Beginning with my earliest days on the circus I would occasionally come up with a diverting question that I tried to ask everyone on the lot. Jimmy nicknamed these odd queries my “question of the day” and egged me on to come up with more. Some of the questions were amusing, such as “How many bathrobes do you have?” (Since performers wear bathrobes over their costumes, most have a large supply. Gloria Bale, the narrow winner, counted nine, all with carrot stains in the pockets.) Others were serious, like “What’s the biggest insult on a circus lot?” (The clear winner: “carny,” which performers find offensive because it likens them to game dealers on carnivals.)

In Atlantic City the question of the day was “How much would you have to win at the casinos in order to leave the show for good?” I had intended this question to be lighthearted, but the answers were surprisingly revealing. Sheri, who along with her husband ran a lucrative corner of the concession wagon, said it would take fifty thousand dollars. “I consider what I make here in a year,” she said, “and then how much I could make on investments. Anything over that and I would leave and raise my children at home.” Gloria, who makes far less, said it would take her a million. “I love my job. Besides, a hundred thousand dollars doesn’t buy what it used to.” Many of the clowns said they would go for twenty thousand, while Jimmy James said he would go for a mere ten grand, a shocking testimony to the feeling he and many others have of being trapped in their own privation.

At the bar the answers came just as fast. One of Darryl’s friends, the one I nicknamed Michael Jackson because of his long curly hair, said he would leave for ten thousand as well. “Hell, I’d buy me a ball of crack about the size of your beer mug and sell flakes of it for twenty dollars apiece. I’d probably make several million in a month.” Darryl, for his part, was more circumspect. “If I won ten thousand dollars I’d send that on to my daughters. It would take a lot for me to leave this show. I’ve been here almost three years. I’ve had many opportunities to go.”

Darryl, who for some reason didn’t have a nickname, was a talker. I never saw him when he wasn’t talking, laughing, slapping someone’s back, or just plain rapping to himself. Trim and fit with a broad toothy smile, Darryl had a slightly receding hairline and a constantly varying daily sheen of stubble that never developed into a beard yet never completely disappeared. That is, until Atlantic City.

“Look out, ladies, here comes GQ Darryl,” I said to him the first time I saw his new clean-shaven look.

“Hell, I’m way past that stage,” he said. “My daughter’s going to have a baby next week in Baltimore and I want to look my best.”

“You’re going to be a grandfather?”

“Shoot, man, what’re you talking about? I’ve already got four…”

No-Nickname Darryl grew up on the streets of Chicago. By age fifteen he had dropped out of school and risen to second-in-command of a gang, the Black Disciples of Death. By age sixteen he had fathered his first child. By twenty he had two more. A year later he was in prison. “This man started making moves on my old lady,” he said. “Finally I confronted him and he told me if I didn’t watch out he was going to fuck me up. I decided to fuck him up first. That night I slit his throat. They gave me ten to twelve.”

Out of prison a decade later, Darryl started wandering. He sold vacuum cleaners and magazines door-to-door. He hustled. He even worked at a carnival. He was living the underside of the American dream: a black man with a criminal record who was running from his family and living by his wits. One night he found himself at a homeless shelter in Miami when a “fat man with a van” pulled up to the door. “You guys want to join the circus?” he said. “Seven days a week. Three meals a day. Free ride to Birmingham.”

“I wanted the free ride to Birmingham,” Darryl said, “so I took him up on the offer. When I got here Ahmed said to me, ‘You look healthy, come with me.’ I thought he was offering me something special. That’s how I ended up in props.”

The workers, like the performers, have a strict hierarchy. Big top is at the bottom; they do the heavy lifting. Cookhouse is slightly higher; they get free food. Props is considered near the top; they get to wear bright red jumpsuits and work in the ring alongside the performers.

“Who do you think runs the show?” Darryl asked as he bought me another beer. “We do. What do people say about the circus?”

“Everyone I know says two things,” I said. “First, ‘Is that really her hair?’ and second, ‘Boy, those guys in the red suits work hard.’”

“Damn straight. Just the other day some guy came up to me and handed me thirty dollars and said, ‘Without you guys there would be no show.’ And he was right. Who else could they get to pull down that rigging? Who else would lift that tiger cage? That’s solid iron, my friend. If we sit down, the show don’t go on. Last year it happened. We sat down at 4:29 on a Tuesday afternoon. We wanted to get a draw, even though it was only the day after payday.”

“And what happened?”

“They brought that money box out as fast as they could.”

“So let me ask you something,” I said. “Why do so many guys do those draws when it costs them so much money?”

“It hurts, man. It really does. But you have to. We have no choice.”

“What do you mean you have no choice?”

“Crack, man. Don’t you know?”

“You mean you’d rather be high today and broke tomorrow?”

“You need it, man. How else could you survive around here? Look, the circus is hell. Sometimes it fucks with your mind. You haven’t spent a night in No. 63….” He laughed at the thought. “Sometimes you just need the escape.”

“Escape from what?”

“This.” He pointed to the skin on his arm. It was as black as the makeup on my clown face. His voice became suddenly sober. “You don’t know what it’s like to be black, man, Bruce. To come from the ghetto. To wake up every day and be oppressed. You don’t know what it’s like to hustle.”

He indicated it was my time to buy a drink. When I agreed he said he was ready for a stiff one. My beer cost him $1.35. His rum and Coke cost me $5.00.

“So is this show that bad?” I asked.

“No worse than anyplace else. There are only two qualifications for my job: be fit and be black. We have a nickname for this place. Where I come from CBCB stands for Cold-Blooded Caucasian Bastards.”

I looked at him in shock.

“Man, you don’t know nothing, do you? The name of the game is survival. I’ll take whatever I can. If they’re going to screw me, then I’m going to hustle them.”

Gradually, as I continued to nurse my beer and Darryl started guzzling his stiff one, he told me the details of a racket he was running on the show. Working with several other people, Darryl regularly let in guests through the sidewall of the tent—an old practice dating back to the beginning of tented shows that always seems to find new practitioners on the show and new takers in every town. If one of the members of the group saw a family of six he would tell them the show wanted sixty dollars from them. He would let them in for thirty-five. After tipping the guards at the door, the racket made upward of a thousand dollars a week, Darryl said. Split several ways, that raised his salary of $150 a week to around $500.

“So this life is pretty good for you,” I said.

“For now. But I’m going to turn forty in about ten days. I may not look it, but I feel it. When we get to Baltimore my family’s coming to pick me up and take me to the hospital where my daughter is staying. They want me to come home. That’s the way black mothers are. They want their people close.”

“So why don’t you go?”

“I’m not quite ready. I like this life. I like messing with women, having a drink, taking a reefer every now and then. My family’s wanted me to come back for a long time. Back in Vineland my daddy came up to Ahmed, pulled out his wallet, and said, ‘How much will it cost me? I want my son back.’ Ahmed took a step back and looked at me. I said, ‘Daddy, you have to understand. I don’t want to come back.’”