Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (34 page)

This is America, I thought to myself. It is the circus. Could I find my way home?

Beaming in my artificial smile, I stand in the middle of the center ring and prepare for the blowoff of the gag.

“
Okay, Doctor, you’ve fixed two, but look who’s coming now
…” I point my glove toward the side door of the tent, where Rob appears in a flowery dress (with an inner tube hidden underneath it) and a tub of popcorn and a drumstick in his arms. “
It’s the circus fat lady
…”

The children giggle at the beastly sight. The fat lady stumbles into ring one, gestures toward her giant stomach, and collides, with an accompanying tympani crash, into the equally obese Nurse Anna Septic.

“
Uh-oh, Doctor. She’s got a big, fat stomachache
…”

The nurse leads the fat lady to the examining table and with a certain degree of huffing and puffing finally attaches the suction cup to her stomach.

“
Now, boys and girls, you better count loudly, she’s got a big stomach
…”

The nurse hurries over to the lever of the pump and most of the children rise to their feet.

“
One!
”

Their voices are so enthusiastic they rattle the rancor inside my head.

“
Two!
”

They want so much to believe in the clowns it would be a shame to let them down.

“
Three!
”

At the end of the count the fat lady stands up and the doctor hurries to the pump. The machine, however, is overheating—coughing and shaking, about to explode. Retrieving a rope from inside the machine, the doctor beckons the fire-eater, the fat lady, the short man, and the nurse to help him pull out the offending object.

“
Doctor, Doctor, what was the problem…?
”

The crew prepares to do battle with the machine.

“
Too much
…” They make one collective pull of the rope. “
Too much
”

They make a second tug together. “
Too much
…” And on the third yank of the rope the line of clowns falls back on the ground and—kaboom!—a giant, eight-foot rubber chicken comes bursting through the doors. “
Friiiiited chicken!
”

Ugh.

Despite this blowoff that was never quite funny, the chicken flaps his wings in the ring as the children clap their hands in amazement. The clowns, in the end, have done their job. We have distracted the audience long enough for the flying net to come down and the elephants to move into place.

Indeed, trotting back to return the microphone, I couldn’t help feeling on more days than not that being a clown is in essence being a distraction. Not only did I see it work every day on hundreds of children and their parents. I saw it work every day on me. Even in the depths of my despair about the circus I never stopped painting a smile on my face and transforming myself from a grump to a clown. The transformation wasn’t voluntary. In fact, just when I was ready to cast off my vision of the circus as a childish delusion, a young boy named Justin came running up to me after the stomach pump in Yaphank, Long Island, and asked if I would autograph his program. Hundreds of other children had asked me this in the preceding five months. But on this day—two weeks after Buck had left; one week after Danny had left; on a day when I thought I might want to leave myself—I picked up Justin’s book and signed my name, “Ruff Draft,” and the simple act seemed like a rare gift. Justin took his book back and beamed a distinctly nonartificial smile. Then he stepped forward and embraced my knees.

11

Reborn

“I felt light, like somebody was lifting my soul. The water went rushing over my body. The white gown got wet and stuck to my skin. I could feel myself transform…”

Sean Thomas was lying on his newly purchased mauve sheets staring up at the ceiling in the back of his trailer. Dressed in tan shorts and white athletic socks, he looked uncommonly crisp and clean, like a child fresh from a bath. The Mighty Mouse above his left nipple was pink from the shower. It was just after eleven on Saturday night in Toms River, New Jersey, and the show was tucked in for the night behind St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church just off the Garden State Parkway. Talk of God was in the air: Reverend Mark Fieger, the local pastor, was planning Sunday-morning services for the center ring. The Lord works in mysterious ways: Father Jack, the regular circus priest, was forced to hold mass in the cookhouse. Sean, meanwhile, had seen the light.

“The truth is, I owe it all to Jenny,” he said. “If not for her I wouldn’t have gone.”

“That Jenny,” I said. “She must be magic.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “All I know is, she’s my wife.”

When Sean hit the ground he switched direction. His new course took flight surprisingly fast.

“I remember the first time I saw her.” he said. “She came to see show in Florida at the end of last year. She was dressed real plain on account of her religion. She had no makeup on and was wearing a long dress. But she had these pretty green eyes and a killer smile. ‘Kris,’ I said, ‘who’s that?’ ‘That’s Jenny Montoya,’ he said. ‘She does a flying act.’ I asked him to introduce me to her. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But I’ve gotta warn you. She won’t sleep with you unless you marry her.’

“We started talking,” Sean remembered. “At first it was mostly about her old boyfriend and stuff. There was this guy from town who she was engaged to, but she had to break it off. He wanted her to go to college, but she told him she had to go back on the road. He thought about joining the circus, but it wasn’t really for him. Eventually they split up. I told her I had had a girlfriend, too, and basically the same thing happened. Sometimes you just can’t call from the road. Sometimes you can’t call for months. Jenny and I were talking about all these things, and the more we talked, the more we had in common. I swear we were like the same people.”

The next day Jenny came to the show again.

“I knew she was there but I didn’t say anything to her,” Sean said. “Later I was walking off the lot after the show when I heard somebody say, ‘Sean.’ I looked around and it was Jenny. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I want you to meet my pastor.’ I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even met her mom and dad. I knew something was going to happen…”

For the moment, however, nothing did. For the next three months they didn’t see each other, and when they met again in Louisville during a pre-season gig for another circus, Sean completely ignored her. “Blew her off, cold,” he said. “This was my first time on a different show. There were lots of girls. Still, I always had my eye on her. I would see what she was doing, who she was with. She was always alone or with her parents. I just kept my thoughts to myself.”

The season began for Beatty—Cole and another four months passed. The two of them were out of touch. Sean never mentioned Jenny around the lot, but his primping and nesting around his trailer belied his distraction. None of us knew why, until we reached New York. At the time there was a sudden flurry of activity. Nearly half a dozen shows were in the area, and every night performers went hurrying to see their friends on other circuses or hosted small reunions around our tent. It was in this stir that Jenny reappeared. She was quiet, shyly beautiful, and blended right in. Like most circus people, she was related to many of the performers on our show. Also she was best friends with Michelle Quiros. Nobody thought anything about her visit. Nobody, that is, except Sean.

“For a week every time I came out of the tent I would run into her. We would talk. The truth is, I made a point of talking to her, We would talk. The truth is, I made a point of talking to her, and she did the same with me. We just talked. Nothing more. I didn’t even make a move. One night we were sitting in front of the horses talking and her brother came walking by and said something to her in Spanish. She started crying.

“‘What’s wrong?’ I asked her.

“‘My brother called me a tramp.’

“‘Why?’ I said. ‘Because you’re talking to me?’

“‘Because he’s jealous,’ she said.

“‘What for?’

“‘You know my brother…,’ she said. ‘He’s jealous because I’m with you.’ Then she started laughing.

“‘No shit,’ I said. ‘You mean you people are fighting over me?’

“‘I guess so, but it’s still bad for me to be talking to you all the time. People will think. You know how the circus is….’ For a week she didn’t come back. I thought she had given in to the pressure. That’s when I hit the ground.”

In the wake of his accident on Staten Island, Sean was a different man. Isolated because of the fight, he was mostly left alone. In pain after every shot, he became surprisingly self-restrained. For the first time since he joined the circus he had been rebuffed—by his body, by his friends, and, apparently, by a girl.

Jenny, it turns out, was in a similar plight. After the incident with her brother, she got into a fight with her parents. She was twenty-three years old, she said. She ought to be able to talk with anybody she wished. Sean had encouraged her to stand up to her family. Now, having done it, she felt all alone. Finally, in a gloom, she decided to flee. With the aid of a friend she jumped into a borrowed car and drove the length of Long Island overnight to the tiny seaside town of Greenport, where the world’s largest tented circus was playing a one-day stand.

She couldn’t have picked a worse day. The lot was dusty, behind an abandoned warehouse. The circus was ornery, Danny had just left. And to make matters worse, word had just reached the lot that Elmo—on an advance publicity tour for the show—had thrown a fit at a mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, tossing his makeup into a fountain, smearing black greasepaint on a photographer’s bald head, and quitting the show in a late-summer huff that seemed to prove that no one was immune to the back side of the circus pendulum. It was hardly the right atmosphere for a confrontation, but at this stage one could hardly be avoided. Jenny’s parents, realizing what she had done, hopped in a car themselves the following morning and headed out in pursuit. The circus would have a rival show that night, just at the time that Billy Joel was said to be bringing his children to the circus.

Jenny arrived just as the first show was ending.

“I saw her step out of the car,” Sean recalled, “and I could see the tension on her face. She tried to avoid me and go straight to Michelle’s, but the high wire was working and nobody was home. Finally she came over to the cannon. ‘Man, you just need to get away from your parents,’ I told her. ‘They’re driving you crazy. You can’t do anything. They’re treating you like a child.’

“‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m not happy. But there’s no way I can leave. I have no place to go.’

“‘Sure there is,’ I said. ‘You can come with me.’”

“‘I can’t go unless I get married,’ she said.

“‘Well then,’ I said, ‘let’s get married.’”

“
Ladies and gentlemen, our featured attraction, the World’s Largest Cannon…!
”

The ringmaster’s voice interrupted the scene. With Jenny left standing at the altar, Sean excused himself to go do his act. By the time he returned Jenny’s mother had arrived. “‘Sean,’ Jenny said, ‘I want you to meet my mother.’” Sean went over and shook her hand. Jenny’s father was parking the car. “‘Mom,’ Jenny said, ‘Sean wants to marry me.’

“‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I love your daughter.’

“‘That’s good,’ her mother said. ‘That is very good. But what about my husband?’

“‘I’ll tell him,’ I said. ‘I don’t care. Let’s go tell him now…’

“‘No,’ Jenny said. ‘No, we can’t. I’m afraid.’”

The second show started. Jenny went to find her father. During intermission she reappeared.

“‘Guess what?’ Jenny said. ‘My mom told my dad.’

“‘And…’

“‘He said he likes you. He said you’re a decent man. You’re clean. You shave good.’”

Shaving? For months Jenny’s father had been observing Sean. In Florida he had seen the act. In Louisville they had shared a dressing room. In Greenport, finally, they met face-to-face.

“I went to see him after the show,” Sean said. “He was standing by himself. ‘I love your daughter very much,’ I said. ‘I want to marry her.’

“‘Sean,’ he said without hesitation. ‘I want you to know. This is the happiest day of my life.’”

Two days later Sean Thomas Clougherty and Jenny Montoya were married in a private ceremony near Yaphank, Long Island. That day he twice got shot out of the cannon.

“The funny thing was, I never even held her hand until I asked her to marry me,” Sean said. “I never even kissed her until we were engaged.”

“So in the end, Kris was right,” I said.

“But I wanted it like that. I wanted it to be all new with the girl I married.”

“You’re just an old-fashioned romantic after all.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“So why do you think her parents were so happy?”

“Because I’m a good guy.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re a jerk.”

Sean laughed.

“Anyway, you’re not Pentecostal.”

“So what? You can always change. I told her I would be willing to do anything to marry her. She said, ‘I don’t want you to change just for me; I want you to change for God…’”

No sooner had he said that than Jenny walked through the door. Though it was still quite warm outside, she was wearing a straight beige skirt that stretched to her ankles and an off-white blouse that was buttoned around her wrists. Her skin was unpainted around her eyes. Her brown hair hung straight to her waist. She looked like a piece of smooth, unvarnished wood. She was beautiful. Unadorned.

“Isn’t she the greatest wife in the world?” Sean asked, sitting up and slapping his thighs.

“Isn’t he just silly?” she countered, pushing him down with insouciant aplomb.

Earlier in the evening the two of them had invited me for dinner—stewed chicken and rice, Wonder bread and butter. It was the first time I had seen silverware in Sean’s trailer. It was the first time they had received houseguests. All night the two of them alternately bickered and cuddled like the strangers and newlyweds they still were. “You are the most hyper person I know,” she said to him when he jumped on her back and kissed her neck. “You are the most stubborn girl I’ve ever met,” he retorted when she slapped his hand away from the stove. They would snap at each other, apologize quickly, then roll around on the floor in a frantic embrace. “It’s just that time of the month,” Sean whispered. “All girls are like that.” “It’s just right after his act,” she countered. “All circus boys are like that.” After dinner she washed the dishes and took the leftovers to Michelle and Angel while Sean lay on the bed and recounted their story. The number of pillows had blossomed again. Not only mauve, now, but fuchsia and lavender. Sean’s old black blanket had disappeared. So had his gold necklace with the Florida Gator.