Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (19 page)

As for the circus, its treatment of the animal rights issue seemed just as bad. While the circus has many points in its favor—many Americans clearly like seeing animals perform; circus animals often exercise more and live longer than their counterparts in zoos; circus animals, by and large, are in fact well treated—circus people have generally ceded the platform to the protesters. Instead of reaching out to moderate groups and inviting them to inspect the animals (as the USDA does several times a year), circus owners and animal trainers alike have treated all concerned people as irrational rabble-rousers and refused to engage them in any reasonable discussions. As a result, public sentiment is slowly but steadily moving in the direction of keeping animals out of circuses altogether. It was a widespread assumption around the lot, for example, that if the show itself survived for another ten years the number of animal acts would be severely curtailed if not eliminated entirely.

In Winchester, meanwhile, the first arrival of the protesters prompted all sorts of agitation on the lot. Khris Allen, who after all called himself a “cat choreographer,” was the least ruffled of the trainers. “I actually consider myself more of an animal rights activist than most,” he said. “I’m actually doing something for these animals. If any protester wants to see how we care for our tigers, I have a standing offer that they can travel with us for a week. We’ll even pay their way. But they don’t even come and talk with us. They’d rather stand in front and picket.”

Dawnita Bale, whose father was a cat trainer and who with the aid of her sisters cared for and presented the horses, was less sympathetic. “These protesters have nothing to say to me,” she insisted. “These horses are my livelihood. Why would I want to mistreat them? Sure, there are some bad trainers. There’s one bad apple in every bunch. But I make sacrifices in my life to make their lives better. And what bothers me is the unprofessional attitude of these protesters. Why don’t they get current information? Their pamphlet is the same one they’ve handed out for six years. They’ve got a picture of one of Gunther’s elephants and some outdated information. Remember, these are people who wear leather shoes. They eat at McDonald’s. They wear perfume, which, after all, is tested on animals. Why don’t they do something about the cat and dog populations in their own hometowns? That is a problem they can have an impact on, not circuses.”

Venko, of course, was more blunt. “These people piss me off,” he said. “They come on a beautiful morning, with sunshine and everything. Then as soon as it starts raining they leave. Why don’t they stay when the goddamn tornado is coming, or a big windstorm. We have to be with the animals all the time.”

“Is the problem getting worse?” I asked him.

“It wasn’t this way ten years ago. Now they’ve started making rules. The people who make the laws know nothing about the animals. Somebody sits at his desk, gets letters from the animal rights activists, and says, well, we have to make bigger transportation cages. This is goddamn crazy. If you have bigger cages, as soon as you hit the brakes the animals will fly from one side of the cage to the other. As it is, the animals have to exercise every day. They practice in the morning, they have the shows in the afternoon. The rest of the time they sleep. Also, they enjoy it. When we go to work they like it. As soon as the music starts they jump all over the place. For them performing is play.”

For all the huffing and puffing about animal rights activists, in the end they had little immediate impact on the day-to-day operation of the circus, except for one dramatic showdown halfway through the season on Long Island. Instead, the circus faced a greater immediate threat from the activities of naïve animal lovers. This was the cause of the most tragic event of the year, in Fishkill, New York. And this was also the source of the most shocking event of the season in West Barnstable, Massachusetts.

“I finished my act in the four-thirty show,” Venko recalled about that afternoon, “and returned to my trailer. Usually one of us will watch the bears, but in this instance we all decided to change clothes as quickly as possible. I was changing into my blue Ringling coveralls, the ones I wear when I do my welding, when suddenly I heard someone shouting, ‘Help, help!’ As quickly as I could, I went running toward the cages. I was wearing only my socks and saying to myself, ‘God, please don’t let anyone be hurt.’”

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 maître 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.