The Circus

The Circus was a pretty fun place.

I had been working for the Hair Club for Men in New York, pestering bald guys over the phone. The company had decided to move the call center I worked at from New York to Florida, and I’d been let go with a pretty good severance package. I then spent a number of months riding out unemployment. One day in August, I found that I was out of cash, and had no real job prospects. In the process of looking for a job, I’d seen a listing for something called ‘Tent Crew’ for the Big Apple Circus. But the interview was up in Walden, New York, which I had no way of getting to. Sigh. The very next week, though, something called ‘House Crew’ was listed, and the interview for that was in the city.

I met a tiny woman named Ellie, who was the Assistant Head of the House Crew, which was responsible for running the house during shows: seating people, dealing with customer problems, cleaning the seats between and after shows. House Crew also helped to put up and take down the tent upon arriving at and leaving the show lots. Ellie did her best to paint a bad picture, talking about maybe having to work for twenty straight hours or more, living in trailers and eating in a converted semi, but when she asked me if I wanted to work for her, I didn’t hesitate at all. I needed a job, I was tired of New York, and it was the circus, for chrissake!

Six days later, I took a train up to Walden, and took a van full of other new hires onto the between-tour home of the Big Apple Circus. I got assigned a room, with a guy named Vlad, and experienced my first instance of loathing on sight. I also met a guy named Ole, who is still the only cat I know with throat tattoos, three of them, one over his adams-apple. He also had ‘your’ tattooed onto the knuckles of his right hand, and ‘ruin’ on the knuckles of the left. But that was later. Ole was cleaning out the room, which was a stack of three beds and some storage drawers in an area the size of a small walk in closet, tacked onto the ass end of a very old trailer, which had four other ‘rooms’.

Over the next week and a half, I learned the basics of the job. How to read the tickets and seat people properly, what each section of the house was called, how much shit to take from a patron before handing them off to the Ramp Boss, or to Ellie. I helped take down the tent for the first time, which was called a ‘load-out’, on a night that I recall lasting somewhere around 250 years. Later, a friend of mine came to work at the BAC, and I recall watching her doggedly keeping up on her first load-out, looking like she’d made a huge mistake. But she did keep up, and after the first time, a load-out, while not easy, wasn’t as hard. Later, she had told me that she had made a silent promise to herself not to quit before a particular temp did. She’d chosen that particular guy because he only had one arm. And he didn’t quit. Which was at least part of her dismay that night.

Load-outs, where we took down the tent, and load-ins, where we put up the tent, got to be, well, not easy, but predictable. You got to know how far along you were, and about how much time was left until the job was done. Like washing dishes, after a while, you didn’t have to think much, just let your body do the work. The worst part was actually during the last show before the load-out started. We’d do two shows, and then tear down. And half way through the second half of the second show, I’d always get this sick feeling, knowing that when the show was over we still had eight to twelve hours of hard labor to go. But then, once the load-out started, I was fine. It was the anticipation of hard work that sucked, not the work itself.

Ellie, who’d worked as an acrobat at quite a few circus’, would talk about working at the Circus Knie in Europe, and how their crew, with a show that was twice our size and included a menagerie, for gods sake, would load-out in two hours, and load-in in four. Of course, they had a crew of Turkish guys who didn’t do anything else at all, and handed down the job from father to son, and we had a crew of freaks and weirdo’s who were all trying to avoid something, but still, two hours is pretty impressive. The fastest load-out I’d taken part in was six hours, start to finish.

Loading out and in was the crucible which decided who was going to make it at the show. It didn’t matter what kind of an idiot you were at other times, for the most part, as long as you pulled your weight when it was required. Didn’t matter how much somebody hated you, they had at least a little respect for you, if you could pull your weight. Vlad, the roommate who disliked me almost as much as I did him, was a perfect example. We’d jumped from Walden down to Reston, VA for the first leg of the tour. Vlad and another guy had been told to set up safety gates at the top of the grandstand. Some short time afterward, Jesus, who was in charge of us, popped up and asked if anyone’d seen Vlad, because only about half of the gates were up. I looked at the gates that were set up, and said, “Okay, here’s my guess. You told him to set up the gates that were piled over there, and when he got done with those, he wandered off, and now he’s scratching his balls somewhere.” And both Jesus and I looked across the still-unfinished tent, to see Vlad, staring open-mouthed at the guys spreading sawdust in the ring, with one hand thrust deep into the crotch of his sweat pants. Really going to town on himself, too. Jesus and I looked at each other and started to laugh. “Geez, man, how’d you know?” Jesus said, wiping away tears. Vlad did make it through to the Lincoln Center load-in, but quit less than a week into the three month engagement, partly because Ellie answered one of his complaints by telling him that he was an idiot, and nobody liked him.

I did my share of stupid stuff, I must admit. I was promoted to Ramp Boss, in charge of half of the House Crew during show times. It got to be a regular thing where I’d get pissed at someone during a load-out, for being lazy, for not doing the right thing or disappearing into their rooms while the rest of us were working, and I’d lose my shit at them. It got to be an expected thing, part of the checklist of the load-out. Take down the grandstand, load the risers, take apart the center ring, and listen to Carter scream insults at a co-worker. I’m not particularly proud of it, and the only thing I can say in my defense is that it was always some jackass who was already close to being fired, but that’s the best I can say. I still feel like an idiot remembering it.

Then there was the time I fell asleep on the floor of my room on the first day of the load-in for Boston. I woke up when someone opened the door, and said, “I think he’s dead, man.” The worst part of that was the ‘not-angry-just-very-disappointed’ dressing down I got from Felipe, the tent-master. Not even my Mom’s ever made me feel that bad.