by Bruce Feiler
After several weeks of trying to untangle these offshoots, I decided to attempt a family tree of the show. What I discovered was that, leaving aside the clowns, seventy-five percent of the people who set foot in the ring were related to one another. Considering that these people hailed from thirteen different countries, this common lineage was stunning. It also had unexpected consequences. On the positive side, families that fly together, well, fly. The interdependence that families enjoyed almost seemed to make up for many of the hardships of life on the road. Papa Rodríguez’s wife agreed to drive their trailer on jump nights, for example, so her husband could pull a separate trailer for his two daughters by a previous marriage. Big Pablo was excused from carrying any rigging and in return carried a generator for his sisters to use at night. Little Pablo and his wife, meanwhile, agreed to caravan with Angel and Michelle, and the four of them went so far as to buy CBs so they could pass the time during long jumps playing “Name That Tune” in Spanish.
This closeness, of course, comes at a cost. Nothing is secret on a circus lot—no act of lovemaking, no intramarital squabble, no extramarital affair. Danny Rodríguez would learn this lesson well. Others had learned it already. The previous year, one performer, whose father was a disciplinarian and whose mother was a Jehovah’s Witness, became unexpectedly pregnant. Afraid of offending her parents, the woman, who, it must be said, had a slightly rotund figure that ran in her family, actually kept her pregnancy secret and continued to perform twice a day on the back of an elephant until five days before her baby was due. When she could hide it no longer, the mother-to-be told her parents she had appendicitis, checked into the hospital, and had her baby. While horrifying to the community, her exploit was a brilliant sleight of hand, for faced with the baby instead of a scandal, her parents overlooked their instinctive outrage and embraced the newborn child.
As for me, I kept bumping up against this juggernaut of invasiveness and gossip that shadows everybody on the show. My brush with ill will after Rock Hill passed as soon as Barrie recovered, but it was followed by a series of speculative stories that worked their way around the lot—rumors I was leaving, rumors I was fired, rumors I was spying for the Bureau of Naturalization and would try to deport some of the performers. I could mark my adjustment to circus life by the gradual decline in how much these rumors bothered me. One incident in particular finally thrust me over the top into a nirvana of indifference, at which point I gave up any hopes of privacy. It happened the first day in Hagerstown, Maryland, about two months into the season. During the previous night’s jump I had stopped to eat a Whopper and a carton of Burger King onion rings, which over the course of my night’s sleep had given me a bad case of gas. The gas was so bad, in fact, that in the middle of the night I actually set off the propane gas detector inside my RV. This was pretty funny, I thought: yet another private moment of bonding between me and my Winnebago.
But the incident was hardly private. After lunch the next day I walked up to the ticket wagon to say hello to Mary Jo, a usually gentle and generous woman who is Fred Logan’s oldest daughter. “Are you parked next door to me?” asked Mary Jo. “Yes,” I said. “I believe so.” “Well, in that case,” she said, “no more loud farting.” Dumbfounded, I tried to ignore her comment: all of my years learning manners in Japan were not enough to prepare me for this situation. But Mary Jo was not to be denied. “Did you hear me?” she repeated. “No more loud farting.” And so I learned my lesson that day: in the circus even one’s privy behavior is part of the public domain.
Once the flyers complete their opening style, the act is ready to begin. In ring one, the Rodríguezes’ anchor man, Antonio, hops on the back of the swing, pushes off from the ground, and begins building a gradual momentum. With a triangular structure eight feet tall suspending a platform five feet long, a Russian swing looks like a cross between a giant medieval battering ram and an oversized version of one of those 1970s coffee-table souvenirs with a row of suspended silver balls that spring outward when boinked on the opposite end. In the act, the silver balls are the Rodríguezes themselves, and when one of the boys is boinked from the platform, he soars into the air and turns a series of somersaults, layouts, pikes, and pirouettes before landing in a vertical blue nylon net and sliding to the ground.
“With a Russian swing you can land your tricks in one of three ways,” Pablo explained in his definitive, slightly bombastic big-brother style of speech. “On someone’s shoulders, on a mat, or in a net. As high as we’re going, shoulders are out of the question. With a mat you risk ruining your legs. Let’s face it, you can come turning two somersaults from thirty feet high, but how many times are you going to land perfectly? Your ankles just aren’t meant to do that. Look at those guys in the Olympics, and they don’t even go that high. When Johnny told us he wanted a Russian swing, we said sure but we’re going to use a net.”
After an initial thrill in which Antonio rotates the swing 360 degrees around the central bar, the family is ready for the first trick of the act. The honor falls to Pablo the Big.
“Of all my brothers I am the one who knows how to turn the best somersaults. It’s really very simple. First of all, I concentrate on the height of the swing. When that’s set, I bend down in a crouched position so I’ll be able to shoot myself into the air. When the time comes I push off with my legs and try to create a tunnel, focusing only on where I’m going to land. I never look at the air, only the net, and if I concentrate correctly it just clicks, it comes to me. Let’s say I’m doing a forward somersault with a one-and-a-half pirouette. I do my forward somersault and as soon as I come out of it I’m already judging how high I am. If I feel I have to hurry my pirouettes I tuck my arms tighter, but if I feel like the trick is going okay I can go slow so the people can enjoy it.”
“And all you think about is the net? Not the audience, not your wife?”
“Nothing. I think only that I’m going to land right there, and if I do land right there I’ll have no problem. There’s no emotion, no anxiety. Just concentration.”
“Do you get dizzy?”
“Sometimes I get lost. But that doesn’t bother me. When I’m actually doing my somersaults my eyes are closed; it’s all feeling. If you close your eyes, the feeling never changes, but once you open your eyes—well, what if the lights go out, what if somebody throws a balloon, what if somebody moves and your eyes go with them?”
What if? Indeed. Talking to an acrobat is like talking to a pilot-either one can have his craft totally under control but lose it in an instant with an internal glitch or an external gust of fate. For Big Pablo, the cocky one, the number one son, this brush of fate happened in practice. He was trying to do a double. The push wasn’t right. He came out too soon and landed short. By the time he came to a stop at the bottom of the net the weight of his body had completely squashed his foot. “The bone was twisted all around,” Mary Chris remembered. “His toes were pointing back and his heel was in the front. It was New Year’s Eve, our first week of practice. We didn’t have any insurance to pay for an operation.”
“We knew at that moment we had to change the act,” Pablo said. “Even after I recovered, someone else had to do most of the jumps. We decided Danny was the one with the best timing. Little Pablo could do a few tricks he always did on the trampoline, but we looked at him on the swing and it was obvious that Danny had more technique. But you have to remember what I said: technique is not the only thing. Concentration is also important. Danny has never had that.”
The accident took place in Frederick, Maryland, on one of the prettiest, flattest lots of the year. The grass was smooth and green—a baseball paradise. The crowds were thick and loud—a grand-slam house. The rain didn’t begin until after the show started, and even then the spring shower was unable to soil the colorful grandeur underneath the tent. Danny climbed onto the swing for the second trick: a backward double somersault into the net. He had already done it perfectly over one hundred times since the start of the year. But unlike on
the diamond, percentages don’t count for much in the ring. When you walk a high wire, or set foot in a cage with tigers, or jump off a Russian swing, you can’t afford to have a bad day.
With all eyes on his slender, well-toned body, Danny hung on to the front of the platform as it knifed relentlessly through the air.
“Take it easy,” he said to his siblings; the cue to prepare.
Danny bent his knees into the takeoff position as a wisp of ponytail swung behind his neck and distracted attention ever so slightly from his deep-set stare and slight overbite.
“Ready,” he called; the next time was the launch.
As the swing rose to its zenith for the final assault, his brothers and sisters pushed the swing on command and were readying to exclaim their traditional “Hurrah!” when suddenly…“Danny? Daniel! Mira.¡Cuidado!”
“As soon as my foot slipped off I blanked out,” he said. “My right foot went first, then my whole body followed. My legs lifted up like I had stepped on a banana peel and I went hurling through the air. When I came down I landed on my neck. It happened so quick all I could think about was moving out of the way so the swing wouldn’t hit me when it came back. Everyone was screaming at me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I rolled toward the seats and closed my eyes. I knew something was wrong.”
Compared with his brothers’, Danny’s English is nearly perfect. Born in America during a family tour, he was raised in the lap of a Mexican family who had made it in the seat of gringo luxury. As proof of his upbringing, he liked to wear a uniquely American wardrobe: Deion Sanders high-tops, Michael Jordan T-shirts, Arsenio Hall baseball caps. He was only twelve when his family spent a year as pampered stars at Walt Disney’s EPCOT Center; his personal hero was Marvin the Martian from The Bugs Bunny Show.
“By the time I came to, my dad was there. He helped pull me out of the way. He tried to pick me up, but I told them not to move me. I knew something was broken. My body was all hot. I felt a lot of pain. He asked me if I heard something pop or break. I told him I didn’t hear anything at all.”
Danny looked limp lying on the ground. His slender body was writhing in pain. His fingers twitched at his side.
“It was just about then that I started losing control. I could hear everyone talking to me, but I couldn’t concentrate. My mom was holding my head. My dad was holding my legs. I opened my eyes once and it was all blurry. I couldn’t see straight. I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I couldn’t feel my fingers, or my toes. That’s when the doctor came from the audience.”
To the ringmaster, the doctor was hardly a welcome sight. “As soon as the doctor came from the audience I knew we were in trouble,” said Jimmy James. “Real doctors don’t do things like that anymore. It’s a new ball game out there. These days you can’t say, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ Because they won’t touch you for insurance reasons. As a result, you don’t know what’s coming out of the audience. You have to be very careful.”
In a maelstrom of European and Latin excess, Jimmy James, from Columbus, Georgia, was a paragon of Southern gentility. Between phrases he paused to let his vowels stretch out to their full magnolia glory. Between shows he hung his tailcoat on a seat wagon so his tails wouldn’t sully themselves in the mud. Between sentences he thought before he spoke.
“At the time, I was standing in ring three. I saw the accident right away. The first thing I did was signal Willie to have him kill the lights. The second thing I did was make sure the next act was up and ready to go. In this case we had a few minutes while the Estradas finished their act, but unfortunately the act after them was the bears. The bears couldn’t work because of where Danny was still lying, but the bear man didn’t tell me that until he was in the ring, which made it worse. I considered going to a clown walk-around. If I had really gotten into a jam I would have just called for a blackout and introduced the band to play a march. But in this case I got lucky; the Ivanovs were ready. I announced the cradle act and they went up in the center ring. At that point I could turn my attention back to the ground.”
While Jimmy was struggling to rearrange the show, Danny was being swarmed by a growing number of family and friends. His sister Elizabeth started to cry. His mother stroked his cheek. The emergency personnel had to push their way through the assembled crowd.
“When the paramedics came they asked me if I could move my fingers, my arms,” Danny said. “They pushed particular places around my head and asked if it hurt—my neck, my back, my spine. One dude knew right away, but he wasn’t allowed to say. They couldn’t move me until they got me on a stretcher with a neck brace. At the hospital I waited for about an hour. The brace was pinching my nerves. I asked them if they could please take it off, and they said the only way I could take it off was to sign a paper saying they weren’t responsible. I decided to leave it on….
“All that time I kept telling my mom how stupid I was. It was my fault and I could have prevented it. What happened was there was Sno-Kone juice on the swing. After the act they shove the swings back into the corner, and someone must have dropped some Sno-Kone on the part where we stand. By the time I noticed it I was already swinging. I lifted my foot and mentioned it to my brothers. While I was talking to them it was time for me to go off but I wasn’t paying attention. That’s when they knocked me off. Shit happens. But I still could have prevented it. That’s why it upsets me more. The truth is, I fucked up.”
A little over an hour later the X rays arrived and confirmed what the paramedics had suspected all along: when Danny flew off the Russian swing and landed on his neck he snapped his collarbone. It would take eight to ten weeks to heal, the doctors said. After that he should be okay. But after that he wasn’t, for Danny, it turns out, might have fallen off the swing for reasons other than the one he confessed to.
Meanwhile the act must continue. With Danny disabled the family was forced, at least for a few months, to shuffle its lineup again. Little Pablo started doing a straight jump along with his brandy in, back somersault out. Mary Chris even considered doing a trick or two herself. But most of the slack was taken up by Big Pablo, who returned to jumping despite his still crippled foot and now aching knee. Because he was twenty pounds overweight and difficult to push, the family had to recruit Kris Kristo to join their act for added weight. He donned a black Howard Stern-like wig, slipped into Danny’s old costume, and learned to dance the mambo. Now the Rodrinovich Flyers were not only Mexican but part Bulgarian as well.
For the finale, Papa Rodríguez, who up to now has been holding the net, hands it off to a prop man and fetches two twelve-foot-high aluminum poles connected at the top by a slender cable wrapped in bright pink towels. He douses the towels with lighter fluid and sets the wire ablaze. The crowd breathes an audible “ahhhh.” Jimmy James responds on cue.
“From the Russian swings, a backward somersault, bliiindfolded…”
Big Pablo slips a black cotton pillowcase over his head, squeezing his arms through two narrow holes and pulling the remainder almost to his chest. His brothers and sisters start clapping their hands until the entire tent catches on. The brass flare gives way to a tympani roll.
“The last trick is always a safe trick,” Pablo explained. “You can’t afford to end with a miss. But you want something that the people are going to enjoy. That’s what the fire is for. It’s not a threat. You can see fairly good with that blindfold anyway. But people like it. It makes them go ‘ahhh.’”
“So how do you know what makes people go ‘ah.’”
“Fire makes people go ‘ah.’ Darkness makes people go ‘ah.’ Somebody jumping over something high makes people go ‘ah.’ Our last trick has all of that. It’s the perfect ending.”
After four swings the platform reaches the ultimate height and Pablo tells his pushers he is ready to fly. On the next rotation he pushes off with his legs and vaults his body into the air, searching for that elusive nirvana, that tunnel of air, which will carry him to his destination. With a cymbal crash
for flourish and a communal ‘Hey!’ for effect, his back is sucked into the vacuum of the net and he comes sliding down the blue nylon chute and lands upright on his feet. He peels off the blindfold and beams at the crowd. He looks confident. He looks poised. Deep inside, he wants more.
“At first I feel pretty good, like I just hit a home run. It’s like after a big ride at a carnival you say, ‘Damn, that was cool.’ It’s a feeling of, well, accomplishment. I have done something right. I have done something good…. But after a moment that high goes away. That’s when I realize I’m not satisfied. The act could be better. The swing needs to be two feet taller. I need to be fifteen pounds lighter. The way the act is now I would not want anybody I think is somebody to see it. Not in my business, which is somersaults. As soon as it’s over I’m thinking, I want to do more, I want to give more. I want to shout out to the audience, ‘Just wait until the flying act. That’s when I know we’ll show you something. That’s when we’ll really show you how to fly.’”
5
This Is When They Become Real
“I woke up at seven this morning, just as I do every day. I looked around the room for a moment. I hadn’t moved any of my clothes. I hadn’t even changed the sheets. It seemed strange to be in her bed. We hadn’t slept together for several months. And now, well, she’s gone.”