After thirty years on the road, I mentioned, he still seemed to be, at heart, the same person he was when he left home.

“I sure hope so,” he said. “I love the South. I love my hometown. I can’t stand all these Northerners, these New England roads. I’m still my mama’s boy. At heart I’m still Agnes’s child.” He became silent and pushed away his tray. After a moment he looked up at me. “Bruce, have you lost your mother?”

“No.”

“Prepare for it, son. It’s the most difficult thing that has ever happened to me. I’ve lost my friends. I’ve lost my religion. But nothing was like losing my mother. We did everything together. We played games. We saw shows. She was my best pal.” We got up to clean our trays. “My father died when he was in his late fifties. He was a chain smoker. My mother died when she was in her early sixties. Heart disease.” We dumped the leftover food in the garbage and dropped our trays into the dirty metal tubs.

“I’ve got it as well,” Jimmy said, “a serious case of heart disease. That’s why I’m so passionate about this show. Did you know that my paycheck hasn’t gone up in ten years? They even stopped giving me contracts several years ago. I was upset about that. I used to get fifty bucks by selling them to circus fans.” Out of his modest weekly salary Jimmy had to pay health insurance, mortgage insurance, and the insurance on his truck and trailer. “As it is, I’m already cutting into what I have set aside for later.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because they don’t pay me enough money.”

“Then why don’t you leave?”

He smiled and lifted his hand in the air as if he were about to start the show. His tone was wistful, almost ironic. “Because I can’t…. And that’s the circus, my friend. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus. I wouldn’t care who owned it, a corporate sponsor, Mr. Pugh and Mr. Holwadel, the state of Florida. I love this show. But the fact is, it takes your life away. Sometimes the circus is a ball and chain around your legs.”

In the distance three whistles blew, indicating ten minutes before the start of the evening show. Jimmy blew three whistles in return, indicating he was on his way. Without speaking we both stepped back from our conversation and moved in the direction of our separate worlds: he to the big top, I to Clown Alley. And in that movement was the essence of the circus. Stop talking, stop thinking, stop trying to put it into words and get back to the show before it goes on without you.

Back in the Alley there was an envelope on my trunk. It was addressed to Ruff Draft, my official clown nickname given to me by the band. My other nicknames included Bruno, Rewrite, and, from one of the butchers, Hemingway. Inside was a card showing a duck on the front with his arms outstretched. CONGRATULATIONS! it said. YOU DID IT! Inside was the message:…NOW AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU TOOK A QUACK AT IT?! Below the printing was a handwritten message: “Happy 1st of May on the 1st of May.” It was signed: “Li’l Buck.”

Give the Bear a Dog

If there isn’t an old circus saying that after a while an animal trainer begins to look like his animal, then there ought to be. After Venko Lilov there probably will.

As soon as the allegedly Russian swingers go sprinting from the rings, the lights go dim, the bass drum thumps proud, and the spotlights come up on the back door of the tent, where a dour, doughy wrestling hunk of man swathed in an alarmingly bright yellow tuxedo is leading behind him a burly dragoon of actual Russian bears. Hardly Mexican wolves in sheep’s clothing, these bears are the genuine face-slashing article. Venko’s wife, Inna, who walks next to her husband in a lavishly low-cut yellow evening dress and well-styled burgundy hair, has a forty-stitch scar and a recrafted face to assign to the wrath of her love.

“In the center ring, the children’s favorite, those lovable Russian bears, presented by the Lilov family…”

Arriving in the center ring with his bears, the forty-six-year-old Venko looks like an overgrown stuffed bear himself, like a kid with a black eye and broken nose who had been plucked from outside the principal’s office, stuffed into an ill-fitting rhinestone jacket, and thrust onto the stage as Papa Bear in an elementary school production of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Next to him, his wife looks like a luxurious Mama Bear with fingers slenderly stretched in the air, toes gracefully pointed toward the ground, and face shyly adorned with the beatific smile of an aging Bolshoi star. Between them, the person who leads the first bear into the ring is Danny, their fifteen-year-old stick-figured Baby Bear of a son who despite a hint of adolescent fur on his upper lip looks more like a chess prodigy than a wrestler. Earlier in the year he had earned the indelible nickname Danny Busch after drinking his first can of beer one night and walking stone drunk into the side of the tent. The Lilovs’ rather grim appearance may not be Hollywood in style, but their personal story is certainly fairy tale in scope.

“When you live in a Communist system,” Venko explained, “any way out is a miracle. Kenneth Feld was our miracle maker.”

Venko Lilov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. Because of his prodigious size, he was selected as a child for special athletic training schools, eventually rising to become three-time heavyweight wrestling champion of the country. Championships, however, did not guarantee him freedom, and one day at the height of his career a friend suggested he try out as a catcher for a famed teeterboard troupe that was leaving for the West. “I went to the practice like it was a joke,” he remembered. “Two weeks later I was in America.” Overnight he knew that’s where he wanted to be. Returning home two years later, Venko married Inna, a Russian wirewalker born in Tbilisi, and the two of them set out to develop an act. Starting with two Russian bears her father had presented to them as a gift, they went to work. In no time they had a family, an act, and a way out. They also had an enemy. “It was a nightmare,” Venko said in his beefy Slavic accent. “The director was fucked up. For some reason he hated us. I had an offer to go to Italy. He said, ‘No, you go to Czechoslovakia.’ I had a contract to go to France. He said, ‘No, you go to Russia.’ He didn’t want us to get out. This lasted nine years.”

Until one day Kenneth Feld appeared. “He came to the office and said, ‘I want that act.’ He was the producer of Ringling Brothers. He saw our pictures and wanted us on his show. It was that simple. We got hired by photographs. The director didn’t dare turn him down.”

“So why did he pick you?”

“Because we were different. Our act was based on sports—rings, hurdles, parallel bars. No bears in dresses. No waltzing in the ring. One month later we flew from Sofia to Paris, from Paris to New York, and from New York to Sarasota. The bears went to sleep in Bulgaria and woke up the next morning in Florida. They never knew the difference. I did.”