I Went to the Prison-Themed Parking Lot Circus So You Don’t Have ToNo Better Use for a Mall Parking Lot
Originally published as part of my weekly Sunday morning series. Re-releasing with audio and photos because I can do that now. Also, if the targeted ads on my social media feed are correct, the circus has returned to town this week… For the first time in probably a decade, I hear the opening guitar riff of Will Smith’s 2002 hit song “Black Suits Comin’ (Nod Ya Head),” the theme song for the film Men in Black II. It should be noted that I am not watching Men in Black II as I am hearing this. I am not even watching men in black. Instead, I am sitting front row, stage right, watching six men in orange prison jumpsuits completing complex aerial feats. One of the prisoners with long braids grasps hands with another. His partner is wearing tall orange socks printed with Bart Simpson heads. The partner is shaved bald but for a single braided rat tail sprouting from the top of his head that hangs down to his shoulder. The pair make eye contact and nod at one another then catch eyes with a third guy. The third fellow is smaller, wearing a white tank top, his prison jumpsuit rolled down to his hips. On the speakers above us, Will Smith is now outlining the plot of Men in Black II. It is lyrically irrelevant but provides a catchy beat for the prisoners’ moves. As the chorus hits, the smaller man runs forward, hits a trampoline, flies in the air, and lands his feet on his comrades’ intertwined hands. The three of them wobble together, stabilizing themselves by moving further and further back, toward the edge of the stage. Toward Paris and me. I’m in danger, I think, but just in time, the smaller guy jumps down. The men set themselves up for another stunt. Another group of three on the other side of the stage do the same. In between their stunts - either in an effort to hype the crowd or because this song just slaps that hard - the men dance. Not particularly well, but with a lot of joy. The man with the rat tail and Bart Simpson socks is the best dancer, naturally. He is enthusiastic and entertaining to watch. Still, he never smiles. Instead, he stares with a scowl and vicious eyes at what little audience has assembled here in this pop up circus tent in the parking lot of Town East Mall in Mesquite, Texas on this Friday night in January 2022. I’m not sure if he is scowling because he hates Will Smith or because he is dedicated to staying in character. His character is a dangerous prisoner at Alcatraz, after all. Not much room for smiling. Though Alcatraz closed nearly 40 years before Will Smith hopped in the studio to lay down this righteous track, the song plays on. As it ends, the prisoners on stage raise their right fists in the air, and the lights go out. My fiancé Paris and I found ourselves in those premium circus seats that night because of the impulse I have to keep tabs on my hometown. There is a Facebook group for residents of Mesquite, and though I haven’t lived there since 2005, I remain a member. “Why did I wait 45 minutes in the Whataburger drive-thru last night?” one post read. The question was directed at the lack of staffing at a local burger joint. It was not meant as a request for insight on the author’s life choices, though conclusions could be drawn. Other posts are innocuous. Questions about new city ordinances, or like another I saw this week, inquiries into the goings-on of town: “Any good garage sales in the area this weekend?” The post that caught my eye was a photo of the mall parking lot. It pictured a white tent, fenced off with barbed-wire. The orange marquee lights across the big top read, “ALCATRAZ PRISON.” The poster wrote, “Looks like this just arrived at Town East Mall?” No one in the comments knew the tent’s back story, so I searched and found the circus’s website. The site warned that the show was “intended for a mature audience.” It promised “a gripping narrative, amazing aerial and acrobatic artistry, sensual cabaret dancing, Broadway style musical, and side-splitting comedy.” All that. In one show. The description read like a Golden Corral had decided to forego the buffet format and instead put all the menu items in a slop bucket and serve it to the customers all together, all at once. And the servers are naked. At the bottom of the page, I found a link to the show’s Instagram page. A man in horn-rimmed glasses with shiny, dark side-parted hair had filmed a video of himself, streaming from a dark mall parking lot in Frisco, Texas. “Live from Stone Briar Mall, it’s Saturday night!” he said, mimicking the announcer from Saturday Night Live. “With Steve!” He flashed a smile that told me he was Steve. Finding himself alone outside the barbed-wire fence behind him, he panned to a Toyota Corolla parked nearby. “And this white car!” he said. He launched into a pitch for the show, hitting many of the website’s talking points. Then he entered the tent, still streaming, and turned the camera to show a father/son duo hopping across a highwire wearing orange jumpsuits. It was causal. It was bizarre. It had almost nothing to do with Alcatraz. It was the only way I wanted to spend my Friday night. With just hours before showtime, I jumped online to buy tickets. The seating chart showed only a handful of the 1,000-some-odd seats had been sold. I winced, imagining Steve performing to an empty parking lot at Town East Mall. I chose two seats on the front row in an entirely empty section to the right of the stage. After a quick dinner at the nearby Buffalo Wild Wings, Paris and I arrived at the back of Town East Mall. We parked between two stores: JCPenney, where almost all of my “nice” clothes had been purchased for the first twenty years of my life, and Macy’s, formerly Foley’s, which was our family’s storefront of choice for pick-ups and drop-offs during parent-free trips to the mall in middle school. All at once, Paris and I find ourselves at the threshold of Cirque Alcatraz.
Walking in, we pass a rusted white school bus with “ALCATRAZ PRISON” printed on the side — never mind that Alcatraz is an island and nobody is getting there by bus. Paris pulls back the white vinyl that serves as the door. We step inside, bumping into a prison guard holding a Canon digital camera. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t welcome us to the show. It’s prison, after all, so get against the wall. He points to a wall plastered with White Bulger and Roy Gardner’s mugshots, two famous Alcatraz inmates. The guard snaps our photo and says nothing. We aren’t given a number or any instructions on how to retrieve it later. We just move on to the next guard who scans the tickets on my phone and points to my left. “You need to go that way,” she says, pointing to one of the larger tent’s entrances. We go the other way because we spot the tattoo booth. A black binder sits on a table, filled with airbrush tattoo templates. A woman with a jet black ponytail wearing a studded black leather jacket is bent over airbrushing a soccer mom’s forearm. Yet another guard, this one in a black nylon jacket with a faded Ringing Brothers logo points to the binders. “There are many designs,” he says. Paris and I flip through the stencils. Some say words like “love” and “peace.” Others are images - a deer, a butterfly, a bird. Some of the stencils have two designs on one piece of plastic to save space. I spot one of these that reads “FUCK” in block letters up top and “End is Forever” in script below, with a crown hanging from the R. I slip that one out and wait my turn.
Paris continues to flip through until he finds the design that would look best on his neck.
I make eye contact with the guard. “Are you from this town?” he asks. I tell him I was born here, but now I live a few minutes away. “It is a very nice town,” he says. I thank him. “I’ve been traveling with circuses for many years. All over the world,” he says. I note how faded the old Ringling Brothers logo on his jacket is. How dirty it is, too. “You know where is my favorite place I’ve ever been?” he asks, then pauses, leaving me to guess. “Here?” I say, confused. “Savannah, Georgia,” he says at the same time. “Oh,” I say. “That makes more sense.” He tells me how beautiful Savannah is. How the trees are green and the buildings are old and beautiful and how the people are the nicest people he’s ever encountered. I tell him I’ll have to visit some day. What a friendly prison guard, I think as Paris hands him $10 cash for the tattoos. On the way to our seats, we stop at a posted sign. “WARNING,” it reads before listing off what we are about to see. The list includes “vulgar language, extreme simulated violence, sexually suggestive content, and drug use.” Jesus. It warns that if we have epilepsy or PTSD, we should turn back now. Finally, an important heads up: “Our actors may touch you.” Suddenly I regret getting front row seats. The round stage juts into the audience so there are spectators on three sides. Our seats, it turns out, are not only front row, but are also aisle seats, directly adjacent to a stage entrance. We about to get touched tonight, I think. Between our seats and the stage, down below, I can see the painted lines of the parking lot we’re in. Paris leans back in his plastic seat, and the entire row tilts with him. The floor beneath us, black painted plywood, creaks under our weight. The room is bathed in blue light. Smoke billows in. I hope it’s part of the show. A haunting song begins. “Spooky music,” I say. “That’s the soundtrack to Insidious,” Paris says. A few minutes after showtime, a prison siren finally sounds. The room goes red. Guards climb the light-rigs around the stage up to platforms above the audience. A voice comes over the speakers. He calls us maggots. He tells us to look around for the nearest exits and not to smoke. He says there are no bathrooms and if we “need to take a piss” we should do it where we are. It’s a joke, of course, but I look at some of my fellow audience members and wonder whether they may be tempted by this directive. The opening riff to “Welcome to the Jungle” begins because of course it does. The music is so loud my head feels like it’s underwater. Guards and prisoners descend on the stage. They stage-fight until only six prisoners are left. Those six grab long chains from backstage and start jump roping, just like in real prison. They do push-up jumps and duo-jumps and Double Dutch with a second chain. They black-flip through the chains, somersaulting between each swing, never missing a beat. They ditch the chains and start launching each other in the air, doing stunts that would put any cheerleading squad to shame. By the time the song ends, I am exhausted from having watched them. Suddenly, a spotlight. It’s Steve from Instagram accompanied by a man I later find out is his comedy partner of nearly twenty years, Ryan. They do their bit, joking with the audience, doing crowd-work, and I start to hate them a little. I cringe for them, for the things they’re having to do. But then, I see Ryan break. He genuinely laughs at something Steve says. I recognize that laugh, the kind that happens on stage when you love your scene partner. They launch into a musical number, the Broadway-style entertainment we’d been promised. The thing is -- they’re good. They can both sing well, and whoever wrote this little Rodgers-and-Hammerstein-style ditty about dropping the soap knew what they were doing. Prison jokes aside, it is a song about being best friends, and Steve and Ryan, professional circus clowns, singing as Steve and Ryan, the wrongfully convicted prisoners, certainly are. After the song, they leave the stage, but not before Ryan does a pratfall and announces for no reason in particular, “I landed on my own balls.” They’re followed by a contortionist with a long brassy ponytail and jet black roots. She bends her body in ways I haven’t seen since The Exorcist. I wonder if they have a physical therapist who travels with the show. Then I look around at the near empty tent. I debate referring her to my chiropractor whose practice is in Mesquite (Hi, Dr. Doughty!) but then remember they’re leaving Sunday. They’re headed from Mesquite to Grand Prairie, then on to Houston. Once she has untangled herself, the contortionist is replaced by a juggler. He throws balls around for the duration of a nondescript heavy metal song then does a backflip and leaves. In the darkness, someone rolls a desk on stage. A guard enters with a chair. He sits at the desk, rolls up his sleeve, and grabs a rubber hose. Things have escalated quickly. “Is he about to do heroin?” I ask. “The poster warned us there was a drug scene,” Paris whispers back. “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane serves as the soundtrack to his (hopefully) faux injection. The lights then go out and a colorful spotlight comes up on the desk in pink, green, yellow, and orange. We are to believe the heroin has made the guard hallucinate. “Does heroin make you hallucinate?” I ask Paris. “Not that I know of,” he says. “Must be a bad batch,” I say. The guard opens the desk, and a clown pops out. Its face is painted white with big red lips, and its head is covered in a jester cap that is just a little too big. It is also wearing a matching one-piece clown suit. The guard throws the clown around in a human ragdoll/contortionist routine. The song heads for a crescendo when, apropos of nothing, the clown strips off its clown suit to reveal it has been a hot lady under there this whole time. Orange bra and panty set. Sexy black garters with fishnet thigh-highs. Clown face. Every high prison guard’s dream. “I did not expect it to be a sex clown,” I whisper to Paris as the sex clown climbs on the desk and begins to gyrate. “Always bet on the sex clown,” he says as the lights go down and the song finishes. Some more guards roll out a dolly carrying a man dressed as Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs - complete with a brown leather facemask and straight jacket. “But Alcatraz closed in 1963,” I whisper to Paris. “Yeah, and Hannibal Lecter was fictional,” he says back. After the guards remove his straight jacket (rookie mistake), Hannibal runs off, shooting a couple of guards with a stolen gun along the way. We never see him again. Steve and Ryan are back. After some back and forth that includes meta-commentary on the light cues and the spotty functionality of Ryan’s headset mic, Steve ends up face-down on a table covered with a sheet. Ryan begins retrieving increasingly larger objects from Steve’s rectum - single cigarettes, an entire carton, a bouquet of fake flowers, a plunger, a board game. Steve says he feels like a Muppet, which prompts what we believe is an improvised riff about what it would be like to have sexual intercourse with Kermit the Frog. “You think this was scripted?” I ask Paris. He looks at me and says nothing. Across the stage in the section opposite ours, I spot three teenagers sitting side by side. They are wholly unimpressed with the stuffed butt bit. One is texting on his phone, while the other two sit with their faces drawn up in scowls that look like they have smelled a fart. Behind them are rows and rows and rows of empty seats. Hundreds of them. On stage, Steve makes a sound like Curly from The Three Stooges. His gurney has started rolling downstage toward the audience. “Oh, oh, oh,” Steve cries out in a tone that indicates this wasn’t part of the bit. “Someone could die tonight,” Paris says as a show photographer jumps from the crowd to stop the runaway bed. From that moment on, the stakes became sky high. Sure, they had a website. A lot of them had been at this for decades. They drove their show around in tractor-trailers wrapped with their logo that looked legit. But also, this is a parking lot circus. Things could go wrong. The next act is another juggler. Framed by strobe lights and backed by more copyright-free rock music, he performs a routine that could land him on stage at America’s Got Talent. He juggles clubs at first then moves on to disks the size of Frisbees with head-size holes in the center. He tees himself up to juggle five of the disks. He tries throwing them all high in the air with the goal of catching them and putting them around his neck one by one. He gets three. One clatters to the ground. Another rolls off toward the audience and ends up beneath the stage. Undeterred, he goes to the bent metal cart he had wheeled out on stage and grabs four more. He tries the trick again. A look of trepidation creeps on his face. My stomach hurts. It’s not the Buffalo Wild Wings from earlier. I am so nervous for him. He throws all seven in the air and misses two again. I burn with him and feel the look of disappointment on his face as he scrambles to retrieve the fallen disks. The juggler pauses. He loops all the disks around his forearm and shuts his eyes. Later, in the car on the way home, Paris will ask me whether I thought this next part was staged. At first, I will say no, but then I will concede that it could have been. I don’t care, though, and Paris didn’t either. With eyes closed, the juggler takes three deep breaths. The crowd is silent. Then, with no prompting from either the juggler or the announcer, something amazing happens. We begin to stomp in unison. We clap, too. Everyone hoots. We whoop. We scream. The sound of our unified clapping and stomping makes the relatively empty tent sound full. I put down my pen and notebook and cup my hands around my face mask. “You can do it,” I scream through the layers. The juggler opens his eyes, a new resolve has come over him. He begins to juggle all the disks, then tosses them high in the air - higher than before. Higher than I thought possible. I realize there is nothing more that I want in that moment than for him to crush the trick. One by one, in an instant, he catches each of the disks. He loops each one around his neck, then reaches back out to catch the others. Paris and I are screaming. We grasp hands. We look around. All the people in the crowd - even the annoyed teenagers - are screaming. We rise up out of our seats, overjoyed for this man. He smiles. He bows. He leaves, triumphant. The acrobats return and perform their routine to the theme from Men in Black II. When they finish, they huddle together in a circle. I hope the hug is real and they’re best friends off-stage, too. At intermission, I pay $15 to take a photo with them. When I ask them how we should pose, the most prolific flipper tells me through a plastic face shield, “Whatever you want.” “Give me the usual,” I say. They surround me on either side while the best flipper uses his hand to pantomime choking me.
The highlight of the show’s second half is Steve’s strip tease. When the poster out front warned of “sensual cabaret style dancing,” I never imagined this. After a quick-change bit, Steve ends up in his white Hanes briefs. “Bad to the Bone” pumps through the speakers behind him.
Steve dances across the stage and comes directly to me. He props a leg up on the barricade separating me from the stage. He rubs his nipples. We lock eyes. I’ve been doing improv comedy since high school. I’ve performed my share of strange bits in near-empty rooms. Sure, it’s never been in my thinnest undergarments, but I feel connected to Steve in this moment. A fellow clown, doing his best. I put down my notebook. I woo. I raise my hands above my head. The more I scream, the more he gyrates. He thrusts harder. I notice that he is not wearing special stage-underpants but just your run-of-the-mill, straight-out-of-the-package kind of drawers. Still, I play into it. As he thrusts, I fan myself in overexaggerated motions for the rest of the crowd to see. After a few moments of back-and-forth, I throw my head back, spent. Steve smiles. He heads out into the crowd to find another victim. He finishes the strip tease, and he and Ryan leave the stage. The guards bring a huge box out. The walls of the box fall down and reveal an electric chair. Inmates gather in a circle around the chair, and I think this is probably not the protocol for executions. Ryan is brought back on stage, and the guards pull a black executioner’s hood over his head. Within seconds, he seated, strapped in, and put to death by electric chair. Steve puts his face in his hands. His shoulders shake from crying. The guards drag the chair, body and all, off-stage. More guards enter moments later, carrying a coffin. An audience member stands, removing his hat and placing it over his heart as the coffin passes. I love Mesquite. The guards do a lap around the audience then head backstage. “Enter Sandman” begins. The six-pack of acrobats is back. This time they brought a swing and take turns jumping from the swing into a fall-bag. I see one of them mouthing the lyrics and wonder how many times he must have heard this song by now. They move the fall bag, and when one of them flips in the air, the rest gather round and catch him. It’s so exciting, it really makes you forget that a man died by electrocution just moments earlier. The acrobats roll their swing and bag off stage, and Steve returns, now alone. Ryan is dead. But then - a spotlight.
It’s Ryan! He’s an angel now. Steve asks if Ryan is his guardian angel. Ryan says, “Bibbity bobbity boo, bitch.” The line kills. The audience eats it up. Steve asks whether he’ll become an angel when he dies, too. The show has taken a dark turn. “Of course,” Ryan says. “You’re a --” he pauses, drawing a square in the air front of him with his index fingers. “A square?” Steve asks. “No, a cunt,” Ryan says. “What?” I yelp. Paris belly laughs. “Are you laughing at that joke? I don’t get it,” I whisper. “No, I’m laughing at you,” he says. “And all this.” He gestures around. He was right to laugh. It was absurd. All of it. I had a lot of notes. You can’t fit that many things in a human rectum. Heroin doesn’t make you hallucinate. Most clowns aren’t sex clowns. Prison guards don’t let prisoners loose from their straight jackets for no reason. Alcatraz didn’t have death penalty facilities. They weren’t electrocuting anyone over there, at least not on purpose. Ryan never would have been executed and never would have turned into an angel. The prison grounds couldn’t have accommodated a trapeze setup or a high wire. They never gave the inmates trampolines or swings or Bart Simpson socks. Alcatraz closed in 1963. How could these inmates have choreographed their routine to a song from 2002 by an artist who wouldn’t even be born until five years after the prison had closed? I stopped myself. I took a deep breath. After all, we weren’t at Alcatraz. Right? Not the real one anyway. We were at Cirque Alcatraz. At Cirque Alcatraz, you let it all go. You clap your hands. You stomp your feet. You nod ya head, and just enjoy.
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I Went to the Prison-Themed Parking Lot Circus So You Don’t Have To
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