To be sure, living in such an intimate community has its advantages. It’s cozy, for one. There’s a certain comfort that comes from living and working so closely with people, a kind of unspoken trust that comes from constant contact with your neighbors and from an encyclopedic knowledge of their most intimate noises. If nothing else, I had complete faith that after six months in this world everyone in the circus would defend me to the death from the threat of outside force. Circus people may tear themselves apart, but to the outside world they present a resolutely unified face.

Still, if this world felt so safe so much of the time, why did it seem so perilous to inhabit? Why did people flee in the middle of the night? The answer, I came to feel, exists in the nature of the melting pot itself. With such a wide variety of ingredients, the only way for this kind of community to thrive is by letting each individual component live according to his or her own rules. The circus, as a result, is fundamentally liberal. Its essence is its freedom. Its peril is its license. In this way, more than most, the circus is a startling mirror of America, presenting an image that is either a precise reflection or a gross exaggeration. Either way, it’s definitely a world where bodies are primal, where people work with, express themselves through, and spend a remarkable amount of their leisure time worrying about their physical selves. And what about their minds? Some pray. Some read. Some sing. But many more watch Geraldo, read the Enquirer (that’s how Kris Kristo, for one, learned English), and talk about their neighbors.

Above all, it was this lethal strain of gossip that so soured me. The sudden departure of Danny Rodríguez brought forth a seemingly endless stream of accusations and innuendo. This wasn’t the tame sort of gossip about who got pregnant before they were married or who was knocking on whose trailer last night. Instead it was a more venomous breed, designed to weaken and destroy. When I first joined the show I was fascinated by all the tales of family intrigue around the lot. I was curious about the number of angles, affairs, and character assassinations that could be flown around one group of people. By August I was sick of them. Did I really want to know that a man I like, a man I admire, tried to make a pass at his own son’s wife? Did I really want to know that another man I like, a man I respect, is married to two women at one time? These activities may be part of “real life,” but if they are, then I know why people go to the circus, for their real lives are too much to bear.

“I knew this was going to happen,” Jimmy James berated me when I told him about my frustration. “You’ve gotten too close. You’ve been at the fair too long. You can’t get attached to these people. You can’t think you’re doing it for them. You’re doing this, we’re all doing this, for the ring. For the love of the circus. It’s like a day-care center all around this lot. That’s why I just retire to my trailer after the show and pull my curtains down. You can’t let circus life ruin your love for the circus.”

After thirty years of living in the same day-care center, Jimmy had tapped into one of the few consistent veins that joined people on the show: the only way to survive in the circus was to build a private world of one’s own. Circus people, I realized, are like tigers: they have a tendency to devour their own. Those who survive do so by living in a tiny cage and only coming out when they have to perform. Right down the line of performers—Nellie and Kristo Ivanov; Venko and Inna Lilov; Dawnita and Gloria Bale—each of these people told me at one time that the only way they survived in the circus was by minding only their own business and nobody else’s. They survived by reaching some mysterious vigilante nirvana, where they trusted no one else and worried only about themselves. They had their forty acres and a mule. They were free.

This is America, I thought to myself. It is the circus. Could I find my way home?

Beaming in my artificial smile, I stand in the middle of the center ring and prepare for the blowoff of the gag.

“Okay, Doctor, you’ve fixed two, but look who’s coming now…” I point my glove toward the side door of the tent, where Rob appears in a flowery dress (with an inner tube hidden underneath it) and a tub of popcorn and a drumstick in his arms. “It’s the circus fat lady…”

The children giggle at the beastly sight. The fat lady stumbles into ring one, gestures toward her giant stomach, and collides, with an accompanying tympani crash, into the equally obese Nurse Anna Septic.

“Uh-oh, Doctor. She’s got a big, fat stomachache…”

The nurse leads the fat lady to the examining table and with a certain degree of huffing and puffing finally attaches the suction cup to her stomach.

“Now, boys and girls, you better count loudly, she’s got a big stomach…”

The nurse hurries over to the lever of the pump and most of the children rise to their feet.

“One!”

Their voices are so enthusiastic they rattle the rancor inside my head.

“Two!”

They want so much to believe in the clowns it would be a shame to let them down.

“Three!”

At the end of the count the fat lady stands up and the doctor hurries to the pump. The machine, however, is overheating—coughing and shaking, about to explode. Retrieving a rope from inside the machine, the doctor beckons the fire-eater, the fat lady, the short man, and the nurse to help him pull out the offending object.

“Doctor, Doctor, what was the problem…?”

The crew prepares to do battle with the machine.

“Too much…” They make one collective pull of the rope. “Too much”

They make a second tug together. “Too much…” And on the third yank of the rope the line of clowns falls back on the ground and—kaboom!—a giant, eight-foot rubber chicken comes bursting through the doors. “Friiiiited chicken!”

Ugh.

Despite this blowoff that was never quite funny, the chicken flaps his wings in the ring as the children clap their hands in amazement. The clowns, in the end, have done their job. We have distracted the audience long enough for the flying net to come down and the elephants to move into place.

Indeed, trotting back to return the microphone, I couldn’t help feeling on more days than not that being a clown is in essence being a distraction. Not only did I see it work every day on hundreds of children and their parents. I saw it work every day on me. Even in the depths of my despair about the circus I never stopped painting a smile on my face and transforming myself from a grump to a clown. The transformation wasn’t voluntary. In fact, just when I was ready to cast off my vision of the circus as a childish delusion, a young boy named Justin came running up to me after the stomach pump in Yaphank, Long Island, and asked if I would autograph his program. Hundreds of other children had asked me this in the preceding five months. But on this day—two weeks after Buck had left; one week after Danny had left; on a day when I thought I might want to leave myself—I picked up Justin’s book and signed my name, “Ruff Draft,” and the simple act seemed like a rare gift. Justin took his book back and beamed a distinctly nonartificial smile. Then he stepped forward and embraced my knees.

11

Reborn