by Bruce Feiler
To hear him tell it, Buck Nolan was always tall: a hillbilly childhood freak from Princeton, West Virginia, just waiting for the circus sideshow to run into him. At eleven, he was already six feet tall. At sixteen, he was approaching seven feet and was given the job of changing the letters on his hometown movie-house marquee. At eighteen, he was featured in Life magazine in a photo series called “The Giants of Schoolboy Basketball.” In the middle of the page, at seven feet tall, was Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, and on the end, at seven feet two, was Charles “Beanpole” Buxton, alias Buck Nolan. “Asked last week if he had ever hit his head on low doorways,” the magazine reported, Beanpole replied: “Heck, I did that four times already today.” After the article appeared, Buck turned down 155 offers to play college basketball. Still, he never forgot the photograph, and when Life magazine published its fiftieth-anniversary edition, “The Biggest and the Best,” he was upset to notice that they didn’t use the picture of the tallest high school basketball player of 1955, but the second tallest, Wilt Chamberlain. “I wrote them a letter and said he may have been the best, but I was the biggest. To hell with your magazine.”
Partly because of his unnatural height, Buck was always a loner, and in 1959 when the Cole Bros. Circus visited his hometown just before his twenty-third birthday, he saw the circus not as a dream but as an escape. At least there he would be normal. “I heard they had short people, midgets and things, and they always fascinated me. I thought I would ask around. I was walkin’ down the midway on my way to become a working man, when the butcher—that’s the name for concessioners, you know—yells out at me, ‘Hey, kid, where ya goin’? You don’t want to be with them, they’ll work your nuts off.’ He took me by the arm and walked me toward the midway. ‘Hey, Bill,’ he called out to the sideshow manager, ‘I got you a new giant.’”
Nearly thirty-five years later Buck was still on that circus, though he had long since moved to clowning after the sideshow folded its tent. Though almost sixty, Buck still slept in a hollowed-out Ford van every night, still ate three meals a day in the cookhouse, and still walked out in particularly frightening white makeup twice a day and cracked wiseacre jokes as the “World’s Tallest Clown.” Even though diabetes and a bum back made him less than agile, Buck still played an important role among the nine men who comprised Clown Alley. He was twice as old as everyone else and twice as wily, and when the others started ganging up on me, Buck told me what to do. Of even more immediate importance, however, Buck told me in my first vulnerable days on the show how to watch my wallet.
“Everybody on the show has a way to make a little extra money,” Buck said in his loopy, wry hillbilly drawl that usually culminated with some unexpected crack. “Sometimes it’s from the rubes, the townies; sometimes it’s from the people around here, like First of Mays. When I first joined the show I made eighteen dollars a week. Now I make ten times that amount. It’s still not very much, so I make a lot of extra money on cherry pie.”
“What’s cherry pie?”
“Oh, it’s many things,” he said. “Taking down and putting up the big top. Carrying the ice. Anything you do to make extra money. They’re what I call my sidelines. I work flea markets, I sell circus memorabilia, I have a few dirty videos I rent out. Also, drinks. If you’re thirsty on this show and you run to the Coke house to get a cold soda, it costs you seventy-five cents. I sell them out of my van to the clowns for fifty cents. You go to the Coke house, they don’t have any diet. I’m diabetic, that’s the only thing I can drink. Hell, half the clowns in there I’ve trained to drink diet.”
“So that’s how you make your living?”
“I certainly don’t make it off the circus. I have to make it off something. Just wait a few days, you’ll see.”
It turns out I didn’t have to wait that long at all. Within hours of my arrival on the lot I became aware of a vast underground economy on the show. Even before I learned people’s jobs, their names, or even their sexual histories (which was usually the second thing I learned), I heard about their rackets. Ora sold jackets. Bonnie sewed costumes. Southpaw smuggled in beer. In some ways the underground economy was a model of communal efficiency. For a price, I could receive almost any service I might possibly desire and still keep my money within my own community: I could get my laundry done every week, have my oil changed every 3,000 miles, even have a copy of USA Today delivered every morning to my camper door. Seemingly complex commercial or civic enterprises were performed effortlessly despite the fact that we were in a different community three or four times a week. A circus postman, alias trombone player, went to the local post office every day to buy and send money orders as well as retrieve and send mail. He would then deliver the mail to your door for a fee of twenty-five cents a letter. The show had its own bank (the office manager), its own lending agent (the treasurer), even its own notary public (the stilt walker). With surprisingly little effort, a circus person could be born, go to school, learn a trade, get a job, take out a loan, buy a car, buy a house, find a spouse, have a child, raise a family, see the world, grow old, and ultimately even pass away in the arms of his loved ones in the place where he was born—without ever leaving the lot. He could even go to church if he wanted, since a traveling circus priest came to the lot every Sunday and said mass in the tent.
While this underground economy was one of the more impressive aspects of the circus, it could also be one of its more sordid. As I learned quickly, life operated much more smoothly on the show with a little tip here or a small bribe there. The problem for an outsider was trying to figure out whom to tip, when to tip, and how much to tip. The water man received a tip, for example. Johnny even mentioned this in the opening meeting. But some people insisted that since the show promised performers water once a day in their contracts, and since his job was to dispense the water, he should only be tipped for providing water a second or third time. Living by myself, I needed water only once a day. The electricians were tipped for plugging in the RVs to the generator on setup mornings, but only when the plugs were laid out on the grass. One evening I chose not to leave my plugs out because I had to go grocery shopping off the lot the following morning. When I woke up, my cord had been removed from its compartment and plugged in for me. I wasn’t sure if this was kindness or capitalism.
What I was sure of was that, in those opening days at least, loyalty was only wallet deep. The workers on the show viewed a First of May, especially one with a bright, shining RV and clean fingernails, as a rube and a gold mine. When I first arrived on the lot, I was told that the external electrical cable on my Winnebago was not long enough and had the wrong kind of plug for the generators. The boss electrician, Jack, sent me to buy an additional fifty feet of cable. Don’t bother with the plugs, he said, he could sell them to me cheaper. I went as instructed to purchase the cord, but just for my own First of May fun I asked the hardware-store attendant how much a pair of 30-amp twist-lock plugs would cost. The male was $12.11, he said, the female $24.85. With the standard circus discount, the total was a little over thirty-two dollars. Back at the lot, Willie, the colorful bearded wacky uncle of the electrical department, agreed to install my plugs.
“Jack told me to tell you that you are expected to tip me,” Willie mumbled in what was probably the most coherent thing I heard him say all year.
“I understand that,” I said. “I hear you like beer.”
“Even better than the smell of a pussy,” he said. “And almost better than reefer.” At the mention of this Willie visibly swooned. “But you still have to pay Jack for the plugs, you know.”
“And how much are they?”
“Sixty-five dollars,” he said.
The next day I dutifully paid Jack for my plugs. And when I learned that he asked all the performers to tip him five dollars a week for their power, I never got around to paying that.
“Higher, higher. Lift your hands a little higher…. That’s right. Now put your palms up, not down. You’re not flying anywhere; you’re no
t an airplane. The proper position is palms up.”
“What about my feet?” I said.
“You can stand like you are now, with your feet not completely together. But turn your toes out a bit.”
“And my head?”
“Head up, eyes out. Don’t look at the first row, but the last. Remember, you’re asking for something: you want their applause. The show is for them and you want their appreciation.”
Elvin Bale is never more alive than when he discusses performing. On opening day he sat outside his sister’s trailer, with a cellular phone in his hands and a tuna sandwich in his lap, and brought his forty-eight years of circus experience to life as he taught yet another newcomer how to style—the circus expression for taking a bow.
“A lot of performers don’t know how to get the audience,” he said, his ruddy cheeks blushing in the afternoon breeze and his thin blond hair flapping against his head. “You have to communicate with them even though you’re not talking to them. You must look into their eyes and control them. To me, the audience was my lifeblood. They were the ones who gave me the daring to do some of the things I did. And no matter what I did, I always left the ring saying, ‘God, I wish I could have done more.’ That’s a good performer—when you feel you haven’t given enough.”
As he spoke, Elvin searched the empty sky with his eyes as if he were looking for a spotlight. With his voice he could conjure up memories of a thousand circuses past. With his arms he could direct me in exactly how to stand. But with his legs he could no longer stand that way himself. Elvin Bale, the “Great Melvor,” the Circus Daredevil of the Century, was sitting forever in a wheelchair.
“It happened in 1987,” he recalled. “I was in Hong Kong to do a shot with my cannon. It was my biggest and best act. In fifteen years with Ringling I had done an ankle catch on the single trapeze, I had walked the ‘wheel of death’—I even wrestled a giant mechanical monster. Every two years I designed a different act, but the cannon was my ultimate creation. It was my legacy.”
For his signature act, Elvin would crouch in the steel barrel of the world’s largest cannon and with a giant fiery explosion be propelled two hundred feet through the air and then land in a giant net. At every new site, he would calculate where to put the net by shooting a sandbag dummy from the cannon. In Hong Kong, however, it rained overnight and the dummy was left outside. The next day Elvin shot the sandbag from the cannon, placed the net where it landed on the ground, then loaded himself where the dummy had been. “Halfway through the flight I knew,” he said with the calm, abnormally stoic voice of a man who has been to hell and back and still can’t quite believe it. “I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I was going to overshoot the net.”
He did. In what turned out to be his farewell performance, Elvin Bale overshot the net and landed on the ring curb, rupturing his spinal cord with a career-ending, marriage-ending, seemingly life-ending snap. Recalling the episode more than six years later, Elvin still seemed haunted by his accident. Though his performing days were over, his circus life had continued. Overnight, he became an elder statesman in the community. He opened an agency and began representing many of the top acts in the country, including almost every act on the Beatty-Cole show. More importantly, he sought out his own replacement. He went looking for the next Elvin Bale. When he found him it was in the most unlikely place.
“He was my pool man.”
“Your what?”
“My pool man. He cleaned my pool. I was lying there one day looking at him. He was blond, muscular. Not too tall, not too heavy, about a hundred fifty-five pounds, I’d say, almost the same weight as me. He had been a high school football star. He was wiry and reckless, always getting into fights at school, kind of a rough-tough kid, though spoiled in other respects. But the thing was, he had that all-American look. And then I realized it: he was me. Sean Thomas was me.”
The bustle of opening day was just beginning to pick up around the end of the trailer line, where Elvin’s three sisters parked their vehicles side by side. Elvin’s older sister, Gloria, stopped by with new blue and white ostrich plumes for her Arabian horses. His younger sister, Bonnie, was home sewing costumes for her cloud swing. His twin, Dawnita, the only brunette in a family of blondes, was complaining that her Siamese cat was about to escape through the screen door. Just then the Bales’s mother arrived from Sarasota bearing Cadbury Creme Eggs and a new costume for Sean. As they had done since they were children—first, on their father Trevor’s circus in wartime London, later on Ringling Brothers in America, after that on Beatty-Cole—the Bales made their own nest of sorts wherever they landed and pulled in a few stray fledglings like me and made them feel at home.
“Oh, Mom, the costume looks great,” Elvin said as his mother bent down to kiss him.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” she said, holding up a white bodysuit covered in red, white, and blue flaming stripes like something Evel Knievel might have worn. Her voice retained much more of the British accent that still lingered around the corners of her children’s speech. “It’s made with a new thing called a hologram. It’s very expensive.”
As she spoke, Sean arrived. Noticeably bowlegged and decidedly stiff, he was wearing blue-jean shorts, no shirt, and a Los Angeles Raiders baseball cap. Around his neck he wore a gold chain with a Florida Gator dangling from its center. On his left breast he had a tattoo of Mighty Mouse in flight. He thanked Elvin’s mother for the costume and sat down on a beach chair to pull it on. The cellular telephone rang for Elvin, who answered it.
I turned to Sean. Like everyone else on the show, he had seen me the night before when Johnny introduced me to the cast and crew after the dress rehearsal, put his arm around me, and said, “He’s one of us now. Treat him like a member of the family.” Thus blessed, I was free to roam.
“So, are you doing anything special today?” I asked. “Any rituals?”
“Go to work, that’s about it.”
“Aren’t you nervous?”
He shrugged. “What’s there to be nervous about? I know what I’m doing. If I land on the ground, well, I land on the ground. It’s a day-by-day act. You try your best to calculate everything, but you can’t always be sure.”
Sean stood up with the costume. The shoulder pads fit perfectly above his arms, but the legs were slightly baggy. Elvin’s mother hurried to the car to get some pins for an emergency repair. The first show was now just two hours away.
“So you don’t get scared?” I asked.
“Scared? Scared of what? Breaking a few bones?”
“Scared of having an accident.”
“Falling’s not scary,” he said, bending down to lace up his high-top boxing shoes. “Scary’s catching AIDS. Scary is being poor.” He stood up, nodded for me to follow, and headed toward the cannon, which was parked in the space next to Dawnita. Sitting quietly in the grass with no glitzy trappings from the show, the cannon looked potent but slightly out of place, like a plastic mobile ICBM I had once seen in a toy store in Moscow. The thirty-foot-long shiny silver barrel was attached to the back of a flatbed truck that had been painted fire engine red. On the passenger door was a message: GUN FOR HIRE. “Pain is not scary,” Sean continued, now looking at me directly with a squint in his eyes. For the first time I could see his face. It was worn by the sun. His nose was sharp, his chin jaunty. His eyes were vivid blue. He was the picture of Marine Corps confidence. “No, pain is a feeling and it goes away. What I’m scared of is dying…”
I raised my eyebrows. Sean nodded his head. Then, as if alarmed by his own morbidity, he suddenly caught himself. “But I’m not going to die,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because I’m good.” He tweaked the cannon on the barrel. His voice assumed the mock-aggressive tone of a man pretending to wrestle with an inanimate object. “Aren’t I, you big lady, you big beast? I’m good, and you know it.” He hopped up on the sideboard and with a flash and jump was standing on the barrel above the mouth of th
e cannon, towering over the circus lot with his arms, Superman-like, at his waist. “I’m Sean Thomas, the Human Cannonball, the Daredevil of the Decade, the Big DD.”
He looked down on me watching from the ground, recast his pose for a moment, then lay down on the barrel and removed the cover from the mouth.
“So,” he asked, “do you want to have a peek inside?”
“Why not,” I said.
“Because you can’t.” He grinned. “People offer to pay me to go inside, you know, but I don’t let them. It’s a secret. Only I can know.” He bent down and kissed the barrel.
“We’ll see,” I said with a nod to the barrel. I turned back toward Dawnita’s.
“Where’s Sean?” Elvin asked when I arrived back under Dawnita’s awning.
“I think he’s making love to the cannon.”
“At least he’s not making love inside the cannon. I’d kill him if he did that.”
“Thanks for the lesson,” I said. “I’m off to put on my makeup.”
“Good luck,” Elvin declared. “And remember what I said: you’re doing it for the audience. No matter how bad it gets around here—how muddy, or gossipy, or miserable—you can never forget that you’re doing it for them.”
I promised him that I would remember. “By the way,” I said, “what do you say to a circus performer before a show? Break a leg?”
Elvin smiled at my question even as I winced at my faux pas. “Not really,” he said, slapping his thighs. “We just say, ‘Go get ’em!’”
Facing the Fire
As soon as the lights shine into the ring, I step out of the bright yellow cartoonlike house, stretch my back like an aching grandfather, and breathe an exaggerated puff of flames from the end of a two-foot cigar. Shocked at the inferno, I lurch back in surprise. Puzzled by the fire, I hurry back into the house. Thrilled at the confusion, the children shriek in delight as the bright orange roof above my head is engulfed in a cloud of smoke.
