Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus

by Bruce Feiler

  Jenny, it turns out, was in a similar plight. After the incident with her brother, she got into a fight with her parents. She was twenty-three years old, she said. She ought to be able to talk with anybody she wished. Sean had encouraged her to stand up to her family. Now, having done it, she felt all alone. Finally, in a gloom, she decided to flee. With the aid of a friend she jumped into a borrowed car and drove the length of Long Island overnight to the tiny seaside town of Greenport, where the world’s largest tented circus was playing a one-day stand.

  She couldn’t have picked a worse day. The lot was dusty, behind an abandoned warehouse. The circus was ornery, Danny had just left. And to make matters worse, word had just reached the lot that Elmo—on an advance publicity tour for the show—had thrown a fit at a mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, tossing his makeup into a fountain, smearing black greasepaint on a photographer’s bald head, and quitting the show in a late-summer huff that seemed to prove that no one was immune to the back side of the circus pendulum. It was hardly the right atmosphere for a confrontation, but at this stage one could hardly be avoided. Jenny’s parents, realizing what she had done, hopped in a car themselves the following morning and headed out in pursuit. The circus would have a rival show that night, just at the time that Billy Joel was said to be bringing his children to the circus.

  Jenny arrived just as the first show was ending.

  “I saw her step out of the car,” Sean recalled, “and I could see the tension on her face. She tried to avoid me and go straight to Michelle’s, but the high wire was working and nobody was home. Finally she came over to the cannon. ‘Man, you just need to get away from your parents,’ I told her. ‘They’re driving you crazy. You can’t do anything. They’re treating you like a child.’

  “‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m not happy. But there’s no way I can leave. I have no place to go.’

  “‘Sure there is,’ I said. ‘You can come with me.’”

  “‘I can’t go unless I get married,’ she said.

  “‘Well then,’ I said, ‘let’s get married.’”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, our featured attraction, the World’s Largest Cannon…!”

  The ringmaster’s voice interrupted the scene. With Jenny left standing at the altar, Sean excused himself to go do his act. By the time he returned Jenny’s mother had arrived. “‘Sean,’ Jenny said, ‘I want you to meet my mother.’” Sean went over and shook her hand. Jenny’s father was parking the car. “‘Mom,’ Jenny said, ‘Sean wants to marry me.’

  “‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I love your daughter.’

  “‘That’s good,’ her mother said. ‘That is very good. But what about my husband?’

  “‘I’ll tell him,’ I said. ‘I don’t care. Let’s go tell him now…’

  “‘No,’ Jenny said. ‘No, we can’t. I’m afraid.’”

  The second show started. Jenny went to find her father. During intermission she reappeared.

  “‘Guess what?’ Jenny said. ‘My mom told my dad.’

  “‘And…’

  “‘He said he likes you. He said you’re a decent man. You’re clean. You shave good.’”

  Shaving? For months Jenny’s father had been observing Sean. In Florida he had seen the act. In Louisville they had shared a dressing room. In Greenport, finally, they met face-to-face.

  “I went to see him after the show,” Sean said. “He was standing by himself. ‘I love your daughter very much,’ I said. ‘I want to marry her.’

  “‘Sean,’ he said without hesitation. ‘I want you to know. This is the happiest day of my life.’”

  Two days later Sean Thomas Clougherty and Jenny Montoya were married in a private ceremony near Yaphank, Long Island. That day he twice got shot out of the cannon.

  “The funny thing was, I never even held her hand until I asked her to marry me,” Sean said. “I never even kissed her until we were engaged.”

  “So in the end, Kris was right,” I said.

  “But I wanted it like that. I wanted it to be all new with the girl I married.”

  “You’re just an old-fashioned romantic after all.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “So why do you think her parents were so happy?”

  “Because I’m a good guy.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re a jerk.”

  Sean laughed.

  “Anyway, you’re not Pentecostal.”

  “So what? You can always change. I told her I would be willing to do anything to marry her. She said, ‘I don’t want you to change just for me; I want you to change for God…’”

  No sooner had he said that than Jenny walked through the door. Though it was still quite warm outside, she was wearing a straight beige skirt that stretched to her ankles and an off-white blouse that was buttoned around her wrists. Her skin was unpainted around her eyes. Her brown hair hung straight to her waist. She looked like a piece of smooth, unvarnished wood. She was beautiful. Unadorned.

  “Isn’t she the greatest wife in the world?” Sean asked, sitting up and slapping his thighs.

  “Isn’t he just silly?” she countered, pushing him down with insouciant aplomb.

  Earlier in the evening the two of them had invited me for dinner—stewed chicken and rice, Wonder bread and butter. It was the first time I had seen silverware in Sean’s trailer. It was the first time they had received houseguests. All night the two of them alternately bickered and cuddled like the strangers and newlyweds they still were. “You are the most hyper person I know,” she said to him when he jumped on her back and kissed her neck. “You are the most stubborn girl I’ve ever met,” he retorted when she slapped his hand away from the stove. They would snap at each other, apologize quickly, then roll around on the floor in a frantic embrace. “It’s just that time of the month,” Sean whispered. “All girls are like that.” “It’s just right after his act,” she countered. “All circus boys are like that.” After dinner she washed the dishes and took the leftovers to Michelle and Angel while Sean lay on the bed and recounted their story. The number of pillows had blossomed again. Not only mauve, now, but fuchsia and lavender. Sean’s old black blanket had disappeared. So had his gold necklace with the Florida Gator.

  “Did you tell him what happened at church?” she said, finally arriving on the bed.

  “I was just getting to that part,” he said, putting his arms around her waist.

  “Stop it,” she said. “We have company.”

  “He’s not company,” Sean said. “He’s Bruce.”

  He tickled her for several seconds until she finally gave him a kiss. Then he returned to his story. The day after Jenny moved into his trailer Sean agreed to attend Sunday-morning services at a local Pentecostal church. “It’s not like it came as a total surprise,” Sean said. “In recent weeks I had been reading the Bible a little with Michelle and Angel. In Commack a priest came to the lot several times and showed us the right way to read it. Once you know, it all makes sense. For Jenny’s sake I agreed to go.”

  “But you have to admit,” she said. “Even you were surprised.”

  “We went to church,” Sean said. “It was Angel and Michelle. Jenny and myself. Mari and even Juan.”

  “Juan went as well?” I said.

  “It was his first time. He had been reading all along, but he never wanted to go to church. You can’t make anybody go. They have to want to do it, or it won’t work. I think he was upset about Danny.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We were sitting there all through the service, and at the end the priest said whoever wanted to be baptized should raise his hand. I thought about it for a second, then raised mine. At that point I tapped Juan on the leg. He didn’t want to do it at first, but then, out of the blue, he raised his hand. He said he felt something inside him push his arm into the air. The priest said, ‘Yes.’” Sean pumped his fist like the athlete he once was. “Anyway, we stood up and went in front of the entire church. We chan
ged into a thin white gown and stepped into the pool.”

  “The priest was in there with you?”

  “The priest was right in the water, only he was wearing fishing waders so he wouldn’t get wet. We stepped in the water. He said a blessing, and then he dunked our bodies in the pool. That’s when I had the feeling. It was like a wave of lightness that came over my body. I wasn’t myself anymore. I felt free.”

  “You see, a lot of other religions baptize you when you’re young,” Jenny added. “But at that time you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s important to go through this experience after you’ve committed a lot of sins.”

  Jenny’s voice was earnest, her body was erect. Sean, however, was still unsure. It would be several months before he felt comfortable enough to regain some of his former spunk. At the moment he was mostly supine.

  “And what about these sins?” I asked Sean.

  “Well, I don’t drink anymore. I’m trying not to curse. To tell you the truth, I feel a lot better. I do crave a dip every now and then. But all of those things are bad for you, even if you do them a little. It’s probably better that I don’t.”

  “We’re not perfect,” Jenny said. “But God doesn’t expect us to be. We pray for each other. We’re trying to do better. Whatever God has planned, that’s what will happen—”

  Far away the generator emitted its midnight cough and slowly, inescapably, ground to a halt. Within several seconds Sean’s circuit breaker snapped and the lights went dark in the room.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Sean asked.

  “Why? Don’t you have battery power?” I said.

  “Only when we hit a bump in the road and the cables under the sink stick in place.”

  “Sean, we have to get a new trailer,” Jenny whined.

  “But I like it in the dark,” he cooed.

  I made my way to the door.

  It was late Friday night on the eve of September, less than a week later, when I walked into Ruby Tuesday’s behind Atlantic City Raceway and happened onto Darryl from the props department and a few of his friends at the bar. Like almost everyone else, they were dreaming of escape. Our race down the coast, now well under way, was moving much faster than our ascent. After a few weeks on the Jersey shore and a brief stop on Chesapeake Bay we would be making a long autumn dash toward the Gulf of Mexico, followed by the gradual slide toward winter quarters in De Land. Darryl and his buddies, like many of the workers, needed money for the journey. I decided to ask them my “question of the day.”

  Beginning with my earliest days on the circus I would occasionally come up with a diverting question that I tried to ask everyone on the lot. Jimmy nicknamed these odd queries my “question of the day” and egged me on to come up with more. Some of the questions were amusing, such as “How many bathrobes do you have?” (Since performers wear bathrobes over their costumes, most have a large supply. Gloria Bale, the narrow winner, counted nine, all with carrot stains in the pockets.) Others were serious, like “What’s the biggest insult on a circus lot?” (The clear winner: “carny,” which performers find offensive because it likens them to game dealers on carnivals.)

  In Atlantic City the question of the day was “How much would you have to win at the casinos in order to leave the show for good?” I had intended this question to be lighthearted, but the answers were surprisingly revealing. Sheri, who along with her husband ran a lucrative corner of the concession wagon, said it would take fifty thousand dollars. “I consider what I make here in a year,” she said, “and then how much I could make on investments. Anything over that and I would leave and raise my children at home.” Gloria, who makes far less, said it would take her a million. “I love my job. Besides, a hundred thousand dollars doesn’t buy what it used to.” Many of the clowns said they would go for twenty thousand, while Jimmy James said he would go for a mere ten grand, a shocking testimony to the feeling he and many others have of being trapped in their own privation.

  At the bar the answers came just as fast. One of Darryl’s friends, the one I nicknamed Michael Jackson because of his long curly hair, said he would leave for ten thousand as well. “Hell, I’d buy me a ball of crack about the size of your beer mug and sell flakes of it for twenty dollars apiece. I’d probably make several million in a month.” Darryl, for his part, was more circumspect. “If I won ten thousand dollars I’d send that on to my daughters. It would take a lot for me to leave this show. I’ve been here almost three years. I’ve had many opportunities to go.”

  Darryl, who for some reason didn’t have a nickname, was a talker. I never saw him when he wasn’t talking, laughing, slapping someone’s back, or just plain rapping to himself. Trim and fit with a broad toothy smile, Darryl had a slightly receding hairline and a constantly varying daily sheen of stubble that never developed into a beard yet never completely disappeared. That is, until Atlantic City.

  “Look out, ladies, here comes GQ Darryl,” I said to him the first time I saw his new clean-shaven look.

  “Hell, I’m way past that stage,” he said. “My daughter’s going to have a baby next week in Baltimore and I want to look my best.”

  “You’re going to be a grandfather?”

  “Shoot, man, what’re you talking about? I’ve already got four…”

  No-Nickname Darryl grew up on the streets of Chicago. By age fifteen he had dropped out of school and risen to second-in-command of a gang, the Black Disciples of Death. By age sixteen he had fathered his first child. By twenty he had two more. A year later he was in prison. “This man started making moves on my old lady,” he said. “Finally I confronted him and he told me if I didn’t watch out he was going to fuck me up. I decided to fuck him up first. That night I slit his throat. They gave me ten to twelve.”

  Out of prison a decade later, Darryl started wandering. He sold vacuum cleaners and magazines door-to-door. He hustled. He even worked at a carnival. He was living the underside of the American dream: a black man with a criminal record who was running from his family and living by his wits. One night he found himself at a homeless shelter in Miami when a “fat man with a van” pulled up to the door. “You guys want to join the circus?” he said. “Seven days a week. Three meals a day. Free ride to Birmingham.”

  “I wanted the free ride to Birmingham,” Darryl said, “so I took him up on the offer. When I got here Ahmed said to me, ‘You look healthy, come with me.’ I thought he was offering me something special. That’s how I ended up in props.”

  The workers, like the performers, have a strict hierarchy. Big top is at the bottom; they do the heavy lifting. Cookhouse is slightly higher; they get free food. Props is considered near the top; they get to wear bright red jumpsuits and work in the ring alongside the performers.

  “Who do you think runs the show?” Darryl asked as he bought me another beer. “We do. What do people say about the circus?”

  “Everyone I know says two things,” I said. “First, ‘Is that really her hair?’ and second, ‘Boy, those guys in the red suits work hard.’”

  “Damn straight. Just the other day some guy came up to me and handed me thirty dollars and said, ‘Without you guys there would be no show.’ And he was right. Who else could they get to pull down that rigging? Who else would lift that tiger cage? That’s solid iron, my friend. If we sit down, the show don’t go on. Last year it happened. We sat down at 4:29 on a Tuesday afternoon. We wanted to get a draw, even though it was only the day after payday.”

  “And what happened?”

  “They brought that money box out as fast as they could.”

  “So let me ask you something,” I said. “Why do so many guys do those draws when it costs them so much money?”

  “It hurts, man. It really does. But you have to. We have no choice.”

  “What do you mean you have no choice?”

  “Crack, man. Don’t you know?”

  “You mean you’d rather be high today and broke tomorrow?”

  “You need it, man. How else could
you survive around here? Look, the circus is hell. Sometimes it fucks with your mind. You haven’t spent a night in No. 63….” He laughed at the thought. “Sometimes you just need the escape.”

  “Escape from what?”

  “This.” He pointed to the skin on his arm. It was as black as the makeup on my clown face. His voice became suddenly sober. “You don’t know what it’s like to be black, man, Bruce. To come from the ghetto. To wake up every day and be oppressed. You don’t know what it’s like to hustle.”

  He indicated it was my time to buy a drink. When I agreed he said he was ready for a stiff one. My beer cost him $1.35. His rum and Coke cost me $5.00.

  “So is this show that bad?” I asked.

  “No worse than anyplace else. There are only two qualifications for my job: be fit and be black. We have a nickname for this place. Where I come from CBCB stands for Cold-Blooded Caucasian Bastards.”

  I looked at him in shock.

  “Man, you don’t know nothing, do you? The name of the game is survival. I’ll take whatever I can. If they’re going to screw me, then I’m going to hustle them.”

  Gradually, as I continued to nurse my beer and Darryl started guzzling his stiff one, he told me the details of a racket he was running on the show. Working with several other people, Darryl regularly let in guests through the sidewall of the tent—an old practice dating back to the beginning of tented shows that always seems to find new practitioners on the show and new takers in every town. If one of the members of the group saw a family of six he would tell them the show wanted sixty dollars from them. He would let them in for thirty-five. After tipping the guards at the door, the racket made upward of a thousand dollars a week, Darryl said. Split several ways, that raised his salary of $150 a week to around $500.

  “So this life is pretty good for you,” I said.

  “For now. But I’m going to turn forty in about ten days. I may not look it, but I feel it. When we get to Baltimore my family’s coming to pick me up and take me to the hospital where my daughter is staying. They want me to come home. That’s the way black mothers are. They want their people close.”