The last person in the room was Guillaume, a scrappy fifteen-year-old with a ponytail on his head, a scar on his cheek, and a chip on his shoulder. Since the beginning of the year I had been having minor run-ins with Guillaume, who was Mary Jo’s son, Fred Logan’s grandson, and a member of the elephant department. In Ladson, South Carolina, he poured taco sauce into my root beer. In Havelock, North Carolina, he tripped me when I went to catch a fly ball during a softball game. And in what seemed like every other town he harassed me with another juvenile trivia question. While the others at the party were dancing or joking, Guillaume was lying back on the bed, complaining about the music, and periodically whacking me on the head with a plastic sword he had picked up from one of the circus novelty stands.
After about an hour of low-grade malaise, Danny announced he was going to the cookhouse to fix his sandwich. Guillaume stood up and said he would follow. But before he did, he bent over to grab his sneakers, pivoted his rear end toward my head, and with a dreary manly grunt let forth a blast of vile-smelling gas directly into my face.
Instinctively I shoved him out of the way. “Get out of here,” I said. “And grow up.” Guillaume did not take this suggestion to heart. Instead he threw down his hat, leapt onto my back, and began shaking my neck as hard as he could. “Take it back!” he demanded. “Take it back.”
This certainly caught me by surprise. Here I was, at a little before midnight on a rainy summer night in Abington, Massachusetts, with a rum and Coke in my hand, a plate of leftover Chinese spareribs in my stomach, and a raving mad, underage, totally inebriated elephant handler on my back, gripping my neck and pounding his fist into my face. My first impulse was to turn around and smash his head against one of Sean’s many pictures of himself on the wall. But at the risk of seeming like a weak-kneed writer, I thought better of this. Instead I pulled his hands from my throat as Danny yanked at his shirt, and the two of them stumbled out the door.
As soon as they left I was dumbstruck. Then confused. It was the kind of feeling I felt often in the circus when my own book-learned beliefs conflicted with the culture around me. This happened on my first day on the lot in DeLand. During practice for the firehouse gag, Marty suggested that it would be hysterically funny if Jerry, the dwarf, would disappear into the house for a moment and emerge wearing a kimono, slanting his eyes, sticking out his teeth, and pretending to be a demented Japanese. They all laughed uproariously at this idea. I winced at all the stereotypes it would be perpetuating. Luckily the idea was dropped.
Later I ran into the same problem with Sean when he referred to some of the workingmen as niggers. I told him I thought that word had gone out of favor some time ago. “You’ve been in school too long,” he said. “In the South everyone still uses that word.” I’m from the South, I told him, and I don’t use that word. “Well you’re just a wuss,” he said, thereby drawing the circle to a close. A “wuss” would naturally defend a “nigger”; anyone would know that. The circus, I realized, for better or worse, is the embodiment of the politically incorrect.
This realization cut to the heart of the chief dilemma I felt about the show. In some ways our circus was a remarkably open-minded and tolerant place. Where else could people of such varying backgrounds—Mexican, Bulgarian, Moroccan, Native American, African American, Redneck American, not to mention Catholic, Jew, and Pentecostal, as well as drunkard, dope addict, missionary, teetotaler, carnivore, and anorexic—all work and live together in such an intense environment, two shows a day, seven days a week, six inches from their closest friend and their gravest enemy? On the other hand, many of the people in the show were remarkably bigoted. People’s actions were invariably attributed to their most distinguishing characteristic—race, religion, or waist size. The bookkeeper was good with money: he must be a Jew. Marcos made a misstatement: he must be a stupid Mexican. Admittedly, coming from the highly charged world of political correctness, I found this directness to be liberating. People on the circus don’t run around talking about others behind their backs: they do it right in front of their faces. While they are often uncaring and unsympathetic, at least they’re up-front about it.
Still this openness was not enough to balance my doubts, particularly about the macho climate that prevailed among the single men on the show.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sean said after Guillaume had left. “If you have to, you’ll just beat his face. He doesn’t attack me because he knows I’ll punch him in the nose.”
“But I’m not going to beat him up,” I said. “What will that prove?”
“It will prove you’re a man.”
As he was saying this, Guillaume appeared at the door. With Danny hovering over his shoulder and poking him in the back, Guillaume uttered a brief apology and the two of us shook hands. At that moment this simple gesture came as a great relief: some things I didn’t have to give up just to be a part of the show.
Jimmy was still in a bad mood from the gout. He was sitting behind the bandstand the following day in his hideaway ringmaster’s station when I arrived, as I usually did, just as the flying act was nearing its end, “the Flying Rodríguez Faaaamily…” As soon as he finished, he handed me the microphone and I sprinted toward the center ring.
When the stomach-pump gag started in DeLand it had a simple premise: various clowns dressed as sideshow performers would wander into a doctor’s office with a string of maladies, a doctor would put each patient into a giant stomach pump, and an assortment of funny objects would be exhumed from their bellies. An announcer would narrate the scene and give a name to each disease. Because of a feud between Elmo and Jimmy, I was chosen to be the announcer. “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” I would bark. “Step right up and see the circus sideshow…” In fact, I had to hurry myself in order to make it into the ring for the start of the gag. As I grabbed the microphone that second afternoon in Abington, I was a little behind schedule, arriving at the center ring just as the lights came up for the gag. At this point, with all eyes in the tent now focused on me since I was the only person in sight, I opened my mouth to begin my pitch when—twannggg—I suddenly collided face-first into a wire that was supporting the flying net. Crunch. The collision sent my feet into the air and my head crashing toward the ground. Dazed, all I could sense when I regained my wits was a booming outburst of laughter from the audience—the biggest I had gotten all year. Realizing I had made the fall of my life and satisfied that I still had my teeth in place, I hopped to my feet, did an Elvin-like style to make the fall seem well planned, and headed for the elephant tub in the center ring.
The next five minutes were the longest of my so-far short career. It took as much concentration as I could muster to narrate my way through the gag. When Arpeggio, who was playing the mad nurse, started to hound me, I tried to cut him off, but he jumped on me anyway, knocking off my hat for the second time in a minute and rendering me bald to the world.
At the end of the number I trotted back to the bandstand, handed Jimmy the microphone, and headed for a nearby fire truck to examine myself in the mirror. I was shocked: blood was streaming down my face from an open wound on my left cheek that ran from my eye to my upper lip. With all the red on my face perhaps the audience hadn’t noticed this. I hurried back to my trailer, took a swab of baby oil, and cleaned a path across my cheek where the wire had slashed my face. When I finished I lay back on my bed and nearly passed out from the ringing pain that stretched from my ear to the roots of my teeth. Then I waited for the rush of people who would want to see what was wrong. Nobody came. The second half of the show passed. Still nobody came. Finally, ten minutes after the close of the first show, Jimmy knocked on my door. I was still in my makeup except for the wound. My costume was strewn across the floor. I still expected to do the second show. Performers are relentless in teasing people who miss performances, especially for minor injuries. There’s plenty of pain on a circus lot, but little sympathy.