The romance of the circus could never overcome its enervating stench. That, at least, is what my nostrils remember about their years of being rubbed with red rouge at Ringling Brothers.
I do not subscribe to the Proustian belief that a brief taste or smell of something can take you back decades to a fully textured and 900 page memory. Not the smells of the circus, anyways. When I try to recall those fragrances my mind recoils in revulsion back to some distant Neanderthal ancestor who liked to smell daisies -- and then eat them.
A barnyard smells of manure and spilled diesel. A candy factory smells of melted sugar. A bar smells of beer and cigarettes. A baby’s bassinet smells of talcum powder. And a men’s locker room smells of congealed sweat and ripening jock straps. Taken individually, such odors will become bearable in time. But the heady mixture of all of these, combined into a miasma that soaks through your consciousness into your very soul is no longer just an olfactory sensation but a physical affront, like a blow to the solar plexis.
The first time I caught that full aroma was in Tampa, the first stop of my first season on the road with Big Bertha. I had been strolling about the parking lot in the morning sunshine, marveling at the warm inviting fragrance of mimosa and fiddlewood, enjoying the swooping white gulls on their everlasting reconnaissance for fast food wrappers. Girls in sports cars, wearing bikinis, drove along the nearby parkway, and I was convinced they were tossing me smiles like they were beads at Mardi Gras. Life was unfolding before me, a tantalizing clambake. Then I walked past Backdoor Jack into the arena.
Holy Grandma Moses! The funk made my stomach do flip flops. I shook my head and took another deep breath. This could not be. Civilization had not yet descended to such malodorous depths. But there it was again -- and I could see where part of it was coming from, as a roustabout shoveled up steaming piles of elephant dung while smoking a ratty cigar. The llamas were spitting their cud at each other, while outside the heavy blue curtains of clown alley Swede Johnson was slurping up a bowl of pie car soup, flipping out the carrots onto the cement floor, where they were trod upon by the heedless candy butchers shuttling their first crop of cotton candy up into the stands.
Some have said they grew to enjoy that smell, and to miss it in later life when they had settled down to more normal pursuits. They lie. That omnipotent smell made my eyes water and rattled my digestion right up until the very last day I performed at Ringing. The veteran clowns, who remembered playing under canvas, said they never had any such stink to contend with back then.
“You worked in the tent and you were walking on wild sage and honeysuckle, and the ground absorbed all the animal pee” Prince Paul told me. “These cement floors play hell with the animals. How’d you like to stand around all day in your own crap because it won’t drain off like it does on plain dirt?”
“Yeah, but remember how dusty it got?” interrupted Swede. “All that manure would dry out in the sun and then crumble into dust. I bet I’ve breathed in a ton of dung in my day, and that ain’t healthy!” He paused to take a deep drag on his Chesterfield. “Or else it would rain cats and dogs and we’d be up to our keisters in mud.”
Mercifully, Backdoor Jack usually kept the arena gates wide open all day so the elephants could come in and out with ease; letting in whatever refreshing zephyrs were handy. This somewhat mitigated the fetor. But when it grew cold and stormy the pachyderms remained inside the building all day and the gates were sealed tight. Then the stench welled up like something out of a sci fi flick. You talk about the smog of Beijing or Los Angeles; the horse flies donned gas masks of an evening when visiting the circus!
I used to welcome a head cold as a respite from the noisome odors. It troubled some of the other First of Mays as well, but they didn’t let it upset their appetite the way it did mine. Whenever the aroma grew too overpowering I completely lost the desire to eat. That damnable odor seemed to coat my tongue like oral thrush. I found some relief, when I could eat, with strongly scented items like sardines and Limburger cheese on crackers; the outlandish fumes drove away the normal fug to some extent. But it didn’t make me a popular character in clown alley.
As the season wore on I came to accept the evil smell as just another bump in the road of circus life. And, truth be told, sometimes it would completely disappear for weeks on end. This happened especially out West, in places like Arizona and Oregon. Was there some microbe in the air that fed on those nasty vapors? I don’t know -- but it might be worth having M.I.T. or NASA look into it. But then, I keep forgetting that Ringling Brothers is gone the way of the mastodon and 8-track. The enchanted environment that created that perfidious smell is no more. Had scientists been able to synthesize it in the lab, it might have been of more use in the Vietnam War than napalm.
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