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As soon as the lights shine into the ring, I step out of the bright yellow cartoonlike house, stretch my back like an aching grandfather, and breathe an exaggerated puff of flames from the end of a two-foot cigar. Shocked at the inferno, I lurch back in surprise. Puzzled by the fire, I hurry back into the house. Thrilled at the confusion, the children shriek in delight as the bright orange roof above my head is engulfed in a cloud of smoke.
“Where there’s smoke,” Jimmy James intones, “there’s fire!”
From the back of the tent a siren wails. All eyes turn toward the screaming uproar as a bright red fire cart with sunburst wheels speeds onto the hippodrome track. Pulling the handle in front, riding the ladder in back, even ru
Though most of the performers on our show would rather burn to death than admit it, the clowns were probably, as a group, the hardest-working members of the show. A few of the other performers were in half a dozen or more acts. The animal people had round-the-clock responsibilities. But once the middle of every afternoon rolled around, the clowns were required to be in makeup, be in position, and be ready to go on at a moment’s notice in case of emergency in the ring. This meant they had little time off every day between 2 and 10 P.M., little time out of greasepaint every week for nine months, and little time to be anywhere during the entire year other than their private canvas dungeon known affectionately as Clown Alley.
Clown Alley is an anthropologist’s dream. Part tribal ring, part locker room, part fraternity, part day-care center, it was a tent the size of a generous closet that held nine steamer trunks, eight wobbly chairs, twenty-seven juggling clubs, seventeen pairs of clown shoes, hundreds of half-empty containers of makeup, and one recyclable piss jug—an empty baby-powder carton that was loudly and publicly filled every day with the exaggerated hand gestures and juvenile penile thrustings of nine grown-up teenagers turned childlike clowns. In the past, clowns were mostly drawn from the ranks of aging performers who could no longer do their acts or homosexual men who were ru
When I arrived on the show, the one unifying feature of all the clowns in the Alley was that they were young, ranging in age from nineteen to twenty-four. (Buck, although a clown, stayed mostly in his van and was not considered part of the Alley.) All had graduated from high school and most had wandered from one part-time job to another, from a few months in school to living at home, before finally ending up in Ringling Brothers Clown College. For them, clowning was a hobby, not an art. And when they didn’t receive an offer to join Ringling and came instead to Beatty-Cole, the circus was an adventure, not a career. Their stories, ranging from the bizarre to the macabre, would have made Margaret Mead ecstatic.
There was Joe, the oddest and fu
Not surprisingly, when I plopped down uninvited in the middle of this group I was the one who was considered odd. Not only had I not been to Clown College (Buck and Jerry hadn’t either), but I had been to regular college, and to graduate school as well. Also, I was a little older, I hung out with the performers (most of the clowns were kept away), and I didn’t pepper every other comment with “Fuck you,” “Suck me,” or “How about a dick in the ass?” As a result, most of the clowns wanted me out. To prove it, they went out of their way to make me feel like an outcast.
First it was my ideas. In the first days of the season we had a series of rehearsals to design the gags. In the begi
I slunk back to being silent.
Next it was my makeup. During intermission on opening day, while the clowns were in the center ring signing autographs, Jerry came over and tapped me on the shoulder. I excused myself from the child I was greeting and stepped to the edge of the ring. It must be important, I thought, or he wouldn’t be interrupting our time with the audience. “Don’t you know anything?” he said when we were just out of earshot. “Whiteface clowns are supposed to wear gloves. Also, your makeup is uneven on the back of your neck. You’re a disgrace to the Alley.”
The final insult came when their hazings entered the ring. As clowns we had various responsibilities in the show. We had to pull various carts in spec, do the firehouse gag in the first half, the stomach-pump gag in the second act, and appear in the finale along with the entire cast when Sean got fired out of the ca