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Swings of Fate
Like lightning, a spangled burst of bright pink tights ignites the blue-and-white-striped tent as two troupes of warriors, close to twenty in all, come blazing into rings one and three. All available light floods the sky. The brass ensemble erupts into a flare, a polka caliente. The ladies shake their hips and dance on the floor. The men slap their hands and pirouette in the air. An older man with graying mustache even turns a flip for show. Out of pure exhilaration the masses applaud as the great red-coated ringmaster himself steps forward and erupts with a noble call.
“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. “Joh
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 co
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 stu
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. Da
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 fu