Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus Part 3

"So there it is," I said when my hair had disappeared. "My face unadorned. How would you describe it?"

"It's a plain face," he said. "Not many lines. No outstanding features. You would make a great spy."

I began to apply the clown white, a mix of petroleum jelly, t.i.tanium oxide, zinc oxide, and paraffin, which Elmo brought for the day. "Put a dab on your left cheek, then your right," he said. He was dressed preppy in a white b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt with his natural blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like a cross between a high school biology teacher and a surfer. "Then move to your forehead, your chin, your nose. Don't be afraid to put it on thick." The makeup felt milky and cold against my skin, sort of like a dab of Crisco shortening, or worse, curdled milk. I resisted rubbing it into my pores. "Rub it around quickly," he said. "Don't waste any time. There will come a time when you're late for a show and you don't want to be too slow. My makeup takes me thirty-five minutes and I hate it. We're going to design you a twenty-minute face."

After a while the clown white covered my skin. It made me feel excitedly messy, like spreading finger paint where it didn't belong, but also slightly constrained, like dunking my head in a vat of Vaseline. Unlike my oval mime face a generation earlier, this face had the white right up to my hairline and underneath my chin. "In the show you'll have to do your ears, your neck, the insides of your nostrils as well."

"What about my eyelashes?" I said as I started to work the white into the crevices beneath my eyes.

"You'll find out," he said, and indeed I already had.

"Once it's evenly smeared, take your open hand, the whole hand, and begin to pat out the rough spots. That way you'll eliminate the streaks. It's like putting your hand on a soft pat of b.u.t.ter and pulling up a thousand stalagmites. Later, those stalagmites will grab the baby powder and keep your face dry."

As I proceeded to smear white around my face, Elmo began sketching some of the history of clowning that I would have to know. The first known instance of using humans as comic diversion, he said, was in the Dilemma festival of ancient Crete, in which slaves were offered freedom if they jumped over charging bulls (thus giving rise to the term "on the horns of a dilemma"). Later the ancient Greeks needed performers to get people in the mood for their outdoor festivals. They came up with the phalla phoria, men who strapped on giant phalluses and red noses and acted as if they were drunk. Phalla phoria were captured and turned into one of a dozen or so stock characters, characters that reappeared centuries later in the commedia dell'arte of the Renaissance. These traveling theatrical troupes, with the comic Harlequina, the young couple in love, and the villainous rival, soon spread throughout Europe. In France, they liked the characters but not the language and moved in the direction of pantomime. In England, they liked the characters but not the scripts and created their own story lines with enduring personalities such as Punch and Judy or Jumping Jack, the modern day Jack-in-the-Box.

The first person to link these characters with the circus, Elmo continued, was Joe Grimaldi, who in the 1760s put on a grotesque costume, chalked up his face, and performed in the English riding shows. It was this mix of styles that John Bill Ricketts copied in the first American circus and that continues to define the circus today: highly skilled performances by acrobats and animals juxtaposed with the humorous and b.u.mbling antics of the clowns. The word "clown" itself, which derives from the Danish word klunis, or "clump of earth," suggests this tension. Clowns were clods. They were the rustics or b.o.o.bs, the ones who were laughed at when they came into the city or suddenly found themselves in the middle of the ring following an outstanding display of equestrian skill. They also stole the show. In addition to performing their standard routines the clowns often joked with the ringmaster or director. The ringmaster would be prim and formal in his red tie and tails, while the clown would be the foil in his mischievous costume and devilish white face. A century and a half later, it was this traditional type of whiteface style that I was trying to develop.

With the white now covering my face I looked like a piece of unformed clay. I began to move my muscles into various expressions: happy, sad, surprised, goofy. As I did, Elmo looked at the grooves above my eyebrows, searching for their range of movement. After a moment he sprang up from the couch, picked up a Q-tip from the table, and put a dot on my forehead half an inch above my right eyebrow. "You see that dot?" he said. "That's the point at which your eyebrow moves the highest. That will be the peak of your clown eyebrow." A good clown face, he explained, is divided into separate regions: eyes, nose, mouth. My eyebrows would begin at that point, then slowly cascade downward, echoing the curve of my eye and focusing attention ever so subtly on my nose and mouth.

We began to look at my cheeks. They were basically flat, though when I smiled a distinctive mound appeared at the height of my cheek-bones. Elmo put a dot just above that mound, then drew a line with a slight curve that ended at the base of my chin. He asked me to repeat it on the other side. I did, a bit wobbly, and he sat back to look. Again I logged through a range of faces. "Too narrow," he declared. "Pat it out and start over." I patted out the lines and drew two more that arched more strongly on their way to my chin like a pair of inverted ba.s.s clefs.

"Better," he said. "Now bring the tops in like the lines of a heart."

"I get it. That way they'll point to my nose."

"The nose is going to be the highlight of your face."

I was starting to get warm. I could feel my skin itching underneath the makeup. I had developed a headache. Suddenly my whole body, my hands, my neck, even parts of my legs, seemed to be covered in white. Clowns, I realized, quickly become aware of the margins: white under the fingernails, white in the nostrils, white behind the ears and inside the lips. Clowning may literally be a white-collar job, but with all the grease in the nostrils it has a distinctly blue-collar smell. Moreover, just as a pizza lingers on the tongue for hours after it's eaten, so a clown face lingers in the nose, the mouth, and especially the ears for days, even weeks on end. For months after I left the circus I could still feel the makeup lines on my face and feel my character living literally just beneath my skin.

Back in the mirror, we moved to my mouth. With my right pinkie I made a fingerprint on the left hinge of my mouth; with my left pinkie I repeated the step on the right. Then I cleaned the white off my bottom lip.

"Why only the bottom lip?" I asked.

"It preserves the distance between the nose and the mouth," Elmo said. "Sometime when you're driving, watch for a picture of Ronald McDonald. It looks like someone threw a tomato at his face, there's just this big red blob. Remember, simplicity is best. You can always tell a circus clown from a birthday-party clown. Party clowns have those big banana mouths with little hearts and flowers all over their face. It gets too cluttered. It doesn't read."

When he talked about the purpose of a face, Elmo kept using words like "read," as in "How will the face read from the back of the tent?"; "catch," as in "How will that feature catch the attention of a child?"; and "sell," as in "How will you sell an emotion during a gag?" A good clown face, he explained, has the ability to expand and contract, like Charlie Chaplin spreading his legs when he gets kicked from behind. Indeed, when we stopped to review the progress of my face it appeared to be quite flexible. The cheeks moved well. The negative s.p.a.ce between my eyes and my eyebrows truly seemed to dance. But something was missing. We had two dominant elements that would be black-rounded eye-brows and curved cheeks-but nothing striking to bring the face together. I tried a star on my chin. "Too much like a party clown." I tried an exclamation point between my eyebrows. "Too busy." Finally I tried a triangle on my chin. Suddenly the face seemed to vibrate, to move the eye around more quickly, as if jolted by a bolt of electricity. The triangle, so una.s.suming, provided two elements: contrast to the loopy curves and opposition to the tapering lines. The triangle stayed. We were ready for color. Elmo went back to his story.

While talking, whiteface clowns thrived in the one-ring circuses of the early nineteenth century; when the circus expanded to three rings, they could no longer be heard in all seats of the tent. A new type of clown-more physical, less talky-was needed. It was about that time that American Tom Belig, who was performing a riding routine in Germany, changed clowning forever. According to lore, one day when Belig was late for his act he threw on a baggy costume and wig, rubbed brick dust on his cheeks and soot over his eyes, and went out to do his routine. He was so frazzled he kept falling off the horse and jumping back on. The crowd roared with laughter, calling out the name of the popular comic-book character Der Dumme Auguste, Dumb Gus. This new persona quickly spread and eventually came to dominate clowning in America (nine of the clowns in our Alley were this type-with redder makeup and brightly colored wigs-while only two were whiteface). Forever after, whitefaces would endure as the new straight men, the foils, but their look would have to be sophisticated compared to their more frivolous and b.u.mpkin cousins, the country-comes-to-town "Auguste."

After bathing my face in baby powder that was stored in a girl's ankle sock and brus.h.i.+ng off the excess with a badger-hair shaving brush, Elmo began to paint the black lines and red nose. Even without looking I could feel the lines changing the dimensions of my face. Unlike the white, which was sloppy and greasy, the black was sharp and crisp, sealing the pores on my face like a fixed expression under wax. The red was equally vibrant and sure, an exclamation point on my lips and nose in contrast to the black clefs on my cheeks.

"So why is the mouth always red?" I asked.

"Tradition," he said. "Also, you don't have to touch it up as often."

"Is that a problem?"

"Well, try not to eat fried chicken." I laughed. First it was Ronald McDonald, now Colonel Sanders. Was any American icon safe from the wrath of circus clowns? "No, I'm serious," he said. "We used to have a guy on the Ringling show who loved Kentucky Fried Chicken. He called it K Fry. But you can't have chicken between shows. Eat your chicken for lunch."

"What else can't I eat?" I asked.

"Spaghetti sauce, pizza. Anything with grease that will cut the makeup. Also anything eaten with a fork. You can always tell a clown by the way he slides food off a fork without letting the food or the fork touch his lips. Even when the makeup is off. It's changed the way I eat forever."

After he finished painting the color on my face we marched to the bathroom for the final powdering. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was amazed by what I saw. My plain white face had been transformed. Now my cheeks were cradled in snappy black curves. My eyes were lifted with beaming brows. My mouth was as plump as a lobster claw. All together the simple strokes were like lines from a limerick that leapt happily off a blank white page. My immediate reaction was to tilt my head, lift my eyebrows, and stretch my lips into a smile.

"Oh my G.o.d," I said. "I look like a clown."

Elmo smiled. "But you're not a clown. You're just a person in makeup. I'm afraid there's a big difference. Only a child can decide who is a clown. The key is persona. A persona is what distinguishes a person in makeup from a clown."

Thus chastened, I closed my eyes and held my breath as Elmo blasted my new face with his powder sock. Even before I could work on my persona, the first step to being a clown, I realized, would be getting used to this onslaught of powder. The second step would be getting used to the onset of mud.

As the end of the gag approaches, the clowns gather themselves together and move one last time to save the lady, who at this point is standing on top of the house wailing and flailing her arms and screaming for the firemen to save her baby. "Don't worry!" Arpeggio calls. "We're trained professionals." "I hope you have insurance," Rob adds. The audience cannot hear these lines, they are just for our own amus.e.m.e.nt. "Hurry up," Henry says, "I have to fart."

"Firemen, firemen, save my baaaaby...," Jimmy cries over the microphone.

Our first task is to save the baby. Christopher, who is playing the old lady, holds the blond baby doll above his head and tosses her in one giant arching motion toward the top of the tent. As the audience gasps, the baby comes somersaulting toward the firemen's net, where the clowns bounce it with a grunt and send it back into the air. Sometimes Henry would catch the baby at this point, at other times it would land on the ground. When this tragedy happened I would run to the side of the baby and give it one last chance at life with a desperate rendition of clown CPR.

All eyes turn back toward the lady. She powders her cheeks, looks down at her house, and bends over in preparation for a final dive to safety. When she is just about to make her leap for life, a bright red fireball of nearly nuclear dimensions comes blasting up from inside the house and nearly consumes her exaggerated rear end. The audience shrieks in delight. Now greatly alarmed, the lady bends over one more time as another burst of flames, this time even brighter, fills the ring with terror and the clowns with fright. The audience cheers again.

"It's the danger," Elmo explained. "Look at some of those old Charlie Chaplin movies. He's walking on a high wire with a monkey on his shoulders that has its hands over his eyes and there's a banana peel thrown on the wire. People love to watch others challenge death. The fire emphasizes that."

In truth, the fire itself was hardly dangerous. It came from a substance called lycopodium, a dried Mexican fern processed in New Jersey that American midwives used to put on umbilical cords to dry them after birth. In the container lycopodium is not flammable, but when it is blown into the air and comes into contact with a flame (in our case a lighter) it makes a dramatic fireball that looks real but doesn't burn. Magicians discovered it, Elmo said, and it was used in The Wizard of Oz. In our gag it received the biggest laugh.

"People don't expect it," Elmo said. "Also, it hits the lady on the behind. The tushy is very funny, especially for little kids. Where do they get punished? Where do they get spanked? A behind is a sacred thing for a kid. It's never shown to others. It's never touched. Therefore we want to make fun of it."

After two bursts of fire the lady is desperate. The audience is crying for her to jump. The clowns holding the net begin sprinting toward the house. The lady bends over one last time, when out of nowhere a deafening blast jars everyone in the tent, one last fireball spurts out of the roof, and the lady jumps for her life, hoping against hope to be caught in the net, but only to land miserably in the mud. Just as she lands, a clown appears from the house waving his hands in distress: his pants have caught on fire. This is the ultimate defeat. Not only could the clowns not put out the fire or catch the baby or save the lady but we also managed in our bungled confusion to set ourselves ablaze. Undaunted, we jump to our feet in unison and run out of the ring to the traditional romp "Happy Days Are Here Again."

4.

Outsiders Always Make Mistakes Kris Kristo had a certain way he went about preparing to go out. First he pulled on his skintight white jeans, his white T-s.h.i.+rt with the pack of Marlboros in the sleeve, his satin tiger-skin vest. Next he slicked back his hair, lightly spritzing it with Brut and gently tugging a few strands over his dark brown eyes and the small seductive scar across his left eyebrow. Finally, on special nights like this, he applied another layer of black spray paint on his well-worn biker shoes, giving them a five-cent patent-leather s.h.i.+ne. Once primped, he would slowly make his way down the trailer line collecting his posse for the evening prowl: first Sean, in a neon-pink s.h.i.+rt and cowboy boots; then Danny in purple silk top and black Ferragamos; finally me in orange Gap b.u.t.ton-down and s.h.i.+ny penny loafers. On the surface I looked as if I didn't belong with this group, yet I had two things that Kris Kristo usually needed for a night out. First, transportation; and second, prophylaxis.

"Hey, Bruce," Kris said when he arrived at my RV, "mind if I borrow a condom?"

My first week on the show I was overcome by the grind. With no day off and no break from the routine, all I could talk about was how tired I was, how much work there was, how hard this life was to lead. I got sick. I didn't know when to sleep. I lost several pounds. My life was turned upside down. By the second week, when we moved from central Florida to the seaboard coast of Georgia, I noticed that when people asked how I was doing I no longer spoke only about the grind. I developed a routine. I ate breakfast in midmorning, my milk no longer frozen. I ate lunch in early afternoon, with my makeup to follow. I ate dinner after the 7:30 show. By the third week, when we jumped to North Carolina to play the Azalea Festival in Wilmington and Camp Lejeune around payday, I began to look forward to performing. I no longer missed my New York Times or MacNeil/Lehrer. I felt naked without my makeup. In short, I began to feel at home.

The real reason was my neighbors. Any fears I had about not being accepted because I was a writer were quickly quelled. First, instead of trying to conceal their true ident.i.ties, many people on the show flocked to my trailer in those opening weeks anxious to confess their deepest vices and gravest misdeeds (not to mention a few federal crimes). Their motivation, it turns out, was simple: they were worried that someone else would tell me first. In the span of several weeks, from mid-March to early April, I had intimate, almost confessional conversations with nearly every performer on the show and had already begun to develop a sense of the multilayered and sometimes dark personal fabric that ties members of the circus world so closely to one another.

Second, instead of viewing me as an intruder, the people on the show reached out to embrace me once they realized I was prepared to do the show alongside them every day. Nellie and Kristo Ivanov, Bulgarian aerialists and parents of nineteen-year-old Kris and his younger brother, Georgi, lent me aspirin, fed me soup, and laughed along with me as I stumbled, eyes agog, from one shocking circus discovery to another. Pablo Rodrguez, fifth-generation acrobat and retired father of Danny and all his seven siblings and half siblings, put his arm around me every afternoon and told me how much I was worth that day: sometimes I was merely a twenty-five-cent clown, other days a million bucks. Dawnita Bale, Elvin's twin and owner of the show's largest collection of wigs, shared her daily complaints about the weather, the drive, or the general agony of deciding what shoes to wear in the ring.

The closer I got to the people around me, the more I discovered the unspoken social order that dominated their lives. In the 1950s, Dawnita told me, married performers were kept away from single performers, single men were kept away from single women ("accidental meetings at the picture shows were not tolerated"), and all performers had to sign back in by 11 P.M. Performers were not allowed to socialize with "roustabouts" (the former name for workers), and roustabouts were not allowed even to speak to performers unless they were spoken to first. On our show, the rules were less rigid, but still firm. Performers were advised to be friendly with the workingmen, but not to become friends with them. Animal people tended to socialize with animal people; performers with performers; clowns with clowns. Particularly crimped by these rules were the single male performers. Since there were few single women in the circus (and none in their late teens or twenties), since most of these guys easily tired of watching borrowed videos with their parents, and since all they seemed to want to do anyway was get out, get drunk, and get laid, the single men in the show banded together most evenings in one common pursuit: chasing townie girls. It was on one of these nights in Camp Lejeune that I ended up in an unlikely clash of wills with the Human Cannonball on the grounds of the Marine Corps base.

As it happened, I didn't want to drive my RV that night. The ground was muddy and I didn't want to get stuck. The day had already been unlucky. Earlier, two hundred Marines had come to the lot to challenge two elephants to a tug-of-war in a mammoth publicity stunt and battle of the s.e.xes (though referred to as bulls, all the elephants on the show were female). At the start of the face-off the two hundred Marines lay flat on the ground on either side of the rope just inches from Pete and Helen, the pride of Fred Logan's herd. As soon as one of the clowns ordered the bout to begin, the leathernecks popped to their feet and started grunting, straining, and pulling the rope with admirable esprit de corps. Within seconds, just when the GIs seemed to be gaining the advantage, the rope suddenly split in the middle of the Marines and ricocheted up the line, sending the entire company to the ground, singeing the hands of nearly two dozen men, and burning off large chunks of the neck and face of eight unfortunate USMC warriors, who had to be sent to the emergency room. For their part, Pete and Helen hardly flinched but forwarded their regards.

Instead of driving in my RV, we took a cab to a place called Club 108, an una.s.suming cinder-block building on the outskirts of town just past the longest strip of machismo-auto-parts shops, gun dealers.h.i.+ps, dirty-magazine outlets-that I had ever seen. It was four dollars for members, six dollars for nonmembers. Kris tried to talk our way in by offering free circus tickets, but they refused. "Show us your IDs and give us your six bucks," the manager barked. As we did, one of the bouncers, a man with steroid-inflated arms, tight blue jeans, and suspenders (no s.h.i.+rt), pushed through the line. "Get the f.u.c.k out of the way," he said. "I've got a knife." Two particularly burly guests were herded out of the bar, followed by a third with blood spewing from his nose, which in the course of the evening had been thoughtfully relocated alongside his ear.

Inside it looked as if we had suddenly been transferred from eastern North Carolina to downtown Tokyo. There was a three-tiered sound system climbing the wall like aluminum ivy, covered with multicolored lights, a fog machine, and rotating sirens. A towering scaffolding structure, a sort of jungle gym for grown-up GI Joes, stretched from one end of the playpen to the other, from the ceiling to the smoky sky. Inside, outside, and all around this metallurgic monstrosity stood four hundred freshly shaven, freshly paid Marine neophytes and no more than fourteen scantily clad young ladies. The whole scene looked like a beer advertis.e.m.e.nt gone berserk. We walked in, bought drinks, and surveyed the scene. Sean and Kris sat down and started moping because there were not enough girls. I got up and started dancing by myself; soon Danny followed. In this menagerie no one seemed to notice that the circus was in town.

Even though I wasn't able to put it to much use myself, in the annals of pickup lines there can't be many opening remarks that receive a better response than "So, did you see me in the circus tonight?" Kris Kristo, a master of lines himself, also had devised one of the best closing lines that I had ever heard: "So, would you like me to give you a tour of the animals?" Elephants, it seems, make a great aphrodisiac. Tigers are even better.

As I had observed from my first days on the show, there is a curious, almost palpable s.e.xual energy surrounding the circus. The costumes, the music, the drumrolls are all part of a gradual seduction that performers play out on the audience, trying to satisfy every dream, daring to t.i.tillate at every turn. In Henry Miller's Paris, circus performers lived and performed in the red-light district, among the vaudevillians, strippers, and prost.i.tutes. In some ways the a.s.sociation is fitting. The ringmaster, king of the cathouse so to speak, leads the customers through the show-building tension, enhancing the excitement, and finally releasing the performer for his or her climactic trick. The word "trick" itself, from the French "to deceive," is applied equally to streetwalkers and wirewalkers, harlots and harlequins. At the end of the night the customers float out of the house with their dreams fulfilled-their fantasies realized-and return to their daily lives.

For many of the performers and audience members alike the show is just a tease-and artificial exposition removed from reality. But for others the tease is irresistible. Many of the young men who grow up in the circus are particularly seduced by their magical power. "Circus people are performers," Jimmy James said to me. "They know people are looking at their bodies. They know people are fantasizing about them. When they get out of the ring they are no different. They tend to enjoy themselves." Kris Kristo, who was one of the first performers to befriend me and welcome me into his family, was a well-traveled, well-toned, well-endowed performer equally at home in the ring and on the dance floor. Born in Bulgaria, raised in Western Europe, and now coming of age in America, he had established a peerless seduction routine. In the show he would use his muscleman juggling routine or his motorcycle-on-the-high-wire act to pique the fantasies of women in the audience; then afterward he would use his innocent-waif-wronged-by-an-ex-girlfriend story or his Italian-wine-connoisseur-Romeo pose to win over their hearts. The outcome was a different girl almost every night and a lot of borrowed condoms.

As a result of playing this game daily from Milan to Montana ever since he was a boy, Kris was one of the most charming, easy-to-get-along-with people I had ever met. Also, because he knew he would leave town every couple of days, he was one of the most reluctant to get attached. He and Danny had even devised a set of standards for girls. Springwater was the highest grade, meaning a girl was beautiful, a ten, "f.u.c.kable without a drink." That was followed by a wine cooler, which meant cute, nice-looking, one needed only a wine cooler to get in the mood; Mad Dog 20/20, meaning you needed to be drunk; and finally a bottle of tequila, meaning you needed to be dead to the world. They had also devised a set of rules for themselves that early on they conveyed to me: never fight over a girl, never pay for a drink, and never, ever, fall in love.

To be sure, it takes two to turn a trick, and most of the women who broke through the fantasy and dated circus hunks understood that their affairs would be short-lived. There was the married mother of two in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who had had a one-night rendezvous with Kris every year for three years running, and the year I was there showed up with the breast implants Kris had recommended even though her husband despised them. There was the stripper from Mobile who said she never dated clients, but in his case made an exception. At times, of course, a woman got caught up in the illusion. In Virginia a woman Kris had met during intermission and taken back to his trailer after the show showed up the following night with a suitcase under her arm. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "I'm coming on the road with you," she said. "No, you're not," he answered. "Go away." Kris had special names for these women: he called them "psycho b.i.t.c.hes from h.e.l.l."

On rare occasions everyone's fantasies got out of hand. In Princeton, New Jersey, Sean and Kris were in a Red Lobster one night after the show. Sean was coming out of the men's room after dinner when a woman at a nearby table did a dramatic double take. She had been to see the show earlier, she told him, and had been hoping to meet him. With this kind of introduction, he asked her if she would like to go back to the lot and make love in the cannon. She agreed, saying it had always been her fantasy to have s.e.x with circus men. Back in Sean's trailer (the cannon unfortunately was wet and Sean nearly broke his neck trying to take off the cover), Sean went first and Kris followed. Kris asked her if she wanted others; she said sure. Before long there were six guys in all, including a fourteen-year-old boy invited for his first time. The performers took turns. One person took a video. Sean toyed with his hairbrush. But just as the evening approached its peak the woman abruptly announced that she was a devil wors.h.i.+pper. As soon as she said this, Kris noticed an upside-down cross on the back of her neck. Suddenly everyone got scared. The boys bolted from the truck as quickly as possible. The following day, after one of them nervously told of the incident, all the partic.i.p.ants were summoned to the manager's trailer, where he reprimanded them for their indiscretion and promptly erased the tape (though not before viewing it first).

"Why didn't you just throw the tape away?" I asked Sean.

"Because it was perfectly good," he said. "You could use it again."

When Sean arrived for his first season the previous year, he had fit instantly into this carousing crew. He and Kris became partners in conquest. The two of them looked quite different-Sean had blond hair and freckled Irish-American poster-boy looks, while Kris had a dark, brooding, misunderstood Italian Casanova aura to him-but in crucial ways they were similar, at least when I first met them. Both were moody, often depressed when out of the spotlight, but invariably cheery around women. Kris could bicker with his parents in Bulgarian and punch his little brother in the face, all the while politely escorting a young lady through the mud to his room with a touch of continental grace. In the light of day he was awkward, on a basketball court he was inept, but on a dance floor at three in the morning he was as smooth as a mug of Irish coffee with a kick most women didn't feel until the following day.

Sean, meanwhile, who was part cracker, part crooner (he looked strikingly like a blond version of Elvis), could throw me into the mud for fun, toss a stake at one of the workers, insult the rear end of his boss's sister, then turn around a moment later and name the perfume of a woman in the audience a hundred yards away. The first time I was in his trailer, after putting on the tape of his national television appearances, he showed me a list of every woman he had slept with. The list was several pages long and had over two hundred entries on it, some as vague as "the black girl in the bar in Louisville" or "the twins on the beach whose legs hung over the back of my Jeep and sc.r.a.ped the finish off my door." In those awkward early days of the year, Sean called me Lucy because I didn't boast of such a list. I called him Mr. Sensitivity of the Circus. We couldn't have been more different. We should have avoided each other.

After nearly an hour when nothing much happened in Club 108, the disc jockey perched high in the scaffolding cage announced the start of the first round of the annual Eastern Carolina Hawaiian Tropic Bikini Contest. The Marines let out a resounding whoop. The circus contingent was nearly as thrilled and joined the tidal wave of testosterone that surged toward the narrow stage.

"Now we're talkin'!" Kris exclaimed. "We're gonna get FUBAR tonight."

"FUBAR?" I said.

"f.u.c.ked Up Beyond All Recognition." He and Danny exchanged high fives.

In their first parade in front of the troops the contestants came out in casual wear. Kris liked Number Two. She was dressed in a virtually see-through Budweiser hand towel barely stretched across her vital statistics. Sean liked Number Three. She was a nurse. She was into shopping, tanning, and hair care. "I like 'em just like that," he said. "I like 'em thin. I like 'em blond. h.e.l.l, I could eat her p.u.s.s.y now. I could eat it onstage." I laughed. He looked at me, insulted. "You don't believe me," he said. "Oh, no," I replied. "I do."

After taking applause from the audience the contestants marched off to change into their bikinis. The boys in our corner started comparing notes. I voted for Number Nine. She identified herself as a writer and editor for a local newspaper, which I took as sufficient evidence that at least she could read and write. Later, when she came out in her swimwear, Number Nine wore a yellow bikini that was short, pert, and considerably more subtle than those of her fellow combatants. Suddenly Sean s.h.i.+fted from the nurse to her. "I like her, man. She's about my height. She's got some tight t.i.tties there. I could eat the spinach out of her s.h.i.+t." It was the highest compliment he could pay.

After the winner was announced (ironically it was Number Three, whom Sean then claimed he had liked all along), we broke up and started circulating. I saw the now famous Number Nine standing with a friend in the other room and went up and asked her where she worked. She said she was an editor for a weekly paper in nearby La Grange and, now that I mentioned it, was coming to the circus in several weeks to do a story on some clown who was a writer. At last, I thought, here was my chance to test the marketing charms of the circus. But just as we started speaking Kris appeared magically at my side, put his arm around me, and introduced himself to her. There went my chances: the best marketing plan in the world was not enough to distract her from his muscles. Indeed, his approach didn't take long at all. It was so smooth as to be imperceptible. It was also a little bit greasy. He started flirting with Mademoiselle Neuf, poking fun at me, gently stroking her thigh. He didn't realize he might be encroaching. In truth, he didn't even care. Then he asked her to dance, and to make matters worse, asked her friend to dance with me. On the dance floor, the friend couldn't keep her eyes off Kris. "What does he do in the circus?" she drooled. "Why don't you ask him yourself," I said, excusing myself to use the rest room. Kris didn't have to fight over girls, I realized, they all but fought over him.

Sitting in a cab an hour later, everyone was upset. Kris was disappointed that Mademoiselle Neuf wouldn't go home with him that night. "h.e.l.l, she didn't even buy me a drink." Sean was disappointed that n.o.body was interested in him. "Bunch of jarheads in there tonight," he said to the driver. Danny was disappointed in himself. "There was no way to pick up a girl without getting drunk," he said, "and I didn't even want to." I was disappointed in my friends-maybe I'd never become part of this circle; maybe we were too different after all.

Approaching the base, I told the driver to go straight. "Don't listen to him," Sean said. "He thinks he knows everything. Just take a left." I encouraged the driver to continue on; Sean insisted he turn. Since Sean was closer, and louder, the driver agreed. "Now, how much do you want to bet?" Sean asked me.

"The fare is eight dollars," I said.

Fifteen minutes later, after twice losing our way, we finally located the tent. The fare had climbed to seventeen dollars. "How did that happen?" Sean said as he got out of the cab and walked away. "We got lost," I said, handing the driver twenty dollars. "Look at that," Sean called. "He's got a twenty. He must be a Jew."

"That's right," I said. "I've also got horns."

The three of them stopped to relieve themselves. I headed back to the tent. At this point I was fed up, partly at Kris for being so young and aggressive he didn't even realize he was violating his own rules, partly at Sean for being so loudmouthed and self-centered he managed to insult everyone he met. Earlier at the club he tried to make a pa.s.s at one of the bartenders. "So, Deb," he said to the woman whose nametag identified her as Debbie. "What time do you get off?" Seven A.M., she told him. "That doesn't leave much time for fun, now does it?" Guess not. "Well, honey, if you were my wife and you came home at seven o'clock in the morning, I would just be getting up and I would have one of those early-morning pop-the-tent kind of b.o.n.e.rs. You'd come home and be all tired and I'd just knock you up good. Then you'd just lay around the house all day, saying how tired you were but how good you felt." Is that right? she said. "Yep, b.i.t.c.h. That's right." Well, then, she said, I'm glad we're not married.

Back at the lot, the boys started shouting as soon as they saw me walking away. "Hey, where are you going?" Sean called. "Look, he's mad at us 'cause we insulted him. 'Cause we made him pay."

I walked around the tent and went back to my camper. Several minutes later there was a knock on my door.

"Hey, man, what's wrong?" The three of them climbed inside and sat down. "Why are you so mad?" Danny said. "Do you not want to go out with us next time?"

"Who are you mad at?" Kris asked. "Me?"

"He's f.u.c.king mad at me," Sean said. "'Cause I made fun of him. Man, what's wrong? We're all men here. We can take it, though maybe not you."

"I can take it," I said, more snidely than I had intended. "I just don't need to."

"Don't need to? Man, s.h.i.+t. This is the circus." He picked up the white plastic brush he had left in my camper and started brus.h.i.+ng his hair. I was sitting on the bed. The show's generator had long been turned off, so we were without lights. "You want to be part of the circus, b.i.t.c.h, you got to take s.h.i.+t. That's all we do is give s.h.i.+t to each other."

They started telling stories. Remember the time we put a pile of s.h.i.+t on someone's door? Remember the time we came in and trashed your trailer? Remember the time we drove that girl's car down the stairs?

"So you see, that's the rules," Sean said when the recollections dribbled to a close. "I'm only teasing you because I like you. If you want to be friends with me, you got to learn to take s.h.i.+t. You're just a little too sheltered. You've never been around people like us. You were over there in j.a.pan and England. We're real American men and we give each other a hard time."

Perhaps he was right, I thought. Perhaps Sean, the Human Cannonball, was just another self-proclaimed hero on the frontier of American ego-abrasive, self-centered, and supercilious from the s.h.i.+ny tips of his alligator boots to the glistening wings of his well-moussed hair. Earlier in the year Sean and I had a conversation about Elvin, about how he was thought to be a prima donna when he was on top-yelling at people, getting in fights, throwing a punch or two. After his accident, Elvin had become soft-spoken and kind. Now I realized how prescient Elvin had been. Sean was indeed Elvin, but ironically it was the old Elvin. He was young, brash, on top of the world. In the cab he had said to the driver, "Oh, you're from Philadelphia. I was on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer." In the club he had said to Number Nine, "I'm the Human Cannonball. Did you see me on TV? I was on four shows: NBC's I Witness Video, CBS's Street Stories, ABC's Peter Jennings, Regis & Kathie Lee." In a way he was the embodiment of fame, a sort of Frankenstein of the modern circus, a clone so perfect he fit too well. When I first met Elvin I asked him, "Can you do it? Can you take any regular Joe and turn him into the circus star of the decade?" Elvin thought for a second, then said, "I did." Not long after, I was talking to Sean. "So can you do it?" I asked. "Can a person come from the other side of the tracks and become the circus star of the decade?" He thought for a second, then said, "I did."

The boys got up to leave. "So next time we go out, are you going to go with us," Danny asked, "or are you going to say, 'I'll think about it'?"

"I think about everything," I said.

"If you're sitting in front of a girl and you get her legs spread open," Kris said, "and all you got to do is stick your d.i.c.k in her p.u.s.s.y, man, do you think about that?"

The boys were so busy giving themselves high fives in congratulations for that retort that they didn't wait for a response. Finally, they looked at me, and I said, "Yes."

The rain started around midnight. I could hear it pattering on the top of my trailer. I had left Camp Lejeune around 7 P.M., following two sold-out shows on Sunday afternoon. The whole crew was in a hurry to get to Murrells Inlet, a small South Carolina tourist trap south of Myrtle Beach, and enjoy the one night a week we had off. Buck had already been there the day before to sell circus memorabilia at a local flea market and had scoped out the lot. He reported back that Inlet Square Mall had a movie theater on the same side as the circus. He wrote down all the movies and put one to four stars by the ones he had seen, then taped the list on the bulletin board by the back door of the tent, right beneath the sign that reminded everyone to turn their clocks ahead one hour for the beginning of daylight saving time.

The gra.s.sy lot was mostly dry when I arrived, though already showing signs of bogging down in some places. The cannon got stuck where the back door would be and an elephant had to come pull it out. It took the elephant only several seconds but cost Sean five bucks. Other drivers got stuck, too, but didn't want to part with their money. Harry Hammond, the legendarily frugal treasurer, got stuck as well but stayed put several days rather than pay the five-dollar toll. Chava, an aerialist, got stuck, but she didn't have to pay. She got her husband, Royce, the manager, to pull her out with a forklift. The Rodrguez Family truck got stuck. But all they needed was to gather the whole family, which numbered close to twenty with wives, cousins, and kids, and they could push it out themselves.

By the time I woke up around ten o'clock the next morning, the tent was already halfway up and the water two inches deep. "What a beautiful day in the neighborhood," Willie, the electrician, said to me as I emerged from my camper and surveyed the wasteland, where the blithe expression "April showers" began to take on a new level of cruelty. "Wouldn't you just want to punch Mister Rogers if he said that today?" As the afternoon progressed and the rain continued, the circus lot began to transform itself into an elaborate constellation of rings that reminded me of Dante's Inferno. The three performance rings themselves were surprisingly dry, while the hippodrome track was muddy. The area under the seats was also dry, whereas the road around the tent was soupy. Under the trailers was dry, yet the outermost ring was the gloppiest of all.

"They say that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow," I said to Bonnie Bale as I slopped off toward Clown Alley that afternoon. "Do circus people have a hundred words for mud?"

"I have only one for it," she said.

"What's that?"

"I think you can guess."

By showtime the lot was covered with four inches of standing water that gathered in elephant tracks, tire tracks, even the tracks where previous walkers had left boot prints on the firm ground below. The tent looked unplayable, but a truckload of gravel was brought into the back door, several bags of cedar shavings were sprinkled around the ticket wagons, and a half dozen bales of hay were scattered around the track where guests would walk to their seats. Backstage, where the performers gathered, remained mired in mud. It was a grimy greenish-gray kind of mud that glurped when anyone stuck his foot in the ground and growled when he took it out. It smelled like a combination of fetid earth and stale horse urine, made only worse by the presence of elephant manure, which ironically stood out on account of its unnaturally yellowy color and its uncanny ability to stay firm. You know you have arrived on muddy ground when elephant stool is the firmest substance around.

"Now, this is the real circus," the clowns crowed to me. "Are you sure you don't want to leave?"

The rain seemed to bring out the best and worst in everybody. The houses were packed and the shows went on with only a few minor glitches. The performers wore their special "mud show" costumes, covered themselves with worn-out bathrobes, and hurriedly sloshed from their trailers to the tent with knee-high boots over their performing tights. In some ways it was funny watching people who could otherwise dance on horseback or fly through the air tiptoe around the lot like a bunch of amateur tightrope walkers.

At the same time the rain made people crabby, and when performers get crabby they start to b.i.t.c.h-usually about one another. "Did you see how she cut her act today? Not very professional." "Did you see him wear mud boots in the ring? n.o.body pays to see Wal-Mart waders." "Did you see how Sean got pulled in by the elephants? It sort of undermines the mystique of the world's largest cannon if it can't even drive through a couple of inches of mud." At moments like this, the circus community seemed to splinter along its natural fault lines as everyone became an expert on everyone else's job. In particular, longtime show people liked to criticize the "gauchos"-people born outside the circus who took a job within. On our show, this included Douglas Holwadel, who was running day-to-day operations during Johnny Pugh's convalescence, Kathleen (always a favorite, even after she stopped performing), Sean, and now me.