Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (22 page)

“You don’t really think…”

“I’m going to be sick…”

“
In ring three
…,” the ringmaster calls, “
from Brazil, Elizabeth Crystal, and in ring one
”—his voice escalates—“
from Mexico, Margarita Michelle
…”

Elizabeth Crystal, alias Lupe Rodríguez, struts to the center of ring three, while her cousin Margarita Michelle, alias Michelle Quiros, walks to the middle of ring one. Michelle takes a bow as her attendant attaches the ring sticking out of her head to a three-quarter-inch cable hung from a pulley at the crest of the tent. With a slight lift and a gentle push around the ring, the twenty-three-year-old Michelle slowly rises into the air and begins to slither out of her next layer of clothes. First she takes off her left shoe, then her right, and tosses them to her attendant, who is actually her husband. Next she unzips the pantsuit down her back and lets it ripple down her legs and drift teasingly toward the earth.

“It’s all a matter of presentation,” she told me in a voice as elegant as her act. “I’m trying to gather attention, to draw your mind to my act. When I take off my cape I’m still wearing my pantsuit, but when I take off my pantsuit all I have on is my bikini. At that point you look at my hair.”

And look at her hair people do. Though naturally brown, it has been dyed black for the act. Though fairly brittle, it has been wetted down for pliancy. And though relatively thin, it is clearly strong enough to support her body weight. Still there’s the trouble of that ring: How did it get there? What does it do? And where does it go at night? These questions, like Michelle, just linger in the air, cryptic and aloof. Indeed, as she hangs in the dark for a moment before turning her own set of tricks, Michelle’s hair pulls up on her scalp, which in turn pulls up on her forehead, which in turn pulls up on the edges of her eyes, giving them an oddly Asian look—the essence of enigma.

“The act was originally done by Chinese acrobats hundreds of years ago,” explained Michelle. “When they did it they used to drink tea and fold their legs, sort of like having a tea break in the air. In Mexico they bring a lot of Chinese acrobats into the circus. My grandmother learned it from one of them. She taught it to my mother, and my mother taught it to me.”

Michelle started practicing the act when she was eleven years old. “I told my father one day, ‘I want to tie my hair up like Mom.’ I stood on a chair and he hooked my hair to a cable. At first I didn’t even kick my feet out, but then, little by little, I slowly lifted my body weight to see what it felt like. At first it hurt, it hurt a lot, but I wanted to do it so much I didn’t care. I vowed I wouldn’t cry.”

After a few months Michelle was ready to kick out the chair and hang alone for several minutes. Within six months she was ready to try a few tricks. Then tragedy intervened.

“We were on Ringling at the time. My mother was doing her act in the center ring. She was spinning in the air one night when the cable holding her up suddenly snapped, dropping her thirty-five feet to the floor. It was horrible. She broke a vertebra in her neck. She fell into a coma. It was a miracle she didn’t die. For several months she stayed in the hospital and after that we moved back to Florida. We stayed home the whole year. I couldn’t stand to see her upset, so that’s when I told my dad, ‘I want to do the act. I want to help the family…I want to be like Mom.’”

Michelle had just turned twelve years old.

After stripping to her bikini, Michelle is ready for her first trick. Starting from a stationary position several feet above the ground, Michelle slips one neon-green hoop around each of her thighs and spins them toward each other. Moving deliberately, she then slips one hoop on each of her elbows, one on each of her forearms, and one on each of her hands. At this stage she looks like an octopus spinning eight mini-Hula-Hoops. Next, the three members of the prop crew who are controlling the rope that holds her hair slowly step backward and hoist her upward as if the rings around her limbs are propelling her into the air. As if to illustrate the point, the band plays “The Wind Beneath My Wings.” The trick could easily seem comical, instead it is sublime.

“My father always taught me: ‘It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.’ He’s always told me you can do something very difficult, but if you don’t do it nice the people won’t appreciate it. But if you do something simple and you know how to make it elegant, the act will look nicer and the people will like it.”

With her sparrowlike body, her graceful figure, her caramel-candy skin, Michelle always looks nice in the ring…even when she’s on fire. For her second trick, Angel lights three juggling torches and carefully tosses them up to his wife. Occasionally she would catch one on the wrong end, several times she actually singed the hair on her forearms, and on one frightful occasion during the fourth week of the year the torch unfortunately alit on her bangs and set her hair ablaze. “Oh, the smell!” was all she could remember. “What delight!” the crowd responded: they thought it was part of the act.

“I’ve noticed that people like things that look strange. If I just hung by my hair, at first they would be ‘Oh, wow.’ Then, after a while, they would say, ‘Big deal.’ I have to make it exciting. Not only can I hang by my hair but I can
juggle
while hanging by my hair. That’s the way people think.”

Ironically, by hanging by her hair thirty feet above the ground, even more, by juggling three fiery clubs while hanging by her hair thirty feet above the ground, Michelle does nothing but undermine any bond she might feel with the audience. The reason is simple: they all think she’s odd.

“I want the audience to think my act is elegant, but I don’t always get that. There are always people who say to me, ‘Wow, that was beautiful.’ But then I see a lot of people who are laughing. I guess I understand. If I had never seen this act and I saw it in a show I don’t know how I would react. When I see these people, at first it upsets me, but then I try to be respectful.”

Sometimes, she confesses, it’s hard to be respectful with so many silly questions.

“For some reason everybody asks me if it’s really my hair. What do they think, that it’s just a wig with bobby pins in it? Some people think I have an invisible rope under my arms. One guy came up to me and said, ‘So, you have a screw in your head, right?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I was joking, of course, but the guy said, ‘I thought so.’ Sometimes people are really dumb.”

Michelle was not alone in this thought. Her difficulties with the audience were part of a larger problem that all circus performers seem obliged to endure: most people don’t think circus people are real; they think performers are fake. Just as many visitors asked Michelle if she had a screw in her head, an equal number asked her wirewalking husband if he had magnets on his feet. They asked Khris Allen if he sedated his tigers. They asked Sean if he had a double who slid into the cannon while he ran all the way around the tent and appeared magically at the bottom of his air bag 3.5 seconds later. In Ladson, South Carolina, a local woman came up to a table in Burger King where I was sitting along with several other performers. An entire section of the restaurant had been taken over by the show for a party. “I recognize you people,” the woman said. “Aren’t you from the circus?”

“That’s right,” replied Mary Chris Rodríguez.

“What are you doing here?” the woman asked.

“We’re having a birthday party for our son.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “You mean you’re normal?”

While I found this badge of oddity sad (it would seem like quite an accomplishment to be considered weird in America today), I could see how it developed. Many of the novels I read about circus life seemed to have characters that were psychopathic, satanic, or, worse, half man, half animal—a trapeze artist with the body of a swan, a sideshow prophet with the flippers of a turtle. Perhaps even more important, most of the people who came to see our show had grown up on a steady diet of television and movies and had rarely seen real people performing real feats. You can’t rewind a circus act, you can’t replay it either. The essence of the show is that it is real—you can smell it, you can feel it, you thrill with excitement while it happens in front of you, you tremble with fear when it happens above you, and if you decide to walk around in it, you might get muddy or sticky or covered in dung but you’ll definitely know from any spot in the tent that this is the one thing you’ve done all day that isn’t operated by remote control.

Lamentably, disbelief among audience members often translates into disrespect toward performers. I learned this matter-of-factly in Winchester, Virginia. We had pulled into town on a Thursday night for our twelfth annual stop at the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, a weeklong event celebrating its sixty-sixth year that swells the sleepy Southern town of 32,000 to a population of over 100,000 and fills hotels from Harpers Ferry to Harrisonburg. The Garden Club’s Annual Ladies’ Lunch on Friday had been sold out for months. Saturday’s Sports Breakfast for Men had no tickets available. Sunday’s Blue Grass Festival was guaranteed to be packed. As a result, those looking for something to do flocked to anything available, and probably the best thing available at 6
A.M.
on Friday was the tent raising of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. Besides, it was free.

By 7
A.M.
close to a thousand people had arrived at the little hill alongside Route 50, a number not only larger than all our tent-raising crowds put together but also larger than many of our paying audiences as well. The problem was that even though the crowd may have been our largest to date, our lot was one of the smallest and my camper was parked right up against the stake line near the front door, the best spot, it turned out, for viewing tent raising. Beginning at 7:30, there was constant bumping, scraping, and shoving against my camper. At about 8:00, in response to one particularly annoying bump that roused me from my sleep, I knocked against my back window where the crowds were gathered. The bumping didn’t stop. Ten minutes later, when someone actually climbed on my fender to get a better view, I opened my blind to reveal that I was sleeping inside. The rocking didn’t ebb. Finally, at 8:24, two women in their early twenties actually climbed the ladder on the back of my camper and sat on the roof of my mobile home. “I am not an animal,” I wanted to shout. “I am a human being.”

These sorts of incidents only got worse the farther north we went. Several weeks later, in Pennsylvania, a kind-looking gentleman holding his school-age daughter by the hand stopped me while I was in makeup and asked me if his daughter could urinate on one of the stakes in Clown Alley. In New Jersey they didn’t even bother to ask. I walked back to my trailer during intermission in Freehold and found a mother supervising two young boys who were urinating directly on the back of my Winnebago. “Excuse me,” I said, “I live here.” A minute later, after going inside, I walked around the corner once more, to find that the boys were continuing to do their business and the mother had started to laugh.

The irony of this denigration of performers as unreal is that circus people are actually quite expert at re-creating
real life
on the road. Half the families on the show had kids; ninety-five percent had pets. Seasonal events were celebrated with all the traditional trappings: in the spring there was an Easter egg hunt for children inside the tent; in the summer a special Fourth of July picnic in the cookhouse with steaks on the open grill; and in the fall a high-stakes Halloween costume contest in the center ring, followed by a trick-or-treating bonanza in which children marched down the trailer line knocking on everyone’s door. Community gambling pools were particularly popular. In the most hotly contested wager of the year, participants were invited to pay five dollars and select a fifteen-minute time period when they thought Susie, one of the ticket sellers and wife of the prop boss, would have her baby. When she had a little girl at 12:10
A.M
. in Annapolis, the show’s mechanic won $175. But all these activities were “abnormal” compared to the one feature of life on the show that convinced me beyond all doubt that circus people are abnormally normal. In the course of nine months on the road, in addition to dozens of birthday parties, two proposals of marriage, several baby showers, and one Pentecostal revival meeting, the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus hosted not one but
two
communal Tupperware parties (actually they’re called “demonstrations”), featuring “games, mini-prizes and special previews of products designed to ease the ‘bumps’ of life on the road.”

Of course, life on the road does have its bumps, and therein lies the ultimate difference between circus and townie life. Most town people know where their job is, where the nearest gas station is, where the best supermarket is. All they crave is a little glamour, excitement, and travel. Circus people, meanwhile, have all the glamour, excitement, and travel they can take, but would gladly pay for information leading to the nearest pay telephone. In the end the only thing abnormal about life in the circus is the lack of telephone service. It’s for that reason that normally sane people walk through the pouring rain with pockets full of change or stand in the blazing heat through the middle of the day all for a chance to worship at the altar of Ma Bell. For these troubadours of the twentieth century the telephone offered the only way to escape from their normally isolated world. Some, like Kris Kristo, often used the phone to call girls; others, like Dawnita Bale, usually used it to call home. But a few, like Michelle and Angel, have used it in the course of their circus lives for arguably its most salient real-life function: conducting a long-distance romance.

As they mingle in the center ring, she hanging by her hair in bikini evening wear, he guiding her gently from the ground in bolero dinner jacket, Michelle and Angel seem like a circus fairy tale come true. The look in his eyes is adoring and passionate. The smile on her face is loving and calm. But the story behind his look, her smile, is anything but serene.