Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus (20 page)

First, he started giving me little pieces of niggling advice. “This is the finale,” he would say. “I think you ought to look more spiffy.” Next he tried to change my makeup. “Your face is really boring,” he would say. “I think you should change it.” Finally, one Sunday evening in Exton, Pennsylvania, he went over the top. The weather had been gorgeous all weekend, but suddenly during our final show the sky darkened and a light rain started to fall. We had already dismantled the firehouse and only the fire cart remained to be loaded into the prop truck for the jump. The palette and brush that Marty had loaned me remained, as they always did, at the bottom of the cart. As the show ended Marty came into the Alley.

“Bruuuuce,” he said in his ingratiating whine. “Will you do me a faaavor?”

“Sure,” I said, “what is it?”

“Tomorrow, take the palette and brush out of the cart, wash them off, put them in the truck, and never use them again.”

Then he spun around and left.

For a moment I was stunned, then dumbfounded, and in the two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Jersey that followed, I slowly became annoyed. The next day, after putting away his prop and replacing it with one I built myself, I pulled up a chair beside him in the Alley when no one else was around. I understood that my presence in the Alley was somewhat unusual, I told him, but I wondered if he would treat me with respect nonetheless.

Marty was caught off guard by my directness. He said he had learned in the circus that you can’t ask people nicely to do things but must treat them like children. Then he apologized. Later that night he complimented me on my bow tie. The next day he asked for my help with his trunk. As with Sean and Kris several weeks before, the less I acted like some silent cartoon (or even a distant writer, for that matter), the more I was accepted into the circus.

In Willingboro, Sean asked me to go to the mall. He was looking for a new pair of high-top sneakers to replace the ones he wore in his act. The twice-daily impact of the cannon launching pad against his feet had completely wrecked the soles of his shoes. It had also all but eliminated his arches and almost ruptured his knees, thereby aggravating what he referred to as his rickets, the euphemism for his bowleggedness. When he was on CBS’s
Street Stories
, Sean had mentioned the problems he was having finding shoes with sufficient support and afterward had waited expectantly for several weeks for an endorsement contract from Nike. Unfortunately, it never came. Michael Jordan got millions for jumping fifteen feet from the foul line and dunking a ball in a net; the Human Cannonball can’t even get a free pair of shoes for getting shot one hùndred and fifty feet twice a day from a cannon and dunking himself in a net. Clearly the scales of justice don’t weigh all acts the same.

In the mall our subject wasn’t feet, but guts. By late May we had entered a several-week stretch of towns where we played only mall parking lots—York and Exton in Pennsylvania; Voorhees and Princeton in New Jersey; Fishkill and Middletown in New York; Danbury in Connecticut. The circus likes playing malls because they are central, easy to find, and mothers feel safer bringing their darlings to a circus in front of TGI Fridays than across the street from Al’s Hubcap and Fender at the fairgrounds three miles out of town. The malls like having the circus because it brings in customers, generates publicity, and enhances their reputation as the new town centers of suburban America. The performers like being at malls because the men can find bars to watch sporting events at night, the women (and men) can go shopping during the day, and the kids can escape their mothers’ trailer cooking and enjoy a Chick-Fil-A for lunch.

Sean liked malls because of the mirrors. Considering his penchant for fistfighting and mudslinging, Sean was remarkably vain—particularly about his hair. His blond locks were short in the front with Little League-type bangs and long in the back with rockabilly-like ducktails. In every place he spent more than a passing moment he liked to keep a brush—in his trailer, in my trailer, in the front seat of the cannon. Before his act he would usually brush his hair for ten or fifteen minutes in a combination of Herculean narcissism and Samson-like fortification. In Lynchburg, during one particularly marathon grooming session, I noticed with some alarm that four of the metal bristles of his white doggy-style brush were missing. “I bit them off,” he said from the top of the cannon. “The rubber was missing off the tips and the metal was hurting my head. When you brush your hair as much as I do you have to be careful.” In a stately gesture he took one final sweep of his bangs and tossed the brush down to the ground. As he did, Arpeggio appeared alongside the cannon and caught the brush in his hat. “Oh, Mr. Thomas,” he squealed. “Thank you so much. I’ll treasure it always.” “There are a few hairs left in it,” Sean kindly pointed out. “You can keep them if you want.”

Going to the mall with Sean, even a run-down one like Willingboro Plaza, was to be a bit player in this ongoing parody of self-aggrandizement. On the way to Pic-n-Pay we passed a mirror. “Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and wonder why God was so good to me,” he said. “And the other times?” I asked. “I
know
why.” To get around this seemingly impenetrable wall of self-confidence, I asked Sean during our walk through the mall to tell me how he met Elvin. He responded with surprising modesty.

Sean’s first brush with the cannon came in 1989, two years after Elvin’s accident, when Elvin first asked his unsuspecting pool boy if he would be interested in joining the circus. Sean said yes; his girlfriend, however, said no. The idea was quickly dropped. Two years later, with no replacement in hand, Elvin again approached Sean. Once again he said yes; more importantly his girlfriend was no longer around. Within a week he was practicing.

“I remember the first time I got inside the cannon,” Sean said, his voice unusually respectful. His posture was much less sure. “The net was up against the lip of the barrel. That was before we had the air bag. I was wearing sweats and Reebok hiking boots. I slid into the capsule and got situated—my legs on the platform, my butt on the seat, my arms crouched at my side. My whole body tensed up. I took the hit—the initial bang when the capsule slides up the track—and I almost passed out. By the time I knew what was happening I was already coming out of the barrel. My heart was beating. I was scared. I ducked my head like Elvin told me to do and the next thing I knew I had landed in the net. You’re supposed to land on your back. Only that time it didn’t work that way. I dragged my feet when I was leaving the cannon and my left foot caught the bottom of the barrel and my shoe was ripped off. I was lucky my foot wasn’t taken off as well.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No. I got up and Elvin said, ‘Are you all right?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I got my foot caught on the mouth of the cannon.’ ‘You’ve got to keep your legs together,’ he said. So I got in again. That time I was concentrating so hard on keeping my legs together that I spread my arms apart too soon. When I opened up I caught the last two fingers of my left hand on the edge of the barrel and split the webbing between my fingers. My wrist got hurt as well. Elvin gave me the rest of the day off. That’s when I got really frightened. On my way home an old lady pulled out into the road in front of me and I had to swerve my Jeep to avoid getting killed. By the time I arrived at my friend’s house I was shaking like a leaf. ‘Sean, where have you been?’ he said. ‘You’re covered in gunpowder.’ I looked down at my body. My black sweats and red T-shirt were coated in white with splotches of blood everywhere. It looked like I’d been shot. But it wasn’t the shot that freaked me out. It was the lady. She had almost killed me. That’s when I realized my life was about to change.”

For the next several months Sean drove out to Elvin’s house every afternoon at 4:30, took a couple of shots, and slowly learned his way around the cannon. Elvin guided him through the mechanical operations part by part, piece by piece. “It’s kind of Neanderthal,” Sean said, “but it’s brilliant.” Elvin also guided him through the mechanics of flight: keep your back stiff, your legs straight, your toes pointed. Shoot straight ahead, look where you’re going, reach for an imaginary track. Gradually they lifted the cannon higher, Sean flew further. Now his head was straight, his back was firm, but his legs were still lagging behind. “For most people who aren’t gymnasts it’s hard to control your legs,” he recalled. “When you watch somebody dive off a diving board, they can usually control their upper body—their arms and their head—but their legs are always sagging. They have them apart or their toes aren’t pointed. In the air you have to stay perfectly straight, then at the last second, in order to get over, you have to squeeze your butt and point your toes so you rotate over onto your back.”

Within several months opening day arrived. Sean’s parents came to DeLand for the show. His ex-girlfriend was there as well. Sean marched in the opening parade, then almost immediately came out for his act, which at the time followed the tigers. Elvin was frantic with nerves: Sean had never done a shot in the tent, only in the open air. Everyone else was nervous as well. Sean, however, was a beacon of calm. “Elvin said to me, ‘Are you sure you’re not going to freak out? Are you sure you’re not stiff?’ I said, ‘What’s there to be afraid of? Let’s just do the shot.’ So I did the shot. It was perfect, beautiful. Elvin was so excited. ‘I told you I could do it,’ I said to him. He just started to cry…”

Sean went silent for a moment. We had stopped for lunch at a Chinese takeout—chicken with peanuts, Oriental vegetables. He put down his fork. “I can’t say Elvin’s like a father to me because my dad’s an incredible father. Elvin’s different. My dad’s like my best friend, a real-guy kind of father. Elvin’s more like a
Leave It to Beaver
type of father. My dad was never really strict with me. Elvin’s very bossy. When we left DeLand last year and drove to Brunswick, Elvin asked me to call every day, but I never did. He gets mad, but I tell him I have it under control. He says, ‘That’s why I worry about you. You only call when there’s a problem, so when the phone rings and it’s you, I know that there’s a problem.’”

For Sean’s first several months on the show Elvin’s phone never rang. There were problems, but nothing Elvin could solve. For Sean, cocky about his body as well as his virility, the primary problem was dealing with his colleagues. “I wasn’t from the circus,” he said. “My family wasn’t from show business. They all knew that. I had to be accepted. That was hard, especially on this show where everybody has grown up together. They all said he’s not a performer or anything and now he’s automatically the star of the show. He’s always on TV, he’s got girls in his trailer every night, and he’s got a full page in the program, which, ooh-ooh, is a big deal to these people. To me I couldn’t give two shits, but to them…”

Everyone thought Sean was a snob because he did the cannon. To make matters worse, they thought he was English. “They just wouldn’t speak. I would say, ‘Hi,’ and they would just be cold. It’s that snobbery thing. You know how it is.”

“So how did it change?”

“I kicked a few butts. There were a few rumors around, and finally one day I got mad. If I’ve done something and you’ve seen me do it, tell the whole world, I don’t care. But if you don’t see me do something and you make it up, then I’m gonna get some revenge.”

The first rumor involved drugs. At the beginning of the year Sean made the bang that accompanied the cannon shot by pumping acetylene gas into a balloon. He would turn on a torch, snuff out the flame, then inflate the balloon with the gas. One day he snuffed out the flame incorrectly, and when he went to squeeze the gas the balloon exploded in his hands, shredding his shirt and burning half the skin on his stomach. Nellie Ivanov gave him some baking soda to put on the wound. That night he was sitting in his trailer when some of the workers came by. “They saw me with this pile of baking soda on my table and said, ‘Man, sell me some of that.’” The following day Kris came up to him and said, “Sean, you better watch what you do. Word travels fast around here.” “What are you talking about?” Sean said. “I heard you were selling cocaine to the workers.”

A week later the rumors had him in jail. In Utica, New York, Sean went to watch a Chicago Bulls game on television with Jerry, the clown. In front of the lot they asked a policeman for directions and he offered to drive them himself. “The next morning I got the manager knocking on my door,” he recalled. “Boom, boom, boom! ‘Sean, Sean, are you in there?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Really?!’ he said. ‘How did you get out of prison?’ As soon as I got out of my trailer everybody was going ‘Hey, jailbird. We heard you got arrested. Big cannon man had a little too much to drink.’” One of the young workers on the front door told everyone Sean had been arrested. “I wouldn’t have been mad,” Sean said. “But word goes back to Elvin. You get one of these shit-ass workers who goes to another show. Say these people want me to work there. ‘Oh, man,’ they say. ‘That guy’s a troublemaker. He’s a bum.’”

To prove he was not a bum Sean decided to beat the guy up. Unfortunately for Sean he never got the pleasure. The man, sensing danger, blew the show first. Sean responded by beating up the man’s friend who had earlier confessed to spreading the rumor. In the prison mentality of the circus, Sean was now considered a man.

“Suddenly people started talking to me. ‘So, how did you get into the business?’ they asked. ‘Tell us, how did you get hold of Elvin? Are you family with the Bales?’ First I couldn’t get a ‘Hi’ from them and now they’re asking me questions. It’s just like they’re doing with you now. ‘So, why did you join the circus? What do you think of life around here?’ As soon as that starts happening you know you’re one of them.”

By the time Sean had finished his story we had finished our lunch and decided to check out the one remaining possibility for shoes, Boscov’s department store. As we cut through Women’s Clothing on our way to Sporting Goods we overheard two women who worked at the store, which was located directly next to the lot. “They must be really weird…,” one of the women said. “You better believe it,” her friend added. “Just wait until they come in here and start washing their babies in the sink.” As soon as we heard this, Sean stopped in place and walked back in their direction.