“Everybody on the show has a way to make a little extra money,” Buck said in his loopy, wry hillbilly drawl that usually culminated with some unexpected crack. “Sometimes it’s from the rubes, the townies; sometimes it’s from the people around here, like First of Mays. When I first joined the show I made eighteen dollars a week. Now I make ten times that amount. It’s still not very much, so I make a lot of extra money on cherry pie.”
“What’s cherry pie?”
“Oh, it’s many things,” he said. “Taking down and putting up the big top. Carrying the ice. Anything you do to make extra money. They’re what I call my sidelines. I work flea markets, I sell circus memorabilia, I have a few dirty videos I rent out. Also, drinks. If you’re thirsty on this show and you run to the Coke house to get a cold soda, it costs you seventy-five cents. I sell them out of my van to the clowns for fifty cents. You go to the Coke house, they don’t have any diet. I’m diabetic, that’s the only thing I can drink. Hell, half the clowns in there I’ve trained to drink diet.”
“So that’s how you make your living?”
“I certainly don’t make it off the circus. I have to make it off something. Just wait a few days, you’ll see.”
It turns out I didn’t have to wait that long at all. Within hours of my arrival on the lot I became aware of a vast underground economy on the show. Even before I learned people’s jobs, their names, or even their sexual histories (which was usually the second thing I learned), I heard about their rackets. Ora sold jackets. Bonnie sewed costumes. Southpaw smuggled in beer. In some ways the underground economy was a model of communal efficiency. For a price, I could receive almost any service I might possibly desire and still keep my money within my own community: I could get my laundry done every week, have my oil changed every 3,000 miles, even have a copy of USA Today delivered every morning to my camper door. Seemingly complex commercial or civic enterprises were performed effortlessly despite the fact that we were in a different community three or four times a week. A circus postman, alias trombone player, went to the local post office every day to buy and send money orders as well as retrieve and send mail. He would then deliver the mail to your door for a fee of twenty-five cents a letter. The show had its own bank (the office manager), its own lending agent (the treasurer), even its own notary public (the stilt walker). With surprisingly little effort, a circus person could be born, go to school, learn a trade, get a job, take out a loan, buy a car, buy a house, find a spouse, have a child, raise a family, see the world, grow old, and ultimately even pass away in the arms of his loved ones in the place where he was born—without ever leaving the lot. He could even go to church if he wanted, since a traveling circus priest came to the lot every Sunday and said mass in the tent.
While this underground economy was one of the more impressive aspects of the circus, it could also be one of its more sordid. As I learned quickly, life operated much more smoothly on the show with a little tip here or a small bribe there. The problem for an outsider was trying to figure out whom to tip, when to tip, and how much to tip. The water man received a tip, for example. Johnny even mentioned this in the opening meeting. But some people insisted that since the show promised performers water once a day in their contracts, and since his job was to dispense the water, he should only be tipped for providing water a second or third time. Living by myself, I needed water only once a day. The electricians were tipped for plugging in the RVs to the generator on setup mornings, but only when the plugs were laid out on the grass. One evening I chose not to leave my plugs out because I had to go grocery shopping off the lot the following morning. When I woke up, my cord had been removed from its compartment and plugged in for me. I wasn’t sure if this was kindness or capitalism.
What I was sure of was that, in those opening days at least, loyalty was only wallet deep. The workers on the show viewed a First of May, especially one with a bright, shining RV and clean fingernails, as a rube and a gold mine. When I first arrived on the lot, I was told that the external electrical cable on my Winnebago was not long enough and had the wrong kind of plug for the generators. The boss electrician, Jack, sent me to buy an additional fifty feet of cable. Don’t bother with the plugs, he said, he could sell them to me cheaper. I went as instructed to purchase the cord, but just for my own First of May fun I asked the hardware-store attendant how much a pair of 30-amp twist-lock plugs would cost. The male was $12.11, he said, the female $24.85. With the standard circus discount, the total was a little over thirty-two dollars. Back at the lot, Willie, the colorful bearded wacky uncle of the electrical department, agreed to install my plugs.
“Jack told me to tell you that you are expected to tip me,” Willie mumbled in what was probably the most coherent thing I heard him say all year.
“I understand that,” I said. “I hear you like beer.”
“Even better than the smell of a pussy,” he said. “And almost better than reefer.” At the mention of this Willie visibly swooned. “But you still have to pay Jack for the plugs, you know.”
“And how much are they?”
“Sixty-five dollars,” he said.
The next day I dutifully paid Jack for my plugs. And when I learned that he asked all the performers to tip him five dollars a week for their power, I never got around to paying that.
“Higher, higher. Lift your hands a little higher…. That’s right. Now put your palms up, not down. You’re not flying anywhere; you’re not an airplane. The proper position is palms up.”
“What about my feet?” I said.
“You can stand like you are now, with your feet not completely together. But turn your toes out a bit.”
“And my head?”
“Head up, eyes out. Don’t look at the first row, but the last. Remember, you’re asking for something: you want their applause. The show is for them and you want their appreciation.”
Elvin Bale is never more alive than when he discusses performing. On opening day he sat outside his sister’s trailer, with a cellular phone in his hands and a tuna sandwich in his lap, and brought his forty-eight years of circus experience to life as he taught yet another newcomer how to style—the circus expression for taking a bow.
“A lot of performers don’t know how to get the audience,” he said, his ruddy cheeks blushing in the afternoon breeze and his thin blond hair flapping against his head. “You have to communicate with them even though you’re not talking to them. You must look into their eyes and control them. To me, the audience was my lifeblood. They were the ones who gave me the daring to do some of the things I did. And no matter what I did, I always left the ring saying, ‘God, I wish I could have done more.’ That’s a good performer—when you feel you haven’t given enough.”
As he spoke, Elvin searched the empty sky with his eyes as if he were looking for a spotlight. With his voice he could conjure up memories of a thousand circuses past. With his arms he could direct me in exactly how to stand. But with his legs he could no longer stand that way himself. Elvin Bale, the “Great Melvor,” the Circus Daredevil of the Century, was sitting forever in a wheelchair.
“It happened in 1987,” he recalled. “I was in Hong Kong to do a shot with my cannon. It was my biggest and best act. In fifteen years with Ringling I had done an ankle catch on the single trapeze, I had walked the ‘wheel of death’—I even wrestled a giant mechanical monster. Every two years I designed a different act, but the cannon was my ultimate creation. It was my legacy.”
For his signature act, Elvin would crouch in the steel barrel of the world’s largest cannon and with a giant fiery explosion be propelled two hundred feet through the air and then land in a giant net. At every new site, he would calculate where to put the net by shooting a sandbag dummy from the cannon. In Hong Kong, however, it rained overnight and the dummy was left outside. The next day Elvin shot the sandbag from the cannon, placed the net where it landed on the ground, then loaded himself where the dummy had been. “Halfway through the flight I knew,” he said with the calm, abnormally stoic voice of a man who has been to hell and back and still can’t quite believe it. “I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I knew I was going to overshoot the net.”