In America the Lilovs once again began to build a new life, though at the time they were making little money. Kenneth Feld paid the Bulgarian government, and the government in turn paid them—$105 a week. Undaunted, they began to breed their bears and cultivate a stable of well-trained animals. Within six years they had developed enough of a reputation and saved enough money to break away. They left Ringling Brothers and moved to Mexico. This proved to be a near-fatal mistake. Once they left the United States, the bottom fell out of their dream—their banks recalled their notes, their working visas ended, and they were stranded with five bears, two loans, and no resources. It was at this point that Douglas Holwadel stepped into their lives. Having promised them a contract, he guaranteed their notes and arranged for working papers. The next year Venko Lilov’s Performing Bears would find a home on the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus.

After the first trick, in which Jackie, a two-hundred-pound toddler, jumps over track-and-field hurdles, Venko leads his bears through several displays of gymnastic skill—turning somersaults, jumping rope, balancing on the parallel bars. This series climaxes when Venko unhooks his prized patriarch, Dobush, an eight-hundred-pound, sixteen-year-old behemoth of a bear, and leads him to a set of gymnastic rings suspended from a bar. Dobush lumbers slowly to the front of the apparatus, places his paws tentatively on the rings, and with a gentle kick with his legs leaps up onto his forearms and performs a towering handstand two feet above the ground. The trick elicits gasps of approval.

“A good trick has to be close to the people. Something they can relate to,” Venko told me. Unlike the Rodríguezes or the Bales, Venko had originally been unfriendly toward me. He was hostile toward outsiders, and, even though I mostly stayed clear of him at first, he actively sought me out around the lot to deliver a series of dire admonitions. “I’m warning you, man,” he liked to say, “these people will kill you once your book is published.” About two months into the season he finally confronted me directly one night on my way back to my trailer. How could I write a book about the circus business, he wanted to know, when I was only traveling with one show? I’m not writing about the business in general, I told him, but about this show in particular. Well then, how could I write about this show at all when I didn’t know anything about animals? That’s why I’m interviewing performers, I told him, because I didn’t know anything about the acts. Interviewing? he said. I didn’t know you were doing that. And with that he offered me a beer.

“For the last few years I’ve been working on a new comedy car,” he went on to explain in that first of many late-night drinking sessions. “In the act the car breaks down and the bear and I try to fix it. When the bear sticks his head under the hood and pulls out the radiator, the people will go crazy. Why? Because everybody in that audience—at least the adults—has a driver’s license. They’ve been dicked around by service people. They will think it’s funny.”

“And does the bear think it’s funny?”

“Are you crazy? She doesn’t know it’s funny, She does it for the cookie. She wants the reward. Now she likes it, of course. You can’t make a bear do something it doesn’t want to do. But all these animal rights people who say we force the bears to do the tricks, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They say that we teach the bears to jump rope by using a heat pad. That’s crazy, my friend.”

“So how did you teach them to jump rope?”

“The bears, they were young. I had some bread one day and I was waiting to feed them. Jackie jumped up to get the bread. I ran and got another piece of bread and she jumped up again. The next day I got a rope. She jumped up to get the bread, I gave her the bread and pulled the rope underneath her. And that’s it. Once I have the trick I don’t practice it anymore. I wait a couple of days, maybe a week or two, and let her remember what she did. Then I go back and do it again and she’s learned the trick. I don’t teach them the tricks, you see, they teach me.”

“And they do all of this for a cookie?” I asked.

“All for a cookie. Just like the ones you buy in the store. Gingersnaps, sugar cookies. We can’t use raisins or chocolate chips because they get stuck in their teeth.”

“So why don’t they ask for more?” I said. “When I was a child and got rewards for doing something I would ask for more the next time. Will they do the same trick for the rest of their lives all for the same reward?”

“Bruce,” Venko said. “You sure are a dumb fuck, aren’t you? Use your head. You have to think about what you’re doing in order to get a higher reward. You have to think, ‘Today I get five dollars; tomorrow I’ll ask for ten.’ The bear doesn’t think that way. For him it’s all a reflex.”

“If that’s the case, then why are so many people upset about having trained animals in the circus?”

“Because we have them on leashes. Because they wear muzzles. Of course, the people don’t realize that the bears can walk without the leashes, they can work without muzzles. It’s all for safety.”

“So why don’t you just explain what you’re doing?”

“You can’t rationalize with the public. People are fucking stupid, my friend. You just don’t understand. They come up to me every day and say things like ‘Wow, man. Where did you get those monkeys?’ Just this morning I was opening the cages to feed the bears and a woman behind me called, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me, sir!’ I ignored her but she kept on calling, ‘Sir, sir. Can I ask you a few questions?’ She wouldn’t shut up, so finally I turned to her and said, ‘Lady, don’t you have a fucking brain in your head? What are you thinking? I have an eight-hundred-pound bear in my hands and if I turn around and talk to you he just might decide to eat me.’ She pressed her lips together and shot me a bird.”

“Does this only happen in America?” I wondered. “Or all over?”

“It’s worse in America,” he said. “Also, it’s worse now than it’s ever been. You just watch, it’s bound to explode.”

“CLOWNS, YES! ELEPHANTS, NO! CIRCUS ANIMALS HAVE TO GO!”

The chant was faint yet clear as it wafted up from the parking lot of the Apple Blossom Mall in Winchester, Virginia, a little after three o’clock in the afternoon. The show had arrived the night before in the pedigree-perfect pink-and-green town just across the West Virginia border from famed Harpers Ferry, and for the first time all year a small group of protesters showed up on the lot to picket against the show’s alleged violation of animal rights. One of the women wore a polyester tiger costume. Another carried a cardboard sign that said: “MAKE THIS YOUR LAST CIRCUS.” A man was dressed in a saggy pom-pom clown costume with runny makeup on his cheeks that already raised my territorial ire: Don’t you know how to powder? I thought.

The first person to notice them was Sheri from concessions. She came climbing over the hot-dog counter and screamed at the protesters to get off the property. The second to arrive was Dave Hoover, the former tiger trainer turned “chief safety officer.” He waved his soggy cigar in their faces and threatened to have them arrested. Doug was much calmer when he appeared. “You are welcome to picket,” he said. “But this is private property and you are not allowed here.” They quietly moved toward the parking entrance.

“This isn’t private property,” I said to Doug after they had left. “Do you have the right to ask them to leave?”

“No,” he said. “I just bullshit a little.”

Several minutes later I walked toward the parking area to speak with the protesters. When I arrived they were discussing the best place to stand. Jimmy told me that in one town the picketers stood at the stoplight and directed people to circus parking “just up the way,” which actually led them out of town. This group was less destructive, but equally adamant. They were from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and had driven in fifty miles from Washington, D.C. A reporter had told me earlier that they had sent a press release to the local newspaper announcing their picket. As they were setting into a location, several children stopped in front of the man in the clown costume with his polyester orange wig and said, “Look, a clown!” The man frowned. I grimaced. The children walked away. In the meantime his partner handed me a pamphlet. CRUELTY IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT, it said over a photograph of an elephant in shackles. “Although some children dream of running away to join the circus, it is likely that most animals forced to perform in circuses dream of escaping them.”