Kris Kristo had a certain way he went about preparing to go out. First he pulled on his skintight white jeans, his white T-shirt with the pack of Marlboros in the sleeve, his satin tiger-skin vest. Next he slicked back his hair, lightly spritzing it with Brut and gently tugging a few strands over his dark brown eyes and the small seductive scar across his left eyebrow. Finally, on special nights like this, he applied another layer of black spray paint on his well-worn biker shoes, giving them a five-cent patent-leather shine. Once primped, he would slowly make his way down the trailer line collecting his posse for the evening prowl: first Sean, in a neon-pink shirt and cowboy boots; then Danny in purple silk top and black Ferragamos; finally me in orange Gap button-down and shiny penny loafers. On the surface I looked as if I didn’t belong with this group, yet I had two things that Kris Kristo usually needed for a night out. First, transportation; and second, prophylaxis.

“Hey, Bruce,” Kris said when he arrived at my RV, “mind if I borrow a condom?”

My first week on the show I was overcome by the grind. With no day off and no break from the routine, all I could talk about was how tired I was, how much work there was, how hard this life was to lead. I got sick. I didn’t know when to sleep. I lost several pounds. My life was turned upside down. By the second week, when we moved from central Florida to the seaboard coast of Georgia, I noticed that when people asked how I was doing I no longer spoke only about the grind. I developed a routine. I ate breakfast in midmorning, my milk no longer frozen. I ate lunch in early afternoon, with my makeup to follow. I ate dinner after the 7:30 show. By the third week, when we jumped to North Carolina to play the Azalea Festival in Wilmington and Camp Lejeune around payday, I began to look forward to performing. I no longer missed my New York Times or MacNeil/Lehrer. I felt naked without my makeup. In short, I began to feel at home.

The real reason was my neighbors. Any fears I had about not being accepted because I was a writer were quickly quelled. First, instead of trying to conceal their true identities, many people on the show flocked to my trailer in those opening weeks anxious to confess their deepest vices and gravest misdeeds (not to mention a few federal crimes). Their motivation, it turns out, was simple: they were worried that someone else would tell me first. In the span of several weeks, from mid-March to early April, I had intimate, almost confessional conversations with nearly every performer on the show and had already begun to develop a sense of the multilayered and sometimes dark personal fabric that ties members of the circus world so closely to one another.

Second, instead of viewing me as an intruder, the people on the show reached out to embrace me once they realized I was prepared to do the show alongside them every day. Nellie and Kristo Ivanov, Bulgarian aerialists and parents of nineteen-year-old Kris and his younger brother, Georgi, lent me aspirin, fed me soup, and laughed along with me as I stumbled, eyes agog, from one shocking circus discovery to another. Pablo Rodríguez, fifth-generation acrobat and retired father of Danny and all his seven siblings and half siblings, put his arm around me every afternoon and told me how much I was worth that day: sometimes I was merely a twenty-five-cent clown, other days a million bucks. Dawnita Bale, Elvin’s twin and owner of the show’s largest collection of wigs, shared her daily complaints about the weather, the drive, or the general agony of deciding what shoes to wear in the ring.

The closer I got to the people around me, the more I discovered the unspoken social order that dominated their lives. In the 1950s, Dawnita told me, married performers were kept away from single performers, single men were kept away from single women (“accidental meetings at the picture shows were not tolerated”), and all performers had to sign back in by 11 P.M. Performers were not allowed to socialize with “roustabouts” (the former name for workers), and roustabouts were not allowed even to speak to performers unless they were spoken to first. On our show, the rules were less rigid, but still firm. Performers were advised to be friendly with the workingmen, but not to become friends with them. Animal people tended to socialize with animal people; performers with performers; clowns with clowns. Particularly crimped by these rules were the single male performers. Since there were few single women in the circus (and none in their late teens or twenties), since most of these guys easily tired of watching borrowed videos with their parents, and since all they seemed to want to do anyway was get out, get drunk, and get laid, the single men in the show banded together most evenings in one common pursuit: chasing townie girls. It was on one of these nights in Camp Lejeune that I ended up in an unlikely clash of wills with the Human Cannonball on the grounds of the Marine Corps base.

As it happened, I didn’t want to drive my RV that night. The ground was muddy and I didn’t want to get stuck. The day had already been unlucky. Earlier, two hundred Marines had come to the lot to challenge two elephants to a tug-of-war in a mammoth publicity stunt and battle of the sexes (though referred to as bulls, all the elephants on the show were female). At the start of the face-off the two hundred Marines lay flat on the ground on either side of the rope just inches from Pete and Helen, the pride of Fred Logan’s herd. As soon as one of the clowns ordered the bout to begin, the leathernecks popped to their feet and started grunting, straining, and pulling the rope with admirable esprit de corps. Within seconds, just when the GIs seemed to be gaining the advantage, the rope suddenly split in the middle of the Marines and ricocheted up the line, sending the entire company to the ground, singeing the hands of nearly two dozen men, and burning off large chunks of the neck and face of eight unfortunate USMC warriors, who had to be sent to the emergency room. For their part, Pete and Helen hardly flinched but forwarded their regards.

Instead of driving in my RV, we took a cab to a place called Club 108, an unassuming cinder-block building on the outskirts of town just past the longest strip of machismo—auto-parts shops, gun dealerships, dirty-magazine outlets—that I had ever seen. It was four dollars for members, six dollars for nonmembers. Kris tried to talk our way in by offering free circus tickets, but they refused. “Show us your IDs and give us your six bucks,” the manager barked. As we did, one of the bouncers, a man with steroid-inflated arms, tight blue jeans, and suspenders (no shirt), pushed through the line. “Get the fuck out of the way,” he said. “I’ve got a knife.” Two particularly burly guests were herded out of the bar, followed by a third with blood spewing from his nose, which in the course of the evening had been thoughtfully relocated alongside his ear.

Inside it looked as if we had suddenly been transferred from eastern North Carolina to downtown Tokyo. There was a three-tiered sound system climbing the wall like aluminum ivy, covered with multicolored lights, a fog machine, and rotating sirens. A towering scaffolding structure, a sort of jungle gym for grown-up GI Joes, stretched from one end of the playpen to the other, from the ceiling to the smoky sky. Inside, outside, and all around this metallurgic monstrosity stood four hundred freshly shaven, freshly paid Marine neophytes and no more than fourteen scantily clad young ladies. The whole scene looked like a beer advertisement gone berserk. We walked in, bought drinks, and surveyed the scene. Sean and Kris sat down and started moping because there were not enough girls. I got up and started dancing by myself; soon Danny followed. In this menagerie no one seemed to notice that the circus was in town.