Tinsel and Sawdust : Life Under--and Behind-- the Big Top When Circus Vargas Comes to Town

“The Left Coast of Paradise: California and the American Heart,” from which this is excerpted, will be published this week.

WHEN I WAS a child I went to the circus every spring. I looked forward to it. I also dreaded it. I was scared that a tightrope walker would plunge down onto the ground and explode like an overripe plum. I was terrified that a trapeze artist would miss her catch on the swing and sail into a far wall where her head would smash like a cherry bomb, or that a tiger would chew up a trainer--suit and entrails and hair--like I had seen an owl in a film chew up a mouse. Before the circus and afterward, my dreams would fill up with brightly colored images, like those in my comic books.

As I walked onto the grounds of the Circus Vargas, all that came back: the excitement, the longing and the fear. I recalled what had frightened and thrilled me as a young girl. Faster-than-the-eye spins, long teeth and sharp fangs. Mascaraed eyes. Open claws.

You remember bare skin. The women hang upside down, streaming their long hair like romantic fairy-tale princesses. They pull upward and reach across empty space, even as they hang by an arm, an ankle. Biceps, triceps, deltoids--every muscle bunches, ripples, knots, flattens. Spotlights wash the pale limbs paler and intensify the scarlets, violets, aquas. Spangle-encrusted fabrics sparkle. The eyes are exaggerated. The smiles, too. I could see why, at 10, I had awakened from dreams of the circus, sweating and terrified, and why at the actual performances I would often feel dizzy and sick to my stomach.

“It’s older than Jesus,” Congo said, meaning the circus. Congo was sloshing a gray string mop up and down in a bucket of sudsy pine-scented disinfectant. Putting down the mop, he leaned against “WOMEN,” lettered in gold paint on one side of the red 18-seat rolling outhouse built onto a 16-wheeler. He drove the vehicle. He cleaned it and slept in a space above its cab.

Circus Vargas had set up that morning. Men had been pounding steel sledgehammers on tent stakes since sunup. People dressed for office work, mothers and a few fathers pushing strollers and holding toddlers’ hands, and whole classes of schoolchildren stood watching the usually vacant lot on which the circus was rising. Behind the chicken-wire fence were 13 elephants, 7 llamas, 2 camels and 30 horses and ponies. Next to the larger animals under a canopy was a children’s petting zoo, with geese, ducks, guinea hens, sheep, lambs, goats and one black yak.

Camels munched hay. Behind them, hobbled at the legs with hunks of logging chain, stood one long row of elephants. The elephants’ big bones seemed to move under skins that were no more than shrouds of ashen fog. They lifted hay with their trunks and tossed the long stems back onto their shoulders. A hatchet-faced man in blue jeans and canvas work gloves passed a hose to each elephant, one after another, along the line. Each elephant grabbed the hose with its trunk, then turned the nozzle into its mouth, clamped down on it and drank. A roustabout pushed a hay-filled red wheelbarrow between the lines of llamas and elephants. Sweat funneled down the hollow of his spine and ran down his tanned sides.

I asked Congo how he liked working the circus. “I like it fine. It’s like everything. All the world’s a pretty picture till you walk in. Circus ain’t no different. Out in front a picture looks good.” I nodded agreement. “And the world’s the same--pretty. In front. There’s sadness in the world. Down inside it. I got my own sadness. But it’s not here.” He pointed toward the red-and-blue Big Top. On all four 56-foot center poles American flags blustered in the breeze.

He asked if I would like him to make me a cotton candy. I said, “No, thank you,” and he said, “You and I got in common that our mamas taught us good manners.” He asked if I was going to go to the circus. I said I was. He said, “This is a real good show this year. Goes past so fast you think it’s been a dream.”

Congo is correct. The circus is older than Jesus. The Romans, 3,500 years ago, screamed through chariot races in the Circus Maximus, whooping while half-naked men battled hungry beasts. When a Roman satirist said, panem et circenses --”bread and circuses”--he meant that all most people want out of life is food and entertainment.

I asked Congo if he knew the nuns who traveled with the show. Sister Priscilla? He nodded. I followed his directions to their trailer and introduced myself to sisters Lorelei, Joel and Priscilla.

The sisters all work in the wardrobe truck and as concessionaires. They eat and sleep, work, study and pray together in their one-room house trailer. Next door is the tiny chapel housed in a Chevy 310 van.

The Little Sisters of Jesus live in groups of three or four. They do manual labor to support themselves and live among nomads and migrants. These three have chosen the circus people as their mission.

“Contemplatives in the midst of the world,” says Sister Joel, smiling broadly. “Rolling hot dogs into buns all day is an activity that encourages contemplation.”

Of the three, Sister Priscilla was the most familiar with the life they committed themselves to. Tanned and slight, with dark eyes and dark, graying hair pulled behind her chambray scarf, she speaks in accented English. Her father’s family, she explains, are Swiss and have been circus people for five generations.

“It’s a rough life, especially for the roustabouts. These men don’t have family,” Sister Joel explained. “They are often completely out of contact with their parents and sisters and brothers. They come and go from one show to another.”

THE DURASKIN POLYESTER tent keeps out light. Even on a sunny afternoon, it is dark inside the tent. Twelve spotlights are set on platforms 20 feet up. The spots focus on the action in each of the three rings. The beams cross the dark tent and flit up spangled legs and down sparkling backs.

Ringmaster Joe Pon’s whistle shrilled across the tent. The lights came up. Pon strutted across the ringmaster’s platform, lifting his aqua top hat high. The audience of 5,000 cheered. He crooned through his hand-held mike, “La-dies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” his voice a candied basso, “astonishing, brilliant, magical, mystifying. . . .” He announced David Pol: “His temperamental, tempestuous tigers transcend terrestrial three-ring tradition!”

Sixteen Bengal tigers came slinking into the center ring. Spotlights struck the black transverse stripes rippling across their tawny pelts. The tigers spat and prowled. Pol ordered them to sail through flaming hoops. He snapped his black whip, and the tigers leaped atop their stands. Pol commanded poses and the tigers assumed prim Victorian postures, ears at attention. The audience oohed, then aahed.

A 10-year-old girl in the front row held her nose. “I always hold my nose at tigers,” she said. Her blond hair had been rolled into Shirley Temple curls. She pressed the popcorn box between her knees and rested her hands, covered with dime-store rhinestone rings, in the lap of her skirt. A dark-haired Latina in the next chair kept saying to her, “I think I’m going to be sick, Sabrina,” and Sabrina answered, “Not me. I’m having too much fun.”

“La-dies and gentlemen, boys and girls. The astonishing aerial ballet of nine brave and beautiful aerial artists daringly disregarding danger--the Web!”

Nine women strutted out, three for each of the three rings. Spotlights glittered off their bikinis. Each paused before a rope and kicked off her high heels. Like monkeys, the spinners climbed 30 feet up the ropes. Once they had reached the top, the nine tuxedoed attendants below grabbed a rope and took up their positions. The men whipped the ropes, the women spun, faster and faster. Sweat slid off their muscled backs and legs and arms and their made-up faces.

The dark-haired child let go her popcorn box and squeezed Sabrina’s wrist. “I’m scared.”

“Not me, “ Sabrina said, and shook off the hand.

The temperature inside the tent went into the 90s. The yeasty smell of the audience blended with popcorn oil, hot-dog spices and tiger musk. Thirty feet in the air, where on a hot day the temperature can reach 130 degrees, the women turned, twirled, twisted, then hung upside-down by their ankles.

Relief cut through the audience as the nine spinners shinnied back to earth. Clapping did not stop until Pon announced the chimps and bears. Suited, hatted and shod, the chimps sat quietly in straight-backed chairs while the bears, wearing hats and shirt fronts, pedaled unicycles. The audience relaxed.

Benny Williams rode out standing astride his elephant, Anna May. A leopard-skin headband held back his shoulder-length blond hair. Over his shoulder he carried petite Lynn Pope, looking helpless and lissome. Her long hair cascaded down over Benny’s bare chest. Atop Anna May, the duo paraded to the center ring. Benny lifted Lynn high above his head. She lay back on his upraised palms as if floating.

A handler led in Benny’s leopard, Nirvanah. Nirvanah pawed the sawdust. Nirvanah growled. Lynn stood, legs apart, on the elephant’s back. Nirvanah jumped to the elephant’s shoulders. Lynn knelt, pursed her lips, crooned to Nirvanah, petted her, rubbed her, cooed and called to her: “Nice kitty.”

Benny stood downring, chest out, admiring Lynn, his elephant and leopard. He extended his arms and coaxed the spotted cat down. Nirvanah hesitated, rubbed her muzzle against Lynn. Benny urged the leopard forward with his hands. Nirvanah leaped off Anna May and landed with her forepaws on Benny’s bare and hairy chest. The audience shrieked.

At the finale, the elephant curled her trunk around Lynn’s tiny waist and then slid her past the sawed-off tusks and took her ankle into the pink, salivating mouth. Lynn dangled upside down, hair drooping toward the sawdust while Anna May galloped the circumference of the ring, running faster with each round. The crowd, awed and quiet, could hear the elephant’s feet thud against the concrete.

Congo is correct when he says the show goes by like a dream. It is a tantalizing phantasmagoria. Spins, long teeth and sharp fangs. Claws. Twinkling sparkles and spangles. Bare human skin. All apparently meaningless and yet just about to converge on some triumphant meaning.

Each performance ends with the Grand Parade in which the entire roster of performers makes a farewell circuit of the football-field-size tent. Caparisoned elephants, blond-maned horses, white-faced clowns, aerialists, jugglers, fire-eaters, magicians--all waving goodby to the cheering audience.

Then, dripping sweat, the performers exit, stripping off their spangle-encrusted costumes as they go. They head straight out of the tent into their vehicles, already hooked up and ready to go.

WHILE BLEACHERS ARE packed up, rigging taken down and the gigantic tent struck, the circus acts push on. By 11 that night they are well along the route. Every few miles “confidence arrows”--sheets of bright paper with black arrows--lead the circus caravan toward the next site.

At the next circus grounds a white cross etched in the asphalt marks the spot where the center pole will rise. East of it will be the midway, main street for the public. To the south will sit the cook house, and west from it a double file of performer’s quarters begins to take shape. They are “smashing in.” By 3 a.m. the village is nearly complete. The miles traveled may be 10 or 200. The drive may take an hour or all night. “When I’m in my truck and driving, I always feel really happy,” said Lynn Pope, trapeze artist and partner of Benny Williams. “I think I like just the process of going places. On arrival, even if it’s the middle of the night, or almost, the first thing you look for is a coin-op laundry and a grocery store.”

During a typical week the circus’ 300 animals, its star performers, its technical assistants, maintenance and concession staff perform 16 separate times and move the entire show twice. Forty-six weeks after opening day Circus Vargas will have traveled more than 20,000 miles and performed 800 times.

Circus Vargas is 12 years old. It is one of the three largest tented circuses left in North America. After Ringling’s began to perform only in buildings, the tented circus went on the decline. But now, circus aficionados say, it is coming back. Two other tented circuses--Carson & Barnes and Cole Brothers-Clyde Beatty--remain.

It takes more than 100 vehicles--campers, house trailers, vans, pickup trucks--to move the circus. Two full-sized diesel flatbeds carry the 17-ton Big Top in 10 canvas-wrapped bags. Four semis haul the four giant center poles, 136 support poles, and 500 stakes (made from car axles) that secure the poles to ropes. Another semi moves the two Clark 125 Bobcat forklifts and a Rube Goldberg stake-pounder with which three workers can pound the four-foot stakes into almost any surface. Other trucks haul electric generators, spotlights, bleachers, fences, folding chairs, concession stands, ice-cream wagons, the ticket wagon and the Bubble Bounce trampoline.

IN NATURAL LIGHT, close up and out of the three rings, you have trouble connecting the performers with the costumed daredevils who swing, climb, ride, hang by ankles and suspend 180-pound men from their teeth. The performers look shorter, slighter-- ordinary.

The silver knee-high boots showed wear, creases and scuffs. They had black marks and were ground down at the heel. Jugglers’ royal-blue tight-fitting trousers were wash-worn polyester with the same nubbins, pile and pulls along the fabric one sees on any matron’s stretch pants. Sequins were coming loose. Seams had ripped. Dried sweat left white half-moon salt stains on dark jackets and tunics.

Lynn Pope was born in Waukegan, Ill. She got a BFA in theater and film from the University of Wisconsin. She trained as a gymnast, a dancer, a mime and a clown. Her background is typical of that of many women in the larger touring circuses, in Ringling’s Red and Blue units, the Cole Brothers-Clyde Beatty Circus, in Carson and Barnes’ Circus. She had not planned on a circus career.

“It just happened. I’d wanted to be a dancer. But at 5-foot-3 I’m too short. After college I got involved in the Festival of Fools in Europe. Then I came to San Francisco and worked with Make-A-Circus. After that I worked for three years as a Ringling showgirl. During that time I decided, ‘I can do more than be a showgirl.’ I put together a trapeze act.”

Pope auditioned the act for Ringling’s. Satin, the first black female aerialists ever to perform in Ringling’s, won out. “I auditioned for Circus Vargas, was hired and came on. I left my boyfriend at Ringling’s.”

Pope tutors two children from one of the circus families. Vanessa Thomas, one of the nine web-spinners, with a master’s degree from Temple University, also tutors two children.

“The Circus Vargas kids,” Thomas explained, “use mostly Calvert Correspondence School materials. Every course comes in a complete package, with workbooks, a teacher’s guide, the textbooks, right down to the last little pencil and pad of paper.” Although third-, fourth- and even fifth-generation circus families still tour through Europe and North and South America, Pope said, “the circus family is deteriorating.” More and more children leave circus homes, go to college and choose settled professions.

Circus Vargas currently boasts several second- and third-generation families nonetheless. One is the family of 55-year-old Rex Williams, the Boss Elephant Man. His 32-year-old son, Benny, performs essentially the same Tarzan-and-Jane elephant-and-leopard act that Benny’s mother and her father (who ran away and joined a circus when he was 14) first routined. In Benny’s teens he replaced his grandfather in the act.

Benny Williams lives in a furniture van he has converted into an on-the-road home for himself, Anna May and Nirvanah. When I asked if the van didn’t smell pretty high on hot days, Benny said, “Sure! It’s a cozy smell. It means I’m working.”

Rex Williams, his second wife, Eva, their 14- and 19-year-old daughters, Renee and Darlene, and Benny perform together. Rex and Eva present and train the elephants and horses. Their daughters ride the horses. Benny changes out of his loincloth into a tuxedo and puts the llamas through a circle dance.

Head showgirl Dione Paray is a graduate of the University of Arizona. Those who fail to differentiate between circus and carnival annoy her. “People who don’t know anything about the circus think of us as ‘carnies,’ as drifters. Circus performers, generally, are just not like that.” Paray stresses that a strong sense of community, much like that in small-town middle America, binds circus performers together.

“Most of us are pretty humdrum people,” Thomas said. “We don’t do anything particularly wild in our personal lives. When you have to get up in the morning like I do and face 11 Samoyeds barking for their food, you don’t do anything crazy the night before.”

The Circus Vargas women watch a lot of television. They shop for groceries. They cook and bake. Write letters. Work out. But some of the tent and maintenance crew, the prop men and animal keepers, appeared to live more chaotic lives. Many do not stay long. I had stood outside the Big Top’s back door and seen two tough-looking men open beers during an afternoon show’s intermission. One of the executive staff walked up and spoke harshly to the drinkers. “You can do that on your own time,” he said. “Get rid of it. Now!” The men grumbled and swore, but they poured the beer onto the ground.

In all but two or three trailers, shades are pulled down. For the roustabouts, last night was the first night’s sleep since the last stand. Snores rasp from the two dormitory trucks even while the odor of coffee wafts from the cook house. The chalkboard menu offers navy bean soup, eggs, hamburgers. I sat on a plastic-wrapped bale of hay with a sloe-eyed tent crewman. He bought me a Coke. “I’ve given up sugar,” he said, laughing as he lit up two inches of cigar stub with a kitchen match. “One day in my 20s I was in a cafe eating my fried eggs and I said to myself, ‘Do I want to do 9-to-5 today? Hell, no.’ I been on this circus two years now. I’m a cop-out. This isn’t the real world. No phone bills, no utilities, no house payment, no wife or children. But I never much liked the real world when I was in it.” I asked about the men who work with him. “About half, maybe, were something and the other half ‘s been drifters all their life--people that can’t settle down. It beats the gutter.” I asked if he met women and took them out. He did. “Mostly the townies that come around. I met one here last year, and we had a dinner and a nice dinner wine. It keeps you civilized. Gets out your bottle of Christmas after-shave.”

What did he imagine himself doing in 20 years? “I’m 34 now. I hope I get moving out of my blood. Hope I’ll stick some place. Maybe raise a family. I get lonesome. I wish I had a place.”

We watched the elephants, the camels and llamas. “See, over there?” He pointed toward the tent site. Two men, stripped to the waist and sweating, brought 15-pound sledgehammers down on tent stakes. “See how he can’t keep that hammer going smoothly? Look at the next guy. He’s got that smooth easy action. He just brings that hammer back and around, back and around. You can tell the temporaries from the regulars by how they handle that hammer.”

Terry, another roustabout, shares with four others the back end of the trailer truck that carries the circus sound studio. “The circus makes use of every space,” says Terry, “just as if it were a sailing ship.”

Unlike performers and staff, roustabouts have no contracts. “They could fire me today, or I could leave today. There are no firm strings.” Most of the men, he says, “are young guys, itinerants, wanderers. You don’t get many, anymore, of the typical kid, run-away-to-join-the-circus types.” In his 50s, an Oxford graduate in sciences and economic history, Terry left his wife, children, his job in an English ad agency, home in the English countryside, and came to the States. “I had not liked Americans in Europe, but I came here to California and adored it.”

A fat white duck, penned at the back of a camper, pecks corn, oblivious to the llama trotting past. Clotheslines hang between the trailers. A new rock hit drifts out of several doors, mixing with shouted orders, the growl of engines and the pinging of 15-pound sledgehammers driving stakes.

From “The Left Coast of Paradise: California and the American Heart,” by Judith Moore. Copyright 1987 by Judith Moore. Reprinted by arrangement with Soho Press.