Microfiction

The Night He Joined the "Cirkus"

Afterward, he had to remind himself and everyone he told about it that he wasn't making any of it up, that it wasn't a dream.

On a random Saturday, Ivan, one of those non-descript computer programmer-types you often see walking around, journeyed into Manhattan to attend a photographer friend's exhibit at a Midtown gallery. Afterward, he had a solitary dinner at a cafeteria-style restaurant, then decided to stroll down 42nd Street. Amid the Disneyfied tourist traps and neon encrusted marquees, he noticed a shabby little doorway with a sandwich sign out front: the Museum of Variety. The museum, the sign said, included a theater, whose mission was to preserve the vaudeville and burlesque atmosphere of the "old" 42nd Street -- "where peep shows and prostitutes were as common as today's plasma screens and Mickey Mouse tchotchkes."

He wandered inside to look at the museum exhibits, which were all of the "Ripley's Believe It or Not variety": a stuffed, four-legged duck under a bell jar; the upholstered chair that a side-show fat lady used to sit on; a picture of a two-headed baby. He noticed that the current show in the museum's theater was a performance by the "Vagabond Family Cirkus." He'd never heard of it, but, having time to waste, he decided to buy the ten-dollar ticket and attend.

While Ivan waited in line for the theater's doors to open, a gorilla appeared and began to accost him. The costumed creature bent down and kissed Ivan's shoe and then gave him a short back rub. "Okaaayy," Ivan said. Then, just before he entered the theater, he was frisked and closely examined with a large magnifying glass by two men wearing clown-face make up.

Ivan was beginning to realize that this would be no ordinary circus. The inside of the small theater presented a distinctly seamy milieu -- black walls, worn bits of scenery and tattered red velvet curtains that rose almost two stories from the floor-level "stage" to form the "big top." Steep banks of seats, some of which were covered with faux leopard skin, accommodated an audience of about 100. It looked like a theater in a David Lynch movie –- like the Red Room in Twin Peaks or the Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive.

The only available seats were in the front row, which Ivan suspected could be trouble. He had a strong premonition that this was going to be an audience-participation spectacle.

Much of the show consisted of tawdry clowning and more or less conventional juggling and acrobatic stunts, all of which featured a high degree of sexual innuendo. The performers also worked in a number of political comments about the gentrification of 42nd Street. It was entertaining and funny, but Ivan had the nervous feeling that his moment was coming.

His time came with the arrival of Svetlana, an attractive blonde in a lizard-skin unitard who looked like someone out of an early James Bond movie. The M.C. introduced her as being from a part of the former Soviet Union that is now an independent country: "Tear-you-a-new-crack-istan." Her talent was spinning a dozen sequined hula-hoops around her undulating body as a live band played new-age bump-and-grind music.

After a minute or so of spinning, she announced, in a heavy Russian accent, that she needed help from a member of the audience.

Svetlana pulled Ivan onto the stage and instructed him to spank her if any of the hula-hoops dropped to the floor. Eventually one did, of course, and she bent over. Feeling like an idiot, he spanked her, just once, as the audience roared. (You had to be there, Ivan later told his mother.) Svetlana did another dance, in which none of the hoops fell, and it was now Ivan's turn to be spanked. He bent over, facing the audience. "No, no, no," Svetlana said, shaking her finger. "You must turn around this way." So he pointed his posterior at the audience and she gave it a whack. Ha, ha, ha.

Next, Svetlana asked him to twirl one of her hoops around his arm while she had a brief conference with her assistant, Sylvia. She and Sylvia then slipped behind the curtain and began a loud, screaming argument. Ivan continued to spin the hoop, alone on stage, for about a minute as the audience giggled. "You are so talented," Svetlana told him when she re-emerged.

She then handed him a dozen hoops and instructed him to throw them to her as she danced. If she managed to complete the dance without any of them dropping to the floor, she said, he would be allowed to kiss her (in her words) "on the ass." If any of them fell, she would kiss his butt. What did he think of that, she wanted to know. "That sounds fair," Ivan said.

He did as he was told, tossing each hoop as she gyrated to some pulsating Euro-disco. The hoops stayed up, and when the music stopped, she bent over. There was a drum roll, and Ivan looked over at the audience. They were all laughing hysterically -- possibly because of the look on his face. There was nothing else to do but plant a kiss on Svetlana's rear -- to the accompaniment of a loud cymbal crash. She straightened up, grabbed his hand and they took a bow as the audience cheered.

Such was Ivan's moment in the spotlight. He knew that, in his mind at least, he would never hear the end of it.

(This story is 99 percent autobiographical.)