by Bruce Feiler
“I never dreamed of being a circus star,” Kathleen said, and her demeanor suggested why. Her brown hair hung uncombed around her shoulders; her pale face was devoid of makeup. She looked more like a tomboy than a showgirl. “I just wanted to spend more time with the cats.”
But suddenly she was a circus star. Her picture was in the newspaper, her story was on television. People came for miles to see her opening performance. Then, on Kathleen’s first day in the ring, the unthinkable happened. With documentary film cameras rolling and reporters filling the seats, she was knocked down by one of the cats, Simba. The next show it happened again, and the following day it also happened, Kathleen barely escaping injury with each time. The experiment seemed a failure. Everyone on the show expected her to quit.
“At that point it was a challenge,” Kathleen said. “None of the people on the show thought I could do it. None of them. Not one. Everybody is extremely cruel here. They all thought I would fail in a week and go crying home and Josip would have to replace me. Screw you guys, I said. I’m going to show you I can do this.”
Kathleen did show them she could do the act, though she never truly mastered the routine and never really liked it very much anyway. Incidents like the cat escaping in Reading only heightened her frustration. Other performers on the show blamed her for not locking the gate. She countered by blaming the crew. In any case, her isolation only deepened. To make matters worse, at times her five-minute act stretched to twenty or twenty-five minutes. It got so bad the members of the band actually kept a running tab of the number of times they had to play “Cat Mambo” waiting for her to perform one trick (the high was twenty-six, the low six). At that point, Kathleen decided to bring someone on the road with her to combat her loneliness. She invited an old high school boyfriend from Atlanta to visit her in winter quarters. He was a zoologist who had recently graduated from West Georgia College and had nothing much to do. He came for a month, he stayed for the season. The kept woman now had a kept man.
“When I first came I wanted to be with Kathleen,” Khris said. “She was my first love in high school and will always be the love of my life. But after about the first month I grew attached to the cats and I couldn’t see myself leaving. No matter what, I wanted to stay with them. No matter what, I wanted the act.”
A battle for the center ring arose.
After two seasons in the ring Kathleen had begun to tire of the pressure. She wanted to give up performing in the ring but still retain control of the tigers’ breeding and care. Khris, meanwhile, had begun to fantasize about performing, but he was reluctant to take the reins of the act without control of the tigers’ welfare as well. Inevitably a split occurred: Khris moved to the couch in Kathleen’s trailer; Kathleen started dating Khris’s brother; and Josip, who by this time had taken up with another woman in Germany, got trapped in the middle: his ex-girlfriend had de facto abdicated his cat act, all but handing it over to her ex-boyfriend, whom he, the owner, had never met.
The situation came to a dramatic head just hours after the new tent was raised, just three days before the opening performance of the season. Josip had signed a contract, his cats would be in the show, but Kathleen refused to perform, even though her picture was in the program and her portrait was on the front of the banner truck along the circus midway. Johnny and Doug were in a panic: the show that still bore Clyde Beatty’s name needed a cat act at all costs. Finally, on Wednesday, just minutes before the dress rehearsal, the owners announced the resolution: the act that was owned by the Legendary Josip Marcan, an act that had been trained in part by his former girlfriend, the Lovely Kathleen Umstead, would be presented for the upcoming season by her now estranged boyfriend, the Great Unknown, Khris Allen.
But one catch: Kathleen would still be with the show and she’d still be living in the same trailer as Khris.
After having the cats sit on their hind legs, Khris moves steadily through the heart of the program: a two-tiger rollover on the ground, a nine-cat walking carousel around the ring, and a hind-leg hop by Tobruk designed to show off the prowess of a full-grown tiger. In a further maturation of the European style, all the cats in Khris’s act perform natural tasks—walking, sitting, leaping, rolling—with no jumping through hoops, no prancing through fire, and no wrestling with the trainer in mock jungle fashion. To exemplify this point, Khris liked to tell reporters along the route that he was not a “lion tamer” at all, but a “cat choreographer.” He didn’t teach tricks, he said, he “enhanced natural behaviors.” In short, he was a diva of cat nouveau.
The cats, for their part, seem to love their new, ennobled status. With each behavior, they glide slowly, almost genteelly, through the routine as if they were walking through a Victorian parlor dance. Occasionally one will pause, slap a flirtatious paw at another cat, or growl menacingly at the trainer. When this happened, Khris would snap his eight-foot kangaroo-hide whip or flick his leather riding crop in the tiger’s direction. Nothing too hostile, only commanding. He knows he must stay in control.
“The cats are very sensitive to my moods,” he said. “If they know I’ve had a bad day, they’ll toy with me and do stuff just to piss me off. Sometimes it’s because there’s a big crowd, and they’ll think, ‘Oh, he won’t discipline me because of all the people.’ If it’s a small crowd, I can be a little bit more of a disciplinarian. It’s just like if you go into a supermarket with a kid and he’s pulling stuff off the shelf. If there are a lot of people around, you scold him. If there are not so many people around, you spank his butt. If he’s been doing it a lot, and there are a lot of people around, you smack him anyway.”
The act climaxes with a heart-stopping shoulder stand. Khris calls Fatima from her pedestal into the center of the ring. Standing slightly hunched over the full-sized tabby and holding a piece of raw horsemeat in each of his hands, Khris shouts, “Up, Fatima! Up!” and braces himself for the tiger’s four-hundred-twenty-five pounds as she plops her front paws on his narrow shoulders just inches from his face.
“In truth, it’s a bit overwhelming to have this thing in your face. I’m five feet six; she’s probably close to seven and a half feet. Her breath smells like a dog’s. I give her meat from the right hand, then the left. Then what I’ll do is put my hands on her paws and she gives me a kiss.”
“A kiss?” I said. “What does that entail?”
“A kiss is a kiss. She puts her lips on mine, though tigers don’t actually have lips.”
“So what does she think she’s doing?” I said.
“I have no idea. She just did it one day, and I thought, ‘This is pretty cool, I’ll do it again.’”
“Do you actually go so far as to pucker up?”
“Yes. It feels like I’m kissing a mustache. Her mouth is bigger than mine, and sometimes she’ll lift her lip and slip me some tongue.”
“Some tongue?” I said, thankful for not having to ask that question.
“Some tongue,” he repeated with a wink of his eye.
At this point in the routine Khris sends Fatima back to her cage. Tobruk, Barisal, Simba, and Zeus are already in their home cages. Khris is nearing the finale of the act. He warms to the audience. He seems, for the first time, to be enjoying himself.
“There are two types of people in the world,” he said, “those who don’t mind stepping into the ring with nine tigers and those who do. I’m an Aries. I don’t mind taking risks. I recently read that Aries men are casual types who like to feel comfortable and secure at home, but like competition in the rest of their lives. That’s me. When I’m gone and through with the act, not very many people will remember Khris Allen as a cat trainer or cat performer, but I see myself as playing a little part in history. I’ve always been like that. On my volleyball team in college, on my baseball team in high school, I always wanted to be the one who made the play. Here I’m making the play every day.”
Khris ends his act with a jumping display—no fire, no hoops, just the cats on their own. He calls down two tigers f
rom their pedestals and has them stand side by side in the middle of the ring. Next he beckons Orissa, the fierce snow white, who slowly cases the two upright tigers, then on command from Khris boldly leapfrogs over their backs, back and forth in near slow motion, to the applause of the audience, the cymbal crash of the drummer, and the eventual reward of a piece of horsemeat, personally delivered by the trainer himself at the end of an aluminum ski pole. The act is nearly over. Orissa is sent home. As the remaining cats follow, Khris climbs on the back of Tito, his anchor cat, and rides his majestic shoulders to the mouth of the cage line.
“Ladies and gentlemen…,” Jimmy James calls, “from Atlanta, Georgia,…American zoologist Khris Alllllen.”
Khris skips to the middle of the ring and accepts the applause with a quick bow and a wave. Some people, he knows, are delighted with his performance, others are probably disappointed, a few maybe even upset.
“Let’s face it, forty-five percent of the people are saying, ‘Oh my God, look how beautiful those cats are,’ another forty-five percent are saying, ‘I wish he had gotten his ass chewed up.’ The other ten percent are probably saying, ‘Oh, those poor cats.’ I try to focus on the positive. Sometimes there will be a very enthusiastic person who really enjoyed the show. When I leave, I’ll walk up to that person and shake their hand, because they were appreciative and because they’ll say, ‘You know what I did at the circus? I shook the hand of the tiger trainer.’ That makes it all worthwhile.”
Though his performance is finished, Khris’s work has just begun. Before he can remove his Captain Kirk outfit and settle down for a few minutes’ rest, the cats must be removed from the tent, quickly watered, and fully fed. The props crew must dismantle the cage, stack it in piles, and pull it away. The tasks are awkward, the crowd needs distraction, in circus tradition the ringmaster calls: send in the clowns.
3
First of May
Few people are more cherished on a circus lot than a First of May. He, or even she, can be embraced, abused, ridiculed, or ripped off. All of these happened to me during my first four days on the show.
“Oh shit. Who the hell are you? And what are you doing here?”
When I drove my camper onto the lot the Sunday evening before setup, I was greeted by the show’s official parking guru and grouch, Gene, a surly, swollen old-timer whom everyone on the circus called Hippo. With the physique of a bouncer and the charm of a tiger in heat, Hippo was the show’s twenty-four-hour man. He taped red arrows to road signs along the route every other night to guide the drivers, laid out the stake line on the new lot, and directed the trucks and trailers to their parking spots as they arrived throughout the night. The first two jobs he did well. As for the third, well, Hippo has been lucky over the years that none of the performers has had very good aim when it comes to throwing stakes.
“I’m a clown,” I said. “I’m new.”
“Well, fuck,” he said. “I don’t have room for you. I think you better leave.”
I laughed. He snarled. Then he gestured for me to follow.
My inaugural hours around the circus lot were like awkward moments in a new country where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t have a map. More importantly, I didn’t have a place to park. Before leaving home I had purchased an RV, the insider’s term for a recreational vehicle, alternately called a motor home, a camper, or, according to my dealer, a honeymoon on wheels. While the workers (as well as some of the clowns and musicians) lived in sleepers—semitrucks with cots in the back like overnight Italian trains—the performers were required to provide their own accommodations. After a crash course on mobile living (“Think small,” I was told by a friend and RV fanatic, “but not too small. If your milk falls out of the fridge during a drive you don’t want to get wet”), I settled on a four-year-old, twenty-three-foot Winnebago Warrior. Essentially a Chevy van with a hotel room on back, it came complete with two miniature beds, a shower, a toilet, a stove, a television set, and a refrigerator more than four feet from the driver’s seat. It also had a small table, which for me was a requirement, since I may have been the only person in history to run away and join the circus with a laptop computer.
After my initial encounter with Hippo, one that was repeated in one form or another every other night for the rest of the year, he decided that since I was a clown I should be parked directly behind Clown Alley, the small tent used for dressing that was located halfway down the line of trailers and near the side doors of the tent. While there was nothing wrong with this resolution in DeLand, where the lot was a large, open fairgrounds, this decision proved to be one of the worst things that happened to me all year. The reason: Hippo tried to park me in the same spot in every town, so even if there was a fence (as in Hinesville), a ditch (as in Hendersonville), or a Wal-Mart Dumpster (as in Waycross), the undisputed Mr. Least Congeniality of the Circus tried to squeeze, cajole, or harass me into the same place in every town we played. In the beginning I hated our thrice-weekly fights, but by the end I came to see them as a badge of honor. After all, he treated me just like everyone else.
Once I had my parking space—my own roving plot of land, as it were—I set out to explore the neighborhood. Despite its outward chaotic appearance, there was nothing random about the arrangement. Every vehicle had a set place, a set function, even a set smell: diesel exhaust, bacon grease, elephant dung, popcorn butter. At the front of the lot were the ticket wagon and the concession stand. At the back were the animals—tigers, horses, and bears. The two elephant trucks usually parked farther away from the big top, near the closest thoroughfare for maximum publicity value. As for the human residents, performers lived behind one long side of the tent, workers behind the other. In addition to a bunk in the sleeper truck, each worker was entitled to take a cold shower in the back of No. 63, use the show’s bank of port-o-johns, known as “donickers” (believed to be from the requisite process of pulling down knickers in outhouses), and eat his meals in the cookhouse, a tented paradise of culinary dreams that served three meals a day of the soupiest, greasiest, rubberiest food I’ve ever had the pleasure to complain about.
The performers, meanwhile, lived in their own trailers, ranging from $80,000, thirty-five-foot-long Teton Homes with pop-out living rooms, washer-dryers, and ten-piece home entertainment centers to fifteen-year-old, one-room, beat-up Prowlers that housed three people, two cats, a dog, and a baby squirrel, as well as sullied piles of outgrown wardrobe from some out-of-date act. The owner of the circus, whichever one was traveling with the show at the time, parked at the front of the trailer line, closest to the ticket wagon. Sean, the Human Cannonball, parked at the end of the line closest to the back door. All other parking spaces were determined by seniority and number of costume changes. The longer one had been with the show, the farther one got to be from the noise of the generator; the greater number of costume changes one had, the closer one got to be to the side doors of the tent.
In addition to these two hundred or so people, the show carried its own infrastructure, giving rise to its vivid nickname “The City That Moves by Night.” At the turn of the last century Kaiser Wilhelm sent efficiency experts from the German army to study the way American circuses moved across the land, and at this century’s end this circus, at least, could still teach a thing or two about efficiency to the Japanese. Besides the basics of room and board, the show had its own mechanics shop, a carpentry, a short-order grill, even a part-time school for the children. The two most coveted services were water and power. For water, the show had a water man with a thousand-gallon tank who drove around the lot five times a day, bathing the animals, filling the tanks of the trailers, and, for a price, even filling the portable swimming pools that some parents carried for their kids. As for electricity, the show carried two Caterpillar diesel generators that were turned on every morning at nine and turned off every evening at midnight. This meant that for hours every day, even nine of the hottest overnight hours in a New York City heat wave, nobody on the show had air c
onditioning, water pressure, television reception, or video games. Some people had their own personal generators, but these were so loud and unneighborly they had to be turned off before 2 A.M. Basically, for more than a third of every day, we lived the way they did in the Age of Barnum, relying on sleep, booze, and an occasional scandal to keep us from raping and pillaging the land.
It took me awhile to adjust to this new regimen. More than once I ran out of water in the middle of my shower or power halfway through a frozen pizza. I even posted a list in my RV reminding me of all the things I had to do before every trip: check the propane, turn off the pump, lower my antenna, raise my staircase. Kris Kristo, the juggler, and Danny Rodríguez, the flyer, laughed at how I struggled with many of the basic functions they had been performing mindlessly all their lives.
All of this novelty came vividly home to me on the morning after I arrived. I got up at five to watch the tent go up and decided to have cereal for breakfast. I took out my brand-new plastic bowl, opened my two brand-new boxes of cereal (Special K and Cranberry Crunch), used my brand-new plastic knife to slice up my still green banana, then opened my refrigerator to retrieve my brand-new half gallon of skim milk, which to my brand-new RV chagrin was frozen solid. I picked the bananas out of the cereal, opened my brand-new box of Saran Wrap, and returned my newly wrapped bowl of dry cereal humbly to the shelf. The tears of more than one clown, no doubt, were prompted by missing a meal.
“Well, well. What do we have here, a new clown in the neighborhood?”
When Buck Nolan stuck his face in my trailer on Monday afternoon, his head almost poked through the vent in the roof even though he was standing outside on the grass. After Hippo, Buck was the first person I met on the lot. He was also the tallest, the loneliest, and the most eccentric. “Do you mind if I come in?” he said. “I always like to check out the First of Mays. I remember when I was one myself. The year was 1959.”
