by Bruce Feiler
Instead of driving in my RV, we took a cab to a place called Club 108, an unassuming cinder-block building on the outskirts of town just past the longest strip of machismo—auto-parts shops, gun dealerships, dirty-magazine outlets—that I had ever seen. It was four dollars for members, six dollars for nonmembers. Kris tried to talk our way in by offering free circus tickets, but they refused. “Show us your IDs and give us your six bucks,” the manager barked. As we did, one of the bouncers, a man with steroid-inflated arms, tight blue jeans, and suspenders (no shirt), pushed through the line. “Get the fuck out of the way,” he said. “I’ve got a knife.” Two particularly burly guests were herded out of the bar, followed by a third with blood spewing from his nose, which in the course of the evening had been thoughtfully relocated alongside his ear.
Inside it looked as if we had suddenly been transferred from eastern North Carolina to downtown Tokyo. There was a three-tiered sound system climbing the wall like aluminum ivy, covered with multicolored lights, a fog machine, and rotating sirens. A towering scaffolding structure, a sort of jungle gym for grown-up GI Joes, stretched from one end of the playpen to the other, from the ceiling to the smoky sky. Inside, outside, and all around this metallurgic monstrosity stood four hundred freshly shaven, freshly paid Marine neophytes and no more than fourteen scantily clad young ladies. The whole scene looked like a beer advertisement gone berserk. We walked in, bought drinks, and surveyed the scene. Sean and Kris sat down and started moping because there were not enough girls. I got up and started dancing by myself; soon Danny followed. In this menagerie no one seemed to notice that the circus was in town.
Even though I wasn’t able to put it to much use myself, in the annals of pickup lines there can’t be many opening remarks that receive a better response than “So, did you see me in the circus tonight?” Kris Kristo, a master of lines himself, also had devised one of the best closing lines that I had ever heard: “So, would you like me to give you a tour of the animals?” Elephants, it seems, make a great aphrodisiac. Tigers are even better.
As I had observed from my first days on the show, there is a curious, almost palpable sexual energy surrounding the circus. The costumes, the music, the drumrolls are all part of a gradual seduction that performers play out on the audience, trying to satisfy every dream, daring to titillate at every turn. In Henry Miller’s Paris, circus performers lived and performed in the red-light district, among the vaudevillians, strippers, and prostitutes. In some ways the association is fitting. The ringmaster, king of the cathouse so to speak, leads the customers through the show—building tension, enhancing the excitement, and finally releasing the performer for his or her climactic trick. The word “trick” itself, from the French “to deceive,” is applied equally to streetwalkers and wirewalkers, harlots and harlequins. At the end of the night the customers float out of the house with their dreams fulfilled—their fantasies realized—and return to their daily lives.
For many of the performers and audience members alike the show is just a tease-and artificial exposition removed from reality. But for others the tease is irresistible. Many of the young men who grow up in the circus are particularly seduced by their magical power. “Circus people are performers,” Jimmy James said to me. “They know people are looking at their bodies. They know people are fantasizing about them. When they get out of the ring they are no different. They tend to enjoy themselves.” Kris Kristo, who was one of the first performers to befriend me and welcome me into his family, was a well-traveled, well-toned, well-endowed performer equally at home in the ring and on the dance floor. Born in Bulgaria, raised in Western Europe, and now coming of age in America, he had established a peerless seduction routine. In the show he would use his muscleman juggling routine or his motorcycle-on-the-high-wire act to pique the fantasies of women in the audience; then afterward he would use his innocent-waif-wronged-by-an-ex-girlfriend story or his Italian-wine-connoisseur-Romeo pose to win over their hearts. The outcome was a different girl almost every night and a lot of borrowed condoms.
As a result of playing this game daily from Milan to Montana ever since he was a boy, Kris was one of the most charming, easy-to-get-along-with people I had ever met. Also, because he knew he would leave town every couple of days, he was one of the most reluctant to get attached. He and Danny had even devised a set of standards for girls. Springwater was the highest grade, meaning a girl was beautiful, a ten, “fuckable without a drink.” That was followed by a wine cooler, which meant cute, nice-looking, one needed only a wine cooler to get in the mood; Mad Dog 20/20, meaning you needed to be drunk; and finally a bottle of tequila, meaning you needed to be dead to the world. They had also devised a set of rules for themselves that early on they conveyed to me: never fight over a girl, never pay for a drink, and never, ever, fall in love.
To be sure, it takes two to turn a trick, and most of the women who broke through the fantasy and dated circus hunks understood that their affairs would be short-lived. There was the married mother of two in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who had had a one-night rendezvous with Kris every year for three years running, and the year I was there showed up with the breast implants Kris had recommended even though her husband despised them. There was the stripper from Mobile who said she never dated clients, but in his case made an exception. At times, of course, a woman got caught up in the illusion. In Virginia a woman Kris had met during intermission and taken back to his trailer after the show showed up the following night with a suitcase under her arm. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I’m coming on the road with you,” she said. “No, you’re not,” he answered. “Go away.” Kris had special names for these women: he called them “psycho bitches from hell.”
On rare occasions everyone’s fantasies got out of hand. In Princeton, New Jersey, Sean and Kris were in a Red Lobster one night after the show. Sean was coming out of the men’s room after dinner when a woman at a nearby table did a dramatic double take. She had been to see the show earlier, she told him, and had been hoping to meet him. With this kind of introduction, he asked her if she would like to go back to the lot and make love in the cannon. She agreed, saying it had always been her fantasy to have sex with circus men. Back in Sean’s trailer (the cannon unfortunately was wet and Sean nearly broke his neck trying to take off the cover), Sean went first and Kris followed. Kris asked her if she wanted others; she said sure. Before long there were six guys in all, including a fourteen-year-old boy invited for his first time. The performers took turns. One person took a video. Sean toyed with his hairbrush. But just as the evening approached its peak the woman abruptly announced that she was a devil worshipper. As soon as she said this, Kris noticed an upside-down cross on the back of her neck. Suddenly everyone got scared. The boys bolted from the truck as quickly as possible. The following day, after one of them nervously told of the incident, all the participants were summoned to the manager’s trailer, where he reprimanded them for their indiscretion and promptly erased the tape (though not before viewing it first).
“Why didn’t you just throw the tape away?” I asked Sean.
“Because it was perfectly good,” he said. “You could use it again.”
When Sean arrived for his first season the previous year, he had fit instantly into this carousing crew. He and Kris became partners in conquest. The two of them looked quite different—Sean had blond hair and freckled Irish-American poster-boy looks, while Kris had a dark, brooding, misunderstood Italian Casanova aura to him—but in crucial ways they were similar, at least when I first met them. Both were moody, often depressed when out of the spotlight, but invariably cheery around women. Kris could bicker with his parents in Bulgarian and punch his little brother in the face, all the while politely escorting a young lady through the mud to his room with a touch of continental grace. In the light of day he was awkward, on a basketball court he was inept, but on a dance floor at three in the morning he was as smooth as a mug of Irish coffee with a kick most women didn’t feel until the followi
ng day.
Sean, meanwhile, who was part cracker, part crooner (he looked strikingly like a blond version of Elvis), could throw me into the mud for fun, toss a stake at one of the workers, insult the rear end of his boss’s sister, then turn around a moment later and name the perfume of a woman in the audience a hundred yards away. The first time I was in his trailer, after putting on the tape of his national television appearances, he showed me a list of every woman he had slept with. The list was several pages long and had over two hundred entries on it, some as vague as “the black girl in the bar in Louisville” or “the twins on the beach whose legs hung over the back of my Jeep and scraped the finish off my door.” In those awkward early days of the year, Sean called me Lucy because I didn’t boast of such a list. I called him Mr. Sensitivity of the Circus. We couldn’t have been more different. We should have avoided each other.
After nearly an hour when nothing much happened in Club 108, the disc jockey perched high in the scaffolding cage announced the start of the first round of the annual Eastern Carolina Hawaiian Tropic Bikini Contest. The Marines let out a resounding whoop. The circus contingent was nearly as thrilled and joined the tidal wave of testosterone that surged toward the narrow stage.
“Now we’re talkin’!” Kris exclaimed. “We’re gonna get FUBAR tonight.”
“FUBAR?” I said.
“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.” He and Danny exchanged high fives.
In their first parade in front of the troops the contestants came out in casual wear. Kris liked Number Two. She was dressed in a virtually see-through Budweiser hand towel barely stretched across her vital statistics. Sean liked Number Three. She was a nurse. She was into shopping, tanning, and hair care. “I like ’em just like that,” he said. “I like ’em thin. I like ’em blond. Hell, I could eat her pussy now. I could eat it onstage.” I laughed. He looked at me, insulted. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “Oh, no,” I replied. “I do.”
After taking applause from the audience the contestants marched off to change into their bikinis. The boys in our corner started comparing notes. I voted for Number Nine. She identified herself as a writer and editor for a local newspaper, which I took as sufficient evidence that at least she could read and write. Later, when she came out in her swimwear, Number Nine wore a yellow bikini that was short, pert, and considerably more subtle than those of her fellow combatants. Suddenly Sean shifted from the nurse to her. “I like her, man. She’s about my height. She’s got some tight titties there. I could eat the spinach out of her shit.” It was the highest compliment he could pay.
After the winner was announced (ironically it was Number Three, whom Sean then claimed he had liked all along), we broke up and started circulating. I saw the now famous Number Nine standing with a friend in the other room and went up and asked her where she worked. She said she was an editor for a weekly paper in nearby La Grange and, now that I mentioned it, was coming to the circus in several weeks to do a story on some clown who was a writer. At last, I thought, here was my chance to test the marketing charms of the circus. But just as we started speaking Kris appeared magically at my side, put his arm around me, and introduced himself to her. There went my chances: the best marketing plan in the world was not enough to distract her from his muscles. Indeed, his approach didn’t take long at all. It was so smooth as to be imperceptible. It was also a little bit greasy. He started flirting with Mademoiselle Neuf, poking fun at me, gently stroking her thigh. He didn’t realize he might be encroaching. In truth, he didn’t even care. Then he asked her to dance, and to make matters worse, asked her friend to dance with me. On the dance floor, the friend couldn’t keep her eyes off Kris. “What does he do in the circus?” she drooled. “Why don’t you ask him yourself,” I said, excusing myself to use the rest room. Kris didn’t have to fight over girls, I realized, they all but fought over him.
Sitting in a cab an hour later, everyone was upset. Kris was disappointed that Mademoiselle Neuf wouldn’t go home with him that night. “Hell, she didn’t even buy me a drink.” Sean was disappointed that nobody was interested in him. “Bunch of jarheads in there tonight,” he said to the driver. Danny was disappointed in himself. “There was no way to pick up a girl without getting drunk,” he said, “and I didn’t even want to.” I was disappointed in my friends—maybe I’d never become part of this circle; maybe we were too different after all.
Approaching the base, I told the driver to go straight. “Don’t listen to him,” Sean said. “He thinks he knows everything. Just take a left.” I encouraged the driver to continue on; Sean insisted he turn. Since Sean was closer, and louder, the driver agreed. “Now, how much do you want to bet?” Sean asked me.
“The fare is eight dollars,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later, after twice losing our way, we finally located the tent. The fare had climbed to seventeen dollars. “How did that happen?” Sean said as he got out of the cab and walked away. “We got lost,” I said, handing the driver twenty dollars. “Look at that,” Sean called. “He’s got a twenty. He must be a Jew.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve also got horns.”
The three of them stopped to relieve themselves. I headed back to the tent. At this point I was fed up, partly at Kris for being so young and aggressive he didn’t even realize he was violating his own rules, partly at Sean for being so loudmouthed and self-centered he managed to insult everyone he met. Earlier at the club he tried to make a pass at one of the bartenders. “So, Deb,” he said to the woman whose nametag identified her as Debbie. “What time do you get off?” Seven A.M., she told him. “That doesn’t leave much time for fun, now does it?” Guess not. “Well, honey, if you were my wife and you came home at seven o’clock in the morning, I would just be getting up and I would have one of those early-morning pop-the-tent kind of boners. You’d come home and be all tired and I’d just knock you up good. Then you’d just lay around the house all day, saying how tired you were but how good you felt.” Is that right? she said. “Yep, bitch. That’s right.” Well, then, she said, I’m glad we’re not married.
Back at the lot, the boys started shouting as soon as they saw me walking away. “Hey, where are you going?” Sean called. “Look, he’s mad at us ’cause we insulted him. ’Cause we made him pay.”
I walked around the tent and went back to my camper. Several minutes later there was a knock on my door.
“Hey, man, what’s wrong?” The three of them climbed inside and sat down. “Why are you so mad?” Danny said. “Do you not want to go out with us next time?”
“Who are you mad at?” Kris asked. “Me?”
“He’s fucking mad at me,” Sean said. “’Cause I made fun of him. Man, what’s wrong? We’re all men here. We can take it, though maybe not you.”
“I can take it,” I said, more snidely than I had intended. “I just don’t need to.”
“Don’t need to? Man, shit. This is the circus.” He picked up the white plastic brush he had left in my camper and started brushing his hair. I was sitting on the bed. The show’s generator had long been turned off, so we were without lights. “You want to be part of the circus, bitch, you got to take shit. That’s all we do is give shit to each other.”
They started telling stories. Remember the time we put a pile of shit on someone’s door? Remember the time we came in and trashed your trailer? Remember the time we drove that girl’s car down the stairs?
“So you see, that’s the rules,” Sean said when the recollections dribbled to a close. “I’m only teasing you because I like you. If you want to be friends with me, you got to learn to take shit. You’re just a little too sheltered. You’ve never been around people like us. You were over there in Japan and England. We’re real American men and we give each other a hard time.”
Perhaps he was right, I thought. Perhaps Sean, the Human Cannonball, was just another self-proclaimed hero on the frontier of American ego—abrasive, self-centered, and supercilious from the shiny tips of his
alligator boots to the glistening wings of his well-moussed hair. Earlier in the year Sean and I had a conversation about Elvin, about how he was thought to be a prima donna when he was on top—yelling at people, getting in fights, throwing a punch or two. After his accident, Elvin had become soft-spoken and kind. Now I realized how prescient Elvin had been. Sean was indeed Elvin, but ironically it was the old Elvin. He was young, brash, on top of the world. In the cab he had said to the driver, “Oh, you’re from Philadelphia. I was on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer.” In the club he had said to Number Nine, “I’m the Human Cannonball. Did you see me on TV? I was on four shows: NBC’s I Witness Video, CBS’s Street Stories, ABC’s Peter Jennings, Regis & Kathie Lee.” In a way he was the embodiment of fame, a sort of Frankenstein of the modern circus, a clone so perfect he fit too well. When I first met Elvin I asked him, “Can you do it? Can you take any regular Joe and turn him into the circus star of the decade?” Elvin thought for a second, then said, “I did.” Not long after, I was talking to Sean. “So can you do it?” I asked. “Can a person come from the other side of the tracks and become the circus star of the decade?” He thought for a second, then said, “I did.”
The boys got up to leave. “So next time we go out, are you going to go with us,” Danny asked, “or are you going to say, ‘I’ll think about it’?”
“I think about everything,” I said.
“If you’re sitting in front of a girl and you get her legs spread open,” Kris said, “and all you got to do is stick your dick in her pussy, man, do you think about that?”
The boys were so busy giving themselves high fives in congratulations for that retort that they didn’t wait for a response. Finally, they looked at me, and I said, “Yes.”
The rain started around midnight. I could hear it pattering on the top of my trailer. I had left Camp Lejeune around 7 P.M., following two sold-out shows on Sunday afternoon. The whole crew was in a hurry to get to Murrells Inlet, a small South Carolina tourist trap south of Myrtle Beach, and enjoy the one night a week we had off. Buck had already been there the day before to sell circus memorabilia at a local flea market and had scoped out the lot. He reported back that Inlet Square Mall had a movie theater on the same side as the circus. He wrote down all the movies and put one to four stars by the ones he had seen, then taped the list on the bulletin board by the back door of the tent, right beneath the sign that reminded everyone to turn their clocks ahead one hour for the beginning of daylight saving time.
