by Bruce Feiler
It wasn’t. For the next two years Michelle and Angel were forced to conduct their engagement in secret. They were on different shows at the time—in a different town almost every night—making communication all but impossible. But still they persisted, and at the end of that period, when Michelle, her sister, and her mother, remarkably recovered from her fall, were invited by Kenneth Feld to do a mother-and-daughter hair hang on the Ringling Show, the two lovers were reunited. Unfortunately, their families were reunited as well.
“It all started with one family on the show,” Michelle said. “They were Catholic and became born-again Christians. After they were born again they started talking to people on the show. About the Bible and stuff. My family was all Catholic, but we never read the Bible. We followed what the priest said and believed it. But if you read you find out the truth. So this family showed the truth to my mother and she became a Christian. It took about a year. Then Angel found out about my mom and he told me, ‘You better not change.’ He even told me if I ever became a Christian like her that we were going to break up.”
“And I was serious,” he added. “My family is Catholic. In Spain we are very proud. That’s the way we are. My parents would not understand.”
“Of course, I told him I was not going to do that. At that time all my family was against my mom. Then six months after that my dad became a Christian, too. And a month later, me. At the time Angel didn’t know what it means to be a Christian…”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“It means I read the Bible and realized that it is the word of God. To be Christian is to live like Christ, or as close to Christ as possible. Like Jesus when he walked the earth. Nobody can be perfect. God knows that. But he knows you are trying. You stop drinking, you stop smoking. Around here they say we sacrifice chickens. But if you live a crazy and wild life like Sean Thomas then that’s considered normal.”
“And were you prepared to end the relationship?”
“If it was for God.” Her answer was firm. “For me, God is first. Before anybody—my mother, my father, even him. Of course, I didn’t tell him right away. In fact, I said I would never talk to him about it. For a while he knew I was going to some Bible study. I told him that was all. Then one day my father was going to church to get baptized. I didn’t want to go, but my father begged me to go with him. I agreed. Angel was standing outside and he saw me leave with my family. He gave me the dirtiest look. It was then that he knew what was happening.”
“And I was so mad,” he seethed. “I was on fire. Boiling, I’d say. I had told her, ‘If you go to that church we will break up.’ Now I knew it was over.”
“The next day he asked for the ring back. I gave it to him, then I tried to calm him down. ‘Oh, Angel, don’t get mad,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong. I just went with my father.’ I tried to convince him, but he was angry. ‘No, I don’t care,’ he shouted. I tried eight hundred ways to calm him down, but none worked. By the end of the day everyone on the show knew it was over. I thought we would never speak again.”
There was a long pause in the conversation. Their gloomy faces were reflected in the oversized mirrors and glassy windows that gave their compact trailer a larger-than-life feel. Peach pillows and blown-up photographs covered a seamless path from sofa to ceiling. On the wall was an ornate scripted plaque that said: “En este hogar somos cristianos. Aquí todos son bienvenidos.” (“In this home are Christians. Here everyone is welcome.”)
“But I had a friend,” Angel said. “He came to me about a week later and told me Michelle was sitting home by herself that night. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘Well,’ he told me, ‘I think you should go see her.’ I didn’t really want to see her, but something inside of me said, ‘Go, go talk to her.’ So I went and knocked on the door.”
“He didn’t say anything at first, and I didn’t say anything to him. Then I invited him in. I had been praying a lot for him, that God would make him understand the truth. But I asked God never to send me to him. Now God had sent him to me. It’s hard to explain if you don’t know about the Holy Spirit, but I felt like God was inside of me at that moment. I felt this voice inside of me, this is not a lie—God knows it—and the voice was telling me to go get my Bible. We were just sitting there, and I heard it again: ‘Go get your Bible.’ Finally I got up to get it, and I was thinking: What am I doing? I said to Angel, ‘I want to show you something.’ He didn’t resist. We were there for two hours.”
Michelle was almost apologetic. “I had just started reading the Bible,” she said. “I didn’t know how to quote scriptures or anything. I didn’t know where anything was. But I would somehow open the Bible to the right place every time. It was amazing. He was looking at me like it wasn’t really me. I told him about my experience and I said, ‘I wish you could experience the same thing.’” Her voice picked up. She moved to the edge of her chair. “As soon as I said that I thought to myself: Whatever happens now is going to happen.”
Angel moved forward in his seat as well. They were in the same position they had been in that night in Dallas: she on the chair, he on the couch. They were staring toward the ceiling.
“I was listening,” Angel said, his voice quivering and soft, “and when she finished I felt a kind of peace. Then I started to cry. I had never cried before that, ever. Even when my father hit me, hit me hard. I was taught never to cry. But at that moment I did, and I knew that was it.” He set his hands down on his knees. “God had touched me.”
Michelle followed his hands with hers. “It’s hard to understand unless you have experienced it yourself,” she said. “It’s a beautiful thing, really.”
“It’s true,” he added. “There’s no way to describe it. At that moment I opened my heart to God. And when it was over we both kneeled on the ground and embraced. It was then that I spoke for the first time all night. I said, ‘Whatever you want, God, I’m ready…’”
Michelle smiled at her husband and took his hands in hers. After several seconds, the tears starting to shine in the black gloss of her eyes, she turned and looked at me. Her voice was almost deathly calm. “That’s when the real battle began.”
Last comes the spin. Like an ice-skater, Michelle has moved gracefully through all of her tricks—spinning hoops, juggling fire, occasionally even balancing plates on a stick—but the act is not complete until she executes the one vivid display that everyone in the tent is secretly expecting—the spiral of death.
“I start on the floor. It’s the first time I’ve actually touched the ground since the act began. I do a little dance, sort of like a mermaid underwater. My husband comes behind me and lifts me off the ground, slowly walking me into space until he gives me a little push. That’s when I start spinning, whipping myself around and around, kind of like turning nonstop pirouettes. I start with one hand over the other like I’m dead, then slowly lift my arms. At that point I get going faster and faster until I don’t know where I am and all I can hear is the beat of the drum, and all I can feel is the pain in my neck…”
And in the end that’s where the trick lies: not in the ring that sticks out of her head, not in the shampoo she uses on her scalp, but in the strength of her hundred-pound body that runs from her back, up through her neck, throughout her scalp, and out of her hair. True to her word, Michelle is the real Samson of the show: her life depends on her hair. Fifteen minutes before every performance she crouches before a plastic bowl in her trailer, pours a pitcher of water over her head, and combs her hair into a long ponytail. Angel stands behind her, ties a cotton rope around her ponytail, then braids the rope into her hair. When he’s finished he folds the braided ponytail into a loop and ties the end to its base at her scalp. Into this loop he places the ring. Michelle Quiros is not hanging by a screw in her head, she is hanging by her hair.
“The funny thing is, I get used to it. It actually hurts more when I first go up. That’s when I feel all the weight. Once I start doing the tricks I don’t feel it at all. Then when I do th
e spin I feel it again. It’s double pressure at that point. I have to concentrate real hard. I’m listening for a certain part of the music that I know is my cue to open my tuck. That gives me time to come down and do my style. Of course, when I do come down I can’t see anything; everything looks blurry. I go down on one knee, because if I was standing up I would probably fall over. I would look like a drunk or something, and that sort of defeats the whole look of the act. Two seconds later, I’m fine.”
Two seconds after that she’s off. As soon as Michelle settles into place, Jimmy blows the whistle with alarming speed and all the performers scurry from the tent, clearing the way for the animals to return.
7
Please Don’t Pet the Elephants
My dream nearly died in Fishkill, New York. Overnight the peril of the circus became real.
“Did you hear about the excitement last night?” Khris Allen found me in the dollar store. I was looking for cotton swabs.
“What excitement?” I said, stepping closer.
“In the elephant department.” He was not speaking loud.
“Somebody in the circus?”
“Somebody in town. I think you better come see…”
The circus reached New England in early June. After four sold-out days in Princeton we headed north to the Hudson Valley before darting across Connecticut for a two-week trek around Boston. Somehow our entire Northeastern run seemed cursed. In Massachusetts one person ended up in the hospital. In Connecticut, days before that, anxiety reigned. Almost exactly fifty years earlier, in July 1944, the worst circus fire in American history engulfed the Ringling tent in Hartford, killing 168 people, injuring 487 more, and creating a rift between the state of Connecticut and the circus community that has yet to heal. Circus people still feel jinxed by the state, especially after historians concluded recently that the fire was almost certainly the result of arson. The state, meanwhile, still feels threatened by the circus, and as a result charges $7,000 in permits (most places let the circus play free) to have firefighters encircling the tent at all times with water pressure in their hoses.
Fishkill, however, was supposed to be different. For two hundred years the Hudson Valley has been considered the “Cradle of the American Circus.” The area has been particularly generous toward circus animals. Isaac Van Amburgh, the famed wild-feline trainer, was actually born in Fishkill. Old Bet, the second elephant ever brought to America and the first to become a star, was purchased in 1805 by Hackaliah Bailey of nearby Somers, New York. Bailey toured the elephant around New England, but it wasn’t until he threatened to shoot the animal if his partner didn’t turn over half the profits that Old Bet became a national phenomenon. Even after the elephant was shot by a disgruntled farmer in Maine for luring money from the town, Bailey continued charging twenty-five cents a peek for fans to view Old Bet’s stuffed carcass in front of his Elephant Hotel in Somers. A granite pillar topped with a gold-lacquered elephant marks the spot today, and two clowns on our show actually made a pilgrimage to this mecca during our weekend stay in Fishkill—just thirty miles away.
“The evening started funny,” Khris explained as we walked out of the Dutchess Mall. The sun was high—summer was coming—but the air was fresh and spicy to breathe. “When I came back from the bar I found this couple playing with the tigers. They had climbed over my fence and were trying to pet the cats. The woman had actually stuck her hand into Tito’s cage. I told them if they didn’t leave I was going to call the police and have them arrested for trespassing. They said they were so in love with the cats that they just had to pet them. I pointed to the exit and they eventually left.”
We approached the portable orange fence that surrounded his compound. The smell of rotting horsemeat swirled around the cages. The red-and-white-striped canopy reflected the noonday glare.
“Twenty minutes later I was just lying down to sleep when I felt my trailer rock. I have the fence tied to my bumper for that reason. It’s like a silent burglar alarm. I hopped out of bed and ran outside—I wasn’t even wearing pants—and that’s when I saw them next to the cages. ‘Get your motherfucking asses away from here!’ I yelled. ‘And stay away! If I see you around here tomorrow, or the next day, I will have you put in jail.’ They climbed over the fence. Only that time I followed them to their car. I waited for about fifteen minutes and when they didn’t leave I went back to get my whip. I walked up to their car, tapped on the window, and in my best tiger-ruling voice said, ‘If you don’t get out of here you’re going to end up in the hospital!’” Khris smiled with a certain degree of satisfaction. “They started the car, and vroom, took off. I went back to the trailer and lay down. That’s when I heard the noise from the elephant compound.
“It wasn’t a scream or anything,” he said, “just a loud crush. But it was jarring enough to jolt me out of bed. I had a feeling. It’s kind of weird. I knew something had happened with the elephants. I looked around for my pants. By the time I found my jacket and hurried outside I saw Mr. Holwadel running.
“‘Douglas,’ I said, ‘something bad has happened.’
“‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s by the elephants.’ I couldn’t believe what we found.”
At a little after one o’clock in the morning Christopher Ponte walked out of the Za Bar & Grill, a pool hall-cum-beer parlor inside the Dutchess Mall, and decided to have some fun at the circus. The tent was beautiful spread out before him. The parking-lot lights made the scene appear tame. Along with a friend, the twenty-two-year-old native of Wappingers Falls wandered down the quiet line of trailers, past the tigers, the bears, and the Arabian horses, past the world’s largest cannon, until he spotted the elephants in the rear parking lot.
“Let’s go pet the elephants,” Christopher said to his friend. His friend did not want to go and tried to stop him.
Undaunted, Christopher climbed over the four-foot-high orange plastic fence, the kind often used on ski slopes to keep reckless novices from careening out of control. Moving forward, he stepped into the pen where the elephants roam with loose chains around one foot, in a facility nicknamed the “Elephant Hotel.” A few of the elephants were lying on beds of hay; the others stood swaying silently side by side. A puddle still lingered on the mottled asphalt where the herd was bathed that afternoon with water from a nearby fire hydrant. All around the pen were hand-painted signs in bright red letters that said: DANGER: KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, PLEASE DON’T PET THE ELEPHANTS.
“Hey, you!” the watchman called from his post. “You can’t be in here. Get back behind the fence!” Christopher’s friend tried to stop him as well.
Christopher, however, refused to stop and approached the end of the elephant line. He was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a white T-shirt that said: TEQUILA: EAT ME! with a picture of a worm. He walked up to Pete, alias Petunia, and decided he wanted to pet her trunk. He never made it. As soon as the young man approached Pete from behind, she spun around in startled defense and swung her head at the intruder, pushing him effortlessly against a nearby truck, where quickly and with stunning precision she crushed him against the steel side of the cab, Elephant Truck No. 60.
“By the time we got there the guy had stopped breathing,” said Khris. “He had taken a few steps, then fallen to the ground. His friend and I pulled him away. That’s when I realized: Hey, I know this guy. I had played pool with him earlier at the bar. He was there with a friend. They were nice guys, but they were wasted. The guy couldn’t even hit a straight shot. Now his friend was crying. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said. ‘I’ve known this guy my whole life. I tried to stop him, but…’ The friend was trained in CPR, so I helped him to go to work. We got his pulse to forty, but every time we stopped pumping his chest, it would disappear. We lifted his shirt and you could see the indentation on his skin. There was no blood, it was all internal injuries. Every time his lungs would fill with air you could see the oxygen just disappear into his stomach.”
“So that’s what happened?” I asked. “A punctured lu
ng.”
“A punctured heart as well.”
Within fifteen minutes the local and county police were on hand. They interviewed Fred Logan, Doug, and the man’s friend, and decided the circus was not to blame. “The elephant was startled,” the detective pronounced. “You’d have been startled, too, if you were half asleep standing up and someone came up beside you.” The paramedics, meanwhile, examined the body and wasted little time before transporting it to the hospital. Finally, at a little after 1:30 in the morning on the first Saturday in June, Christopher Ponte was officially declared dead.
The season was two months old.
Standing in front of the elephant pen after Khris had gone, I watched in chilled silence as the circus continued to churn its never-ending grind—a trunk picked up hay and sprayed it in the air, a push broom spread puddles to dry on the ground, a shovel scooped dung and dumped it into a barrel. Somehow in the harsh midday light the sharp edges seemed more ominous—the open blade of the forklift grip, the jutting dagger of the tent’s main guy line, the deafening grumble of the tigers. Staring at this scene, I couldn’t help thinking that the circus, like any dream, is meant to be viewed in the dark, where you can’t see the wires, you can’t watch the preparation, and you can’t observe the pain. When the show is in the rings, one doesn’t presume to belong. It’s only when one steps outside that the dream seems accessible. With a circus, as with a Greek tragedy, hubris is the ultimate deadly sin.
