In truth, there were probably other reasons everybody wanted to talk to Buck. Even without his makeup on he looked like an alien—a quaint, rather awkward alien that had stepped out of a B-grade 1950s science fiction film. Everything about him seemed to accentuate his height. His black hair with streaks of gray on the side was always standing on its end from where he slept on the eight-foot foam mattress that occupied most of the back of his van. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses that looked as if they were hand-me-downs from a comic-book science teacher. Plus his neck, shoulders, and even his waist all slumped continually from crouching every day for half a century under doorways and signboards in six-feet-and-under America. Whether it was an optical illusion or not, I don’t know, but even though Buck was well over seven feet tall, his hands always seemed to drag on the ground.

Beyond his appearance, there was something a little unnerving about Buck. As a clown, he was definitely a relic. He didn’t move much or particularly make faces. Instead he liked to make fun of children, play tug-of-war with their arms, or shock them with his personal brand of bathroom humor. His favorite walk-around was to carry a large piece of granite and a roll of toilet paper with a sign that said: “Old-Fashioned Rock and Roll.” It was hardly clean family fun, some complained. Around the lot his behavior got him into even more trouble. Perhaps as a result of having people gawk at him his whole life, Buck had become something of an exhibitionist. Without access to a shower, he regularly bathed out of a bucket directly in front of Clown Alley. Also, he had a well-known and mostly disapproved-of habit of sunning himself nude up and down the East Coast. He also urinated at will in public. As a result, many of the performers thought him perverted and kept their children away. They even complained to management. They feared that one day a paying customer would as well.

Finished with breakfast, we headed into town on Route 94, a typical congested semiurban highway with strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food playgrounds all clamoring for the best frontage and median cut. But here there was a difference: many of the signs were local in nature. According to the neon vernacular, Hanover was the home of Snyder’s Pretzels, Utz Potato Chips, Hanover Shoes. Stores touted discount clothing, discount auto parts, even discount beer. Arrows beckoned drivers into darkened streets promising cheap thrills. It all seemed like bargain heaven for Buck. “I like to drive in alleys,” he said, finally pulling off the main drag closer to town. “People throw out all sorts of interesting stuff in alleys.” Sure enough, a few minutes later he pulled over behind an abandoned hotel. “Why, look at that.” He stretched his arm through the driver’s window, reached into the top of a dark green Dumpster, and pulled a mangled object out of the pile. “It’s a CB radio!” he exclaimed, tinkering with the buttons and putting it up to his ear as if he really was a science teacher. “You can hear it, but you can’t talk. I’d say it’s worth about five bucks.”

As we moved on, our first stop was the semiannual factory outlet sale of the Hanover Shoe Company, just off Main Street. Buck rummaged around the second-floor rows of mismatched moccasins and patent-leather dress shoes but found nothing in his size. This was not uncommon, he said. Several years earlier he had gone to a similar sale in Brockton, Massachusetts, the self-proclaimed shoe capital of New England. “‘What size shoe do you wear?’ the woman asked. ‘Sixteen,’ I said. ‘Well, you’re in luck. Go to the back wall and look there.’ I went back there and they had a whole wall of perfectly new shoes. ‘They say those are seconds,’ the woman said. ‘But I can’t find anything wrong with them. The price is two dollars a pair.’ I tried on one pair and they were comfortable enough, so I handed the woman a hundred-dollar bill. ‘How many would you like?’ she said. ‘That’s a hundred-dollar bill, ain’t it?’ I said. ‘I’ll take fifty.’ ‘What are you going to do with all of them?’ she asked. ‘Save them for future use.’” He smiled with wicked delight. “I walked out of that store, kept two for myself, and sold all the rest for forty dollars a pair.”

Our next stop was the Salvation Army, two blocks up Main Street. This time Buck didn’t bother with the shirts or jackets, but headed straight for the kitchen supplies. Half an hour later, he walked out with two belts for a walk-around Arpeggio was making, an eggbeater for the chef in the stomach-pump gag, and a slightly rusty Sterno stove. “Look, it still has the fuel cartridges,” he boasted. “I’ll use it to heat up my makeup when the weather is cold.” Altogether he had spent $1.75. “Boy, the books in there were terribly expensive,” he said as he tossed his purchases into the back of his van, the atticlike space where he slept, ate, watched television, and gave himself insulin shots, as well as kept his sodas on ice, stored dozens of pairs of secondhand shoes, and maintained what was reported to be the most extensive supply of pornographic videos of anyone on the circus. “They had some Westerns and even a Civil War book. I opened them up and they wanted three dollars apiece. I would never pay that much. I would pay a buck a book and sell it for two. But three dollars? How do you make a living off that?”

We headed back toward Route 94 and the Goodwill Mission Store. Once again he found little of interest—no china elephants, no clown books, no round Coca-Cola signs, but as we were leaving he noticed several boxes of day-old bread, muffins, and pies. “Why, look at this,” he said, bending down at the waist like a mechanical cherry picker and filling up most of the aisle. “Five to a family. Get you five, we’re from different families.” He picked out a loaf of raisin bread, an angel-food cake, two cartons of English muffins, and a shoofly pie. “Ever had one of these?” “No,” I said. “Well, you’re in for a treat. It’s Amish. Feel how heavy it is…It’s made from turkey syrup, eggs, and brown sugar. In the thrift store where I work in the winter I could feed five families with this stuff.”

Back in his van heading home Buck was philosophical again. “There are not many thrift stores I leave without buying a book. Their selection was real bad. They had a lot of Bibles and blooper books. You can get rid of Bibles in the South, but not up here around New York. Also, you would think blooper books sell, but they don’t. It’s a real art to knowing what books’ll sell. At the store back in West Virginia where I work in the off-season I throw away a lot of books. Clear up the shelf space. I put the books in boxes and give them away as heating fuel. One guy came back once a week for several months. Finally, he told me he was feeling real guilty for heating his house with books, so he decided to read each book before he burned it up. People in West Virginia know how to get by with very little.”

“So do you miss that life?” I asked. “West Virginia. Home.”

“My mother’s still there. I go back a couple of times during the season to visit my doctor. But my life’s out here now. When you’ve been living on the road as long as I have you learn to like it. I have special parking lots I like to sleep in in every city. I have special treats I know where to find, like shoofly pie around here or clams in Boston. I know this great place that has scuppernong jelly with no added sugar in Columbus, Georgia.”

Soon the tent came into sight. Surrounded by a mall on three sides and a Roy Rogers and discount fabric store on the other, it looked as if it belonged to a bloated used-car sale instead of the world’s largest circus. “And for how much longer can you live like this?” I asked.

“I suppose I can do it till I die. I do want to go to a smaller show, though, with one or two clowns, and produce again.”

“Have you done that in the past?”