by Bruce Feiler
As soon as he got outside he saw the blood. Then in front of the cage he saw the woman. She had walked from inside the tent in the middle of the show. Arriving in front of the Lilovs’ truck, she decided to feed a hot dog to one of the bears. They look so cute, she must have thought. Surely they must be hungry. Undeterred by the multitude of DO NOT ENTER signs, the woman climbed over the portable orange fence, stepped up to the truck that held the bears, and stuck her hot dog through the narrow gap at the bottom of the cage.
“She picked our worst bear,” Inna recalled. “That one doesn’t like anyone but me. She hugs me. She kisses me. But she doesn’t even like my husband. The lady went right for her cage.”
Predictably, once the bear caught sight of the hot dog she immediately lunged for the treat. When she did, her paw got stuck in the woman’s bracelet and her claws dug deep into the woman’s hand. The woman started to scream. Venko sprinted from his trailer. He grabbed a shovel from the side of the truck and swung at the bear. As he did, the bear let go of the woman, but not before tearing a hole in the top of her hand and ripping her index finger to shreds. Blood was spewing everywhere. The woman fell back in horror. For a moment there was silence, then suddenly, inexplicably, she got up to leave.
“She was drunk,” Venko said. “She was trespassing. She was attacking my bears. I told her to fucking stay where she was.”
Inna came running out with a camera. The police showed up and made a report. Eventually an ambulance arrived and drove the woman to a hospital. For the time being everyone was in shock. The encounter was the worst nightmare of everyone on the show. It seemed to highlight all of the hazards of life in the circus: the danger of working with animals, the perils of dealing with the public, the threat of disaster at any moment—even outside the ring. Like anxious parents who fret for their children as soon as they step out of sight, performers live in constant fear that their families will be taken hostage by events such as this. But what developed next in this episode surmounted everyone’s past experience. In fact, it seemed to transcend the rich history of the circus and embed itself firmly in the culture of the present. The one fact that haunted all of us for months, the one detail that made this incident with the bear representative not just of the circus but of American society in the 1990s, was that the boyfriend of the woman who fed her hot dog to the bear announced to doctors at the hospital that the woman was HIV-positive. As a result, in the harried days that followed this already horrid episode, the show had to get not only the three members of the Lilov family but also their five Siberian bears tested for the AIDS virus.
When I heard this news, all I could think of was Venko’s beleaguered admonition: “People are fucking stupid, my friend. You just don’t understand.”
As soon as Dobush completes his handstand on the rings the act accelerates through a series of increasingly complex tricks: Tampa rolls backward on the parallel bars; Peggy walks on a spinning barrel; Dobush catches a series of juggling rings and slips them necklacelike over his head. For the final trick the prop crew brings out a giant trampoline and sets it in the center of the ring. Venko leads Dobush onto the bright red trampoline. With the drummer accenting the bear’s every bounce with his lower toms and sixteen-inch cymbal, Dobush springs several feet in the air like a giant furry version of one of those juvenile bat-a-balls. The audience applauds enthusiastically, but Venko barely smiles. In truth, his heart is no longer in the ring.
After the disaster on Cape Cod, Venko slowly descended into a low-grade rage about the circus. The HIV tests on the bear, performed by a special veterinarian, proved negative. The tests on his family were negative as well. But still Venko had had enough. “I’m preparing myself to leave show business,” he said. “I don’t need this anymore.”
“Are you sad?” I asked.
“Bruce, you’ve been here too long,” he said. “You are starting to think like these people. Just because I live in the circus doesn’t mean I have to die here as well. Do I want to be seventy years old and driving two hundred miles to the next lot and arriving at five in the morning? I want to have a normal life. I want to have a house. I want to work five days and have two days off. I want to go fishing. Now I must work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. When I go to a Chinese restaurant I must be thinking what would happen if the cages came open. When I go to the supermarket I must think what happens if my fence breaks. Sometimes I do not sleep at night. The reason is if something happens to my bears I am lost. And if something happens with the public they sue me.”
The lady who fed the hot dog to the bear did eventually sue the circus. Even though she was trespassing, the show settled out of court for $9,000.
“This is a great country. You can work very hard and make a good living. When I first came to this country in 1973 I was making four dollars a week. Ten years later I was making only $105 dollars a week from Kenneth Feld. Now I make a good living but I have $1,000 a week in fixed expenses. That is okay when I get paid, but when I have three weeks off in the winter that starts to cost a lot of money. Every year I have to begin the season with no money. This is no life for a family. I’m just happy I’m not like the rest of these people. I have something else I can do.”
When he did leave, Venko said, he planned to give his bears away to zoos and open a twenty-four-hour trailer repair business in Florida. Still he vowed not to forget where he came from, or what caused him to leave. “I’m going to call my company Royal Bear Trailers,” he said, “and I’m going to ask every customer that comes in if they are animal rights activists. If they say yes, I’m going to charge them triple.”
6
Death of a Naïf
Soon after Ahmed’s wife, Susie, had her baby, something happened to the show. We were in New Jersey by then. June was on its way. Suddenly the show was losing its freshness. Overnight a sort of seven-week itch consumed the cast and crew.
In Clown Alley, meanwhile, discord still reigned, though I was growing more settled. In the two months I had been clowning I had slowly warmed to the ring. At the start of the year I had often stared at the ground during shows. It wasn’t nerves, just concentration. With every lot a different surface—asphalt, mud, grass, or gravel—every day presented a different danger. Sometimes I would slip on an anthill during the firehouse gag and land on my back. Sometimes I would trip on a rock and land on my face. This was hilarious for the audience but painful for me. Finally Elmo pointed out during one of his visits that I should stop playing to my feet and play to the audience instead. “Don’t make eye contact with anyone,” he said, “but make faces in their direction. If you don’t look at anyone in particular, everyone will think you’re looking at them.”
As a performer, my relationship with the audience was not what I would have expected. In many ways the performers don’t do the show for the audience. The size of the crowds varies widely, from frequent packed houses of over 3,000 to the occasional dismal showing of under 200 (Rock Hill, at 157, was the lowest of the year), and performers can’t rely on them for motivation. As a result, they must rely on something higher—like a love for the circus—or something lower—like the promise of a paycheck. Moreover, the size of the crowd is often less important than its enthusiasm. In Phillipsburg, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania Dutch country, the show sold out but the people were taciturn. In Willingboro, closer to Philadelphia, we had only half houses but they were mostly Latin and cheered with zeal. When the Flying Rodríguez Family was introduced as the “Pride of Mexico,” the crowd whooped and whistled with patriotic hysteria. Unfortunately they were less adoring of the Rodrinovich Flyers, not realizing they were Mexican as well.
For me, each particular audience was less important than my overall attempt to develop my clown persona. I learned early how to turn on and turn off my clown on demand—“on” when I stepped inside the tent, “off” when I stepped out. Not particularly limber, I had been developing a character that was upright, almost formal: an inept maî
tre d’ with a relentlessly sunny spirit, blind to the restaurant burning down around me. Ironically, even though the historic distinction among clown categories (whiteface, Auguste, and a few minor characters, such as the tramp) has all but disappeared in recent years, I fit naturally into the role of the traditional whiteface: a straight man and perfect target for all the manic Augustes around me. This was particularly true in the firehouse gag.
Like everyone else in the Alley, I joined in the rush to find new bits to add to the gags. During the ladder routine in particular I needed something to do. I considered normal things that firemen do that would be funny when done around a burning house, such as selling tickets to the firemen’s ball; as well as things that normal people do over a fire that would be funny for a fireman to do, such as roasting marshmallows. In the end I settled on a normal thing that people do to a house that would be funny for a fireman to do, namely, painting the outside. This idea was made possible by the fact that Marty had the perfect prop, an oversized painter’s palette with a giant scrub brush on a stick. A few days later Jimmy was lecturing a few of us over dinner about the virtues of sight comedy over slapstick when he asked, “By the way, who came up with the painting?” I signaled that I had. He raised his eyebrows approvingly, but didn’t say anything further. He didn’t have to. I was learning my way.
Unfortunately, no sooner had this prop come to symbolize all the virtues of the Alley than it came to represent its faults. While the clowns pretty much cooperated during the gags, once out of the ring the boys would usually just return to the Alley, take off their wigs and pants, and sit around in their undershorts telling off-color jokes. I had been trying to counter some of the tedium and improve my relations with the Alley by asking a few of the boys—particularly Marty—to give me some pointers on being a clown. Although at nineteen he was the youngest, Marty was also one of the hardest-working and most talented of the clowns. In his loudmouthed persona of the Village Idiot he was also the most outspoken, the most conceited, and the most resentful about my being considered a clown. He would constantly complain about my makeup, the way I pulled the cart, even my driving. After passing me on the road one night in the truck he drove for the electrician, he sought me out on the lot. “Bruuuuce,” he said in his whimpering Village Idiot drawl that he never seemed to put away. “It’s considered courtesy to blink your lights at somebody when they pass you.” After several incidents like this, I decided to treat him with the respect he craved and asked him to teach me about taking falls, making bangs, and building props. He eagerly obliged. Soon the problems got worse.
First, he started giving me little pieces of niggling advice. “This is the finale,” he would say. “I think you ought to look more spiffy.” Next he tried to change my makeup. “Your face is really boring,” he would say. “I think you should change it.” Finally, one Sunday evening in Exton, Pennsylvania, he went over the top. The weather had been gorgeous all weekend, but suddenly during our final show the sky darkened and a light rain started to fall. We had already dismantled the firehouse and only the fire cart remained to be loaded into the prop truck for the jump. The palette and brush that Marty had loaned me remained, as they always did, at the bottom of the cart. As the show ended Marty came into the Alley.
“Bruuuuce,” he said in his ingratiating whine. “Will you do me a faaavor?”
“Sure,” I said, “what is it?”
“Tomorrow, take the palette and brush out of the cart, wash them off, put them in the truck, and never use them again.”
Then he spun around and left.
For a moment I was stunned, then dumbfounded, and in the two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Jersey that followed, I slowly became annoyed. The next day, after putting away his prop and replacing it with one I built myself, I pulled up a chair beside him in the Alley when no one else was around. I understood that my presence in the Alley was somewhat unusual, I told him, but I wondered if he would treat me with respect nonetheless.
Marty was caught off guard by my directness. He said he had learned in the circus that you can’t ask people nicely to do things but must treat them like children. Then he apologized. Later that night he complimented me on my bow tie. The next day he asked for my help with his trunk. As with Sean and Kris several weeks before, the less I acted like some silent cartoon (or even a distant writer, for that matter), the more I was accepted into the circus.
In Willingboro, Sean asked me to go to the mall. He was looking for a new pair of high-top sneakers to replace the ones he wore in his act. The twice-daily impact of the cannon launching pad against his feet had completely wrecked the soles of his shoes. It had also all but eliminated his arches and almost ruptured his knees, thereby aggravating what he referred to as his rickets, the euphemism for his bowleggedness. When he was on CBS’s Street Stories, Sean had mentioned the problems he was having finding shoes with sufficient support and afterward had waited expectantly for several weeks for an endorsement contract from Nike. Unfortunately, it never came. Michael Jordan got millions for jumping fifteen feet from the foul line and dunking a ball in a net; the Human Cannonball can’t even get a free pair of shoes for getting shot one hùndred and fifty feet twice a day from a cannon and dunking himself in a net. Clearly the scales of justice don’t weigh all acts the same.
In the mall our subject wasn’t feet, but guts. By late May we had entered a several-week stretch of towns where we played only mall parking lots—York and Exton in Pennsylvania; Voorhees and Princeton in New Jersey; Fishkill and Middletown in New York; Danbury in Connecticut. The circus likes playing malls because they are central, easy to find, and mothers feel safer bringing their darlings to a circus in front of TGI Fridays than across the street from Al’s Hubcap and Fender at the fairgrounds three miles out of town. The malls like having the circus because it brings in customers, generates publicity, and enhances their reputation as the new town centers of suburban America. The performers like being at malls because the men can find bars to watch sporting events at night, the women (and men) can go shopping during the day, and the kids can escape their mothers’ trailer cooking and enjoy a Chick-Fil-A for lunch.
Sean liked malls because of the mirrors. Considering his penchant for fistfighting and mudslinging, Sean was remarkably vain—particularly about his hair. His blond locks were short in the front with Little League-type bangs and long in the back with rockabilly-like ducktails. In every place he spent more than a passing moment he liked to keep a brush—in his trailer, in my trailer, in the front seat of the cannon. Before his act he would usually brush his hair for ten or fifteen minutes in a combination of Herculean narcissism and Samson-like fortification. In Lynchburg, during one particularly marathon grooming session, I noticed with some alarm that four of the metal bristles of his white doggy-style brush were missing. “I bit them off,” he said from the top of the cannon. “The rubber was missing off the tips and the metal was hurting my head. When you brush your hair as much as I do you have to be careful.” In a stately gesture he took one final sweep of his bangs and tossed the brush down to the ground. As he did, Arpeggio appeared alongside the cannon and caught the brush in his hat. “Oh, Mr. Thomas,” he squealed. “Thank you so much. I’ll treasure it always.” “There are a few hairs left in it,” Sean kindly pointed out. “You can keep them if you want.”
Going to the mall with Sean, even a run-down one like Willingboro Plaza, was to be a bit player in this ongoing parody of self-aggrandizement. On the way to Pic-n-Pay we passed a mirror. “Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and wonder why God was so good to me,” he said. “And the other times?” I asked. “I know why.” To get around this seemingly impenetrable wall of self-confidence, I asked Sean during our walk through the mall to tell me how he met Elvin. He responded with surprising modesty.
Sean’s first brush with the cannon came in 1989, two years after Elvin’s accident, when Elvin first asked his unsuspecting pool boy if he would be interested in joining the circus. Sean said yes; his girlfriend
, however, said no. The idea was quickly dropped. Two years later, with no replacement in hand, Elvin again approached Sean. Once again he said yes; more importantly his girlfriend was no longer around. Within a week he was practicing.
“I remember the first time I got inside the cannon,” Sean said, his voice unusually respectful. His posture was much less sure. “The net was up against the lip of the barrel. That was before we had the air bag. I was wearing sweats and Reebok hiking boots. I slid into the capsule and got situated—my legs on the platform, my butt on the seat, my arms crouched at my side. My whole body tensed up. I took the hit—the initial bang when the capsule slides up the track—and I almost passed out. By the time I knew what was happening I was already coming out of the barrel. My heart was beating. I was scared. I ducked my head like Elvin told me to do and the next thing I knew I had landed in the net. You’re supposed to land on your back. Only that time it didn’t work that way. I dragged my feet when I was leaving the cannon and my left foot caught the bottom of the barrel and my shoe was ripped off. I was lucky my foot wasn’t taken off as well.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No. I got up and Elvin said, ‘Are you all right?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I got my foot caught on the mouth of the cannon.’ ‘You’ve got to keep your legs together,’ he said. So I got in again. That time I was concentrating so hard on keeping my legs together that I spread my arms apart too soon. When I opened up I caught the last two fingers of my left hand on the edge of the barrel and split the webbing between my fingers. My wrist got hurt as well. Elvin gave me the rest of the day off. That’s when I got really frightened. On my way home an old lady pulled out into the road in front of me and I had to swerve my Jeep to avoid getting killed. By the time I arrived at my friend’s house I was shaking like a leaf. ‘Sean, where have you been?’ he said. ‘You’re covered in gunpowder.’ I looked down at my body. My black sweats and red T-shirt were coated in white with splotches of blood everywhere. It looked like I’d been shot. But it wasn’t the shot that freaked me out. It was the lady. She had almost killed me. That’s when I realized my life was about to change.”
