by Bruce Feiler
The grassy lot was mostly dry when I arrived, though already showing signs of bogging down in some places. The cannon got stuck where the back door would be and an elephant had to come pull it out. It took the elephant only several seconds but cost Sean five bucks. Other drivers got stuck, too, but didn’t want to part with their money. Harry Hammond, the legendarily frugal treasurer, got stuck as well but stayed put several days rather than pay the five-dollar toll. Chava, an aerialist, got stuck, but she didn’t have to pay. She got her husband, Royce, the manager, to pull her out with a forklift. The Rodríguez Family truck got stuck. But all they needed was to gather the whole family, which numbered close to twenty with wives, cousins, and kids, and they could push it out themselves.
By the time I woke up around ten o’clock the next morning, the tent was already halfway up and the water two inches deep. “What a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” Willie, the electrician, said to me as I emerged from my camper and surveyed the wasteland, where the blithe expression “April showers” began to take on a new level of cruelty. “Wouldn’t you just want to punch Mister Rogers if he said that today?” As the afternoon progressed and the rain continued, the circus lot began to transform itself into an elaborate constellation of rings that reminded me of Dante’s Inferno. The three performance rings themselves were surprisingly dry, while the hippodrome track was muddy. The area under the seats was also dry, whereas the road around the tent was soupy. Under the trailers was dry, yet the outermost ring was the gloppiest of all.
“They say that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow,” I said to Bonnie Bale as I slopped off toward Clown Alley that afternoon. “Do circus people have a hundred words for mud?”
“I have only one for it,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I think you can guess.”
By showtime the lot was covered with four inches of standing water that gathered in elephant tracks, tire tracks, even the tracks where previous walkers had left boot prints on the firm ground below. The tent looked unplayable, but a truckload of gravel was brought into the back door, several bags of cedar shavings were sprinkled around the ticket wagons, and a half dozen bales of hay were scattered around the track where guests would walk to their seats. Backstage, where the performers gathered, remained mired in mud. It was a grimy greenish-gray kind of mud that glurped when anyone stuck his foot in the ground and growled when he took it out. It smelled like a combination of fetid earth and stale horse urine, made only worse by the presence of elephant manure, which ironically stood out on account of its unnaturally yellowy color and its uncanny ability to stay firm. You know you have arrived on muddy ground when elephant stool is the firmest substance around.
“Now, this is the real circus,” the clowns crowed to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to leave?”
The rain seemed to bring out the best and worst in everybody. The houses were packed and the shows went on with only a few minor glitches. The performers wore their special “mud show” costumes, covered themselves with worn-out bathrobes, and hurriedly sloshed from their trailers to the tent with knee-high boots over their performing tights. In some ways it was funny watching people who could otherwise dance on horseback or fly through the air tiptoe around the lot like a bunch of amateur tightrope walkers.
At the same time the rain made people crabby, and when performers get crabby they start to bitch—usually about one another. “Did you see how she cut her act today? Not very professional.” “Did you see him wear mud boots in the ring? Nobody pays to see Wal-Mart waders.” “Did you see how Sean got pulled in by the elephants? It sort of undermines the mystique of the world’s largest cannon if it can’t even drive through a couple of inches of mud.” At moments like this, the circus community seemed to splinter along its natural fault lines as everyone became an expert on everyone else’s job. In particular, longtime show people liked to criticize the “gauchos”—people born outside the circus who took a job within. On our show, this included Douglas Holwadel, who was running day-to-day operations during Johnny Pugh’s convalescence, Kathleen (always a favorite, even after she stopped performing), Sean, and now me.
I heard a variety of reasons why gauchos should not be allowed on the show. First, gauchos don’t know how to play a crowd, I was told. Moreover, they complain a lot. “They will not perform with a hangnail,” Dawnita Bale told me, “while a circus person would perform with a broken hand. A gaucho almost closed the show several years ago after complaining to OSHA that the beds were too short.” But the biggest fear of all is that a gaucho will commit a blunder and cost a performer his or her career. The rain and cold of South Carolina, coming so early in the season, only heightened this alarm. “You just watch,” Dawnita told me at the end of that first day of mud as we waited to wade into the finale. “Something is bound to happen this week. Outsiders always make mistakes.”
That something happened in Rock Hill. The occasion was Easter weekend.
The rain continued throughout the week as the show moved down the South Carolina coast to Ladson before heading north again. Now three weeks into the season, I was struck by how each town took on its own narrative. Even though we might stay in one place for only two days, or three days, or even one day, a small story would develop in each location. In Waycross, Georgia, the story centered on a Chinese restaurant. On Sunday night sixty members of the circus crowded the eight-table restaurant for an all-you-can-eat buffet; the next day at lunch Kris Kristo returned with Danny and the two of them ate so much they got sick in the bathroom. In the morning everyone was talking about the previous night’s dinner; in the afternoon everyone was talking about that day’s lunch; that night we moved on to Hinesville.
The narrative was usually driven by one or more factors: the place we played, the people we met, or the weather we encountered. In Ladson, South Carolina, the show played an oyster-shell lot adjacent to a flea market, just up the road from a strip shopping mall. For three days, the workingmen went back and forth to the liquor store; the clowns went back and forth to the Laundromat; the Americans went back and forth to Burger King; and the Mexicans went back and forth to Taco Bell. As for people, Kris met a lingerie model named Angie during the first show who proceeded to drag him, Sean, and me on an elaborate three-day scavenger hunt/striptease that resulted in little but frustration and a crossed-off name in Kris’s spiral-bound black book.
But the big story was weather, “weather” being the circus euphemism for bad weather. Rain is tolerable in this worldview; wind is not. We heard both were coming. Doug was worried about Rock Hill. The first time I met him he had told me that certain lots were dangerous and Rock Hill was one of them. Located behind a mall, it was a clay lot two hundred feet by six hundred feet: plenty of room, but long and thin, and “unable to take rain.” All week long people were speculating. Kris was hoping we would have two extra days and he could continue chasing Angie. Angel Quiros, the wirewalker, wished for the ultimate fantasy—a day off. But by early evening on Good Friday, when we knew we were going to Rock Hill anyway, the talk had shifted from if the “weather” would come to when it would come, what it would be like, and how much it would affect the next lot. As it happened, a drizzle came during the final show in Ladson, but the downpour held off until just after the finale. As we moved northwest, along 1-26, then 1-20 and 1-77, from the southeast corner of the state to the lip of the North Carolina border, the weather reports became more ominous—steady showers overnight, tapering off the following morning, accumulation of several inches. The narrative was under way.
By morning the rain had stopped, but the lot was unplayable. The mall, however, refused to let the show move onto its new asphalt parking area. Doug was furious: the ads had run on the radio, free kids’ coupons had been distributed, the newspaper had run several promotional stories, including one inviting farmers out to the lot to receive free all-you-can-haul elephant manure for their gardens. At the final moment a compromise was reached. The show could play on the a
sphalt, but we could drive only a limited number of stakes into the blacktop. This meant the show would be done without the tent. It would be an open-air show, known colloquially as a sidewall, in which the four center poles would be raised, limited rigging hung from them, and the rings, seats, and side-walls laid out as normal.
An open-air show was a rare occasion and added a certain amount of stress to the weekend. The clown tent was not pitched and we clowns had to dress, prepare our props, and put on our makeup in the back of a crowded semi. The juggling act was cut from four jugglers to one, and the high-wire act didn’t perform at all, forcing the clowns to move the second gag to the end of the show. All of this confusion meant the clowns didn’t have time to change costumes before the finale, and since I was the announcer for the gag, I would have to lead the parade of performers who ushered in the world’s largest cannon for the final bang. This was not my normal spot.
Waiting behind the curtain, I was cutting up a little, and when the flaps opened for the cast to enter, I went shooting onto the track and started lifting my hand to wave at the audience. My hand never made it. As soon as I stepped onto the track I felt the elongated legs of Barrie Sloan, the veteran stilt walker and surrogate godfather to the show, brush against my side. Before I could free myself from his towering green silk leggings, Barrie, a virtual tree of life, was falling fifteen feet toward the pavement, clutching his arms around his knees and crying out in terror. As soon as he hit the asphalt several people rushed to his side. I reached for his top hat, which had spilled from his head and was wobbling drearily on the ground like a penny in a mournful spiral. Jimmy James came hurrying to the scene and urged us all to go on with the show. I felt sick to my stomach, a swell of fear in my throat. At the moment I didn’t know how hurt he was: I knew he had undergone two knee operations in the past and had recently survived a heart attack. I didn’t know if I had caused him to fall. What I did know was that I felt responsible.
After the show the performers rushed to the cabin of Barrie’s truck, where he was lying on his back cradled in the arms of his wife, Shelagh. The long legs of his costume trousers dangled helplessly off the back of the truck. His face was covered in perspiration and his nose was already starting to bruise. He was all right, he said, nothing broken; I felt a surge of relief. He didn’t know what had happened, he added, though Shelagh said she thought someone had run into him. I took a step backward and hurried to my camper. I didn’t bother to take off my makeup and just locked myself in the one place on the lot I knew I could be alone. At that moment I was ready to quit. My joining the show seemed like a horrible conceit. These people were professionals; this world was dangerous; I clearly did not belong. I had confirmed what Dawnita had said: I was an outsider, I had made a mistake.
Fifteen minutes later I stepped out of my camper. The first person I saw was Guillaume, Fred Logan’s teenage grandson, who worked in the elephant department.
“Hey, I heard you pushed Barrie Sloan over,” he said.
“You did?”
“Marcos told me.”
I closed my eyes in despair. I had seen gossip fly around the lot, but never this quickly. The ring of rumor proved even more powerful than I could have anticipated. Shaken, I had two immediate concerns: first, dealing with what might or might not have happened in the tent; second, coping with everyone blaming me. I wandered around the asphalt for several moments in a daze. The lot was ominously empty, the water mirrored on the pavement. After a moment I knocked on Dawnita’s door. A longtime friend of Barrie’s who had known him since their days in England, she seemed shocked when I told her what people were saying. She told me to knock on Barrie’s door immediately and talk to him directly. I went to do as she said.
The Sloans were remarkably cordial under the circumstances. Barrie was lying on the sofa in their dimly lit Holiday Rambler wrapped in a blanket with a wet towel over his head. When he fell he hurt his elbow and bruised his chest, he said, but he would never truly know what had happened. I told them I had been upset by seeing the cliché “The Show Must Go On” come to life so vividly, so uncaringly. Barrie said he was once knocked over during spec on the Ringling show and they just dragged him out of the way so the elephants could pass. After several minutes Shelagh announced she was serving dinner and I turned to go, feeling better but still slightly queasy. She came over and put her hand on my arm. “Just let them talk,” she said. “They always will. Whatever happened, it was an accident. Barrie will be okay. It was nobody’s fault.” It was less than half an hour after showtime. I was still wearing my face.
Outside I ran into Kris. He came over to my place to have a glass of milk and some ginger snaps. He told me he had heard somebody knocked Barrie over, but he didn’t know whom. I knew he was lying to protect me. He told me I couldn’t possibly feel worse than he did when one of his girlfriends the previous year was accused of stealing a hundred dollars from Sean’s trailer. He made me take off my makeup and dragged me to the movies, where, one after another, various performers shared their versions of the episode with me. That night was the first time I felt the power of the circus community in all its intensity. Some people reached to embrace me—Dawnita, Kris, ironically even Shelagh—while others seemed willing to let me remain outside and feel the cold slap of the group on my face. Walking back home, I stopped by the back door to look at the open-air skeleton of the tent. With no big top to contain them, all the colors, smells, and illusions of the circus seemed to evaporate into the sky high above the rings.
Swings of Fate
Like lightning, a spangled burst of bright pink tights ignites the blue-and-white-striped tent as two troupes of warriors, close to twenty in all, come blazing into rings one and three. All available light floods the sky. The brass ensemble erupts into a flare, a polka caliente. The ladies shake their hips and dance on the floor. The men slap their hands and pirouette in the air. An older man with graying mustache even turns a flip for show. Out of pure exhilaration the masses applaud as the great red-coated ringmaster himself steps forward and erupts with a noble call.
“On the Russian swings, the Rodrinovich Flyers, the Romanoff Aaaacrobats…”
The combatants bow and gesture toward the swings—two enormous pivoting platforms that slice forebodingly through the air. Soon daring young men will fly into the sky from these three-hundred-pound planks, gravity’s foe. The whole scene seems thrilling, grandiose, even mythic, yet one detail in the picture still vexes the mind. Rodrinovich Flyers? Romanoff Acrobats? These costumes aren’t Tartar, they’re cancan at best. And these warriors aren’t Russians, they’re Mexicans for sure—just dressed in Slavic headbands.
“To tell you the truth, I think the name is stupid,” said Pablo Rodríguez, one of three people in the pseudonymous Rodrinovich Flyers with the same first and last names. There were his father, whom everyone called Papa Pablo; his younger brother, whom everyone called Little Pablo; and him, whom everyone called Big Pablo. Though not the oldest, Big Pablo was the largest of the siblings (175 pounds), his mouth was the loudest (not to mention the dirtiest), and his trailer was the longest (over thirty-five feet). When his father retired from performing several years earlier, the twenty-seven-year-old Pablo had seized control of the family in an unspoken, bloodless coup.
“Just because the apparatus is called a Russian swing doesn’t mean you have to be Russian to do it,” he scoffed. “They wanted us to dance Russian, to use Russian music. That’s where we drew the line. Let’s face it, you can’t turn a Mexican into a Russian. Do they think people are that stupid…?”
The answer to that query was probably yes, but sitting one afternoon with Pablo, his wife, and their four-year-old son, none of us wanted to affirm it. One hundred years (and fifty million minutes) after he probably didn’t say it, Barnum’s theory of the birth of suckers was alive and well.
“Actually, I’ve grown sort of fond of it,” said Pablo’s wife, Mary Chris. Originally from a Spanish circus family, Mary Chris had married into the Rodríg
uez troupe a little over eight years ago. At the time of their engagement, she owned sixty bottles of fingernail polish, she told me; now married, she was down to five. “Johnny Pugh said he wanted a Russian name, and we thought it wasn’t a big deal to argue about it. Some things you do for the sake of the circus, because as far as we’re concerned, right now, if it’s good for this circus it’s good for our family.”
In truth, if it was part of this circus it was probably part of their family. The presence of the Rodríguezes in ring one and their cousins the Estradas (a.k.a. Romanoffs) in ring three was just a hint of the blood connections that flowed throughout the tent. Indeed, one of the most surprising things about the show was this exhaustive, truly labyrinthine family network that links nearly everyone in the circus business to everyone else. On our lot, for example, Big Pablo and Mary Chris often parked next to Michelle and Angel Quiros. Michelle hung by her hair in the first half of the show, while Angel walked the high wire in the second. In real life, Michelle’s grandmother and Pablo’s father were siblings, while in the business, Mary Chris’s mother and Michelle’s mother were working on the same show. Also, while Pablo’s second cousin Michelle was married to Angel, Angel’s sister Mary was married to Pablo’s half brother, Little Pablo, making Big Pablo and Angel half brothers-in-law, if there is such a creation. To make matters even more complicated, Little Pablo performed not only in the Russian swing act with his family but also in a cradle act with his wife, in the flying act with his brothers and sister-in-law, and in the wire act with his brother-in-law, his wife, and his brother-in-law’s wife, who, for the record, was also his cousin—that, of course, being Michelle.
