The Big Top Wants You!

It's funny how you can go for weeks and never think about the circus, and then suddenly it's there in your mind, blotting out everything else, sometimes even for the better part of a day.

It's as if the circus not only is making those one-night stands through half the country but is traveling through your subconscious as well. They send me Hoxie's route cards still; every once in a while I look at the current one to see where he is today, and then I'm off for a while in my mind, seeing the baby elephants and Junior and his cats and the big top and all the people and wishing them well. And, always, wishing I were there.

It happened one day last May when I was on the shuttle from La Guardia to Washington. I was dressed properly for dealing with people out here in the real world: the neat turtleneck and nice jacket, the briefcase garbage you always take when you're "on business"---the airline schedules, the business cards, the Flairs and Bics, the paper-back, the tape recorder and extra tobacco and extra batteries and all that junk. I looked out the window and I saw a piece of suburbia below. It was someplace in Maryland, more than likely; all the tiny split-levels were strung along the curving streets, each with its strip of driveway and its carport and its gray roof that glinted, and a small back yard with a tree and a kid's swing or a small pool; and in the middle of the suburb, there was the one-story modern brick school, with lots of grass and a big athletic field.

And I wondered where Hoxie Tucker and his circus would be today. The route card was in my briefcase: Enon. I had been in Enon, Ohio, with Hoxie a year before, visiting. Visiting was all I had ever done, except for a few turns at selling tickets for the sideshow. My excuse for being there at all was that I was a magazine writer. But long after the time had passed when the story could have been written, I kept going back, setting up my work so it coincided with the route card.

Enon had been straight suburbia, much like the place the plane had just passed. The tent had been set up in a huge, lovely field, but Hoxie had been worried about rain and drainage, and when the show was over that night he had ordered the canvasmen to load everything up as usual but then to move the trucks to a hard road next to the field. Sure enough, it did rain that night and the field became a slough. Hoxie had a great respect for weather.

The plane was flying over a writhing pit of interstates. I thought, looking out the window, of all the miles of interstate the circus would have to travel before the first cool days of fall would send it back to Florida. And then I thought of the thunderstorms and tornadoes, and through it all, the beautiful cats in their cramped trailer cages, waiting for their 11 minutes in the arena with Junior; and, too, through it all, the elephant shit, huge mounds of it; the best rose grower in the world; the proclamation, in a thousand schoolyards and suburban shopping centers, that the circus had been there.

And I thought of the people, and of the triumphs a few of them would have and of the tragedies some of them would have: of the people who started out with the show and who had already left it, for no one knows where; of the people who were joining it that day in Enon; and those who had joined in places like Ocala and Andalusia and Claxton and Blacksburg, some of whom were already gone, in the middle of the day or the middle of the night or the middle of the show; gone and missed, at most, for 15 minutes by maybe two other people in the entire world.

They were like a huge collection of hitchhikers, attached temporarily to a huge, ragged, fantastically exciting piece of canvas that elephants helped put up in a different town each day and that sheltered them from the rest of the world for a few hours before it was time to ask the elephants to tear it down again.

Not just the canvasmen. Everybody was a hitchhiker on that tent; even Hoxie was, and he owned it. And I was, too. Sometimes, almost invariably late at night when I was staying with the show, and usually when I was watching the big top come down, I would permit myself a flash of half-baked insight (brief and intense and, if you aren't careful, quickly forgotten, as in those first few times you tried pot) and I would understand something of what it was all about: that the circus was really a symbol of the world, and that we were all hitchhikers on that, too.

I seriously wondered what I was doing, flying the shuttle to Washington "on business," dressed decently and purporting to be making a living, when it could be argued very convincingly (by me, at least) that it would have been a lot more important for me to be in Enon that day, slogging around in old clothes in fresh elephant shit and trying again to figure out what it was about the circus. (Hoping that I never would, of course, because the search for the circus is the best part.)

It all had its beginnings for me, I think, back in Raleigh, North Carolina, when I was a child. At least, when I pronounce the word circus to myself, this is the picture that comes, like an old but perfectly clear photograph from 30 years ago. My father had taken me to the state fairgrounds on a Saturday morning to see the Ringling Brothers set up. They had come in the night on what seemed like miles of flatcars and sleepers, and at dawn they put up the big top.

From a parked car, mostly, we watched them raise the canvas, and then we went back home and we returned that afternoon to see the show. We got there early and walked around the big top, and there, in back, were the striped tents and awnings and pots boiling with stew, and the people who made up the show. They paid no attention to us nor to the other citizens of Raleigh who had come to stare.

I don't remember hearing any English being spoken. They were swarthy people, their skin tanned like leather, and I thought of them as gypsies. At that time, as now, Italians were in short supply in North Carolina. My father said something about them. I don't remember what it was, but I know that it was uncomplimentary. He did not trust or like people who lived in tents and spoke no English.

There were saddleless horses tethered next to the family tents, and above everything there was the mammoth big top, the reason for the whole thing, its size scary. Its ribs were as delicate and as beautiful as one of my paper-covered model airplanes; its canvas was a translucent white (for this was early in the season and the tent was still clean). At a place where the side wall was open we looked inside. It was virtually empty, but the emptiness made the tent seem even more powerful.

It said that soon this would be a different place, a place altogether unlike any other you had ever been. It said that things would happen here that would transcend your fantasies. The whole scene was enough to hold an entire category in a child's memory, if not forever, then at least a lot longer than most things. Interestingly enough, I remember hardly anything of the performances.

• • •

Miami in March: At the airport, most of the people from my flight headed toward the Beach. I got a car and went in the other direction, out West Flagler toward the Everglades.

It was after midnight when I got there. The winter quarters were silent. A dog ran over to smell my shoes, then trotted back to his blanket under a house trailer. The practice tent, a piece of torn brown canvas, was up, but it had no side walls and you could see that there was nothing inside, just a makeshift ring for the horses and elephants.

The house trailers and long tractor-trailer trucks---purple, most of them, with Hoxie Bros. Circus lettered on the sides---were quiet and dark. A man worked by one bare bulb in the cook tent, peeling or slicing something, and a couple of men sat beneath the fly outside it, talking and smoking and falling silent when I approached. Beyond them, in a field padded with hay, the elephants---five giant ones and three babies, the little ones no more than four feet tall---stood in their shackles, swaying quietly and gently and patiently. All of a sudden I felt like a complete damn fool. Not only was it unlikely that I would get inside this thing, there was also a serious question of whether I should get inside it. You don't return to your memories unless you want to be disappointed. But I stayed.

By daylight, winter quarters looked a little tamer, more like what circus winter quarters really are, which is where they store for the winter everything of the circus except the performers: the rolling stock and the livestock, the canvas and the bleachers, the saddles and the spangles. It is the place where you make the circus ready for the next season.

There are even a few people stored at winter quarters. Each year a handful of the men who do the hard work of the circus, the canvasmen, stay for the winter. (They are also called workingmen, and they used to be called roustabouts.) Their winter wages are a place to sleep, three meals a day, a few dollars a week and a sack of Bugler tobacco when they need it.

In the winter the canvasmen work slowly, in the manner of privates on K.P., for they know that when the present job is done there will just be another one. There are no real deadlines in sight until the show goes on the road, and a sack of Bugler is not sufficient inducement for a man to worry about some boss's idea of what a deadline should be. A boss, of course, will see it differently. He sees the work that has to be done and knows that it cannot be done at the current rate, so he strides over to a canvasman who is slowly painting a wheelbarrow purple and snatches the brush from his hand and does it himself, faster.

Or a boss may do it himself from the beginning, with one eye on the canvasmen, who sometimes will stroll away, on the pretext of going to urinate, away through the tall grass of the Everglades, to hitch a ride or walk a couple of miles to the crossroads of Sweetwater, which has a police station, a gas station, a grocery store and two bars that do not care how you are dressed.

I went to Sweetwater that afternoon to make a phone call and to buy a few things, and I stopped at one of the bars for a beer. Inside was a young man I had seen at the lot. He said his name was Rick; he was a clown.

We talked awhile before he warned me. "Circus people are strange people," he said. "We don't go much for outsiders. We have ways of putting up walls against people like you." He said I'd get a story, but it wouldn't be the real story. He hinted that he was in possession of the real story. But he wasn't sharing it.

I gave him a ride back to the lot, and along the way he explained that in addition to being a clown, he was doing some work in the show's business office; he was turning out the press releases, and before long, he thought, he'd be someone to be reckoned with. As we were getting out of the car, he suggested again that I might as well give up on my story. We parted on friendly terms.

At winter quarters there was really not much activity, considering the fact that the show was going to move to Palm Springs North for rehearsal and the opening in three days. Canvasmen were feeding the animals; a young man back a week from Nam, with hair the color and texture of corn silk, fooled with a truck engine; a couple of men were slopping purple paint onto elephant tubs and onto the ground. The cook tent seemed to be the busiest place. It wasn't hard to spot Hoxie Tucker; he was the man who looked like the owner.

He wore a white short-sleeved shirt, tan pants, boots and a number-seven John B. Stetson hat, the Open Road model, tan like his pants, with the front brim turned down. I found out later that this meant he was displeased with the way things were going. Hoxie was working very hard that day and I tried not to bother him. I spent maybe two minutes with him. I delivered a little speech I had prepared after receiving my warning from Rick, in which I said I was trying not to write the conventional circus story but that I understood that circuses were skeptical of outsiders, and that I didn't want to get in the way. I left the door open for a suggestion by Hoxie, if he wanted to make it, that I forget the whole thing.

Hoxie's reply was brief and it gave me no hint of his real feelings, if he had any: "Good buddy, you're more'n welcome to stay just as long as you want to." Then he apologized for being in a hurry. He snapped down his hat brim, though it already was lowered and walked away.

A huge black man, sweating copiously (continued on page 188)Big Top(continued from page 156) in a white T-shirt and denim pants stiff with mud, welded the bars on a trailer full of lions and a tiger. Every once in a while one of the cats would edge over toward him and lift a paw. The black man would swat it and the lion would back away, prince bogino and his performing lions and tigers, said the sign. The black man was Prince Bogino himself. He was the only known black lion tamer in the United States.

Twenty-some years before, when he was 12, the Prince had left home in Los Angeles and had gone to work for Clyde Beatty. Beatty had asked him his name. It was Manuel Ruffin. Beatty had said he probably would forget a name like that, so he named the boy Junior. Junior learned the act from Beatty, and now Beatty was dead and Junior was a full-grown 245-pound lion tamer on whom the name Junior did not stick very well, but everybody who knew him called him that.

Kenny was a man with a glass eye and a pipe always in his mouth, and he wore the uniform of an engineer: chino pants, half Wellingtons, khaki shirt with epaulets. He had worked for Hoxie since 1962. It was his job to lay out the lot each day. The circus would perform in one town, then tear down and load everything onto the 15 purple trucks and leave it all there overnight, and at dawn they would move on to the next town, usually no more than 35 miles away, and Kenny would be there first to size up the lot and lay it out. He had a tape, but he did not use it, he said; ordinarily he needed only his one good eye to fix locations for the big top, the marquee canvas and the sideshow tent, which housed the animals.

Kenny said he sometimes had to yell for "a tub of Vaseline, a shoehorn and a lot stretcher," but he always got the show in, despite the fact that large vacant lots are hard to find now. He had been a C. P. A. in Indiana, but he had gotten caught up in circuses a long time ago. He was a worrier like Hoxie, worrying not only about shrinking lots but also about the canvasmen who had to be there to put up the big top and take it down every day.

Canvasmen are wanderers, and the circus accommodates them by not asking too many questions. The circus is not surprised when they leave abruptly, and they are not surprised when they are fired just as abruptly. "They get enough money to get them a bottle of wine and they just start walking," said Kenny. "If we have the same crew on Decoration Day, it'll be a miracle."

Kenny said he was not unsympathetic to the canvasmen who walked. "You just want to travel," he said. "You just want to be around the circus. If I'm not satisfied with my work, I'm not going to be here. I'll go somewhere else."

John Hall was the general manager, a bright man in his mid-30s who wore clean white shirts and neatly pressed dark pants. He drove a red Cadillac that pulled a house trailer neatly filled with books and framed circus posters. When John was 15, Hoxie Tucker had taken his circus, a two-ringer with no elephants then, to the school grounds at Halifax, Virginia. John had seen the show and more or less vowed that he would have his own circus someday.

As general manager, John was the circus person who dealt with the "committees"---the organizations that sponsored the show in the towns along its route---and with the inevitable local feature writers and TV crews. He was nice to those people; he really appeared to like them. His attitude seemed to be that he recognized that they dug the circus, and that was reason enough to be friendly with them.

He did not place any walls between himself or the circus and outsiders. Partly for that reason, and partly because of his neat appearance and his trailer full of books, a lot of the other show people couldn't figure John out and stayed out of his way. They dismissed him as a circus fan who happened to be employed by the show. "Circus fan," when a circus person says it, can be a compliment or a put-down, or both, but more often it is a term that indicates his tolerance of a sort of person who adores him and what he does for a living but who frequently gets in the way. It is not nearly as bad as calling someone a "towner."

And there was Joyce. Perhaps none of us, even those who worked all season with her, would completely understand Joyce Fox. It was not that she was mysterious. She was just quiet, perhaps even shy. She was 22 that summer, a schoolteacher by trade; formerly Miss Fox of eighth-grade math in Gary. Indiana, now entering her second season as a show person: a worker at fancy horseback riding, training baby elephants and learning Spanish web; and still schoolteacher, to some extent. She taught Darlene Williams, the young daughter of the elephant trainers, when Darlene wasn't busy breaking her elephant act.

Joyce was one of the first performers to arrive at winter quarters. Some of the show people get indoor work during the winter; some own land in Florida and park their trailers there and go on welfare and hunt and fish. Joyce had gone home to Gary to visit her father after the last season, and she had come back early. She had backed her home into a corner of the lot. It was a forlorn-looking 1963 Microbus, with battered red paint and a hoxie brothers circus sign on the front and a plastic pan of water outside the door for her tired old dog. She smiled shyly and tried to be polite when I talked to her, but she did not want to answer any real questions. But in the process of not saying very much that first day, she said the words that explained, more than any others I had heard, what it was about the circus.

It was a matter of freedom, she said, and of lack of antagonism. (There was nothing new here. Circus people know that very few people consider themselves free, so when they are asked to talk about themselves they always emphasize the freedom.) It was a society in which people were tolerant of others, she said. There was no gossiping, as in the teaching profession; no wondering out loud and at length about who was carrying on with whom and for what purpose. It was partly being outdoors, and it was partly the unpredictability of the life, like the weather. You felt as if you belonged; you felt as if you had some sense of identity.

And then she said it: "In the circus you can be whatever you want to be."

It was the last day of winter quarters. It was hard to believe that the show could move tomorrow. There was nothing that could be called busyness, much less frantic activity. At noon it was very hot, and people disappeared---into their trailers, those who had them; the rest down the road to Sweetwater---and I got a horse and rode for an hour in the pasture beside the lot. The pasture ran beneath an approach to Miami Airport, and every few minutes a jet made its descent down the invisible grade, so close that I could see the pale New York faces in the window seats.

I had been in Miami only a couple of days, and yet I felt that the people on the planes were outsiders. Towners on their way to Miami Beach. I tried to gouge the horse into a trot, but she immediately felt back into an amble. She had done enough riding to know when there was a towner on her back.

• • •

Palm Springs North: We moved out at 5:30 a.m., because Hoxie wanted to beat the rush-hour traffic on the belt line around Miami. It was a slow, pink, beautiful sunrise, with the smell of gasoline in the air and people talking softly, respectful of the hour. And much coughing around the cook tent, and hacking and spitting. The canvasmen got fried-egg sandwiches and coffee and the convoy started moving, widely spaced and informal. One truck balked at the very beginning and had to be towed.

An hour later the big top was on its way up in a grassy plot across the street from a small shopping center in Palm Springs North, a housing development in a suburb of Miami. High school kids waiting for the early school bus gawked at the show as it rolled in. Then the bus came and the kids left, but one of them, a straw-blond youth, stayed behind to help put up the tent.

Today was the day of the dress rehearsal, the day the rest of the performers would come in. Hoxie turned up with a carload of new canvasmen and handed them over to Kenny. Two of them were brothers, long-armed and rawboned and widow's-peaked, slow-moving but strong---and determined-looking. They were named Greene with an e, old Scotch-Irish from the North Carolina foothills. They were carpenters, they said, and right now they were following the weather. About the time the show got back to their neighborhood, they would probably leave, because it would be the right time for outdoor work up there.

They said this in the cook tent. Some of the workingmen at the tables were truly gorging themselves---they had their heads down two inches from their aluminum trays and they were shoveling the food into their mouths with serving spoons. You had the idea that Hoxie must have gone after the hungriest-looking men he could find.

But the brothers were restraining themselves, eating slowly and wiping their faces with paper napkins. Still, they were able to put away a lot of noodles, turkey hash, corn, Jell-O, bread, peanut butter, jelly and water.

"See, me and my brother, we sort of follow the construction business, putting up condominiums and everything. Do a little electrical work." That was the more talkative brother. I asked him how they got involved with a circus.

"Well, we was walking down this street in Miami," he began. And then he hesitated and glanced at his brother, who was grinning, and then he chewed on some bread, and then he started smiling. "To tell you the truth, we had gone ourselves on a drunk. I mean a real flat-out drunk, and we'd decided to go over to the Brothers---that's a place there in Miami where you can get a meal, you know---"

A mission?

"A mission. Damn good meal, too. And he, Mr. Tucker, he walked over, and we was standing in line, and he said did we want to go to work, and we said yes. You know, just for the fun of it."

The quiet brother said something inaudible and the talkative one amended his last statement. "Well, not all for the fun of it. Our tools, you might say, they was in hock."

Nearby, at a table by himself, a man gobbled food closer to his tray than anyone else, hardly using even a spoon, (continued on page 192)Big Top(continued from page 189) lifting his eyes every once in a while to see who was watching or approaching, like a dog busy with a bone and ready, even eager, to defend it.

The others had the sense to stay away from this man, who had joined up when the show was in winter quarters. Those who had talked to him quoted him as saying he had lost his mind and he had come to the circus to find it again. He spoke more or less in tongues, but with the deep, forceful voice associated with a municipal judge or an evangelist who suffers from a drinking problem. He walked, too, bent over, with the shuffling gait of a man who had known better days, who had tangled with the Devil in a fight to the finish and who had lost.

In the Army, in prison, in the circus and in other places where men are confined together, there are some people whose names you will never know. They are the people who go best, and go only, by nicknames. This man had two: Shorty, for his stature, and Redjacket, for the lumberjack shirt he always wore. His big toes stuck out of his rotting low-quartered shoes (he wore no socks), and he often had been seen making his way through the tall grass in the direction of Sweetwater, though he rarely had any money. He proved to be incompetent at everything he did, even shoveling elephant droppings into a wheelbarrow. But he was not fired.

The bosses and Redjacket's fellow workingmen tolerated him, perhaps because they comprehended, somehow, the magnitude of his loss to the Devil. He was carried on the payroll the way a small-town grammar school carries a Mongoloid child through the grades; it was a question not so much of kindness as of awe, of fear, almost of superstition. Redjacket had been in winter quarters about two days when he had wandered over to watch Junior rehearse the cats, and he walked up and tried to pet a lion. He was not hurt. Perhaps the lion understood, too.

Now, in Palm Springs North, Red-jacket was helping to put up the tent. Almost instinctively, the men who had joined the group that morning shied away from him. He nearly killed himself with a tent pole, and I wondered if he was planning a crucifixion for the opening day.

Late in the afternoon, Hoxie called everyone together and introduced Dime Wilson, the ringmaster and boss of the prop department. Dime was a short, feisty man with a good voice who came from a long line of circus people. (His parents had been with a two-car rail-road circus. "I was born on the train," said Dime, "on the run in the night.")

Dime promised that they would rehearse all night if it took that. They rehearsed until 11 p.m., to no one's satisfaction, and then Dime called it a day. The band was a collection of good black musicians who had never played together before. King Charles, the leader, did his best to hold them together. Some of them, cityfolk like Brother, a saxophonist who wore dark glasses and smiled a lot to himself, were simply not used to playing in time with a horse. It would be better tomorrow.

On opening day, the straw-blond kid who had skipped school to work was still there, and I suspected that he had fallen in love with Dagmar Pedrola, a lovely blonde 20-year-old wire walker who had arrived the day before with her parents, who were German acrobats. Dagmar did not have the slightest notion of this boy's love for her.

She was a magnet for high school boys. She practiced her wire act and they appeared from nowhere, squealing and pommeling one another and having vivid mental emissions, and Dagmar managed to ignore it while simultaneously promoting and enjoying it. Her parents were people who still talked a lot about the old country, although they had performed in the States for a dozen years. Dagmar talked of the present. She used expressions such as wow and groovy and like.

In midafternoon, with the opening performance about three hours away, it rained like hell for an hour. The sandy soil soaked up a lot of it, but Hoxie contracted with a sawmill for 14 cubic yards of sawdust.

The towners, even the kids who had hurried over on bicycles after school, disappeared in the rain. But as the downpour was ending, a well-dressed woman carefully picked her way from the shopping center through the mud to the big top and asked where she could buy tickets, and everyone regarded that as a good sign. Hoxie ate a huge steak and alternately flipped his hat brim up and down, mostly down.

Dime hurried around, lining up the performers for the spec, the walk-around that opened the show. When he ran out of performers, he started drafting canvasmen to carry banners and to lead horses.

The show opened, on time and to a full house, with the spec. Dime told the people in Palm Springs North---as he would tell the people in 164 other towns during the next six and one half months---that they were there to forget their troubles. The theme of the spec, Dime told them, was "The Good Old Days."

Joyce Fox, ex-schoolteacher, with a silvery baton and in a red, white and blue costume, was the first around the track as the band played Happy Days Are Here Again. It was not as silly as it sounds; the looks on the kids' faces made it all very real and understandable. Just behind Joyce, somewhat shakily astride a horse, was one of the long-armed North Carolina boys whom Hoxie had picked out of the mission.

He was carrying the American flag. He was doing that shakily, too, but proudly, and he was smiling. The way he was smiling, you could tell that he was smiling at himself.

• • •

Carol City: It was only eight miles to the next date. Already things were settling down into a routine. The big top went up faster this morning, and with less yelling and theatrics on the part of the canvasmen, though Redjacket had some more trouble with a tent pole. Two men left during the night, and no one remembered their names, nor even their nicknames.

The sun was out and everything was dry, and there was a good breeze. The canvas on the big top was all billows and swells, like the early-morning ocean; the tent was so vast that the breeze moved along it in waves that were slow and graceful, as in slow-motion movies of surfing.

The lot was squarely next to a shopping center, a large one, on grass that was probably reserved for some giant parking lot of the future. The performers drifted over to check out the discount stores, and once they were inside, they behaved like everyone else, filling plastic baskets with things they did not need.

Hoxie had his hat brim down because Kenny had set up the tents---the big top, the sideshow tent and the marquee with the banner line---in a cluster. Hoxie would have done it shotgun style, one after the other; there was room for that, and it would have given the illusion of a show three times the size. I asked him if that would straighten itself out as the season progressed.

"No, hell no," he said. "It'll never straighten out. Only way it gets done right is if I'm here, on the lot, all the time."

That was Hoxie's problem, according to his wife, Betty: the idea that he had to do it all himself. Hoxie was pushing 60. One day the season before, about the time the circus stopped racing with spring up through the Southland and had made its turn eastward through Pennsylvania, Hoxie had had a heart attack. Then he had come down with pneumonia. The doctors in Pennsylvania had said he had made a complete recovery, but a heart attack is a heart attack, and a man pushing 60 is a man pushing 60.

The trouble was that Hoxie was functionally incapable of standing by while someone else did the work. Betty used to say, "He'd last a lot longer if he'd just use his finger and point, rather than doing it all himself. He never gives up. Never. Always going." You could look at his face and see evidence of that. He chewed his lip so much that it was raw and open. He had to carry around a tube of ointment for it.

Hoxie Tucker had been a circus man since he was 15 years old, when he ran away from home in Somerset, Kentucky. He worked with just about every kind of road show possible: stock (live, not summer) companies, shows that performed under kerosene and coal-oil lamps, opries. regular circuses, all kinds of tented shows. Then, in 1943, his own show, Hoxie Brothers Circus, although there were no brothers involved. He started with a scrap of canvas and one ring, and he billed it as the World's Largest One-Ring Circus.

Later he got more canvas and another ring. Now he was up to three rings and a tent that was 230 feet long and 80 feet wide, still small by circus-tent standards, but it would hold a couple of thousand people. This was the tent's second season.

• • •

Miami: Back in the real world, at the airport, I felt a great number of emotions, confusing ones. I missed the circus already, and already I was making plans to return. Yet I was clearly part of the straight world, the world of airports and airplanes and the people who gather before flights in the bar with the best view; people who sleep indoors and who eat the evening meal at some point after 4:30 p.m.

It was while I was waiting for the plane back to New York that I realized, in one of those strokes of insight that sometimes arrive in airport bars, that we were all wrong in calling the circus a circus. Circus implied fantasy, and everything I had seen had been real: certainly a lot more real than this plastic airport world that surrounded me now.

There was something a lot more real about rain, mud, live music, long-armed boys from the foothills who carried the American flag, black men who became lion tamers, schoolteachers who ran away with the circus and people who chewed their lips like Hoxie Tucker. And there was more reality in a place where you could be whatever you wanted to be.

This confusion continued to bother me as I got on the airplane. Once I had sat down in that sterile plastic capsule and had adjusted my ears to the nonsense of the Muzak and the stewardesses, I realized that, in a way, and at least temporarily, I had settled the question of reality. There was about me, and especially on my shoes, the delicious odor of elephant shit. It lasted all the way back to Kennedy Airport.

• • •

Enon, Ohio, in May: The show had more or less kept pace with spring up through Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky and then Ohio. Spring, though, in that part of the country, also means the thunderstorm and tornado season, and that is a serious consideration in the circus business. I drove onto the lot in Enon and got out of the car about the time Hoxie was rounding a trailer, his hat brim down. In pretty much all one fluid motion he squinted, noticed me, smiled and said, "Hello, good buddy, whatchasay? Were there any thunderstorms or 'nadoes where you came from?"

I suppose I had been hoping he'd say something like "Where the hell did you come from?" so I could explain how I had juggled airline schedules and rental cars in order to appear on this vacant lot in the middle of Ohio on this particular day. But he didn't, and I guess I understood why. Such an unexpected appearance in the real world might have been cause for some exclamation, but in the circus world it was not at all remarkable. People came and went. The world went on. It was certainly not surprising that I should turn up again. (In fact, a little later Hoxie told me he had been assuming that I'd turn up. "You're stuck with us." he said one night after the crowd had gone into the big top for the last show. "And we're stuck with you. I told myself down at winter quarters, I felt so bad about not having time to really talk to you and make you feel welcome, I said to myself, 'If that fellow stays through the day he'll stay here forever.' " It was after that that I started selling tickets for the sideshow, just to have something to do, to demonstrate that I was stuck with them and they were stuck with me.)

Redjacket was long gone, but someone else had joined up in Alabama or South Carolina who was just like him. The Greene boys from the foothills had taken off about the time spring had hit their home state, just as they had said. Brother, the saxophonist, was gone. "He got sick and had to go home," somebody said. "You know those pills he was taking? Well, it turned out those pills and liquor don't mix too well and he had to go home," Rick, the young clown who had given me that advice in Sweetwater, was also gone. John Hall said he had turned out to be "obviously not for us."

Junior had lost his winter fat and now he looked as sleek and powerful as his cats. It was to him that the other performers paid their supreme compliment: They watched his act, twice a night, night after night. Some of them undoubtedly wanted to be on hand in case there was blood, but most of them quite clearly watched out of admiration for Junior's skill.

The big black man treated his lions and tiger as ferocious, dignified animals, worthy of respect, not as objects of ridicule. Some animal trainers build their acts around ridicule; a man rides a lioness' back or sticks his head into a lion's mouth. Junior's act was more classical and more respectful of the animals. He said he thought he got more showmanship out of them that way.

Junior was loquacious and friendly and always willing to explain things to me, although he really didn't have much spare time. He had been helping Kenny get the canvas up and down (and making extra money for it), so he was working a pretty long day. But he always took time to talk, especially if I brought along a cold six-pack.

Yes, he said, there were some audiences, particularly in Alabama and Georgia, that were shocked to see a black man doing the most important act, and he was fairly certain that some of them were hoping that his lions would eat him up before their eyes. "But I think they want that to happen to a while lion tamer, too," he said.

I asked him if it were true about lions and tigers' not getting along. "Well." he said, "they work together OK, but sometimes they have trouble living together. It's like this racial problem, you know: The races work together OK, and they have for years in the South. But living together's something different."

I suspected that Junior had carefully chosen and polished that line, to be delivered whenever somebody asked the proper question. Junior's relationship with the rest of the circus, I felt, was a complicated one. There had to be some accommodation on his part to the show, to the other circus people and to those who paid to see it. There was also the undeniable fact that Junior was the only lion tamer with this circus (and its top attraction), not to mention his status as a black lion tamer. That counted for a lot; how much, I wasn't sure.

• • •

York, Pennsylvania, in late June: The circus had gone as far North as it was going, and now it had turned toward the East. It was a Sunday, with no evening performance. Many of the show people went out to eat or to the movies, while most of the canvasmen tried to figure out the Pennsylvania liquor laws. They took down the big top after the afternoon performance.

That helped me develop a little better my theory about the big top. I had seen this circus in various places and varying circumstances, but always it was with that fantastic canvas symbol in the center of it all, or on its way up or on its way down. Before, when the tent had been down, it had been late at night. Here, the canvasmen and elephants had it down by four o'clock on a summer Sunday afternoon. And I felt it: What had been the circus was suddenly reduced to a collection of mobile homes parked in a playing field next to a Catholic school in York, Pennsylvania.

The obvious difference was the tent. But it was difficult to make any earth-shaking conclusions out of that. The big top was a scruffy piece of canvas---a big one, to be sure, but nowhere as big as Ringling's of the old days---and it leaked water when it rained and in the afternoon performances it leaked intense rays of sunshine. Buckminster Fuller could whip up something twice as efficient for half the price.

And yet it was something magical. Maybe it really was symbolic of the world and the trip we're all on. I didn't really know. I just knew that when it was down that afternoon in York, something essential was missing. It was as if all the people were there but the reason for the people was missing.

Hoxie spoke of mysterious tornadoes that had struck in various western Pennsylvania cities, touching down almost in the center ring. Hoxie, I realized, was capable of making you see vivid pictures in your mind, and almost every picture was of a tornado menacing a circus tent.

Kenny, the boss canvasman, had said back in March that if he had the same crew on Decoration Day it would be a miracle. Decoration Day had passed, and it was true that there had been an almost complete turnover---one that extended to Kenny himself. Hoxie had walked up to him one morning in Ohio and said something about the way he was laying out the lot, and Kenny had said if Hoxie thought he could do it better, he should do it, and he had left.

I had brought ray own tent to York, one that had been made in the real world for people who wanted to go canoeing and things like that. You needed no elephants to put it up; it was all done by metal poles under compression, and it was about eight feet by ten feet. John Hall called it a "modest oneringer." Much to my delight, some of the circus people came over and inspected it. To them, it was unusual.

• • •

A suburb of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the next day: The lot was a huge field about a mile from a shopping center that sloped down to a patch of thick greenery and trees and a collapsing unpainted barn. There were ground-hog holes as much as a foot in diameter. The people and animals, especially the horses but not the elephants, had difficulty walking.

Shortly after the big top was up. I walked slowly around it, inside, and I saw that the people and the elephants already had worn down the grass along the track. Even the furrows were flattened out and the ground-hog holes there were filled---not deliberately but inadvertently by the presence of the circus.

Outside, they were having trouble with the generator. The huge machines cut off from time to time, and I realized that now I was aware of their presence only when they were silent.

Joyce Fox had bought a new television set for her Microbus. She was making arrangements to trade the bus in on a car and to buy a new 15-foot trailer. "It looks like I'm with the circus for the duration," she said. I had a feeling of envy when she said that.

Junior, who had been working hard each time I had seen him, was working even harder now. He had been promoted to boss canvasman; it was he who laid out the lot each morning and got the tent down each night. And, of course, there was his act.

I noticed a wound, barely healing, on Junior's right arm. "Oh, yes," he said when I asked about it. "I got hurt since last time I saw you. Thirteen stitches in my arm. One afternoon we had a good crowd, and you know how it is when you hear the applause out there; you want to add a little bit more to the act, and I got in very close and a little careless, and she nailed me in the arm for thirteen stitches."

When had this happened?

"About three weeks ago."

And where did it happen?

"I don't exactly remember what town it was," he said.

The next morning, I was one of the last to leave the lot. The purple trucks had long since departed for Quarryville. Gradually, the performers woke up, made coffee, walked their dogs, took in the folding lawn chairs and pulled out.

The tall grass was already springing back into place. It had become an old rutted field again. You couldn't really tell where the big top had been. As I drove out past the collapsing barn, I saw a canvasman inside, sleeping peacefully on the floor, one arm over his face to keep away the sunlight; I do not know why, but I did not wake him to tell him the circus was gone.

• • •

While Haven, Pennsylvania, in late July: During the season, the circus played at 19 state mental hospitals. The performers all said that these dates were the most challenging and rewarding for them. White Haven was such a date.

The big top was set up in a closely cropped grass field next to some functional, red-brick, government-looking buildings. And beyond the tent were the lovely blue Poconos. It was threatening to rain. You could see the clouds moving through the mountains miles away.

There were both adults and children in the audience. Some of them were in wheelchairs and some were standing alone, swaying in their tracks like the elephants in winter quarters. Some were on shiny metal crutches and walkers; some had their hands protected by woolen socks; some of the men wore gray work pants and T-shirts; some of them were led into the tent and onto the bleachers by volunteers and by nurses in blinding-white uniforms. The performers and canvasmen did not stare. Except for one of them, a young prop man named Slim, who joked with some of the patients in a heavy but friendly way, they were all very respectful.

Junior clearly took, extra chances with the cats. Some of the people sitting closest to the arena stared past it, not seeing him or the lions, but they beat their hands together in time with the band, which was trying harder, too. When the audience left at the end of the first show, some of them were obviously happy. Some of them were crying.

There was a second show immediately after the first one, so that all the patients could see the circus. As the crowds were exchanging places, I started feeling the tension. I saw it in Dime Wilson's face, and then I looked where Dime was looking and I saw why: Past the blue mountains the sky was black. It was moving: not directly toward us, but at an angle. The storm would hit us; there was no doubt about that. It was just a question of when.

Dime decided to start the second performance and hurry things along. He clipped one act off the end, but the storm came just as the patients were about to go back to their dormitories. It came suddenly, though it had been expected, and it came with great violence, and there was some panic.

The rain poured through holes in the tent---there were many holes now, halfway through the second season---and this mesmerized some of the patients; it made some of them laugh and it terrified some of them. All over the bleachers, people were pointing their fingers at the holes. The leaks were of different sizes, some mere drips and some with the force of a garden hose. The rain was cascading down the sides of the tent and pounding the ground so hard it kicked mud up into the air.

"We've got to get these people out of here," yelled Dime, and he begged the men to get the side wall down quickly. He wanted it open so the patients could leave easily and not be funneled out the main entrance. And he was worried that when the hard wind came, there would be a blow-over.

A blow-over is an awful event in the life of a circus. Sometimes it can mean the end of the circus. A blow-over at White Haven would almost certainly be a tragedy. Now the big tent was groaning, Heavy, complaining, in agony; not the morning ocean but an angry one, as if beaten by a hurricane.

I was standing with a group of young people at the edge of the tent. They were 200 yards from their dormitory, scared, terrified of standing there but equally terrified of going out into the rain. There was thunder all around, and flashes were almost simultaneous. "Hurry!" yelled Dime to everybody. I picked up a crippled child who was weeping softly and started across the grass with him, or her, I do not know which. I grabbed another by the arm and the group started toward the dormitory. Halfway there, some of them wanted to lie down and cry.

We made it to the porch and I put the crippled child down and the child would not let go. The child clung like a tick, still weeping. Two teenaged girls ran up, their hair streaked across their faces, and they stopped and caught their breath and turned to look at the circus. The big old tent was shaking and straining violently in the wind, jerking and snatching at its ropes and stakes. The rain was so thick you could not see the mountains anymore. We were in the middle of the blackness now. Someone was screaming at the elephants, begging them to bring the centerpoles down faster. The elephants did their work, but at their own pace. They seemed to be truly unconcerned about the storm. Fifteen minutes after the storm had struck, everybody was safe, but many people were wet.

Back on the dormitory porch, one of the teenaged girls (I do not know whether they were workers at the hospital or patients there) let out a big "Wooh!" and said: "Look at that! That's crazy! Boy, I'm never going to run away with the circus!"

Hoxie and I sat in his trailer and talked awhile, and in the middle of the conversation he said: "How do you like my new lip?"

Indeed, he had a new lip. "Had it a couple of weeks now. The doctor who operated on it said it was malignant. I've been back a couple of times and they say it's all healed. I don't have to carry around that goddamned ointment anymore."

• • •

Spottswood, Pennsylvania, August 25: The circus lot was next to a pond, and it was August-hot, and performers and canvasmen, who normally get all their water from a huge drum on the back of a purple truck, went swimming. Slim, the prop man, drowned. Everyone---the performers, bosses and workingmen---chipped in and sent Slim's body home to Georgia. The death was tragic enough, and unexpected enough, so that weeks later everyone would remember the name of the town where it occurred.

• • •

Old Bridge, New Jersey, in mid-September: It would not be long now. In a little more than a week, the season would end in South Boston, Virginia, and then there would be the long home run to Florida. Some of the circus people were complaining of the "cold" weather. The sun was coming from farther South now, from over Florida. The canvasmen were talking about eight more ups and nine more downs, and they were not talking about pills.

There had been a circus fans' convention and Dagmar Pedrola had played her guitar, and afterward a man had come by and told her he wanted to get her on the Merv Griffin Show. "I would like to try singing awhile for an audience," she said in Old Bridge. "Because I feel like---this may sound silly---but I feel like that's what I'm supposed to do, really."

John Hall said it had been a good year. He had a photograph of the new tent, next year's tent, a tent 310 feet long. They were going to pick it up on the way home to Florida. The photographer had simply stood on the ground inside the tent and aimed his camera toward the top, and the sunlight had shown through the white canvas like the big top of Ringling Brothers in my memory.

Outside the ticket wagon where John sat, the people came to the circus: whole families, mostly, but your eyes were on the children. And a man painfully negotiating himself on two crutches along the midway. Young Jersey matrons, in pants suits and tunics, doing it for the kids, but I know, because I had watched them before, that once they got inside the big top and watched awhile, they would be as spellbound as their children. They came back, like the salmon, to something that had happened early in their lives and over which they had no control.

And there were teeny-boppers and street people there, too, looking as if they knew it all already, and I knew that soon they, too, would be wide-eyed. John said he thought it was because the young people "enjoy the simple life, and this is a beautiful, simple life. Because in the circus there is only goodness."

Dime blew his 15-minute whistle and Junior, inside his trailer, slowly drank a beer. His wife, an attractive Georgia lady in a wig, was there. She lived in the Bronx. Last night she had seen his act for the first time in her life. They had been separated; now they were talking about getting back together; she would leave the Bronx and live with Junior in the house that Junior would build, with a loan from Hoxie, in Fort Lauderdale.

Junior said a lot had happened to him; he had learned a lot about responsibility. He had become---outside of his work with the cats---one of the two or three most important people with the show. One morning the circus had moved into a bad lot and Junior had unilaterally told the committee that he would not lay it out there. They had argued with him; Junior had gotten the idea that they didn't think much of the judgment of a black man. But he had stayed his ground. When Hoxie had arrived, he had told Junior you bet your ass you made the right decision.

Joyce Fox sat on the edge of the center ring that afternoon and said she would not be back next year. She would not say why. She said she didn't know what she might do. I begged her to tell me why. She said only that she had found out that even in a circus you are not totally free. (Later, in Gary, she said it had been "more like I wanted to see if I could get away from the circus." She had not sold the car and the trailer; they were parked in the back yard in Gary.)

Betty Tucker said it was the best year they had ever had. Hoxie's heart had made it, although there had been times when he had lost his temper and she had prepared for the worst.

Already Hoxie was talking of the next year. He knew that not long after they got home to Miami, he would start itching again. The new and larger tent would mean more performers, more rolling stock, more elephants, more purple paint. Hoxie was even toying with the idea of setting up two units---two circuses, two big tops, going different places and playing under the same name, the way the red and blue units of Ringling Brothers do.

He had the money. He knew where to get the extra tent and people and equipment. He would need a good man to operate one of the units. "You can't just run out on the street and pick up somebody," he said. "You have to be experienced. You have to be mean where nobody likes you to start with. Anybody likes you, you'll never own one of these things."

As we talked, I kept remembering what Joyce had said back in winter quarters, about the circus being the place where you could be whatever you wanted to be. For a half second I permitted myself to wonder if that meant that if I wanted it badly enough, I could be the mean bastard who operated Hoxie's blue unit. It was only the briefest of fantasies. Without mentioning it. I told the Tuckers what Joyce had said.

"Oh, yes," said Betty. "You can be anything you want to be here. Anything you're big enough for."

And Hoxie said: "If you gamble your life to do what you want to do, anybody in the circus business can achieve what he wants, regardless of what it is."

I said I had to go, and we shook hands, and Hoxie said, "See you next season, good buddy. You don't want to miss that new tent."

• • •

Next season: I did go back, of course, and I still do, whenever I can juggle an airline schedule. The second unit didn't develop; at least not yet. But the new tent was even better than it looked in the photograph. Hoxie got through the next season all right, and the show made a lot of money, which Hoxie lovingly plowed back in. It was touch and go for a while during the Pennsylvania floods, but the big tent made it.

The man never called Dagmar about the Merv Griffin Show. Joyce Fox did, indeed, stay away. The National Geographic did a story on the show, making the circus look and sound about as real as anything else the National Geographic does stories on, but the publicity helped.

Before Junior's wife could get her things together for the reconciliation and the move to Florida, she was stabbed to death in her apartment in the Bronx. The family couldn't find a route card, so Junior did not know about his wife's death until after she was buried. He never really found out why she was murdered. Later, he had trouble with his cats. They started getting sick and dying late in the season, and by the time the show entered its last few weeks. Prince Bogino had only three cats with any real fire in them.

It would be different and better, though, next year, Junior said, "Because life goes on, and most of the time it gets better." He was right, of course; about life and about the circus, too.