Free Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus by Bruce Feiler

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 pussy,” 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, ‘God, 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.