by Bruce Feiler
I should have known better than to quibble about pennies with the World’s Most Frugal Clown. I asked him instead how he got started sunbathing in the nude.
“I’ve always liked going to the beach,” he said, still dressed in his skimpy jogging shorts and ratty thrift-store thongs. Folded into a wobbly director’s chair, he looked like a giant hermit crab who had long since outgrown his shell. “Years ago a friend suggested I go with him to a secret place he knew. Well, I couldn’t believe it when I first saw it: nobody had any clothes on! I decided to give it a try, and—boy!—you can really get a good tan. Then another friend told me you could buy a book of all the nude beaches in America, even the world. I still use it today.”
Buck pushed back on his heels and smiled: a life on the road, a barrel of laughs, and, as always, a hint of mystery.
When my trunk was repaired I headed back to the Alley, where the boys were just beginning to settle into their chairs and apply the first halting strokes of greasepaint. Just as I sat down Jimmy appeared in the entranceway. His reddened face had the stern demeanor that usually suggested a rebuke was imminent. Maybe we were bunched too closely in spec. Maybe he was upset that so few clowns had signed for the following year.
“Okay, boys, here’s the deal,” he said, leaning up against the entrance pole in anguished resignation. “When you make the bangs, no more shooting the shotgun behind the seat wagons. You must shoot it behind the fourth center pole, closest to the band. Plus, no more playing with the kids during autograph party. You can shake their hands. You can sign their books. But don’t touch them anyplace else…”
Some of the boys started to complain, but their pleas came out rather muted. I could feel impending doom. One of the things that had saddened me most about being a clown was all the things I couldn’t do: I couldn’t hug a child or put an infant on my lap. If a mother asked me to hold her toddler for a photograph, I had, politely, to decline. What if that child goes home at night and tells his mother he was touched by a clown? What if that child begins to cry?
“And that reminds me,” Jimmy said. “Who was playing tug-of-war with a kid during autograph party?”
The boys looked around and mumbled at one another, in the process hinting at what everyone knew. He was probably talking about Buck.
Jimmy slapped his hands together in despair. “Well, make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he insisted. “Somebody called the office and complained, and now we have an incident. I’ll have to have a talk with him.”
Jimmy left the Alley and the show began. Later that evening I passed Buck walking back toward his van. His head was drooped and he was talking to himself. He was holding his clown wig in his hand.
“Goddamned parents,” he said. “All they want to do is complain. I tell you, it’s no fun anymore. Once you take away the contact with the kids, you take the fun out of clowning. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I certainly don’t want to clown anymore.”
I brushed off his remark as another one of Buck’s low-grade grumblings. Later, when he took back his red, white, and blue barker’s jacket I had been borrowing for the stomach-pump gag, I took his comment at face value that he wanted to have it cleaned. The next morning when I saw him just before we were paid and he had a frustrated grimace on his face, I took it as a sign of the upcoming “six-pack” weekend with three shows on Saturday and three more on Sunday. That afternoon when I heard Buck had taken the day off and that I would be asked to fire the gun during the firehouse gag, it didn’t even occur to me that his absence was out of the ordinary. But by that evening I began hearing comments from some performers. A few of the workers started asking questions as well. And finally, during the second show as I was sitting in the Alley with the other clowns, the unspoken truth finally sank in: Buck had blown the show.
Immediately I felt the loss. Sure, we had lost workers during the year. Sure, I knew that in the circus people come and go all the time. But Buck seemed like such a fixture to me. He had been with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus off and on for close to forty years. He was one of the first people I met on setup day in DeLand, when he stepped into my camper, stretched his legs halfway across my floor, and told me the meaning of slukum juice—the syrupy precursor to Sno-Kones. And now he was gone. I wouldn’t have anyone to recommend whether to eat in the cookhouse (Buck’s favorite was the country-fried steak). I wouldn’t have anyone to suggest alternate routes to the next lot that were shorter than following the arrows. I wouldn’t have anyone who could direct me to the cheapest gasoline, the largest thrift store, or the best homemade pie in any city east of the Mississippi, and a few on the other side as well. I had no source for duct tape either.
And why? What drove Buck from the circus was not health, or money, or even a desire for a normal life. It wasn’t even one of the many mysteries he had been eluding all his life. Instead it was the times. Buck Nolan was the epitome of an old-fashioned clown—indeed an old-time circus man. He joined the show because it kept him on the run. He could live his life and pursue his predilections through the immunity of travel. Outside the tent he might engage in indiscretions, but inside the ring he was always professional, despite his sometimes gruff demeanor and often corny jokes. Unfortunately the distinction between public performance and private life seems less possible in America today. These days every public act is viewed as an expression of private demons.
Ultimately this is what chased Buck from the ring: a pernicious climate of mistrust, a kind of sexual McCarthyism that seems to be spreading across America. I had felt it from my earliest days on the show. In my first week as a clown a teenage boy came up to me during autograph party and asked me if I would sign his hand since he couldn’t afford a coloring book. I happily obliged. A mother who was waiting nearby snatched her daughter’s waiting hand and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “Never let a strange man do that to you.” The girl looked up at me and burst into tears. Now, for her, clown equals pervert. In Virginia several weeks later, as Big Pablo was trying to coax his four-year-old son inside the trailer, the boy started throwing a tantrum. When Pablo reached down and started tugging his arm, several high school students who were passing by started yelling, “Child abuse! Child abuse!” at the top of their lungs. Maybe it was just bad manners, maybe bad luck, but I feared it was a sign that we are starting to believe that behind every strange face—even the face of a clown—is a serial rapist waiting to pounce.
To make matters worse, no one outside of Clown Alley seemed to miss Buck at all.
“Good riddance,” one band member said.
“He was a horrible clown anyway,” said one of the performers.
“I saw him play that handshake game,” one of the butchers complained. “Usually the kid fell down when it was over.”
“So is that all there is?” I said to Jimmy, surely Buck’s closest friend on the show. “No one seems to care that he’s gone.”
“Are you kidding?” Jimmy asked. “This is the circus. I warned you, Bruce. The circus just eats you up. It sucks your blood and spits you out on the floor. If I dropped dead right now from a heart attack, I would probably lie here for several hours and then they would carry me out of the tent and red-light me from a truck tonight.”
“Red-light?” I repeated.
“Throw me from a moving vehicle. That’s what they do to people they don’t want. You’ve got to realize that. Even if we die they don’t stop for a minute. The truth is, they don’t really care.”
The next day few people talked about Buck. Some of the clowns speculated he might jump to another show. One person suggested he might just go home. Before the first show Arpeggio found one of Buck’s old size-sixteen vermilion shoes and hung it from the center pole in Clown Alley. After the firehouse gag he found a bunch of dead daisies and stuck them in the heel. Before autograph party he sketched a sign on the back of a magazine that said: WE WANT BUCK BACK.
The next day the entire effigy was gone. The World’s Tallest Clown was not
mentioned again.
A week later it happened again.
“You see, I told you the circus was killing its stars.” Little Pablo was sitting on a beach chair in front of his trailer late on Friday afternoon. His dog, Jordan (named after Michael), was scratching and digging in the sandy grass behind the flea market in Commack, Long Island.
“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.
This is the genius of clowns, and for some reason only children fully understand it. An adult looks at a clown and sees a person in makeup. A child looks at a clown and sees something else entirely—a caricature, a cartoon, an invincible creation doing what that child always wanted to do: being silly and not being reprimanded, being reckless and not being injured, being naughty and not being punished. Not surprisingly, the child is right. The makeup, so central to the adults, is not an end unto itself; it’s a means of escape. It’s a two-way mirror: allowing you to see what’s deep inside of me, and allowing me to reflect what’s deep inside of you. I was not myself in the ring. I was you. I was everybody. I was a clown.
“Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, the world-famous fire-eater—Captain Blaaaze…”
At the moment, however, I am king of the roost, a sideshow barker with a straw hat and a sassy atti
tude. As I start my pitch, Henry comes stumbling into the center ring, flinging behind him a Superman-like cape and waving in front of him a fiery torch. He staggers up to the elephant tub, and just as I’m about to brag about his “amazing feats of fire consumption…,” he points to his stomach, groans in pain, and collapses onto the ground.
“Uh-oh, boys and girls! Captain Blaze can’t work tonight. Heeee’s got a stomachache. What are we going to do!? Is there a doctor in the house…?!?”
The words are barely out of my mouth before a screech comes from the back of the seats, the band converts to an upbeat romp, and Marty comes speeding into the ring with flaming red hair, a long lab coat, and a four-foot stethoscope. With his manic pace and agitated action he looks like an absentminded physician—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He is followed closely by Arpeggio, wearing mud boots, a nurse’s cap, and a giant white dress that sticks out two feet from his bust and butt with oversized foam vital parts. The Playboy Bunny meets Florence Nightingale.
“Boys and girls, please welcome…Dr. I. Killum and Nurse Anna Septic…”
Stopping briefly to accept their accolades (Anna just can’t resist applause; at one point she actually shoves aside the doctor to blow a kiss to her fans), the two professionals from Clown Town Hospital lift the patient off the ground and carry him to a two-piece stomach pump that is waiting in ring one. After a giant suction cup is attached to the fire-eater’s stomach, the procedure is ready to continue.
“Boys and girls, we need your help…, help us count to three…!”
Standing at the front of the pump, a giant wooden box about the size of a washing machine, the nurse grabs the handle and pushes toward the ground.
“One.”
With each push on the bar she sticks out her butt and the patient’s limbs go flailing.