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 sexual 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 titillate at every turn. In Henry Miller’s Paris, circus performers lived and performed in the red-light district, among the vaudevillians, strippers, and prostitutes. In some ways the association 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, “fuckable 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 bitches from hell.”
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 sex 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 worshipper. 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 participants 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 scraped 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.