"Oh s.h.i.t. Who the h.e.l.l are you? And what are you doing here?"

When I drove my camper onto the lot the Sunday evening before setup, I was greeted by the show's official parking guru and grouch, Gene, a surly, swollen old-timer whom everyone on the circus called Hippo. With the physique of a bouncer and the charm of a tiger in heat, Hippo was the show's twenty-four-hour man. He taped red arrows to road signs along the route every other night to guide the drivers, laid out the stake line on the new lot, and directed the trucks and trailers to their parking spots as they arrived throughout the night. The first two jobs he did well. As for the third, well, Hippo has been lucky over the years that none of the performers has had very good aim when it comes to throwing stakes.

"I'm a clown," I said. "I'm new."

"Well, f.u.c.k," he said. "I don't have room for you. I think you better leave."

I laughed. He snarled. Then he gestured for me to follow.

My inaugural hours around the circus lot were like awkward moments in a new country where I didn't speak the language and didn't have a map. More importantly, I didn't have a place to park. Before leaving home I had purchased an RV, the insider's term for a recreational vehicle, alternately called a motor home, a camper, or, according to my dealer, a honeymoon on wheels. While the workers (as well as some of the clowns and musicians) lived in sleepers-semitrucks with cots in the back like overnight Italian trains-the performers were required to provide their own accommodations. After a crash course on mobile living ("Think small," I was told by a friend and RV fanatic, "but not too small. If your milk falls out of the fridge during a drive you don't want to get wet"), I settled on a four-year-old, twenty-three-foot Winnebago Warrior. Essentially a Chevy van with a hotel room on back, it came complete with two miniature beds, a shower, a toilet, a stove, a television set, and a refrigerator more than four feet from the driver's seat. It also had a small table, which for me was a requirement, since I may have been the only person in history to run away and join the circus with a laptop computer.

After my initial encounter with Hippo, one that was repeated in one form or another every other night for the rest of the year, he decided that since I was a clown I should be parked directly behind Clown Alley, the small tent used for dressing that was located halfway down the line of trailers and near the side doors of the tent. While there was nothing wrong with this resolution in DeLand, where the lot was a large, open fairgrounds, this decision proved to be one of the worst things that happened to me all year. The reason: Hippo tried to park me in the same spot in every town, so even if there was a fence (as in Hinesville), a ditch (as in Hendersonville), or a Wal-Mart Dumpster (as in Waycross), the undisputed Mr. Least Congeniality of the Circus tried to squeeze, cajole, or hara.s.s me into the same place in every town we played. In the beginning I hated our thrice-weekly fights, but by the end I came to see them as a badge of honor. After all, he treated me just like everyone else.

Once I had my parking s.p.a.ce-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 b.u.t.ter. 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 ent.i.tled 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 Cannonball, parked at the end of the line closest to the back door. All other parking s.p.a.ces were determined by seniority and number of costume changes. The longer one had been with the show, the farther one got to be from the noise of the generator; the greater number of costume changes one had, the closer one got to be to the side doors of the tent.

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 j.a.panese. 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, n.o.body 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 unneighborly they had to be turned off before 2 A.M. Basically, for more than a third of every day, we lived the way they did in the Age of Barnum, relying on sleep, booze, and an occasional scandal to keep us from raping and pillaging the land.

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 antenna, raise my staircase. Kris Kristo, the juggler, and Danny Rodrguez, the flyer, laughed at how I struggled with many of the basic functions they had been performing mindlessly all their lives.

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 gra.s.s. 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-anniversary edition, "The Biggest and the Best," he was upset to notice that they didn't use the picture of the tallest high school basketball player of 1955, but the second tallest, Wilt Chamberlain. "I wrote them a letter and said he may have been the best, but I was the biggest. To h.e.l.l with your magazine."

Partly because of his unnatural height, Buck was always a loner, and in 1959 when the Cole Bros. Circus visited his hometown just before his twenty-third birthday, he saw the circus not as a dream but as an escape. At least there he would be normal. "I heard they had short people, midgets and things, and they always fascinated me. I thought I would ask around. I was walkin' down the midway on my way to become a working man, when the butcher-that's the name for concessioners, you know-yells out at me, 'Hey, kid, where ya goin'? You don't want to be with them, they'll work your nuts off.' He took me by the arm and walked me toward the midway. 'Hey, Bill,' he called out to the sideshow manager, 'I got you a new giant.'"

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 b.u.m 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.

"Everybody on the show has a way to make a little extra money," Buck said in his loopy, wry hillbilly drawl that usually culminated with some unexpected crack. "Sometimes it's from the rubes, the townies; sometimes it's from the people around here, like First of Mays. When I first joined the show I made eighteen dollars a week. Now I make ten times that amount. It's still not very much, so I make a lot of extra money on cherry pie."

"What's cherry pie?"

"Oh, it's many things," he said. "Taking down and putting up the big top. Carrying the ice. Anything you do to make extra money. They're what I call my sidelines. I work flea markets, I sell circus memorabilia, I have a few dirty videos I rent out. Also, drinks. If you're thirsty on this show and you run to the c.o.ke house to get a cold soda, it costs you seventy-five cents. I sell them out of my van to the clowns for fifty cents. You go to the c.o.ke house, they don't have any diet. I'm diabetic, that's the only thing I can drink. h.e.l.l, half the clowns in there I've trained to drink diet."

"So that's how you make your living?"

"I certainly don't make it off the circus. I have to make it off something. Just wait a few days, you'll see."

It turns out I didn't have to wait that long at all. Within hours of my arrival on the lot I became aware of a vast underground economy on the show. Even before I learned people's jobs, their names, or even their s.e.xual histories (which was usually the second thing I learned), I heard about their rackets. Ora sold jackets. Bonnie sewed costumes. Southpaw smuggled in beer. In some ways the underground economy was a model of communal efficiency. For a price, I could receive almost any service I might possibly desire and still keep my money within my own community: I could get my laundry done every week, have my oil changed every 3,000 miles, even have a copy of USA Today delivered every morning to my camper door. Seemingly complex commercial or civic enterprises were performed effortlessly despite the fact that we were in a different community three or four times a week. A circus postman, alias trombone player, went to the local post office every day to buy and send money orders as well as retrieve and send mail. He would then deliver the mail to your door for a fee of twenty-five cents a letter. The show had its own bank (the office manager), its own lending agent (the treasurer), even its own notary public (the stilt walker). With surprisingly little effort, a circus person could be born, go to school, learn a trade, get a job, take out a loan, buy a car, buy a house, find a spouse, have a child, raise a family, see the world, grow old, and ultimately even pa.s.s away in the arms of his loved ones in the place where he was born-without ever leaving the lot. He could even go to church if he wanted, since a traveling circus priest came to the lot every Sunday and said ma.s.s in the tent.

While this underground economy was one of the more impressive aspects of the circus, it could also be one of its more sordid. As I learned quickly, life operated much more smoothly on the show with a little tip here or a small bribe there. The problem for an outsider was trying to figure out whom to tip, when to tip, and how much to tip. The water man received a tip, for example. Johnny even mentioned this in the opening meeting. But some people insisted that since the show promised performers water once a day in their contracts, and since his job was to dispense the water, he should only be tipped for providing water a second or third time. Living by myself, I needed water only once a day. The electricians were tipped for plugging in the RVs to the generator on setup mornings, but only when the plugs were laid out on the gra.s.s. One evening I chose not to leave my plugs out because I had to go grocery shopping off the lot the following morning. When I woke up, my cord had been removed from its compartment and plugged in for me. I wasn't sure if this was kindness or capitalism.

What I was sure of was that, in those opening days at least, loyalty was only wallet deep. The workers on the show viewed a First of May, especially one with a bright, shining RV and clean fingernails, as a rube and a gold mine. When I first arrived on the lot, I was told that the external electrical cable on my Winnebago was not long enough and had the wrong kind of plug for the generators. The boss electrician, Jack, sent me to buy an additional fifty feet of cable. Don't bother with the plugs, he said, he could sell them to me cheaper. I went as instructed to purchase the cord, but just for my own First of May fun I asked the hardware-store attendant how much a pair of 30-amp twist-lock plugs would cost. The male was $12.11, he said, the female $24.85. With the standard circus discount, the total was a little over thirty-two dollars. Back at the lot, Willie, the colorful bearded wacky uncle of the electrical department, agreed to install my plugs.

"Jack told me to tell you that you are expected to tip me," Willie mumbled in what was probably the most coherent thing I heard him say all year.

"I understand that," I said. "I hear you like beer."

"Even better than the smell of a p.u.s.s.y," he said. "And almost better than reefer." At the mention of this Willie visibly swooned. "But you still have to pay Jack for the plugs, you know."

"And how much are they?"

"Sixty-five dollars," he said.

The next day I dutifully paid Jack for my plugs. And when I learned that he asked all the performers to tip him five dollars a week for their power, I never got around to paying that.

"Higher, higher. Lift your hands a little higher.... That's right. Now put your palms up, not down. You're not flying anywhere; you're not an airplane. The proper position is palms up."

"What about my feet?" I said.

"You can stand like you are now, with your feet not completely together. But turn your toes out a bit."

"And my head?"

"Head up, eyes out. Don't look at the first row, but the last. Remember, you're asking for something: you want their applause. The show is for them and you want their appreciation."

Elvin Bale is never more alive than when he discusses performing. On opening day he sat outside his sister's trailer, with a cellular phone in his hands and a tuna sandwich in his lap, and brought his forty-eight years of circus experience to life as he taught yet another newcomer how to style-the circus expression for taking a bow.

"A lot of performers don't know how to get the audience," he said, his ruddy cheeks blushing in the afternoon breeze and his thin blond hair flapping against his head. "You have to communicate with them even though you're not talking to them. You must look into their eyes and control them. To me, the audience was my lifeblood. They were the ones who gave me the daring to do some of the things I did. And no matter what I did, I always left the ring saying, 'G.o.d, I wish I could have done more.' That's a good performer-when you feel you haven't given enough."

As he spoke, Elvin searched the empty sky with his eyes as if he were looking for a spotlight. With his voice he could conjure up memories of a thousand circuses past. With his arms he could direct me in exactly how to stand. But with his legs he could no longer stand that way himself. Elvin Bale, the "Great Melvor," the Circus Daredevil of the Century, was sitting forever in a wheelchair.

"It happened in 1987," he recalled. "I was in Hong Kong to do a shot with my cannon. It was my biggest and best act. In fifteen years with Ringling I had done an ankle catch on the single trapeze, I had walked the 'wheel of death'-I even wrestled a giant mechanical monster. Every two years I designed a different act, but the cannon was my ultimate creation. It was my legacy."

For his signature act, Elvin would crouch in the steel barrel of the world's largest cannon and with a giant fiery explosion be propelled two hundred feet through the air and then land in a giant net. At every new site, he would calculate where to put the net by shooting a sandbag dummy from the cannon. In Hong Kong, however, it rained overnight and the dummy was left outside. The next day Elvin shot the sandbag from the cannon, placed the net where it landed on the ground, then loaded himself where the dummy had been. "Halfway through the flight I knew," he said with the calm, abnormally stoic voice of a man who has been to h.e.l.l and back and still can't quite believe it. "I knew I wasn't going to make it. I knew I was going to overshoot the net."

He did. In what turned out to be his farewell performance, Elvin Bale overshot the net and landed on the ring curb, rupturing his spinal cord with a career-ending, marriage-ending, seemingly life-ending snap. Recalling the episode more than six years later, Elvin still seemed haunted by his accident. Though his performing days were over, his circus life had continued. Overnight, he became an elder statesman in the community. He opened an agency and began representing many of the top acts in the country, including almost every act on the Beatty-Cole show. More importantly, he sought out his own replacement. He went looking for the next Elvin Bale. When he found him it was in the most unlikely place.

"He was my pool man."

"Your what?"

"My pool man. He cleaned my pool. I was lying there one day looking at him. He was blond, muscular. Not too tall, not too heavy, about a hundred fifty-five pounds, I'd say, almost the same weight as me. He had been a high school football star. He was wiry and reckless, always getting into fights at school, kind of a rough-tough kid, though spoiled in other respects. But the thing was, he had that all-American look. And then I realized it: he was me. Sean Thomas was me."

The bustle of opening day was just beginning to pick up around the end of the trailer line, where Elvin's three sisters parked their vehicles side by side. Elvin's older sister, Gloria, stopped by with new blue and white ostrich plumes for her Arabian horses. His younger sister, Bonnie, was home sewing costumes for her cloud swing. His twin, Dawnita, the only brunette in a family of blondes, was complaining that her Siamese cat was about to escape through the screen door. Just then the Bales's mother arrived from Sarasota bearing Cadbury Creme Eggs and a new costume for Sean. As they had done since they were children-first, on their father Trevor's circus in wartime London, later on Ringling Brothers in America, after that on Beatty-Cole-the Bales made their own nest of sorts wherever they landed and pulled in a few stray fledglings like me and made them feel at home.

"Oh, Mom, the costume looks great," Elvin said as his mother bent down to kiss him.

"Isn't it magnificent?" she said, holding up a white bodysuit covered in red, white, and blue flaming stripes like something Evel Knievel might have worn. Her voice retained much more of the British accent that still lingered around the corners of her children's speech. "It's made with a new thing called a hologram. It's very expensive."

As she spoke, Sean arrived. Noticeably bowlegged and decidedly stiff, he was wearing blue-jean shorts, no shirt, and a Los Angeles Raiders baseball cap. Around his neck he wore a gold chain with a Florida Gator dangling from its center. On his left breast he had a tattoo of Mighty Mouse in flight. He thanked Elvin's mother for the costume and sat down on a beach chair to pull it on. The cellular telephone rang for Elvin, who answered it.

I turned to Sean. Like everyone else on the show, he had seen me the night before when Johnny introduced me to the cast and crew after the dress rehearsal, put his arm around me, and said, "He's one of us now. Treat him like a member of the family." Thus blessed, I was free to roam.

"So, are you doing anything special today?" I asked. "Any rituals?"

"Go to work, that's about it."

"Aren't you nervous?"

He shrugged. "What's there to be nervous about? I know what I'm doing. If I land on the ground, well, I land on the ground. It's a day-by-day act. You try your best to calculate everything, but you can't always be sure."

Sean stood up with the costume. The shoulder pads fit perfectly above his arms, but the legs were slightly baggy. Elvin's mother hurried to the car to get some pins for an emergency repair. The first show was now just two hours away.

"So you don't get scared?" I asked.

"Scared? Scared of what? Breaking a few bones?"

"Scared of having an accident."

"Falling's not scary," he said, bending down to lace up his high-top boxing shoes. "Scary's catching AIDS. Scary is being poor." He stood up, nodded for me to follow, and headed toward the cannon, which was parked in the s.p.a.ce next to Dawnita. Sitting quietly in the gra.s.s with no glitzy trappings from the show, the cannon looked potent but slightly out of place, like a plastic mobile ICBM I had once seen in a toy store in Moscow. The thirty-foot-long shiny silver barrel was attached to the back of a flatbed truck that had been painted fire engine red. On the pa.s.senger door was a message: GUN FOR HIRE. "Pain is not scary," Sean continued, now looking at me directly with a squint in his eyes. For the first time I could see his face. It was worn by the sun. His nose was sharp, his chin jaunty. His eyes were vivid blue. He was the picture of Marine Corps confidence. "No, pain is a feeling and it goes away. What I'm scared of is dying..."

I raised my eyebrows. Sean nodded his head. Then, as if alarmed by his own morbidity, he suddenly caught himself. "But I'm not going to die," he said.

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because I'm good." He tweaked the cannon on the barrel. His voice a.s.sumed the mock-aggressive tone of a man pretending to wrestle with an inanimate object. "Aren't I, you big lady, you big beast? I'm good, and you know it." He hopped up on the sideboard and with a flash and jump was standing on the barrel above the mouth of the cannon, towering over the circus lot with his arms, Superman-like, at his waist. "I'm Sean Thomas, the Human Cannonball, the Daredevil of the Decade, the Big DD."

He looked down on me watching from the ground, recast his pose for a moment, then lay down on the barrel and removed the cover from the mouth.

"So," he asked, "do you want to have a peek inside?"

"Why not," I said.

"Because you can't." He grinned. "People offer to pay me to go inside, you know, but I don't let them. It's a secret. Only I can know." He bent down and kissed the barrel.

"We'll see," I said with a nod to the barrel. I turned back toward Dawnita's.

"Where's Sean?" Elvin asked when I arrived back under Dawnita's awning.

"I think he's making love to the cannon."

"At least he's not making love inside the cannon. I'd kill him if he did that."

"Thanks for the lesson," I said. "I'm off to put on my makeup."

"Good luck," Elvin declared. "And remember what I said: you're doing it for the audience. No matter how bad it gets around here-how muddy, or gossipy, or miserable-you can never forget that you're doing it for them."

I promised him that I would remember. "By the way," I said, "what do you say to a circus performer before a show? Break a leg?"

Elvin smiled at my question even as I winced at my faux pas. "Not really," he said, slapping his thighs. "We just say, 'Go get 'em!'"

Facing the Fire 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 running desperately behind the cart are those well-dressed, well-trained public servants of the pyromaniacal: the Clown Town Volunteer Fire Department. At the sight of this band of Keystone Firemen, the children in the seats start clapping their hands. The band perks up with the sprightly "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." Speeding the long way around the track, the clowns arrive in the center ring just as the smoke reaches the top of the tent and an old-lady clown sticks her head out of the roof. The firemen come to a sudden stop, the driver does a somersault over the handle of the cart, while the rider in the rear flops off the ladder and lands facedown in the gra.s.s. The drummer crashes his cymbals. The old lady spreads her arms in dismay. Putting out this fire will not be easy, for despite all those pairs of oversized shoes none of the clowns can stay on his feet. Still they rise and approach the house.

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 p.i.s.s 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual men who were running from convention and needed a mask behind which to hide. These days, gay men apparently no longer need clowning, and as for older performers, with the long hours, low pay (starting at $180 a week), and lack of respect from the other show members, most would rather tote their children's rigging or stay home and work at Wal-Mart. That leaves clowning to kids.

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 funniest of the bunch, who wore flip-flops on his feet and a ponytail on his head, who ate his vegetarian meals with chopsticks, drank his generic sodas out of a plastic martini gla.s.s, and hoped to translate his wacky character, Arpeggio, into a Las Vegas nightclub act. There was Marty, a.k.a. the Village Idiot, who had the most energy, the loudest mouth, and the largest number of radio-station and iron-man b.u.mper stickers on his costume trunk (the most prominent: YOU GOTTA BE TOUGH IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE STUPID) and who hoped to save enough extra money doing cherry pie to join the cast of Up with People. Finally there was Jerry, alias Ace, a four-foot-seven-inch dwarf whose father had been on the Ringling show and who in the midst of all the oddities, anxieties, and kinky obsessions of his mainstream dropout colleagues was the cleanest, preppiest, and probably the most likely to be able to find and keep a real "townie" job. In a world where close shaving is a job requirement, Arpeggio usually had shaving soap in his ears and a missed tuft or two on his throat; Marty, the Village Idiot, often just plain forgot; but it was Jerry who always had an electric razor and who earned the indelible nickname the Neck Shaving Dwarf by personally taking the responsibility of making sure everyone in the Alley went to work each week with no unsightly stubble on the back of his neck.

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 "f.u.c.k you," "Suck me," or "How about a d.i.c.k in the a.s.s?" 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 beginning I decided that in these rehearsals, as in most situations around the lot, I would keep quiet as a way of fitting in. After lying low for a while, however, I decided that my silence seemed awkward and that I should wade into these brainstorming sessions. How about having the clowns do such and such? I shyly suggested. Never tried. How about having a clown do so and so? Ignored. In one session Marty and Rob, the two Young Turks, were practicing different versions of sliding down a ladder. When they asked for comments I stepped off the ring curb and said, "I hate to say this but it does look better if you do it closer to the house." The response was an appalled silence. "f.u.c.k you," Marty blurted. "Go away."

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 cannon. Also, in the first half we had to do what was known as a walk-around, in which the clowns walk around the track performing short gags for several sections while the prop crew readies the next act. In Wilmington, North Carolina, these walk-arounds sp.a.w.ned a change in my att.i.tude. All day the boys had been abnormally quiet, almost conspiratorially so. Then the whispers started. Rob went to Marty, then to Jerry. Jerry went to Brian, who then went back to Marty. A plan was being hatched.

The show started as usual. The early gags went as planned, but I sucked up some baby powder during the firehouse gag and went back to my trailer to get something to drink. Minutes before the walk-around I returned to the Alley to pick up my prop. It wasn't there. I went to the side of the tent where the performers wait to enter. It wasn't there either. By that time the walk-around had begun. Nellie Ivanov was just returning from her cradle act. She looked at me sympathetically. I felt a tinge of guilt. Earlier she had told me that no matter how many acts she had or how injured she felt she never missed a performance. Here I was missing something as simple as a walk-around.

I headed back to the Alley. As soon as the whistle blew Marty appeared from the tent and raised his hands as if to say, "Where were you?" This struck me as a little odd. During a walk-around there is usually no time to see what the other clowns are doing, much less whether they are even there. Back in the Alley the hounding started. Brian asked me where I left the prop. Marty asked me when I last saw it. Jerry thrust his finger in my face and said I would have to pay him twenty dollars if it didn't turn up. "It will turn up," I a.s.sured them. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Marty said they had found my gag inside the tent and had hid it to teach me a lesson. I wasn't exactly sure what the lesson was, since many props were left in the tent. But the lesson, I suspected, had less to do with the prop and more to do with letting me know who was in charge.

"The Alley has a certain way of doing things," Marty said. "If you don't do what you're supposed to do, if you let us down, you're going to be made aware of it. We have to be able to count on one another. We have to work together."

It was after I received this little speech that I knew the only way to be accepted into this group was to start speaking up for myself. All pantomime aside, it was time to become a talking clown.

Once the firemen are in the ring the clowns set about trying to put out the blaze. Inside the firehouse, I rapidly strip off my old-man pajama top, slip on black trousers, a red jacket, and a metal fire hat and run out to join the chaos. The first stunt involves a hose. Once in the open I retrieve a coiled-up section of hose from Buck, spin it in the air like a la.s.so, and toss it toward Arpeggio, who takes the end that slaps him in the face and tries to hook it up to a five-foot-high fire hydrant. Just as he approaches the giant hydrant, however, it moves. Arpeggio takes two steps to the left; the fire hydrant takes two steps to the right. Finally, as an exasperated Arpeggio storms toward the fixture, the hydrant spits out a stream of water, rises up on the shoulders of the dwarf inside, and sprints out of the ring. At this point the clowns have had two run-ins so far-one with the cart, one with the hydrant-and the inanimate objects have won both. The audience could not be more pleased.

"People have a negative image of clowns these days," Elmo said to me at the beginning of the year. A fifteen-year veteran of the circus, Elmo, a short blond idiot savant of a clown, designed the gags, built the props, then left the performing to us as he traveled one week ahead of the show doing advance publicity. Like the other clowns on the show, he was temperamental and moody; unlike the others, however, he had a clear philosophy of clowning. "Krusty the Klown on The Simpsons, Homey the Clown on In Living Color, even Stephen King's It are all maniacal and just plain odd. They never do anything funny. If we can do something funny, then we are doing our jobs. Remember, most people come to the circus to see clowns and elephants. If that's the case, the elephants better be big and the clowns better be funny."

For clowns, being funny means being silly. The firehouse gag is one of a dozen or so traditional gags that have been around the American circus since early in the twentieth century. (The most famous clown routine of all, the overstuffed clown car, was actually first performed on the Cole Bros. Circus with a specially constructed Studebaker in the 1950s.) The key to the firehouse gag, Elmo explained, is the incompetence of the clowns, who can't even perform simple tasks that every child in the audience can do. If the clowns can't ride in their cart, if they can't even hook up a hose, woe is the woman who stands on the house screaming for the clowns to save her baby.

With the fire hydrant out of the ring and the hose lying on the ground, the clowns decide to use it for some fun. Marty and Rob grab the ends of the hose and the three of us watching from the side come skipping to the center and perform an elaborate jump rope-one, two, three, four-until we get tripped up in midair and go tumbling to the ground like living dominoes. Left holding the rope, the two clowns on the end then go racing in opposite directions until the hose between them recoils like a rubber band and flings them to the ground. With each fall the audience laughs louder. The act is building to its blowoff.

"The firehouse is a slapstick gag," Elmo explained. "A 'slapstick' is something you hit someone on the rear with and it makes a loud noise. During the Renaissance, the commedia dell'arte troupes used a pig bladder on a stick to make that sound. Today slapstick is just another form of that-a kick in the behind, a slap to the face, a bucket over the head."

Indeed, once the clowns pick themselves off the ground and start to a.s.sault the house the gag moves inexorably toward the one action that always got a laugh: the bucket of water on the head of a clown. Before that, however, most of the clowns end up on the ground at least several more times. Four of us run toward the house and get knocked off our feet by an opening door. One person tries to climb the ladder only to be punched by the lady. And in the most dramatic incident of the act, Arpeggio enters the ring waving a four-foot ax, trips, swings around, and accidentally decapitates a seemingly helpful fireman. After a moment the audience realizes the head is fake and the fireman is only a dummy on top of the dwarf. Still the horror thrills.

"It's violence," Elmo explained. "Violence is funny to people if it happens to somebody else. They are not laughing with you, they are laughing at you. Let's say you hate your boss or your teacher, and we have a gag where an authority figure is picked on. People love it. The audience lives vicariously through you. They can step out of their own parameters of good behavior. Why do you think Road Runner is so popular? Or Tom and Jerry? It's because we like to watch other people getting hit. Clowns are like that. We are living cartoons."

It was this transition from person to cartoon that was the most interesting and challenging for me. As a teenage actor, I was taught to be realistic; as a mime, I tried to be reflective; but as a clown, I had to learn to be exaggerated, in a sense unreal, beyond gender, beyond human, beyond constraint. Running around the ring in the firehouse gag day after day, week after week, I slowly began to make this transition, but to do it properly I had to get beyond the confines of my own body. The shoes helped in this matter; they were caricaturish and surreal. The costume helped; it was wider and taller than what any conventional person would wear. But the key to feeling less like a human and more like a clown, indeed the key to looking less like a person and more like a cartoon, was the same. In the end, it all came down to the face.

"Take a dab of white with your fingers. More than that, cover the tip until it's dripping off. Good. Now take another finger. And a third."

It was a little over two weeks before the season would begin when Elmo came to my apartment in Washington, D.C., to help me design my face. Dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, I sat before a mirror on the ottoman in my living room. Elmo lent me a woman's knee-high stocking to pull over my head and hold my hair in place.