“Good God!” Jimmy exclaimed when he looked at my face. Glancing at my reflection in the window I saw that the previous shallow mark on my cheek had already swollen into a red puffy sore like a slice of slightly discolored peach on my otherwise pale white face. “Did you put ice on it?”
“It didn’t occur to me.” I was beginning to feel weak.
“Do you have any ice?”
“A few cubes, I think.” I sat down in my chair.
“Wait right here.”
Jimmy disappeared and returned moments later with a bag of ice and a tube of Betadine.
“First of all, get your makeup off,” he said. “You’re not going to perform tonight. Then put some ointment and this ice on your cut and get yourself to a doctor as soon as you can. I’ve got to go back and announce the second show. Do you think you’ll be all right?”
I assured him that I would be fine. After he left I carefully removed my remaining clown face, unplugged my camper from the generator, and just as the whistle blew for the start of the second show wobbled slowly off the lot and away from the tent.
“So, you’re a clown?” the doctor said to me as she entered the emergency room a little over an hour later. The ice pack was still on my face. Clown white was still behind my ears. I felt like a boy left behind in summer camp after the rest of my cabin had gone fishing.
“Yes,” I confirmed. “I’m a clown.”
“Well, then, make me laugh,” she said.
Why do so many people ask this question of clowns? I thought. Everywhere I went people asked for a free performance. If you want to be made to laugh, I felt like saying, come pay to see a show. She certainly wasn’t offering me free medical care.
My look managed to get the message across, and the doctor turned her attention to my face. After a brief examination she announced that I was at risk of developing an infection and if I didn’t take care of my wound it might require plastic surgery. Plastic surgery? I gulped. For a cut? Maybe I should have made her laugh. Yet she assured me that surgery wouldn’t be necessary if I followed her advice. “First,” she said, “I want you to go home and stand in the shower for thirty minutes and use this sponge to clean out your cut…” Now I truly had to laugh. If only she knew that I didn’t have thirty minutes’ worth of water in my Winnebago. “Next,” she continued, “let the shower water run over your face twice a day for the next three days. Water is the best cleansing agent.” Again I had to smile. The water that came out of my showerhead was hardly a good agent for cleansing anything. “Finally,” she said, “no makeup for a week.”
That would be the hardest of all.
“Were you fired?” Guillaume wondered when he saw me out of costume near the end of the second show. Everyone was surprised when I told them about the accident. They hadn’t seen it and, in the intervening two hours, hadn’t heard about it either. I was shocked. “You mean to tell me that, with all the worthless gossip that goes around this lot, when somebody actually gets injured nobody talks about it?” The performers know whom their neighbors are fighting with, flirting with, even fornicating with, but, it turns out, they know very little about what those neighbors are doing in the ring.
This seems only fitting. The American circus, I was beginning to realize, has developed its own standards of behavior unrelated to the larger world it inhabits. With these rhythms, of course, comes a code, a kind of artificial religion. In this religion the show itself is God. It’s unjudgmental, yet unforgiving. It rewards perseverance, yet accepts no excuses. Under its tent it expects allegiance, while outside its walls it doesn’t care. After four months I was just starting to appreciate the true dimensions of this world. Inside the ring I must act like a priest and spread the gospel of the circus, but after the show I could do as I pleased. On the surface this formula seemed simple enough. But as the show headed for New York City and the long sprint for home, I was unprepared for the wave of disenchantment that gripped our fold and the challenge that this would place on my ability to believe in the goodness of our cause. The season was far from over.
“Welcome to the beginning of the end,” Dawnita said a week later as I was preparing my camper for the drive from northern New Jersey into Queens.
“Any advice before leaving?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t go.”
Chuckling through my trepidation, I hopped in the driver’s seat of my Winnebago and headed alone for the George Washington Bridge.
Intermission
The Color of Popcorn
With the houselights illuminated for intermission the tent begins to stir. The clowns come pouring into the center ring to sign autographs; two elephants come plodding into ring one to give rides; and a dozen butchers come wandering down the track. The show is in recess, but the business marches on.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there will now be a precise fifteen-minute intermission…, with elephant rides in ring one—elephant rides for the entire family: you must purchase a ticket before boarding the pachyderm…concessionaires selling hot dogs, hot buttered popcorn, ice-cold Coca-Cola, peanuts, Cracker Jack, cotton candy, and delicious cherry Sno-Kones…plus—Mom, Dad, bring your camera, come right down to the center ring, and meet the clowns in an autograph party: don’t forget to purchase the all-new Clown Alley coloring book…”
The business makes quite a show.
As the circus inched its way back down the East Coast from New England toward its inevitable date with New York, it also moved steadily toward another important date: the change of leadership from Doug to Johnny. By early July, Johnny’s back had recuperated and he was preparing to rejoin the show. Before that could happen, Doug would have to chaperon the show’s twenty-seven trucks, thirty-five trailers, and two hundred employees to the door of the Big Apple. To date it had been an uneven ride.
When John W. Pugh and E. Douglas Holwadel first became partners in 1982, the two of them could not have been more different. Johnny, a boxy boater type at home on the high seas, was short and pugnacious, an English bulldog with a lovable face and occasionally vicious bite who was raised on the wilds of a circus back lot. He always smiled and never wore a tie. Doug, a self-proclaimed “dyed-in-the-wool Bob Taft Republican from Cincinnati, Ohio,” was tall and aloof, a Great Dane with an imperial mien and imposing strut who could roam golf courses and country clubs with ease but did not enjoy getting mud on his shoes. He never smiled and always wore a tie. He also understood money.