Swings of Fate

Like lightning, a spangled burst of bright pink tights ignites the blue-and-white-striped tent as two troupes of warriors, close to twenty in all, come blazing into rings one and three. All available light floods the sky. The brass ensemble erupts into a flare, a polka caliente. The ladies shake their hips and dance on the floor. The men slap their hands and pirouette in the air. An older man with graying mustache even turns a flip for show. Out of pure exhilaration the masses applaud as the great red-coated ringmaster himself steps forward and erupts with a noble call.

“On the Russian swings, the Rodrinovich Flyers, the Romanoff Aaaacrobats…”

The combatants bow and gesture toward the swings—two enormous pivoting platforms that slice forebodingly through the air. Soon daring young men will fly into the sky from these three-hundred-pound planks, gravity’s foe. The whole scene seems thrilling, grandiose, even mythic, yet one detail in the picture still vexes the mind. Rodrinovich Flyers? Romanoff Acrobats? These costumes aren’t Tartar, they’re cancan at best. And these warriors aren’t Russians, they’re Mexicans for sure—just dressed in Slavic headbands.

“To tell you the truth, I think the name is stupid,” said Pablo Rodríguez, one of three people in the pseudonymous Rodrinovich Flyers with the same first and last names. There were his father, whom everyone called Papa Pablo; his younger brother, whom everyone called Little Pablo; and him, whom everyone called Big Pablo. Though not the oldest, Big Pablo was the largest of the siblings (175 pounds), his mouth was the loudest (not to mention the dirtiest), and his trailer was the longest (over thirty-five feet). When his father retired from performing several years earlier, the twenty-seven-year-old Pablo had seized control of the family in an unspoken, bloodless coup.

“Just because the apparatus is called a Russian swing doesn’t mean you have to be Russian to do it,” he scoffed. “They wanted us to dance Russian, to use Russian music. That’s where we drew the line. Let’s face it, you can’t turn a Mexican into a Russian. Do they think people are that stupid…?”

The answer to that query was probably yes, but sitting one afternoon with Pablo, his wife, and their four-year-old son, none of us wanted to affirm it. One hundred years (and fifty million minutes) after he probably didn’t say it, Barnum’s theory of the birth of suckers was alive and well.

“Actually, I’ve grown sort of fond of it,” said Pablo’s wife, Mary Chris. Originally from a Spanish circus family, Mary Chris had married into the Rodríguez troupe a little over eight years ago. At the time of their engagement, she owned sixty bottles of fingernail polish, she told me; now married, she was down to five. “Johnny Pugh said he wanted a Russian name, and we thought it wasn’t a big deal to argue about it. Some things you do for the sake of the circus, because as far as we’re concerned, right now, if it’s good for this circus it’s good for our family.”

In truth, if it was part of this circus it was probably part of their family. The presence of the Rodríguezes in ring one and their cousins the Estradas (a.k.a. Romanoffs) in ring three was just a hint of the blood connections that flowed throughout the tent. Indeed, one of the most surprising things about the show was this exhaustive, truly labyrinthine family network that links nearly everyone in the circus business to everyone else. On our lot, for example, Big Pablo and Mary Chris often parked next to Michelle and Angel Quiros. Michelle hung by her hair in the first half of the show, while Angel walked the high wire in the second. In real life, Michelle’s grandmother and Pablo’s father were siblings, while in the business, Mary Chris’s mother and Michelle’s mother were working on the same show. Also, while Pablo’s second cousin Michelle was married to Angel, Angel’s sister Mary was married to Pablo’s half brother, Little Pablo, making Big Pablo and Angel half brothers-in-law, if there is such a creation. To make matters even more complicated, Little Pablo performed not only in the Russian swing act with his family but also in a cradle act with his wife, in the flying act with his brothers and sister-in-law, and in the wire act with his brother-in-law, his wife, and his brother-in-law’s wife, who, for the record, was also his cousin—that, of course, being Michelle.

After several weeks of trying to untangle these offshoots, I decided to attempt a family tree of the show. What I discovered was that, leaving aside the clowns, seventy-five percent of the people who set foot in the ring were related to one another. Considering that these people hailed from thirteen different countries, this common lineage was stunning. It also had unexpected consequences. On the positive side, families that fly together, well, fly. The interdependence that families enjoyed almost seemed to make up for many of the hardships of life on the road. Papa Rodríguez’s wife agreed to drive their trailer on jump nights, for example, so her husband could pull a separate trailer for his two daughters by a previous marriage. Big Pablo was excused from carrying any rigging and in return carried a generator for his sisters to use at night. Little Pablo and his wife, meanwhile, agreed to caravan with Angel and Michelle, and the four of them went so far as to buy CBs so they could pass the time during long jumps playing “Name That Tune” in Spanish.

This closeness, of course, comes at a cost. Nothing is secret on a circus lot—no act of lovemaking, no intramarital squabble, no extramarital affair. Danny Rodríguez would learn this lesson well. Others had learned it already. The previous year, one performer, whose father was a disciplinarian and whose mother was a Jehovah’s Witness, became unexpectedly pregnant. Afraid of offending her parents, the woman, who, it must be said, had a slightly rotund figure that ran in her family, actually kept her pregnancy secret and continued to perform twice a day on the back of an elephant until five days before her baby was due. When she could hide it no longer, the mother-to-be told her parents she had appendicitis, checked into the hospital, and had her baby. While horrifying to the community, her exploit was a brilliant sleight of hand, for faced with the baby instead of a scandal, her parents overlooked their instinctive outrage and embraced the newborn child.

As for me, I kept bumping up against this juggernaut of invasiveness and gossip that shadows everybody on the show. My brush with ill will after Rock Hill passed as soon as Barrie recovered, but it was followed by a series of speculative stories that worked their way around the lot—rumors I was leaving, rumors I was fired, rumors I was spying for the Bureau of Naturalization and would try to deport some of the performers. I could mark my adjustment to circus life by the gradual decline in how much these rumors bothered me. One incident in particular finally thrust me over the top into a nirvana of indifference, at which point I gave up any hopes of privacy. It happened the first day in Hagerstown, Maryland, about two months into the season. During the previous night’s jump I had stopped to eat a Whopper and a carton of Burger King onion rings, which over the course of my night’s sleep had given me a bad case of gas. The gas was so bad, in fact, that in the middle of the night I actually set off the propane gas detector inside my RV. This was pretty funny, I thought: yet another private moment of bonding between me and my Winnebago.