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Once I had my parking space—my own roving plot of land, as it were—I set out to explore the neighborhood. Despite its outward chaotic appearance, there was nothing random about the arrangement. Every vehicle had a set place, a set function, even a set smell: diesel exhaust, bacon grease, elephant dung, popcorn butter. At the front of the lot were the ticket wagon and the concession stand. At the back were the animals—tigers, horses, and bears. The two elephant trucks usually parked farther away from the big top, near the closest thoroughfare for maximum publicity value. As for the human residents, performers lived behind one long side of the tent, workers behind the other. In addition to a bunk in the sleeper truck, each worker was entitled to take a cold shower in the back of No. 63, use the show’s bank of port-o-johns, known as “donickers” (believed to be from the requisite process of pulling down knickers in outhouses), and eat his meals in the cookhouse, a tented paradise of culinary dreams that served three meals a day of the soupiest, greasiest, rubberiest food I’ve ever had the pleasure to complain about.
The performers, meanwhile, lived in their own trailers, ranging from $80,000, thirty-five-foot-long Teton Homes with pop-out living rooms, washer-dryers, and ten-piece home entertainment centers to fifteen-year-old, one-room, beat-up Prowlers that housed three people, two cats, a dog, and a baby squirrel, as well as sullied piles of outgrown wardrobe from some out-of-date act. The owner of the circus, whichever one was traveling with the show at the time, parked at the front of the trailer line, closest to the ticket wagon. Sean, the Human Ca
In addition to these two hundred or so people, the show carried its own infrastructure, giving rise to its vivid nickname “The City That Moves by Night.” At the turn of the last century Kaiser Wilhelm sent efficiency experts from the German army to study the way American circuses moved across the land, and at this century’s end this circus, at least, could still teach a thing or two about efficiency to the Japanese. Besides the basics of room and board, the show had its own mechanics shop, a carpentry, a short-order grill, even a part-time school for the children. The two most coveted services were water and power. For water, the show had a water man with a thousand-gallon tank who drove around the lot five times a day, bathing the animals, filling the tanks of the trailers, and, for a price, even filling the portable swimming pools that some parents carried for their kids. As for electricity, the show carried two Caterpillar diesel generators that were turned on every morning at nine and turned off every evening at midnight. This meant that for hours every day, even nine of the hottest overnight hours in a New York City heat wave, nobody on the show had air conditioning, water pressure, television reception, or video games. Some people had their own personal generators, but these were so loud and u
It took me awhile to adjust to this new regimen. More than once I ran out of water in the middle of my shower or power halfway through a frozen pizza. I even posted a list in my RV reminding me of all the things I had to do before every trip: check the propane, turn off the pump, lower my ante
All of this novelty came vividly home to me on the morning after I arrived. I got up at five to watch the tent go up and decided to have cereal for breakfast. I took out my brand-new plastic bowl, opened my two brand-new boxes of cereal (Special K and Cranberry Crunch), used my brand-new plastic knife to slice up my still green banana, then opened my refrigerator to retrieve my brand-new half gallon of skim milk, which to my brand-new RV chagrin was frozen solid. I picked the bananas out of the cereal, opened my brand-new box of Saran Wrap, and returned my newly wrapped bowl of dry cereal humbly to the shelf. The tears of more than one clown, no doubt, were prompted by missing a meal.
“Well, well. What do we have here, a new clown in the neighborhood?”
When Buck Nolan stuck his face in my trailer on Monday afternoon, his head almost poked through the vent in the roof even though he was standing outside on the grass. After Hippo, Buck was the first person I met on the lot. He was also the tallest, the loneliest, and the most eccentric. “Do you mind if I come in?” he said. “I always like to check out the First of Mays. I remember when I was one myself. The year was 1959.”
To hear him tell it, Buck Nolan was always tall: a hillbilly childhood freak from Princeton, West Virginia, just waiting for the circus sideshow to run into him. At eleven, he was already six feet tall. At sixteen, he was approaching seven feet and was given the job of changing the letters on his hometown movie-house marquee. At eighteen, he was featured in Life magazine in a photo series called “The Giants of Schoolboy Basketball.” In the middle of the page, at seven feet tall, was Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, and on the end, at seven feet two, was Charles “Beanpole” Buxton, alias Buck Nolan. “Asked last week if he had ever hit his head on low doorways,” the magazine reported, Beanpole replied: “Heck, I did that four times already today.” After the article appeared, Buck turned down 155 offers to play college basketball. Still, he never forgot the photograph, and when Life magazine published its fiftieth-a
Partly because of his u
Nearly thirty-five years later Buck was still on that circus, though he had long since moved to clowning after the sideshow folded its tent. Though almost sixty, Buck still slept in a hollowed-out Ford van every night, still ate three meals a day in the cookhouse, and still walked out in particularly frightening white makeup twice a day and cracked wiseacre jokes as the “World’s Tallest Clown.” Even though diabetes and a bum back made him less than agile, Buck still played an important role among the nine men who comprised Clown Alley. He was twice as old as everyone else and twice as wily, and when the others started ganging up on me, Buck told me what to do. Of even more immediate importance, however, Buck told me in my first vulnerable days on the show how to watch my wallet.