Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus

by Bruce Feiler

  “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.’”

  We got up and left the bar. He didn’t want to leave a tip. I left one for both of us.

  “So why do you stay?” I said as we walked across the empty parking lot toward the tent. The day had been the hottest in a month. The night was still uncomfortably warm.

  “Well, to be honest, I think I’m running from something,” Darryl said. “Running from what, I don’t know. Ever since my grandmomma died about five years ago, my mind’s been fucked up. Then my little brother died and it got worse. He had AIDS.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He was a faggot,” he said sadly. “I spent the last two months with him and was there when he died. Ever since then the world hasn’t been the same. For a long time I had to get away. I went back to hustling. I’d go to a nice bar, like the one we were just in. I would meet some nice white man at the bar. We’d chat. I’d make him buy me a drink. I’d find out how much money he had. Then when we got outside in the parking lot I would jump him. ‘This is a jack,’ I would say. ‘Don’t make it a murder.’”

  I paused on the blacktop and looked at Darryl. His eyes were yellow and clouded with smoke. His arms were shaking at his side. He was remembering his childhood. He was recalling his brother. He was recreating his hustle. For a moment neither of us moved. My mind froze still in the face of a story I was helping bring back to life. My eyes darted nervously from his face to the nearby tent and back to his hands. I couldn’t help remembering that it was only a year earlier that Darryl had witnessed a murder during setup. Two men from props were setting the high wire when one of the men pulled a knife from his blue jeans and stabbed his colleague to death in the chest. Outraged, the rest of the crew, including Darryl, surged around the attacker and started beating him in frustration, eventually stabbing him in the eye with the weapon he had used to kill his colleague. The killer was left behind in jail. Word never leaked off the lot. The circle closed around itself.

  Now face-to-face in the parking lot, Darryl and I eyed each other, each of us haunted by different fears. Across the street a young woman appeared with a dog. Darryl whistled in her direction. “Hey, babe, come on over here!” he cried. The woman ignored him. “I got a knife,” he called to her. “Okay,” I started to say. “Enough.” But I didn’t have to say it at all. He knew. Darryl put his hands over his eyes and wobbled on the pavement. For a second I thought he was going to fall over—or cry. He put his arm on my shoulder. I was no longer afraid.

  “I’m getting too old for this,” he said. “I’ve got to get a new life.”

  We started toward the tent. For a long time Darryl didn’t say anything. Finally I broke the silence.

  “You’ve been telling me for a long time you wanted me to remember you when I left,” I said. “What do you want me to remember?”

  “I want you to say that when you were in the circus you met this man named Darryl. He was a black man. And he was always jovial. No matter if you was in a bad mood, or if the world was on your shoulders, Darryl made you smile. When I sold magazines I used to love the grumps. They were the easiest people to sell because they were the easiest to cheer up. I like to make people smile. That’s my thing. That’s why I say to you every time I see you, ‘Just let me hold something, even if it’s just your hand!’”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What does that mean anyway?”

  “It doesn’t mean nothing. It just means we’re in this together, brother. It means we’re partners. It means that the circus is sometimes hell and the only way to survive is to enjoy it.”

  He stuck out his hand about chest high. I stuck out mine in the same position, re-creating the mock dance we both had mastered in the course of the year. And in that moment before our palms locked, we both laughed out loud, and smiled.

  Two days later Darryl’s fifth grandchild was born.

  The day after that he left the show and returned at last to his family.

  Love on the Wire

  The penultimate act is the closest to heaven. Its actors are the nearest to God.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, directing your attention to ring one…Circus producers John W. Pugh, E. Douglas Holwadel proudly present…three-time Golden Clown winner at the Circus Festival of Monte Carlo…the amazing…the daring…Angel Quiros!”

  Dressed like a matador in purple knickers and saffron shirt, Angel Quiros springs out of his clogs at the edge of ring one and lands soft-footed on a diagonal wire that stretches halfway across the tent and halfway up to the summit. The crowd grows hushed. They barely applaud. Their fingers, by now, are totally coated in popcorn butter and Cracker Jack caramel. Their lips are equally adhesive with Coca-Cola syrup and cotton-candy residue. At this stage the elephants have come and gone. The Kristo family has followed in style with an exotic hand-balancing act. The smoke from that act still lingers in the sky as Angel slowly tiptoes through the fog toward his own private skyscraping tower.

  “For me, walking up is simple,” Angel said when I asked him why he ascended the wire instead of one of the ladders on the supporting towers. “Frankly it’s the easiest way to the top. It’s certainly easier than climbing the ladder. That would surely kill me.”

  Ta-dum! Arriving at the platform on top of the tower, Angel lifts his arms like a triumphant bullfighter and—along with his wife, brother-in-law, and sister—waves his hands in introductory salute.

  “From Spain…,” Jimmy James exclaims, “the Quiros Troupe!”

  With a spicy intro from the band and a cheery clapping of his hands, Angel pivots on the platform and, at last, confronts the wire. Made of tightly braided steel, it’s thirty feet above the ground, thirty-five feet from end to end, and three-quarters of an inch around. In real life this type of wire is used to suspend elevators. In the circus it’s used to dance.

  “I remember the first time I ever stepped on a high wire,” Angel said. His voice was still coated in Castilian elegance. His mannerisms were almost princely. “I was fourteen years old. We had been doing a low-wire act at my family’s circus in Madrid, and my father asked us if we wanted to do the high wire. ‘It’s much higher,’ he said, ‘and more dangerous. You might be scared.’ We decided to try it. It’s more prestigious, and more—how do you say?—commercial. The first time I went up there, though, I was like ‘Oooh, what am I doing here? Why am I doing this?’ But we took our time. Sometimes we just went up, stayed an hour or so, and did nothing. Then we started to walk. Finally we began to run.”

  Running, dancing, even dueling on the wire quickly became the trademark of the Quiros family. While traditional wirewalkers emphasized grace and beauty—elegant tricks performed with balancing poles to the tune of flowing waltzes—the Quiros Troupe emphasized speed and bravado, or what they called alegría—dashing empty-handed across the wire, climbing on one another’s backs, and generally behaving like raucous adolescents to the equally raucous, fast-paced rhythms of Spanish flamenco music. Angel’s opening tricks reflect this bravura. First he darts back and forth on the wire with amazing velocity. Next he stops in the center of the span, catches a gold rope from his wife on the platform, and before anyone in the audience has a chance to realize what he’s going to do, jumps rope with the speed of a championship boxer and the grace of a ballet star. Finally, after his sister rides a bicycle across the wire, Angel scampers to the middle of the wire with a shiny saber, thrusts it menacingly into the air, and then, holding the handle in his right hand and the tip in his left, jumps over the blade with a dramatic vertical leap. As always, he carries tension in his eyes, but the pressure is on his feet.
/>
  “My feet are my life,” he said matter-of-factly. “When you walk on the wire, you can put your feet down straight on the cable, but when you run, the wire has to stretch diagonally from the inside ball of your foot to the outside of your heel. Plus, your toes always have to be pointing toward the ground. It’s almost like you’re a monkey: you have to grab the wire.”

  Beginning with his feet, which he protects in white athletic socks and black ballet slippers, Angel carefully builds his act. His legs are noticeably sturdy and strong (“just like a soccer player,” he boasts), while his upper body is slender and trim (“all mush,” his wife complains). “I’m not the kind of person who uses force,” he said. “With me it’s all timing. If you use your feet well but not your arms, you fall. If you use your arms right but not your feet, you slip.” The balance is in the eyes. “When I run I look at the middle of the wire, never at my feet. If I look at my feet I’ll never see what’s coming. It’s like when you’re driving: you don’t look at your hands. You always look straight ahead. Your body will follow your eyes.”

  Following in his family’s tradition, Angel is fearless on the wire. He’s bouncy, cheery, almost childlike in glee. As a child, though, Angel had little glee.

  “I never had a chance to be a kid,” he said. “My father was a very tough man. We had to get up at eight o’clock every morning and practice, practice, practice until two. Then we would eat, sleep, and come back again for another two hours of practice. At night we did two shows.”

  “And how long did that last?”

  “Every day for five years. We could never go to the swimming pool or play soccer like other children. He wouldn’t even let us go to the beach because we would need a nap when we got home. He didn’t want us to be tired, because then we couldn’t practice with the same strength.”

  “Why do you think he did it?” I asked.

  “Because he didn’t want us to be scared.”

  “Can you train someone not to be scared?”

  “Sure. If the person is young enough you can slap him or scream at him and he’ll do whatever you tell him. But if the person is older, like twenty or twenty-one, it won’t matter. When you’re young you do it because you have to, because you’re more scared about what will happen to you if you disobey. That’s why you do what he says, because you’re frightened. Then you go ahead and do it—you cross the wire—and you think: Oh, I see. It’s not that bad.”

  “And you never rebelled?”

  “I never even cried. Once we decided we wanted to do it, we never changed our minds.”

  Mindful and even a bit headstrong, Angel and his brothers quickly rose to the pinnacle of their profession. Their act was like no other in the circus. They were invited to perform all over the globe—in Australia, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, and ultimately the United States. They were, in many ways, on top of the world. Then came the unexpected collapse.

  “It happened almost overnight,” Angel said. “One day we were a family. The next day we were hardly speaking.”

  Sitting in his trailer surrounded by mirrors, Angel was much more somber at home than he was on the wire. His face was dark with a ten o’clock shadow (a circus day ends well after dark). His eyes were weary with the weight of a season that seemed as if it would never end. It was October by now. We were in northern Alabama. To lighten an otherwise unending autumn, the Quiroses had recently invited a Pentecostal priest from Denver to travel with them for several days and lead their rapidly expanding spiritual community in prayer. In addition to Sean, Jenny, Mari, and Little Pablo, several other people had converted to the Pentecostal movement, including another one of the Rodríguezes, one of the Estradas, and even the beloved pooper scooper from the elephant department, whom everyone called Pizza Man. And one of the Bale sisters, Bonnie, was considering converting and had begun attending the regular Bible study sessions in Michelle and Angel’s trailer.

  Predictably, this type of mass conversion in such a small community triggered a certain amount of animosity. First there were problems with other families. When one teenage boy started attending the Quiroses’ meetings, his parents lashed out at the group, accusing it of splintering the circus community and brainwashing gullible victims. Next there were problems with different sects. A rival Bible study group was so alarmed at the spread of the Pentecostal movement that its members started an active recruitment campaign of their own, including baptizing people in New York Harbor. Finally there were problems with the neighbors. People up and down the trailer line complained that they were being harassed by proselytizers during the day, then kept awake at night by chanting, clapping, and the unmistakable sound of worshippers speaking in tongues. “I heard that one of them speaks in Chinese,” one neighbor said. “I hear they sacrifice chickens,” added another.

  None of this controversy came as much of a surprise to Michelle and Angel. “It warns us in the Bible,” Michelle observed. “It says others are going to hate you because of your love for Jesus. It’s part of the territory. That’s what God wants.” Still, there was another reason the two of them could tolerate the strife. To them it was nothing compared with the situation two years previously when they first declared their love for each other. Then the situation was much closer to home, as their families embarked on a yearlong battle to try to separate them. Only during the final week of our season did they feel comfortable enough—with the situation and with me—to tell me what had happened.

  “After that night in Dallas when Angel came to my trailer and found God, I was very happy,” Michelle said. “In a way it was better that it happened after I became a Christian. That way we were able to find God together. Two days later I invited him to go to church with me. He said yes, but only if he could do it without anyone seeing him. No one did see him that day, but unfortunately his mother did see me on my way home from church and somehow figured out what had happened.”

  Within hours trouble erupted.

  “After the wire act I heard people screaming backstage,” Michelle said. “I thought: Oh, my God. What’s happening here? I heard his brother say to Angel, ‘You went with them! You went to church. You are a liar!’ His father started screaming as well. Then his brother got real upset and punched a hole in the wall. He broke his hand. From then on it only got worse. His family didn’t speak to me anymore. They wanted nothing to do with me at all—”

  “They thought she had brainwashed me,” Angel said. “I said to them, ‘You don’t understand. It’s not what you think.’ But they didn’t listen. I was upset. They were upset. It was a very difficult time.”

  “At that point I didn’t know what to do,” Michelle said. “We had decided to get married at the end of the year. I was going to go to Europe with his family. Then after this happened I got really worried. I thought: What if I go over there with him and nobody ever talks to me? What if they totally ignore me? Finally I decided I shouldn’t go at all. ‘If you want to get married,’ I told him, ‘we can go on our own.’”

  “But we already had a contract for Europe,” Angel said. “My mother talked to me about the situation. I told her that I would go with the family for a year but that after that I was going to get married and go out with Michelle.”

  For several months the plan seemed to be working. The Quiros Troupe was performing in Europe. Michelle’s family was working in the States. Michelle and Angel were speaking by phone. Then Angel invited her to come visit the following April. That’s when his parents again intervened.

  “They told me she couldn’t come,” Angel said. “They tried to persuade me to forget about her. I told them, ‘If you won’t let her visit me you’re even less likely to let us get married. If she doesn’t come, then I have to leave. The day you least expect it, I’ll be gone.’” He asked his mother to give him his passport. She told him she had already hidden it.

  “At that point everything was bad,” Angel said. “I felt angry, like someone had betrayed me. So I told Michelle, ‘Buy me a ticket. I don’t want to stay he
re anymore.’ I went to the Spanish Consulate in Frankfurt, and they told me I needed two forms of identification to get a new passport—my birth certificate and my driver’s license. I had only my driver’s license. My mother had hidden my birth certificate as well.”

  At that point Angel remembered he had a friend in the consulate in Washington, D.C. Angel called Michelle. Michelle called Washington. Washington called Frankfurt. Angel received his new passport the day before his flight. The next day he left before dawn.

  “I didn’t have much luggage,” he said, “only a bag with a pair of tennis shoes and a T-shirt. I left everything else behind. I didn’t even leave a note. I’ll tell you, you think everything at a time like that. Why am I doing this? Why am I hurting my parents? But I told Michelle, ‘Something inside me was saying, It’s okay what you’re doing. Don’t worry. Don’t stop…’”

  “He was scheduled to arrive in Sarasota about seven o’clock,” Michelle remembered. “I drove myself to the airport, hoping that he was on the plane. Then I waited. And why is it that when you’re waiting for somebody they’re always at the end of the plane? All of these people were coming out, and I was saying, ‘Come on…Come on…’ When he came and I saw him I couldn’t believe it. It was a miracle, really. I was in shock. I was too happy to cry.”

  “It felt very strange,” Angel agreed. “What I had gone through was very difficult, but when you love somebody you love somebody. Other things don’t matter. If it wasn’t for my family she would have come to Europe with me. But things didn’t work out like that, so I had to come to her. In my culture that’s a very bad thing to do, but I decided to do it anyway.”

  Two days later Angel Quiros and Michelle Ayala were married in the Sarasota United Pentecostal Church. That night they spent their honeymoon in a hotel by the beach. The following day they left for Reno, Nevada, where Michelle’s family was scheduled to perform on a show. Angel’s family was not informed.