Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (14 page)

“
On the Russian swings, the Rodrinovich Flyers, the Romanoff Aaaacrobats
…”

The combatants bow and gesture toward the swings—two enormous pivoting platforms that slice forebodingly through the air. Soon daring young men will fly into the sky from these three-hundred-pound planks, gravity’s foe. The whole scene seems thrilling, grandiose, even mythic, yet one detail in the picture still vexes the mind. Rodrinovich Flyers? Romanoff Acrobats? These costumes aren’t Tartar, they’re cancan at best. And these warriors aren’t Russians, they’re Mexicans for sure—just dressed in Slavic headbands.

“To tell you the truth, I think the name is stupid,” said Pablo Rodríguez, one of three people in the pseudonymous Rodrinovich Flyers with the same first and last names. There were his father, whom everyone called Papa Pablo; his younger brother, whom everyone called Little Pablo; and him, whom everyone called Big Pablo. Though not the oldest, Big Pablo was the largest of the siblings (175 pounds), his mouth was the loudest (not to mention the dirtiest), and his trailer was the longest (over thirty-five feet). When his father retired from performing several years earlier, the twenty-seven-year-old Pablo had seized control of the family in an unspoken, bloodless coup.

“Just because the apparatus is called a Russian swing doesn’t mean you have to be Russian to do it,” he scoffed. “They wanted us to dance Russian, to use Russian music. That’s where we drew the line. Let’s face it, you can’t turn a Mexican into a Russian. Do they think people are that stupid…?”

The answer to that query was probably yes, but sitting one afternoon with Pablo, his wife, and their four-year-old son, none of us wanted to affirm it. One hundred years (and fifty million minutes) after he probably didn’t say it, Barnum’s theory of the birth of suckers was alive and well.

“Actually, I’ve grown sort of fond of it,” said Pablo’s wife, Mary Chris. Originally from a Spanish circus family, Mary Chris had married into the Rodríguez troupe a little over eight years ago. At the time of their engagement, she owned sixty bottles of fingernail polish, she told me; now married, she was down to five. “Johnny Pugh said he wanted a Russian name, and we thought it wasn’t a big deal to argue about it. Some things you do for the sake of the circus, because as far as we’re concerned, right now, if it’s good for this circus it’s good for our family.”

In truth, if it was part of this circus it was probably part of their family. The presence of the Rodríguezes in ring one and their cousins the Estradas (a.k.a. Romanoffs) in ring three was just a hint of the blood connections that flowed throughout the tent. Indeed, one of the most surprising things about the show was this exhaustive, truly labyrinthine family network that links nearly everyone in the circus business to everyone else. On our lot, for example, Big Pablo and Mary Chris often parked next to Michelle and Angel Quiros. Michelle hung by her hair in the first half of the show, while Angel walked the high wire in the second. In real life, Michelle’s grandmother and Pablo’s father were siblings, while in the business, Mary Chris’s mother and Michelle’s mother were working on the same show. Also, while Pablo’s second cousin Michelle was married to Angel, Angel’s sister Mary was married to Pablo’s half brother, Little Pablo, making Big Pablo and Angel half brothers-in-law, if there is such a creation. To make matters even more complicated, Little Pablo performed not only in the Russian swing act with his family but also in a cradle act with his wife, in the flying act with his brothers and sister-in-law, and in the wire act with his brother-in-law, his wife, and his brother-in-law’s wife, who, for the record, was also his cousin—that, of course, being Michelle.

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.