fire the lady is desperate. The audience is crying for her to jump. The clowns holding the net begin sprinting toward the house. The lady bends over one last time, when out of nowhere a deafening blast jars everyone in the tent, one last fireball spurts out of the roof, and the lady jumps for her life, hoping against hope to be caught in the net, but only to land miserably in the mud. Just as she lands, a clown appears from the house waving his hands in distress: his pants have caught on fire. This is the ultimate defeat. Not only could the clowns not put out the fire or catch the baby or save the lady but we also managed in our bungled confusion to set ourselves ablaze. Undaunted, we jump to our feet in unison and run out of the ring to the traditional romp “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
4
Outsiders Always Make Mistakes
Kris Kristo had a certain way he went about preparing to go out. First he pulled on his skintight white jeans, his white T-shirt with the pack of Marlboros in the sleeve, his satin tiger-skin vest. Next he slicked back his hair, lightly spritzing it with Brut and gently tugging a few strands over his dark brown eyes and the small seductive scar across his left eyebrow. Finally, on special nights like this, he applied another layer of black spray paint on his well-worn biker shoes, giving them a five-cent patent-leather shine. Once primped, he would slowly make his way down the trailer line collecting his posse for the evening prowl: first Sean, in a neon-pink shirt and cowboy boots; then Danny in purple silk top and black Ferragamos; finally me in orange Gap button-down and shiny penny loafers. On the surface I looked as if I didn’t belong with this group, yet I had two things that Kris Kristo usually needed for a night out. First, transportation; and second, prophylaxis.
“Hey, Bruce,” Kris said when he arrived at my RV, “mind if I borrow a condom?”
My first week on the show I was overcome by the grind. With no day off and no break from the routine, all I could talk about was how tired I was, how much work there was, how hard this life was to lead. I got sick. I didn’t know when to sleep. I lost several pounds. My life was turned upside down. By the second week, when we moved from central Florida to the seaboard coast of Georgia, I noticed that when people asked how I was doing I no longer spoke only about the grind. I developed a routine. I ate breakfast in midmorning, my milk no longer frozen. I ate lunch in early afternoon, with my makeup to follow. I ate dinner after the 7:30 show. By the third week, when we jumped to North Carolina to play the Azalea Festival in Wilmington and Camp Lejeune around payday, I began to look forward to performing. I no longer missed my New York Times or MacNeil/Lehrer . I felt naked without my makeup. In short, I began to feel at home.
The real reason was my neighbors. Any fears I had about not being accepted because I was a writer were quickly quelled. First, instead of trying to conceal their true identities, many people on the show flocked to my trailer in those opening weeks anxious to confess their deepest vices and gravest misdeeds (not to mention a few federal crimes). Their motivation, it turns out, was simple: they were worried that someone else would tell me first. In the span of several weeks, from mid-March to early April, I had intimate, almost confessional conversations with nearly every performer on the show and had already begun to develop a sense of the multilayered and sometimes dark personal fabric that ties members of the circus world so closely to one another.
Second, instead of viewing me as an intruder, the people on the show reached out to embrace me once they realized I was prepared to do the show alongside them every day. Nellie and Kristo Ivanov, Bulgarian aerialists and parents of nineteen-year-old Kris and his younger brother, Georgi, lent me aspirin, fed me soup, and laughed along with me as I stumbled, eyes agog, from one
4
Outsiders Always Make Mistakes
Kris Kristo had a certain way he went about preparing to go out. First he pulled on his skintight white jeans, his white T-shirt with the pack of Marlboros in the sleeve, his satin tiger-skin vest. Next he slicked back his hair, lightly spritzing it with Brut and gently tugging a few strands over his dark brown eyes and the small seductive scar across his left eyebrow. Finally, on special nights like this, he applied another layer of black spray paint on his well-worn biker shoes, giving them a five-cent patent-leather shine. Once primped, he would slowly make his way down the trailer line collecting his posse for the evening prowl: first Sean, in a neon-pink shirt and cowboy boots; then Danny in purple silk top and black Ferragamos; finally me in orange Gap button-down and shiny penny loafers. On the surface I looked as if I didn’t belong with this group, yet I had two things that Kris Kristo usually needed for a night out. First, transportation; and second, prophylaxis.
“Hey, Bruce,” Kris said when he arrived at my RV, “mind if I borrow a condom?”
My first week on the show I was overcome by the grind. With no day off and no break from the routine, all I could talk about was how tired I was, how much work there was, how hard this life was to lead. I got sick. I didn’t know when to sleep. I lost several pounds. My life was turned upside down. By the second week, when we moved from central Florida to the seaboard coast of Georgia, I noticed that when people asked how I was doing I no longer spoke only about the grind. I developed a routine. I ate breakfast in midmorning, my milk no longer frozen. I ate lunch in early afternoon, with my makeup to follow. I ate dinner after the 7:30 show. By the third week, when we jumped to North Carolina to play the Azalea Festival in Wilmington and Camp Lejeune around payday, I began to look forward to performing. I no longer missed my New York Times or MacNeil/Lehrer . I felt naked without my makeup. In short, I began to feel at home.
The real reason was my neighbors. Any fears I had about not being accepted because I was a writer were quickly quelled. First, instead of trying to conceal their true identities, many people on the show flocked to my trailer in those opening weeks anxious to confess their deepest vices and gravest misdeeds (not to mention a few federal crimes). Their motivation, it turns out, was simple: they were worried that someone else would tell me first. In the span of several weeks, from mid-March to early April, I had intimate, almost confessional conversations with nearly every performer on the show and had already begun to develop a sense of the multilayered and sometimes dark personal fabric that ties members of the circus world so closely to one another.
Second, instead of viewing me as an intruder, the people on the show reached out to embrace me once they realized I was prepared to do the show alongside them every day. Nellie and Kristo Ivanov, Bulgarian aerialists and parents of nineteen-year-old Kris and his younger brother, Georgi, lent me aspirin, fed me soup, and laughed along with me as I stumbled, eyes agog, from one
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