Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus Part 7

"So do you think you can save money?" I asked.

"Unfortunately I have to take a draw tomorrow. I need fifty dollars to have a tooth pulled. I went to the dentist in the last town and he wanted sixty-seven. I didn't have it. New York said he didn't have it either. I even went to Rob the clown. I can't wait any longer. This morning I almost couldn't work. After we put the tent up I had to go lie down under the truck and go to sleep. When I woke up it was time to go to my door. I didn't even have time to change my clothes." He was wearing blue jeans covered in mud and a dirty blue mechanic's s.h.i.+rt. "I think I'll have enough saved up to leave this fall."

"And then what will you do?"

"I'd like to work in a warehouse again," he said. "I can make about nine or ten dollars an hour. I can live on that, help out my mother. She's not doing too well. I can get an apartment, fix it up real nice, and start changing my life around. I'd go to church."

"Church?" I said, surprised.

"Yes, I'm a church person, child. I come from Carolina originally. What I'd like to do is get me a job, find me a lady, and have us a nice wedding in a church. I could turn my life around, you know. All I need is a real job. Right now this is the best I got."

The Amazing Art of Hair Suspension "Oh, my G.o.d. I don't believe it..."

"You mean she's going to..."

"Wait a minute, this can't be real..."

Mich.e.l.le Quiros, like a bird of paradise, glides from the wings of the darkened tent into a light that ignites the plumes that sprout from her Napoleonic hat. Dressed regally in a flowing black cape embroidered with pink-and-white fleurs-de-lis, she drifts into the ring with a silent flutter of chiffon, ruffling the feathers of her never-ending train with a not quite flirtatious quiver. Draped on the arms of her tuxedoed chaperon, she appears for a moment like a lithe ballerina in the pastel fantasies of Degas. That is, before she takes off her hat.

"Ladies and gentlemen, what yoooou are about to seeeee, is an amazing display of haaair suspension..."

Mich.e.l.le steps forward into the center of the ring, flitters her arms like a b.u.t.terfly, and in one dramatic sweeping motion flings the cape off her shoulders and into the arms of her consort. For a moment she poses-both arms in the air-as the next layer of costume, long black pantaloons, settles over her fragile body. Then, almost coyly and with no apparent chagrin, she carefully removes her hat. And suddenly there it is: it's almost imperceptible, it's draped in black velvet, many find it fascinating, a few even revolting. Sticking out of the top of Mich.e.l.le's well-oiled head of hair is a three-inch solid-steel ring.

"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 Mich.e.l.le..."

Elizabeth Crystal, alias Lupe Rodrguez, struts to the center of ring three, while her cousin Margarita Mich.e.l.le, alias Mich.e.l.le Quiros, walks to the middle of ring one. Mich.e.l.le 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 Mich.e.l.le 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 Mich.e.l.le, 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, Mich.e.l.le'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 Mich.e.l.le. "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."

Mich.e.l.le 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 Mich.e.l.le 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.'"

Mich.e.l.le had just turned twelve years old.

After stripping to her bikini, Mich.e.l.le is ready for her first trick. Starting from a stationary position several feet above the ground, Mich.e.l.le 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 ill.u.s.trate 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, Mich.e.l.le 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, Mich.e.l.le 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."

Mich.e.l.le 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 Mich.e.l.le 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 Rodrguez.

"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. Sat.u.r.day's Sports Breakfast for Men had no tickets available. Sunday's Blue Gra.s.s 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 b.u.mping, sc.r.a.ping, and shoving against my camper. At about 8:00, in response to one particularly annoying b.u.mp that roused me from my sleep, I knocked against my back window where the crowds were gathered. The b.u.mping 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, partic.i.p.ants 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 'b.u.mps' of life on the road."

Of course, life on the road does have its b.u.mps, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 Mich.e.l.le 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, Mich.e.l.le and Angel seem like a circus fairy tale come true. The look in his eyes is adoring and pa.s.sionate. The smile on her face is loving and calm. But the story behind his look, her smile, is anything but serene.

"I first saw her when I was practicing about eight years ago," Angel said. A das.h.i.+ng Spanish conquistador type, Angel has piercing eyes, ink-black hair, and a sprightly matador step. In addition he boasted a naughty smile. "I was twenty-three at the time. She was sixteen. I thought she was kind of young-"

"Plus he had a girlfriend."

"Well, of course," he said. "But I had many girlfriends at the time."

"Many is not the word, I'd say. Kris Kristo is nothing compared to you and your brother."

Angel breathed a guilty sigh. Sitting in their brand-new Shasta trailer on a Monday night in early summer, Angel was soaking his feet in hot water and wrapping an open sore in the palm of his hand where he had caught himself on the high wire. Mich.e.l.le spooned some vanilla ice cream into three bowls, gave one to each of us, and settled into an easy chair as if she were about to watch a Hallmark romance on their portable television. In this case the romance was hers.

"So, anyway," Angel continued, "I had this friend who told Mich.e.l.le's father that I wanted to go out with his daughter. He said, 'Well, he should know I've got a gun, and the one who goes near my daughter...Pow!' I was standing nearby when he said this and I thought: Uh-oh, better stay away. Still, I saw something in her I liked, and I never forgot what I saw. Two years later she came to the show again. She looked more like a woman that time. We started dating. Two weeks later I asked her to marry me. I thought it would be okay."

It wasn't. For the next two years Mich.e.l.le and Angel were forced to conduct their engagement in secret. They were on different shows at the time-in a different town almost every night-making communication all but impossible. But still they persisted, and at the end of that period, when Mich.e.l.le, her sister, and her mother, remarkably recovered from her fall, were invited by Kenneth Feld to do a mother-and-daughter hair hang on the Ringling Show, the two lovers were reunited. Unfortunately, their families were reunited as well.

"It all started with one family on the show," Mich.e.l.le said. "They were Catholic and became born-again Christians. After they were born again they started talking to people on the show. About the Bible and stuff. My family was all Catholic, but we never read the Bible. We followed what the priest said and believed it. But if you read you find out the truth. So this family showed the truth to my mother and she became a Christian. It took about a year. Then Angel found out about my mom and he told me, 'You better not change.' He even told me if I ever became a Christian like her that we were going to break up."

"And I was serious," he added. "My family is Catholic. In Spain we are very proud. That's the way we are. My parents would not understand."

"Of course, I told him I was not going to do that. At that time all my family was against my mom. Then six months after that my dad became a Christian, too. And a month later, me. At the time Angel didn't know what it means to be a Christian..."

"What does it mean?" I asked.

"It means I read the Bible and realized that it is the word of G.o.d. To be Christian is to live like Christ, or as close to Christ as possible. Like Jesus when he walked the earth. n.o.body can be perfect. G.o.d knows that. But he knows you are trying. You stop drinking, you stop smoking. Around here they say we sacrifice chickens. But if you live a crazy and wild life like Sean Thomas then that's considered normal."

"And were you prepared to end the relations.h.i.+p?"

"If it was for G.o.d." Her answer was firm. "For me, G.o.d is first. Before anybody-my mother, my father, even him. Of course, I didn't tell him right away. In fact, I said I would never talk to him about it. For a while he knew I was going to some Bible study. I told him that was all. Then one day my father was going to church to get baptized. I didn't want to go, but my father begged me to go with him. I agreed. Angel was standing outside and he saw me leave with my family. He gave me the dirtiest look. It was then that he knew what was happening."

"And I was so mad," he seethed. "I was on fire. Boiling, I'd say. I had told her, 'If you go to that church we will break up.' Now I knew it was over."

"The next day he asked for the ring back. I gave it to him, then I tried to calm him down. 'Oh, Angel, don't get mad,' I said. 'There's nothing wrong. I just went with my father.' I tried to convince him, but he was angry. 'No, I don't care,' he shouted. I tried eight hundred ways to calm him down, but none worked. By the end of the day everyone on the show knew it was over. I thought we would never speak again."

There was a long pause in the conversation. Their gloomy faces were reflected in the oversized mirrors and gla.s.sy windows that gave their compact trailer a larger-than-life feel. Peach pillows and blown-up photographs covered a seamless path from sofa to ceiling. On the wall was an ornate scripted plaque that said: "En este hogar somos cristianos. Aqu todos son bienvenidos." ("In this home are Christians. Here everyone is welcome.") "But I had a friend," Angel said. "He came to me about a week later and told me Mich.e.l.le was sitting home by herself that night. 'So what?' I said. 'Well,' he told me, 'I think you should go see her.' I didn't really want to see her, but something inside of me said, 'Go, go talk to her.' So I went and knocked on the door."

"He didn't say anything at first, and I didn't say anything to him. Then I invited him in. I had been praying a lot for him, that G.o.d would make him understand the truth. But I asked G.o.d never to send me to him. Now G.o.d had sent him to me. It's hard to explain if you don't know about the Holy Spirit, but I felt like G.o.d was inside of me at that moment. I felt this voice inside of me, this is not a lie-G.o.d knows it-and the voice was telling me to go get my Bible. We were just sitting there, and I heard it again: 'Go get your Bible.' Finally I got up to get it, and I was thinking: What am I doing? I said to Angel, 'I want to show you something.' He didn't resist. We were there for two hours."

Mich.e.l.le was almost apologetic. "I had just started reading the Bible," she said. "I didn't know how to quote scriptures or anything. I didn't know where anything was. But I would somehow open the Bible to the right place every time. It was amazing. He was looking at me like it wasn't really me. I told him about my experience and I said, 'I wish you could experience the same thing.'" Her voice picked up. She moved to the edge of her chair. "As soon as I said that I thought to myself: Whatever happens now is going to happen."

Angel moved forward in his seat as well. They were in the same position they had been in that night in Dallas: she on the chair, he on the couch. They were staring toward the ceiling.

"I was listening," Angel said, his voice quivering and soft, "and when she finished I felt a kind of peace. Then I started to cry. I had never cried before that, ever. Even when my father hit me, hit me hard. I was taught never to cry. But at that moment I did, and I knew that was it." He set his hands down on his knees. "G.o.d had touched me."

Mich.e.l.le followed his hands with hers. "It's hard to understand unless you have experienced it yourself," she said. "It's a beautiful thing, really."

"It's true," he added. "There's no way to describe it. At that moment I opened my heart to G.o.d. And when it was over we both kneeled on the ground and embraced. It was then that I spoke for the first time all night. I said, 'Whatever you want, G.o.d, I'm ready...'"

Mich.e.l.le smiled at her husband and took his hands in hers. After several seconds, the tears starting to s.h.i.+ne in the black gloss of her eyes, she turned and looked at me. Her voice was almost deathly calm. "That's when the real battle began."

Last comes the spin. Like an ice-skater, Mich.e.l.le has moved gracefully through all of her tricks-spinning hoops, juggling fire, occasionally even balancing plates on a stick-but the act is not complete until she executes the one vivid display that everyone in the tent is secretly expecting-the spiral of death.

"I start on the floor. It's the first time I've actually touched the ground since the act began. I do a little dance, sort of like a mermaid underwater. My husband comes behind me and lifts me off the ground, slowly walking me into s.p.a.ce until he gives me a little push. That's when I start spinning, whipping myself around and around, kind of like turning nonstop pirouettes. I start with one hand over the other like I'm dead, then slowly lift my arms. At that point I get going faster and faster until I don't know where I am and all I can hear is the beat of the drum, and all I can feel is the pain in my neck..."

And in the end that's where the trick lies: not in the ring that sticks out of her head, not in the shampoo she uses on her scalp, but in the strength of her hundred-pound body that runs from her back, up through her neck, throughout her scalp, and out of her hair. True to her word, Mich.e.l.le is the real Samson of the show: her life depends on her hair. Fifteen minutes before every performance she crouches before a plastic bowl in her trailer, pours a pitcher of water over her head, and combs her hair into a long ponytail. Angel stands behind her, ties a cotton rope around her ponytail, then braids the rope into her hair. When he's finished he folds the braided ponytail into a loop and ties the end to its base at her scalp. Into this loop he places the ring. Mich.e.l.le Quiros is not hanging by a screw in her head, she is hanging by her hair.

"The funny thing is, I get used to it. It actually hurts more when I first go up. That's when I feel all the weight. Once I start doing the tricks I don't feel it at all. Then when I do the spin I feel it again. It's double pressure at that point. I have to concentrate real hard. I'm listening for a certain part of the music that I know is my cue to open my tuck. That gives me time to come down and do my style. Of course, when I do come down I can't see anything; everything looks blurry. I go down on one knee, because if I was standing up I would probably fall over. I would look like a drunk or something, and that sort of defeats the whole look of the act. Two seconds later, I'm fine."

Two seconds after that she's off. As soon as Mich.e.l.le settles into place, Jimmy blows the whistle with alarming speed and all the performers scurry from the tent, clearing the way for the animals to return.

7.

Please Don't Pet the Elephants My dream nearly died in Fishkill, New York. Overnight the peril of the circus became real.

"Did you hear about the excitement last night?" Khris Allen found me in the dollar store. I was looking for cotton swabs.

"What excitement?" I said, stepping closer.

"In the elephant department." He was not speaking loud.

"Somebody in the circus?"

"Somebody in town. I think you better come see..."

The circus reached New England in early June. After four sold-out days in Princeton we headed north to the Hudson Valley before darting across Connecticut for a two-week trek around Boston. Somehow our entire Northeastern run seemed cursed. In Ma.s.sachusetts one person ended up in the hospital. In Connecticut, days before that, anxiety reigned. Almost exactly fifty years earlier, in July 1944, the worst circus fire in American history engulfed the Ringling tent in Hartford, killing 168 people, injuring 487 more, and creating a rift between the state of Connecticut and the circus community that has yet to heal. Circus people still feel jinxed by the state, especially after historians concluded recently that the fire was almost certainly the result of arson. The state, meanwhile, still feels threatened by the circus, and as a result charges $7,000 in permits (most places let the circus play free) to have firefighters encircling the tent at all times with water pressure in their hoses.

Fishkill, however, was supposed to be different. For two hundred years the Hudson Valley has been considered the "Cradle of the American Circus." The area has been particularly generous toward circus animals. Isaac Van Amburgh, the famed wild-feline trainer, was actually born in Fishkill. Old Bet, the second elephant ever brought to America and the first to become a star, was purchased in 1805 by Hackaliah Bailey of nearby Somers, New York. Bailey toured the elephant around New England, but it wasn't until he threatened to shoot the animal if his partner didn't turn over half the profits that Old Bet became a national phenomenon. Even after the elephant was shot by a disgruntled farmer in Maine for luring money from the town, Bailey continued charging twenty-five cents a peek for fans to view Old Bet's stuffed carca.s.s in front of his Elephant Hotel in Somers. A granite pillar topped with a gold-lacquered elephant marks the spot today, and two clowns on our show actually made a pilgrimage to this mecca during our weekend stay in Fishkill-just thirty miles away.

"The evening started funny," Khris explained as we walked out of the Dutchess Mall. The sun was high-summer was coming-but the air was fresh and spicy to breathe. "When I came back from the bar I found this couple playing with the tigers. They had climbed over my fence and were trying to pet the cats. The woman had actually stuck her hand into t.i.to's cage. I told them if they didn't leave I was going to call the police and have them arrested for trespa.s.sing. They said they were so in love with the cats that they just had to pet them. I pointed to the exit and they eventually left."

We approached the portable orange fence that surrounded his compound. The smell of rotting horsemeat swirled around the cages. The red-and-white-striped canopy reflected the noonday glare.

"Twenty minutes later I was just lying down to sleep when I felt my trailer rock. I have the fence tied to my b.u.mper for that reason. It's like a silent burglar alarm. I hopped out of bed and ran outside-I wasn't even wearing pants-and that's when I saw them next to the cages. 'Get your motherf.u.c.king a.s.ses away from here!' I yelled. 'And stay away! If I see you around here tomorrow, or the next day, I will have you put in jail.' They climbed over the fence. Only that time I followed them to their car. I waited for about fifteen minutes and when they didn't leave I went back to get my whip. I walked up to their car, tapped on the window, and in my best tiger-ruling voice said, 'If you don't get out of here you're going to end up in the hospital!'" Khris smiled with a certain degree of satisfaction. "They started the car, and vroom, took off. I went back to the trailer and lay down. That's when I heard the noise from the elephant compound.

"It wasn't a scream or anything," he said, "just a loud crush. But it was jarring enough to jolt me out of bed. I had a feeling. It's kind of weird. I knew something had happened with the elephants. I looked around for my pants. By the time I found my jacket and hurried outside I saw Mr. Holwadel running.

"'Douglas,' I said, 'something bad has happened.'

"'I know,' he said. 'It's by the elephants.' I couldn't believe what we found."

At a little after one o'clock in the morning Christopher Ponte walked out of the Za Bar & Grill, a pool hall-c.u.m-beer parlor inside the Dutchess Mall, and decided to have some fun at the circus. The tent was beautiful spread out before him. The parking-lot lights made the scene appear tame. Along with a friend, the twenty-two-year-old native of Wappingers Falls wandered down the quiet line of trailers, past the tigers, the bears, and the Arabian horses, past the world's largest cannon, until he spotted the elephants in the rear parking lot.

"Let's go pet the elephants," Christopher said to his friend. His friend did not want to go and tried to stop him.

Undaunted, Christopher climbed over the four-foot-high orange plastic fence, the kind often used on ski slopes to keep reckless novices from careening out of control. Moving forward, he stepped into the pen where the elephants roam with loose chains around one foot, in a facility nicknamed the "Elephant Hotel." A few of the elephants were lying on beds of hay; the others stood swaying silently side by side. A puddle still lingered on the mottled asphalt where the herd was bathed that afternoon with water from a nearby fire hydrant. All around the pen were hand-painted signs in bright red letters that said: DANGER: KEEP OUT, NO TRESPa.s.sING, PLEASE DON'T PET THE ELEPHANTS.

"Hey, you!" the watchman called from his post. "You can't be in here. Get back behind the fence!" Christopher's friend tried to stop him as well.

Christopher, however, refused to stop and approached the end of the elephant line. He was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a white T-s.h.i.+rt that said: TEQUILA: EAT ME! with a picture of a worm. He walked up to Pete, alias Petunia, and decided he wanted to pet her trunk. He never made it. As soon as the young man approached Pete from behind, she spun around in startled defense and swung her head at the intruder, pus.h.i.+ng him effortlessly against a nearby truck, where quickly and with stunning precision she crushed him against the steel side of the cab, Elephant Truck No. 60.

"By the time we got there the guy had stopped breathing," said Khris. "He had taken a few steps, then fallen to the ground. His friend and I pulled him away. That's when I realized: Hey, I know this guy. I had played pool with him earlier at the bar. He was there with a friend. They were nice guys, but they were wasted. The guy couldn't even hit a straight shot. Now his friend was crying. 'Oh, my G.o.d,' he said. 'I've known this guy my whole life. I tried to stop him, but...' The friend was trained in CPR, so I helped him to go to work. We got his pulse to forty, but every time we stopped pumping his chest, it would disappear. We lifted his s.h.i.+rt and you could see the indentation on his skin. There was no blood, it was all internal injuries. Every time his lungs would fill with air you could see the oxygen just disappear into his stomach."

"So that's what happened?" I asked. "A punctured lung."

"A punctured heart as well."

Within fifteen minutes the local and county police were on hand. They interviewed Fred Logan, Doug, and the man's friend, and decided the circus was not to blame. "The elephant was startled," the detective p.r.o.nounced. "You'd have been startled, too, if you were half asleep standing up and someone came up beside you." The paramedics, meanwhile, examined the body and wasted little time before transporting it to the hospital. Finally, at a little after 1:30 in the morning on the first Sat.u.r.day in June, Christopher Ponte was officially declared dead.

The season was two months old.