Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (27 page)

Still this openness was not enough to balance my doubts, particularly about the macho climate that prevailed among the single men on the show.

“Don’t worry about it,” Sean said after Guillaume had left. “If you have to, you’ll just beat his face. He doesn’t attack me because he knows I’ll punch him in the nose.”

“But I’m not going to beat him up,” I said. “What will that prove?”

“It will prove you’re a man.”

As he was saying this, Guillaume appeared at the door. With Danny hovering over his shoulder and poking him in the back, Guillaume uttered a brief apology and the two of us shook hands. At that moment this simple gesture came as a great relief: some things I didn’t have to give up just to be a part of the show.

Jimmy was still in a bad mood from the gout. He was sitting behind the bandstand the following day in his hideaway ringmaster’s station when I arrived, as I usually did, just as the flying act was nearing its end, “
the Flying Rodríguez Faaaamily
…” As soon as he finished, he handed me the microphone and I sprinted toward the center ring.

When the stomach-pump gag started in DeLand it had a simple premise: various clowns dressed as sideshow performers would wander into a doctor’s office with a string of maladies, a doctor would put each patient into a giant stomach pump, and an assortment of funny objects would be exhumed from their bellies. An announcer would narrate the scene and give a name to each disease. Because of a feud between Elmo and Jimmy, I was chosen to be the announcer. “
Hurry, hurry, hurry
,” I would bark. “
Step right up and see the circus sideshow
…” In fact, I had to hurry myself in order to make it into the ring for the start of the gag. As I grabbed the microphone that second afternoon in Abington, I was a little behind schedule, arriving at the center ring just as the lights came up for the gag. At this point, with all eyes in the tent now focused on me since I was the only person in sight, I opened my mouth to begin my pitch when—
twannggg
—I suddenly collided face-first into a wire that was supporting the flying net.
Crunch
. The collision sent my feet into the air and my head crashing toward the ground. Dazed, all I could sense when I regained my wits was a booming outburst of laughter from the audience—the biggest I had gotten all year. Realizing I had made the fall of my life and satisfied that I still had my teeth in place, I hopped to my feet, did an Elvin-like style to make the fall seem well planned, and headed for the elephant tub in the center ring.

The next five minutes were the longest of my so-far short career. It took as much concentration as I could muster to narrate my way through the gag. When Arpeggio, who was playing the mad nurse, started to hound me, I tried to cut him off, but he jumped on me anyway, knocking off my hat for the second time in a minute and rendering me bald to the world.

At the end of the number I trotted back to the bandstand, handed Jimmy the microphone, and headed for a nearby fire truck to examine myself in the mirror. I was shocked: blood was streaming down my face from an open wound on my left cheek that ran from my eye to my upper lip. With all the red on my face perhaps the audience hadn’t noticed this. I hurried back to my trailer, took a swab of baby oil, and cleaned a path across my cheek where the wire had slashed my face. When I finished I lay back on my bed and nearly passed out from the ringing pain that stretched from my ear to the roots of my teeth. Then I waited for the rush of people who would want to see what was wrong. Nobody came. The second half of the show passed. Still nobody came. Finally, ten minutes after the close of the first show, Jimmy knocked on my door. I was still in my makeup except for the wound. My costume was strewn across the floor. I still expected to do the second show. Performers are relentless in teasing people who miss performances, especially for minor injuries. There’s plenty of pain on a circus lot, but little sympathy.

“Good God!” Jimmy exclaimed when he looked at my face. Glancing at my reflection in the window I saw that the previous shallow mark on my cheek had already swollen into a red puffy sore like a slice of slightly discolored peach on my otherwise pale white face. “Did you put ice on it?”

“It didn’t occur to me.” I was beginning to feel weak.

“Do you have any ice?”

“A few cubes, I think.” I sat down in my chair.

“Wait right here.”

Jimmy disappeared and returned moments later with a bag of ice and a tube of Betadine.

“First of all, get your makeup off,” he said. “You’re not going to perform tonight. Then put some ointment and this ice on your cut and get yourself to a doctor as soon as you can. I’ve got to go back and announce the second show. Do you think you’ll be all right?”

I assured him that I would be fine. After he left I carefully removed my remaining clown face, unplugged my camper from the generator, and just as the whistle blew for the start of the second show wobbled slowly off the lot and away from the tent.

“So, you’re a clown?” the doctor said to me as she entered the emergency room a little over an hour later. The ice pack was still on my face. Clown white was still behind my ears. I felt like a boy left behind in summer camp after the rest of my cabin had gone fishing.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “I’m a clown.”

“Well, then, make me laugh,” she said.

Why do so many people ask this question of clowns? I thought. Everywhere I went people asked for a free performance. If you want to be made to laugh, I felt like saying, come pay to see a show. She certainly wasn’t offering me free medical care.

My look managed to get the message across, and the doctor turned her attention to my face. After a brief examination she announced that I was at risk of developing an infection and if I didn’t take care of my wound it might require plastic surgery. Plastic surgery? I gulped. For a cut? Maybe I should have made her laugh. Yet she assured me that surgery wouldn’t be necessary if I followed her advice. “First,” she said, “I want you to go home and stand in the shower for thirty minutes and use this sponge to clean out your cut…” Now I truly had to laugh. If only she knew that I didn’t have thirty minutes’ worth of water in my Winnebago. “Next,” she continued, “let the shower water run over your face twice a day for the next three days. Water is the best cleansing agent.” Again I had to smile. The water that came out of my showerhead was hardly a good agent for cleansing anything. “Finally,” she said, “no makeup for a week.”

That would be the hardest of all.

“Were you fired?” Guillaume wondered when he saw me out of costume near the end of the second show. Everyone was surprised when I told them about the accident. They hadn’t seen it and, in the intervening two hours, hadn’t heard about it either. I was shocked. “You mean to tell me that, with all the worthless gossip that goes around this lot, when somebody actually gets injured nobody talks about it?” The performers know whom their neighbors are fighting with, flirting with, even fornicating with, but, it turns out, they know very little about what those neighbors are doing in the ring.

This seems only fitting. The American circus, I was beginning to realize, has developed its own standards of behavior unrelated to the larger world it inhabits. With these rhythms, of course, comes a code, a kind of artificial religion. In this religion the show itself is God. It’s unjudgmental, yet unforgiving. It rewards perseverance, yet accepts no excuses. Under its tent it expects allegiance, while outside its walls it doesn’t care. After four months I was just starting to appreciate the true dimensions of this world. Inside the ring I must act like a priest and spread the gospel of the circus, but after the show I could do as I pleased. On the surface this formula seemed simple enough. But as the show headed for New York City and the long sprint for home, I was unprepared for the wave of disenchantment that gripped our fold and the challenge that this would place on my ability to believe in the goodness of our cause. The season was far from over.

“Welcome to the beginning of the end,” Dawnita said a week later as I was preparing my camper for the drive from northern New Jersey into Queens.

“Any advice before leaving?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t go.”

Chuckling through my trepidation, I hopped in the driver’s seat of my Winnebago and headed alone for the George Washington Bridge.

Intermission

The Color of Popcorn

With the houselights illuminated for intermission the tent begins to stir. The clowns come pouring into the center ring to sign autographs; two elephants come plodding into ring one to give rides; and a dozen butchers come wandering down the track. The show is in recess, but the business marches on.

“
Ladies and gentlemen, there will now be a precise fifteen-minute intermission…, with elephant rides in ring one—elephant rides for the entire family: you must purchase a ticket before boarding the pachyderm…concessionaires selling hot dogs, hot buttered popcorn, ice-cold Coca-Cola, peanuts, Cracker Jack, cotton candy, and delicious cherry Sno-Kones…plus—Mom, Dad, bring your camera, come right down to the center ring, and meet the clowns in an autograph party: don’t forget to purchase the all-new Clown Alley coloring book
…”

The business makes quite a show.

As the circus inched its way back down the East Coast from New England toward its inevitable date with New York, it also moved steadily toward another important date: the change of leadership from Doug to Johnny. By early July, Johnny’s back had recuperated and he was preparing to rejoin the show. Before that could happen, Doug would have to chaperon the show’s twenty-seven trucks, thirty-five trailers, and two hundred employees to the door of the Big Apple. To date it had been an uneven ride.

When John W. Pugh and E. Douglas Holwadel first became partners in 1982, the two of them could not have been more different. Johnny, a boxy boater type at home on the high seas, was short and pugnacious, an English bulldog with a lovable face and occasionally vicious bite who was raised on the wilds of a circus back lot. He always smiled and never wore a tie. Doug, a self-proclaimed “dyed-in-the-wool Bob Taft Republican from Cincinnati, Ohio,” was tall and aloof, a Great Dane with an imperial mien and imposing strut who could roam golf courses and country clubs with ease but did not enjoy getting mud on his shoes. He never smiled and always wore a tie. He also understood money.

“As a kid in the 1930s I went to see the circus when it came to Ohio,” Doug recalled, “but unlike my friends, I wasn’t interested in the high wire or the flying trapeze, I was fascinated by the movement of the thing. Once my uncle took me to see them unload the railroad cars and I was hooked. From then on I became infatuated with the logistics—railroad cars, setups, tear-downs, things like that. Later that grew into a love of marketing.”

And what a marketer he became. When the two novice owners bought the circus, their principal step after redesigning the show was to rethink the marketing plan. Together they developed a new way for the circus to approach each town, a process they later termed the “true circus parade.” The first person in the parade is the booker, who, months or even years before the season, scopes out potential lots in a town and books the circus into a location. Terms are agreed on—usually the show pays about $500 to $1,000 a day—but no money is transferred. In many towns, the circus will then seek out a sponsor, a Rotary Club or high school band, which will agree to get all the necessary permits, licenses, and security personnel in return for about a third of the take. Still, no money changes hands.

Next, two months before the show arrives, a media buyer visits the town to book television, radio, and newspaper advertising. He is followed by a marketing director, who actually lives in the town for up to a month, schmoozing the local media, ordering hay and feed, and trying to generate publicity about the show. Some of the advance purchases are paid for with IOUs, far more are bartered for with complimentary tickets. Thus, if the front end has done its job, by the time the red arrows leading to the lot are posted and the stake line is laid out, the circus has generated thousands of advance sales but still not spent any money. The actual cash doesn’t arrive until the show does. When that happens lots of people smell it out.

A century ago, whenever a circus arrived in a town the sheriff would remove the central nut from one of the wheels of the show’s main wagon to make sure the circus couldn’t leave town until its bills were paid. Ever since, the term “making the nut” on a circus lot has implied taking in enough money to cover expenses. On our show the nut was around $25,000 a day (roughly $6 million in yearly operating expenses divided by 240 show days). That meant the show had to sell enough six-and nine-dollar tickets as well as enough one-, two-, or four-dollar concessions to earn $25,000 every day—rain or shine, ice or heat. The expenses were relentless. There was a $50,000-a-week payroll, a $3,000-a-week fuel bill, and a $500 added charge every time the circus played a mall in order to pay a local contractor to visit the parking lot after we left and fill in all 476 stake holes left behind by the tent. In addition, every week the show bought an average of three hundred pork chops, eighty pounds of ham, sixty pounds of sausage, ninety dozen eggs, thirty gallons of milk, and fifty pounds of coffee, not to mention five hundred pounds of oats, seven tons of hay, and a quarter ton of sweet feed.

Of course, there were all sorts of unexpected costs as well. A weigh station outside Burke, Virginia, for example, cost the show a small fortune. Three trucks—the horses, bears, and cookhouse—each received fines of $260 for not keeping their logbooks up to date. The cookhouse was fined an additional $1,000 for having a passenger in the cab with an open beer can in his hand.

All of this money—for food, fines, and weekly salaries—was paid out in cash. Some local vendors felt so uncomfortable receiving their fees in cash that they came to pick up their payments with armed guards in tow. I could understand their apprehension. Never in my life had I seen so much money. During a good engagement the show could take in close to $100,000. At certain times of the year there was probably close to a quarter of a million dollars locked in the safe in the office truck, stuffed under mattresses in performers’ trailers, and tucked under Q-tip boxes in the clowns’ trunks. All cash. Much of it in small bills. Most of it untraceable. Since many of the people on the lot were often broke, or had very limited resources, just the knowledge that all this money was floating around prompted some pretty sordid behavior. The money was like an unspoken curse tempting people to misbehave.