Right before a show, Mr. Vassallo, who spent his childhood in Italy shuffling from town to town, changing schools every time, empties his mind. He thinks about nothing, and then gauges the audience. “You can’t plan clown gags,” he said.
Oh, can’t you? Well, I have a different story to tell -- about a clown gag that was planned for years and years. Here’s how it happened:
In 1971 when I joined Ringling Brothers as a First of May clown there was a middle-aged stilt walker on the show nicknamed Krinkles. He was given this nickname because of the crevasses that crisscrossed his underdeveloped brow. Caused by the single solitary thought that rampaged inside his mind from the first day I met him until the day, years later, when he passed on. Krinkles was a man possessed by an idea. He wanted to create a trained rabbit act for center ring.
“Here’s how it’s gonna work” he told me that first week of rehearsals. He had buttonholed me out by the elephant barn as I was innocently walking over to the Pie Car Jr. for a ham and cheese sandwich. I didn’t even know the guy yet.
“I’ve studied all the different breeds of rabbit, see” he began. “Belgian Hares are too harum-scarum -- they run all over the place at the drop of a hat. The French Lop is too shy -- you can’t get ‘em out of their nests. Mini Lops are too dumb to learn any tricks. Ah, but the Belgian Giant! There’s a rabbit that can learn to do tricks and shows up well in the spotlight! Once neutered, they’re as smart as a dog!”
“Um, that is sure interesting stuff. But I gotta get a sandwich before rehearsals start again, so . . . “ I tried to stem the tide of his mania.
“No, no! You don’t get the big picture yet! Their dry food requirements are so simple that it costs next to nothing to feed them. Just think of how much money I’ll save on fodder rations when Mr. Feld finally puts me in center ring!”
Abandoning courtesy of any kind towards this lunatic, I turned tail and fled back to rehearsals, sans any lunch. When I told my clown alley companions about the rabbit lunatic they assured me he was harmless.
“That guy has been harping on his rabbit act for years” said Prince Paul. “ He thinks he’s going to be the next Clyde Beatty.”
“He’s a good stiltwalker, though -- he’s not afraid of heights. Remember that buster he took in Macon a few years ago? Shoulda killed him. But he got right back up on them damn things and kep on workin’ with a broke collarbone” said Swede.
Mark Anthony shook his head. “You can’t train rabbits to do anything but eat carrots. I tried working some geese into my act, pulling a chariot, on the Sells Floto Show. But barnyard critters like geese and rabbits and such just don’t take to it. Krinkle will never pull it off, not if he works on it till hell freezes over.”
As the season progressed I kept my distance from Krinkles, since I had no special affinity for rabbits. But I have to say I was impressed with his fearlessness when it came to stilt walking. The higher up he was, the better he liked it. Back in those days the stilts were simply long oak shafts, specially carved by an outfit in Maine. The walkers would nail black baby shoes to the bottom of each shaft, to present a grotesque aspect as they ranged around the arena. One of the clowns always acted as spotter for each stilt walker, walking in front of them to look for pitfalls like wrinkled rubber carpeting or tangled electrical cables. A really tall stilt walker never failed to thrill an audience -- no crowd was ever so jaded that they didn’t appreciate the compelling risk these men took at each performance. Sometimes they got a bigger round of applause than the lion tamer!
At the end of my first season with Ringling I couldn’t help noticing that Krinkles had finally gotten himself a Belgian Giant. It was white and black and seemed pretty sullen. Krinkles would wait until the arena was empty and dark after the last show and then bring out his giant Belgian to begin basic training. Swede and I would stand in the shadows to observe.
“Up!” Krinkles would command, gently poking a stick under the rabbit’s flaccid chins to encourage it to stand up. The rabbit did nothing but chew its cud like a cow.
“Roll over, cantcha?” Krinkles cried in frustration, using his stick to stroke the side of the unyielding rabbit. Belgian Giants apparently have a short fuse, because this one would not tolerate very much of being prodded before batting the stick away with its front paws and leaping out of the ring bent on escape.
“That poor son of a bitch is gonna ruin hisself with rabbits” Swede murmured to me. “Too bad he didn’t take to drink instead -- he’d have more fun on the way to the poorhouse.”
I lost track of Krinkles as the years piled on top of one another, until 1984. That year I went to clown at Disneyland in California. And who should I run into but Krinkles. He said he had five acres outside of Anaheim, where he ran a rabbit ranch.
“Still trying to train them for the center ring?” I asked him as we shook hands in Canter’s, an all-night bistro that catered to show biz insomniacs.
“Oh sure” he said, looking as confident and crazed as ever. “I’m breeding a special type -- it’s a cross between Tri-Colored Dutch and the Dwarf Hotot. They take simple commands. Well, sometimes they take simple commands. But they don’t like the heat much. I’m thinking of relocating to Oregon.”
I invited him to sit with me. I was feeling lonely, since I was out in California by myself, leaving the wife and kids behind in Kansas. The gig at Disneyland was only three months. Even nutty company was better than none. I ordered an egg creme, matzoh ball soup, and a tongue sandwich. Krinkle had a sour pickle in buttermilk with a side of Harvard beets.
That evening, his tongue loosened by the buttermilk, he told me the blow off to his rabbit training gag. He had never revealed it to another human being before, he solemnly informed me. After having the rabbits go through their paces of jumping through flaming hoops and mounting on top of each other to make a bunny pyramid, he would chase all four of them into a specially prepared box -- and when they came out the other side they would be accompanied by a dozen baby rabbits.
“It’ll be a killer” he assured me. “The crowd will laugh its head off! Soon as I have the rabbits fully trained I’m auditioning for Ringling.”
“When do you think that will be?” I asked.
He was noncommittal about the timing.
“Maybe another month or two -- maybe a year or so. You can’t rush rabbits, y’know. They’re high strung, like horses.”
My chronology takes another great leap forward to 2009, when I did publicity for the Culpepper & Merriweather Circus. I found Krinkles on the show, walking stilts again. But his eyesight was bad and he had lost his sense of balance, so he was only on painter’s stilts -- metal struts that put him a measly three feet off the ground. It was obvious that times had not been good for him of late.
“Still got the rabbit ranch?” I asked him.
“Naw, I lost that” he replied. I didn’t press for details. Circus folk don’t pry into each other’s affairs -- not if there’s a long season ahead.
“I had to eat the lops” he volunteered. “They went well with fried potatoes.”
But Krinkles was not to be denied his dream. Somewhere along the route that year he picked up some white laboratory rabbits. They were a revelation to him.
“I never knew about these kind of rabbits before” he told me in wonder. “I can actually get them to sit up and roll over!” And he demonstrated with the two pink-eyed beauties he had acquired. And by golly, they DID sit up at his command, and they kinda-sorta rolled over when he waved his stick over them. I began to think that maybe, just maybe, crazy old Krinkles was actually going to pull this stunt off after all.
I headed out ahead of the show to make sure ticket sales were energetic -- several states had just passed new laws that put the kibosh on boiler room phone sales for charities, including sponsored circuses like ours. High pressure telemarketers were going extinct, or asking way too much of a cut, so the show needed me out front encouraging sponsors like Rotary Clubs and the VFW to shoulder more of the responsibility in getting tickets sold. It wasn’t easy; they were accustomed to bringing in the show and letting the phone sales take care of everything. Getting them to pay for local advertising in the newspapers and putting something up on the local bank’s electronic billboard was an uphill battle for me. So I forgot about Krinkles.
I rejoined the show in Texas that fall, as it was headed back to winter quarters in Hugo, Oklahoma. That’s when I learned that Krinkles had died. A heart attack took him while the show was in Sedona, Arizona. Everyone had chipped in to buy him a plot and a gravestone. One of the Mexican contortionists had taken the white rabbits as pets for his kids. Krinkles clown gag was buried along with him. But if there’s rabbits up in heaven, I have a feeling Krinkles is finally playing the center ring like he always wanted.
