewhere. I can still go to school. I can still get an education. I’ve always wanted to do welding or mechanics. As long as you make enough money to pay the food bills, the light bills, the phone bills, I’ll be happy with that.”

In the circus, as in America, each generation no longer expects to jump higher, or turn more somersaults, than their parents did. Like so many others, young performers in the circus today have upward desires and downward mobility. Juan Rodríguez could fly through the air, but in the end all he wanted was to land on his feet.

His younger brother was just the same. Only he did something about it.

10

Without Saying Goodbye

Before there was Danny, there was Buck.

I spent Friday afternoon at Buck’s place, or what Arpeggio referred to as “Bucky’s Workshop.” The reason was my trunk. For four months the props department had loaded and unloaded my wardrobe trunk in each new town, a service for which I was obliged to tip them five dollars a week. Now, as a result, the wood on top was splintered, the lock on the front was broken, and the bottom was splitting its seams. Near Shea I had purchased four elbow brackets at a hardware store on Roosevelt Avenue, along with sixteen nuts and bolts. Now on Staten Island, I emptied out my mildewed assortment of dress shirts, baggy trousers, juggling balls, grease rags, makeup containers, powdered socks, dismembered roaches, and melted pieces of candy and carried the trunk over to Buck’s red van. There I spent the afternoon slowly repairing the ruptured bottom and listening to stories of Buck’s latest adventures on the nude beaches of the Northeast. Just that morning, while I was visiting the Statue of Liberty with Danny, his sisters, and their mother, Buck had driven from Staten Island to New Jersey for a few hours of total body tan.