“What are you talking about?” I said. Several members of the Rodríguez family were gathered in a circle around the door, drinking iced tea and looking somber.

“Danny,” he said.

“Danny?” I repeated. “What about him?”

“He left.”

“Left?”

“In the middle of the night.”

I leaned against the open screen door. His sister looked up from the ground. “Without even saying goodbye.”

I sat down. For several moments the group was silent. A series of images from the last several weeks went skidding through my mind. Just a week earlier, after riding the ferry to Manhattan for our long-planned trip to the Statue of Liberty, Danny decided that he would rather be by himself and wandered off alone toward Chinatown. On Monday, during our first stop on Long Island, Danny and I went across the street one night for a snack and he took the unusual step of buying me a pizza. “I’m feeling rich,” he said. “Soon I’m going to have lots of money.” And then the previous night, after our first day in Commack, Danny said he was sick and stayed behind when Kris, Marcos, and I went out to a nightclub. Sean stayed behind moping over lost love.

When we came back at around two in the morning, Kris and I went to knock on Danny’s trailer. There were muffled sounds within, then clanging, and finally whispered shouts among Danny, his girlfriend, and her husband—who unfortunately had just discovered what all of us had known for the last several months. I hurried back to my camper.

“Of all the problems in the world,” Little Pablo said. “If he had stolen some money. If he had hurt somebody. Then I could understand his feeling that he had the world on his shoulders. But a girl?”

A few hours after the incident in his room Danny was seen wandering down the trailer line looking for a ride off the lot. He asked Mary Jo, but she turned him down. Finally a member of the band agreed. Danny brought his suitcase, slipped into the truck, and, before the first blush of morning awakened the tent, drove off to the Farmingdale Airport. Several hours later Johnny Pugh was just dropping off his wife at the same airport when Papa Rodríguez and his wife, Karen, came rushing into the departure lounge. “Have you seen Danny?” they asked. Johnny hadn’t. The three of them hurried to the information desk, where they learned that their worst fears had come true: minutes earlier Danny had taken off on a flight for Los Angeles. Standing in the middle of the airport, Danny’s mother started to cry.

“You know what bothers me most,” Antonio Rodríguez told me later. “Beyond what he did to his brothers, his friends. It’s what he did to his mother. She’s been crying all day.” Antonio, Danny’s cousin, was changing clothes in his room in the back of Big Pablo’s truck. The flying act would be starting momentarily. “I’m not blaming the girl, or anything—she’s married; she has her child to think about; she’s been on this circus most of her life—but last night he told his parents he would stay. They offered to give him more money. But it was the girl who wanted him to leave so he could make more money, and it was she who was the last to see him. There was all that talk about their relationship after his accident. Everybody thought he fell because he was looking at her. But he was prepared to stay. He was just worried about his plane ticket. He had already paid for it. I told him I would buy it from him and use it to go to Mexico this winter.” They had agreed that this morning at ten o’clock they would go to the travel agent and swap the ticket. “This morning he was gone.”

“And he didn’t say anything to you?”

“He left a note.”

“A note? What did it say?”

“I didn’t read it. I just put it away. If I see him at Christmas I’m going to hand it back to him. He never should have lied.”

In silence the rumors quickly spread. By evening they had turned malicious.

“They say a pussy pulls stronger than an elephant,” Big Pablo said. “Now I know why. But you know what? He can’t blame it on her. He can’t blame it on the circus. He can’t blame anyone but himself. He’s the one who got into this mess and now he has to get himself out of it. And he can forget coming to me for help. As far as I’m concerned, he’s out of the family. Anyone who breaks a contract doesn’t have any place here. And anyone who treats his own mother like that doesn’t deserve respect. He told everyone in the family he was thinking about leaving but he never came and told me. He knows I wouldn’t have tolerated the idea. I have no sympathy for crybabies. Now, I have no respect for him.”

Reeling, none of us left the lot that night. I, like many, went to bed early. The circus seemed so unforgiving. The dream seemed out of control.

Where Are the Clowns?

Just in time the clowns arrive.

Walking now instead of running, I approach the center ring with Jimmy’s microphone just as the Flying Rodríguez Family completes its final style. As they exit, Big Pablo tries to knock off my hat. Little Pablo feints a right hook to my face. The camaraderie gives way to a gulp of loneliness as I hop on top of the red elephant tub and spin around in my oversized shoes. For a second the tent is tense with silence. I’m all alone in the center ring. Jimmy blows his whistle from behind the back door and the voice that fills the tent is mine. I’m master of the moment. I’m lord of the ring. I’m a child again.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry…”

At the beginning of the year the sound of my own voice startled me. Blaring from the speakers and hurling through the air, it was painfully shrill—and way too fast. I couldn’t hold the squirming crowd. I couldn’t hold the silly accent I’d adopted for the part. I couldn’t even hold the microphone, I was shaking so hard. Elmo advised me to drop my accent, lower my voice, and speak into the microphone as if I was talking to a room full of children.

“Step right up, boys and girls, and see the circus sideshow…”

Within a few days I had slowed myself down, and within a few weeks I had deepened my tone in an attempt to mimic the full-bodied bass that Jimmy used so well. A former clown himself, Jimmy had a way of hanging on certain vowels and soaring with certain syllables (“The Flying Rodríguez Faaaamily…”) that gave his otherwise flat-footed phrases the ability to turn somersaults in the air. It was by listening to him over several months that I learned the central lesson of announcing, indeed the central lesson of clowning itself. The key was not to be myself, per se, but to be my clown. This notion, so simple, was surprisingly difficult to comprehend, though it ultimately proved pivotal to my ability to perform. It freed me from any embarrassment I might otherwise suffer from standing around in silly shoes with a pointy cap on my head. It allowed me to transcend my otherwise critical mind and act on behalf of my instincts. Above all, it empowered me to override my superego—the constraints learned from society—and live according to my id—my deepest, childlike urges.