Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (7 page)

“In truth, it’s a bit overwhelming to have this thing in your face. I’m five feet six; she’s probably close to seven and a half feet. Her breath smells like a dog’s. I give her meat from the right hand, then the left. Then what I’ll do is put my hands on her paws and she gives me a kiss.”

“A kiss?” I said. “What does that entail?”

“A kiss is a kiss. She puts her lips on mine, though tigers don’t actually have lips.”

“So what does she think she’s doing?” I said.

“I have no idea. She just did it one day, and I thought, ‘This is pretty cool, I’ll do it again.’”

“Do you actually go so far as to pucker up?”

“Yes. It feels like I’m kissing a mustache. Her mouth is bigger than mine, and sometimes she’ll lift her lip and slip me some tongue.”

“Some tongue?” I said, thankful for not having to ask that question.

“Some tongue,” he repeated with a wink of his eye.

At this point in the routine Khris sends Fatima back to her cage. Tobruk, Barisal, Simba, and Zeus are already in their home cages. Khris is nearing the finale of the act. He warms to the audience. He seems, for the first time, to be enjoying himself.

“There are two types of people in the world,” he said, “those who don’t mind stepping into the ring with nine tigers and those who do. I’m an Aries. I don’t mind taking risks. I recently read that Aries men are casual types who like to feel comfortable and secure at home, but like competition in the rest of their lives. That’s me. When I’m gone and through with the act, not very many people will remember Khris Allen as a cat trainer or cat performer, but I see myself as playing a little part in history. I’ve always been like that. On my volleyball team in college, on my baseball team in high school, I always wanted to be the one who made the play. Here I’m making the play every day.”

Khris ends his act with a jumping display—no fire, no hoops, just the cats on their own. He calls down two tigers from their pedestals and has them stand side by side in the middle of the ring. Next he beckons Orissa, the fierce snow white, who slowly cases the two upright tigers, then on command from Khris boldly leapfrogs over their backs, back and forth in near slow motion, to the applause of the audience, the cymbal crash of the drummer, and the eventual reward of a piece of horsemeat, personally delivered by the trainer himself at the end of an aluminum ski pole. The act is nearly over. Orissa is sent home. As the remaining cats follow, Khris climbs on the back of Tito, his anchor cat, and rides his majestic shoulders to the mouth of the cage line.

“
Ladies and gentlemen
…,” Jimmy James calls, “
from Atlanta, Georgia,…American zoologist Khris Alllllen
.”

Khris skips to the middle of the ring and accepts the applause with a quick bow and a wave. Some people, he knows, are delighted with his performance, others are probably disappointed, a few maybe even upset.

“Let’s face it, forty-five percent of the people are saying, ‘Oh my God, look how beautiful those cats are,’ another forty-five percent are saying, ‘I wish he had gotten his ass chewed up.’ The other ten percent are probably saying, ‘Oh, those poor cats.’ I try to focus on the positive. Sometimes there will be a very enthusiastic person who really enjoyed the show. When I leave, I’ll walk up to that person and shake their hand, because they were appreciative and because they’ll say, ‘You know what I did at the circus? I shook the hand of the tiger trainer.’ That makes it all worthwhile.”

Though his performance is finished, Khris’s work has just begun. Before he can remove his Captain Kirk outfit and settle down for a few minutes’ rest, the cats must be removed from the tent, quickly watered, and fully fed. The props crew must dismantle the cage, stack it in piles, and pull it away. The tasks are awkward, the crowd needs distraction, in circus tradition the ringmaster calls: send in the clowns.

3

First of May

Few people are more cherished on a circus lot than a First of May. He, or even she, can be embraced, abused, ridiculed, or ripped off. All of these happened to me during my first four days on the show.

“Oh shit. Who the hell are you? And what are you doing here?”

When I drove my camper onto the lot the Sunday evening before setup, I was greeted by the show’s official parking guru and grouch, Gene, a surly, swollen old-timer whom everyone on the circus called Hippo. With the physique of a bouncer and the charm of a tiger in heat, Hippo was the show’s twenty-four-hour man. He taped red arrows to road signs along the route every other night to guide the drivers, laid out the stake line on the new lot, and directed the trucks and trailers to their parking spots as they arrived throughout the night. The first two jobs he did well. As for the third, well, Hippo has been lucky over the years that none of the performers has had very good aim when it comes to throwing stakes.

“I’m a clown,” I said. “I’m new.”

“Well, fuck,” he said. “I don’t have room for you. I think you better leave.”

I laughed. He snarled. Then he gestured for me to follow.

My inaugural hours around the circus lot were like awkward moments in a new country where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t have a map. More importantly, I didn’t have a place to park. Before leaving home I had purchased an RV, the insider’s term for a recreational vehicle, alternately called a motor home, a camper, or, according to my dealer, a honeymoon on wheels. While the workers (as well as some of the clowns and musicians) lived in sleepers—semitrucks with cots in the back like overnight Italian trains—the performers were required to provide their own accommodations. After a crash course on mobile living (“Think small,” I was told by a friend and RV fanatic, “but not too small. If your milk falls out of the fridge during a drive you don’t want to get wet”), I settled on a four-year-old, twenty-three-foot Winnebago Warrior. Essentially a Chevy van with a hotel room on back, it came complete with two miniature beds, a shower, a toilet, a stove, a television set, and a refrigerator more than four feet from the driver’s seat. It also had a small table, which for me was a requirement, since I may have been the only person in history to run away and join the circus with a laptop computer.

After my initial encounter with Hippo, one that was repeated in one form or another every other night for the rest of the year, he decided that since I was a clown I should be parked directly behind Clown Alley, the small tent used for dressing that was located halfway down the line of trailers and near the side doors of the tent. While there was nothing wrong with this resolution in DeLand, where the lot was a large, open fairgrounds, this decision proved to be one of the worst things that happened to me all year. The reason: Hippo tried to park me in the same spot in every town, so even if there was a fence (as in Hinesville), a ditch (as in Hendersonville), or a Wal-Mart Dumpster (as in Waycross), the undisputed Mr. Least Congeniality of the Circus tried to squeeze, cajole, or harass me into the same place in every town we played. In the beginning I hated our thrice-weekly fights, but by the end I came to see them as a badge of honor. After all, he treated me just like everyone else.

Once I had my parking space—my own roving plot of land, as it were—I set out to explore the neighborhood. Despite its outward chaotic appearance, there was nothing random about the arrangement. Every vehicle had a set place, a set function, even a set smell: diesel exhaust, bacon grease, elephant dung, popcorn butter. At the front of the lot were the ticket wagon and the concession stand. At the back were the animals—tigers, horses, and bears. The two elephant trucks usually parked farther away from the big top, near the closest thoroughfare for maximum publicity value. As for the human residents, performers lived behind one long side of the tent, workers behind the other. In addition to a bunk in the sleeper truck, each worker was entitled to take a cold shower in the back of No. 63, use the show’s bank of port-o-johns, known as “donickers” (believed to be from the requisite process of pulling down knickers in outhouses), and eat his meals in the cookhouse, a tented paradise of culinary dreams that served three meals a day of the soupiest, greasiest, rubberiest food I’ve ever had the pleasure to complain about.

The performers, meanwhile, lived in their own trailers, ranging from $80,000, thirty-five-foot-long Teton Homes with pop-out living rooms, washer-dryers, and ten-piece home entertainment centers to fifteen-year-old, one-room, beat-up Prowlers that housed three people, two cats, a dog, and a baby squirrel, as well as sullied piles of outgrown wardrobe from some out-of-date act. The owner of the circus, whichever one was traveling with the show at the time, parked at the front of the trailer line, closest to the ticket wagon. Sean, the Human Cannonball, parked at the end of the line closest to the back door. All other parking spaces were determined by seniority and number of costume changes. The longer one had been with the show, the farther one got to be from the noise of the generator; the greater number of costume changes one had, the closer one got to be to the side doors of the tent.

In addition to these two hundred or so people, the show carried its own infrastructure, giving rise to its vivid nickname “The City That Moves by Night.” At the turn of the last century Kaiser Wilhelm sent efficiency experts from the German army to study the way American circuses moved across the land, and at this century’s end this circus, at least, could still teach a thing or two about efficiency to the Japanese. Besides the basics of room and board, the show had its own mechanics shop, a carpentry, a short-order grill, even a part-time school for the children. The two most coveted services were water and power. For water, the show had a water man with a thousand-gallon tank who drove around the lot five times a day, bathing the animals, filling the tanks of the trailers, and, for a price, even filling the portable swimming pools that some parents carried for their kids. As for electricity, the show carried two Caterpillar diesel generators that were turned on every morning at nine and turned off every evening at midnight. This meant that for hours every day, even nine of the hottest overnight hours in a New York City heat wave, nobody on the show had air conditioning, water pressure, television reception, or video games. Some people had their own personal generators, but these were so loud and unneighborly they had to be turned off before 2
A.M.
Basically, for more than a third of every day, we lived the way they did in the Age of Barnum, relying on sleep, booze, and an occasional scandal to keep us from raping and pillaging the land.

It took me awhile to adjust to this new regimen. More than once I ran out of water in the middle of my shower or power halfway through a frozen pizza. I even posted a list in my RV reminding me of all the things I had to do before every trip: check the propane, turn off the pump, lower my antenna, raise my staircase. Kris Kristo, the juggler, and Danny Rodríguez, the flyer, laughed at how I struggled with many of the basic functions they had been performing mindlessly all their lives.

All of this novelty came vividly home to me on the morning after I arrived. I got up at five to watch the tent go up and decided to have cereal for breakfast. I took out my brand-new plastic bowl, opened my two brand-new boxes of cereal (Special K and Cranberry Crunch), used my brand-new plastic knife to slice up my still green banana, then opened my refrigerator to retrieve my brand-new half gallon of skim milk, which to my brand-new RV chagrin was frozen solid. I picked the bananas out of the cereal, opened my brand-new box of Saran Wrap, and returned my newly wrapped bowl of dry cereal humbly to the shelf. The tears of more than one clown, no doubt, were prompted by missing a meal.

“Well, well. What do we have here, a new clown in the neighborhood?”

When Buck Nolan stuck his face in my trailer on Monday afternoon, his head almost poked through the vent in the roof even though he was standing outside on the grass. After Hippo, Buck was the first person I met on the lot. He was also the tallest, the loneliest, and the most eccentric. “Do you mind if I come in?” he said. “I always like to check out the First of Mays. I remember when I was one myself. The year was 1959.”

To hear him tell it, Buck Nolan was always tall: a hillbilly childhood freak from Princeton, West Virginia, just waiting for the circus sideshow to run into him. At eleven, he was already six feet tall. At sixteen, he was approaching seven feet and was given the job of changing the letters on his hometown movie-house marquee. At eighteen, he was featured in
Life
magazine in a photo series called “The Giants of Schoolboy Basketball.” In the middle of the page, at seven feet tall, was Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, and on the end, at seven feet two, was Charles “Beanpole” Buxton, alias Buck Nolan. “Asked last week if he had ever hit his head on low doorways,” the magazine reported, Beanpole replied: “Heck, I did that four times already today.” After the article appeared, Buck turned down 155 offers to play college basketball. Still, he never forgot the photograph, and when
Life
magazine published its fiftieth-anniversary edition, “The Biggest and the Best,” he was upset to notice that they didn’t use the picture of the tallest high school basketball player of 1955, but the second tallest, Wilt Chamberlain. “I wrote them a letter and said he may have been the best, but I was the biggest. To hell with your magazine.”

Partly because of his unnatural height, Buck was always a loner, and in 1959 when the Cole Bros. Circus visited his hometown just before his twenty-third birthday, he saw the circus not as a dream but as an escape. At least there he would be normal. “I heard they had short people, midgets and things, and they always fascinated me. I thought I would ask around. I was walkin’ down the midway on my way to become a working man, when the butcher—that’s the name for concessioners, you know—yells out at me, ‘Hey, kid, where ya goin’? You don’t want to be with them, they’ll work your nuts off.’ He took me by the arm and walked me toward the midway. ‘Hey, Bill,’ he called out to the sideshow manager, ‘I got you a new giant.’”