As a performer, my relationship with the audience was not what I would have expected. In many ways the performers don’t do the show for the audience. The size of the crowds varies widely, from frequent packed houses of over 3,000 to the occasional dismal showing of under 200 (Rock Hill, at 157, was the lowest of the year), and performers can’t rely on them for motivation. As a result, they must rely on something higher—like a love for the circus—or something lower—like the promise of a paycheck. Moreover, the size of the crowd is often less important than its enthusiasm. In Phillipsburg, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania Dutch country, the show sold out but the people were taciturn. In Willingboro, closer to Philadelphia, we had only half houses but they were mostly Latin and cheered with zeal. When the Flying Rodríguez Family was introduced as the “Pride of Mexico,” the crowd whooped and whistled with patriotic hysteria. Unfortunately they were less adoring of the Rodrinovich Flyers, not realizing they were Mexican as well.

For me, each particular audience was less important than my overall attempt to develop my clown persona. I learned early how to turn on and turn off my clown on demand—“on” when I stepped inside the tent, “off” when I stepped out. Not particularly limber, I had been developing a character that was upright, almost formal: an inept maître d’ with a relentlessly sunny spirit, blind to the restaurant burning down around me. Ironically, even though the historic distinction among clown categories (whiteface, Auguste, and a few minor characters, such as the tramp) has all but disappeared in recent years, I fit naturally into the role of the traditional whiteface: a straight man and perfect target for all the manic Augustes around me. This was particularly true in the firehouse gag.

Like everyone else in the Alley, I joined in the rush to find new bits to add to the gags. During the ladder routine in particular I needed something to do. I considered normal things that firemen do that would be funny when done around a burning house, such as selling tickets to the firemen’s ball; as well as things that normal people do over a fire that would be funny for a fireman to do, such as roasting marshmallows. In the end I settled on a normal thing that people do to a house that would be funny for a fireman to do, namely, painting the outside. This idea was made possible by the fact that Marty had the perfect prop, an oversized painter’s palette with a giant scrub brush on a stick. A few days later Jimmy was lecturing a few of us over dinner about the virtues of sight comedy over slapstick when he asked, “By the way, who came up with the painting?” I signaled that I had. He raised his eyebrows approvingly, but didn’t say anything further. He didn’t have to. I was learning my way.

Unfortunately, no sooner had this prop come to symbolize all the virtues of the Alley than it came to represent its faults. While the clowns pretty much cooperated during the gags, once out of the ring the boys would usually just return to the Alley, take off their wigs and pants, and sit around in their undershorts telling off-color jokes. I had been trying to counter some of the tedium and improve my relations with the Alley by asking a few of the boys—particularly Marty—to give me some pointers on being a clown. Although at nineteen he was the youngest, Marty was also one of the hardest-working and most talented of the clowns. In his loudmouthed persona of the Village Idiot he was also the most outspoken, the most conceited, and the most resentful about my being considered a clown. He would constantly complain about my makeup, the way I pulled the cart, even my driving. After passing me on the road one night in the truck he drove for the electrician, he sought me out on the lot. “Bruuuuce,” he said in his whimpering Village Idiot drawl that he never seemed to put away. “It’s considered courtesy to blink your lights at somebody when they pass you.” After several incidents like this, I decided to treat him with the respect he craved and asked him to teach me about taking falls, making bangs, and building props. He eagerly obliged. Soon the problems got worse.

First, he started giving me little pieces of niggling advice. “This is the finale,” he would say. “I think you ought to look more spiffy.” Next he tried to change my makeup. “Your face is really boring,” he would say. “I think you should change it.” Finally, one Sunday evening in Exton, Pennsylvania, he went over the top. The weather had been gorgeous all weekend, but suddenly during our final show the sky darkened and a light rain started to fall. We had already dismantled the firehouse and only the fire cart remained to be loaded into the prop truck for the jump. The palette and brush that Marty had loaned me remained, as they always did, at the bottom of the cart. As the show ended Marty came into the Alley.

“Bruuuuce,” he said in his ingratiating whine. “Will you do me a faaavor?”

“Sure,” I said, “what is it?”

“Tomorrow, take the palette and brush out of the cart, wash them off, put them in the truck, and never use them again.”

Then he spun around and left.

For a moment I was stunned, then dumbfounded, and in the two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Jersey that followed, I slowly became annoyed. The next day, after putting away his prop and replacing it with one I built myself, I pulled up a chair beside him in the Alley when no one else was around. I understood that my presence in the Alley was somewhat unusual, I told him, but I wondered if he would treat me with respect nonetheless.

Marty was caught off guard by my directness. He said he had learned in the circus that you can’t ask people nicely to do things but must treat them like children. Then he apologized. Later that night he complimented me on my bow tie. The next day he asked for my help with his trunk. As with Sean and Kris several weeks before, the less I acted like some silent cartoon (or even a distant writer, for that matter), the more I was accepted into the circus.

In Willingboro, Sean asked me to go to the mall. He was looking for a new pair of high-top sneakers to replace the ones he wore in his act. The twice-daily impact of the cannon launching pad against his feet had completely wrecked the soles of his shoes. It had also all but eliminated his arches and almost ruptured his knees, thereby aggravating what he referred to as his rickets, the euphemism for his bowleggedness. When he was on CBS’s Street Stories, Sean had mentioned the problems he was having finding shoes with sufficient support and afterward had waited expectantly for several weeks for an endorsement contract from Nike. Unfortunately, it never came. Michael Jordan got millions for jumping fifteen feet from the foul line and dunking a ball in a net; the Human Cannonball can’t even get a free pair of shoes for getting shot one hùndred and fifty feet twice a day from a cannon and dunking himself in a net. Clearly the scales of justice don’t weigh all acts the same.

In the mall our subject wasn’t feet, but guts. By late May we had entered a several-week stretch of towns where we played only mall parking lots—York and Exton in Pennsylvania; Voorhees and Princeton in New Jersey; Fishkill and Middletown in New York; Danbury in Connecticut. The circus likes playing malls because they are central, easy to find, and mothers feel safer bringing their darlings to a circus in front of TGI Fridays than across the street from Al’s Hubcap and Fender at the fairgrounds three miles out of town. The malls like having the circus because it brings in customers, generates publicity, and enhances their reputation as the new town centers of suburban America. The performers like being at malls because the men can find bars to watch sporting events at night, the women (and men) can go shopping during the day, and the kids can escape their mothers’ trailer cooking and enjoy a Chick-Fil-A for lunch.