Memoir
Here are some excepts from my memoir, FLYING WITHOUT A NET, MY JOURNEY TO CIRQUE DU SOLEIL. Expect a few unexpected twists and flips 
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CHAPTER 1 excerpt
“Stand by thirty minutes!”
Sophie, the curly-haired stage manager, gives the first countdown cue to me and the rest of the cast of Quidam before curtain. With the clock officially ticking, formalities and preshow rituals begin as we prepare to stare danger in the face once again.
Another day at the office, so to speak, but boy, what an office.
Our office is different, very different. Magical even. Cirque life is located on the edge of safety and calculated craziness and loaded with adrenaline – a juggling act of razor blades and glistening swords, eager to puncture careers.
An ambulance waits parked at the back each and every show. The paramedics have not been called to duty since I joined the tour eight months ago. I have never met them or spoken to them. May it stay that way.
We have become immune to the fear of daily risk. Danger is a part of the scenery that we overlook and forget. That does not mean we are blind to the threat of our job, however. We just hope tragedy won’t happen to us, and that it’s not today…
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CHAPTER 2 excerpts
…The remote location of Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, whirrs with anticipation. The night is clear and still while the succulent smell of popcorn wafts through the air and families get lost in the excitement.
Traffic clutters the surface streets all the way to the freeway exit. Patient police officers direct cars to the limited parking spaces, while the walking masses mill around the grounds, stomachs tingling. Lovers walk arm in arm, sharing romantic glances and kisses.
The Big top is like a beehive with hundreds of busy bodies buzzing around, curiously pointing, waggling and chatting. Inside the tent, ushers check tickets and steer guests to their aisles and seats.
At the stroke of eight, the expectation of Cirque du Soleil’s Quidam will morph into mystique, pageantry, and spectacle.
Step right up. The circus is in town. But not just any circus. Mesdames et Messieurs, Cirque du Soleil! Quidam is ready for commercial consumption.
Backstage, we add the final touches to our make up, each dab shedding a layer of ordinary.
Acrobats stretch and pump-up. Wardrobe sews. The skippers double-dutch and the jugglers juggle, obsessively repeating maneuvers in the hope of attaining impossible perfection.
As for the Russians, who form the majority of the cast, they smoke, play dominoes, and drink Vodka in absolute bliss…
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…Forty feet above, precariously hanging from a single foot, my close friend, Danielle, suspends from an aerial hoop, dressed in a form-fitting, light blue and mauve body suite. Though the drop is far too dangerous for comfort, Danielle remains fearless.
There are no safety guarantees when testing fate. This enchanted yet perilous world knows many tales of tragic falls. Injuries always hide in the wings waiting to swoop. A split second of hesitation, a momentary loss of concentration, and fate bites deep and hard.
At ground level, a short man by the name of Gunta, in a pale green costume with a target on his chest, leaps around like a baby antelope to pump blood into his calves and thighs. An even stranger character, Monique, with pink and purple striped socks, and pointy ears longer than her arms, sits on one of two white benches, reading a Quebecois newspaper.
To the right, four very young Chinese girls contort like pretzels made of crazy putty and soft rubber, all the while gigglig in Mandarin. They are dressed in strange silver suites that remind me of the tin man in Wizard of Oz. I can neither pronounce nor remember their names. Our communication is limited to smiles and waves.
On the floor, Serge, another of my friends who’s named Boomboom in the show, curls up under a blanket with the flu.
Business as usual in Cirque.
“Stand by five minutes! Five minutes.” Sophie’s voice has a little more authority to it now. “Attention, cinq minutes! Cinq minutes.”
With time winding down, I address my last minute rituals – check make-up, pull several strange faces in the mirror bounce around to get my vim elevated.
Sophie walks over to the bundled body inside the blanket to gently wake him up. Serge crawls out of his cocoon in a semi-daze and rubs his fake baldhead, then coughs into his large grey boxing gloves. Pain streaks his highly painted face.
I rub his shoulders and add some gentle karate chops down his back to bring him to life.
The cast puts on the white post-nuclear suits on top of their regular costumes for the opening.
With seconds remaining, I stand at the center of the backstage tent without my white suite, set to attempt something I shouldn’t.
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CHAPTER 4
London, England, late sixties.
The reality of my upbringing, though not the poetry of Cirque du Soleil, embraced a circus of sorts, nonetheless — where the clowns regrettably became cruel anomalies who laughed like pregnant penguins, their own laughs known to break dreams even before they’re borne.
My childhood was a wound of such laughter, a precarious un-choreographed festival act with garish off-key music and ripped costumes not created for the sake of happy entertainment, but rather dysfunctional reality TV.
According to statistics and studies, my childhood experiences should have left me dead by gang related violence before the age of eighteen, or in jail for crime, if not in rehab for whatever addiction.
I was born to an African mother, Regina Tshilumba, and a Caucasian father, Eugene Jacob in The Belgian Congo during a horrific civil war. The year was 1964. My birth town, then called Stanleyville, is now Kisangani. It is located in the north about 800 miles from the capital of Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, where Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in a classic Heavyweight-boxing bout better known as “The Rumble in the Jungle,” which put the country on the map for good reasons. Today, Zaire is called The Democratic Republic of Congo.
I had two dark-skinned African half brothers, Jean-Pierre and Rudy. They were the biological sons of my mother’s first marriage. From his first marriage, my father had one son, Daniel, who suffered from multiple sclerosis. His mother was deceased. Daniel was born Caucasian. He lived safely in Brussels with grandma and grandpa, far away from the African skirmish that surrounded me.
While my half brother fought his own personal war against illness and paternal abandonment in Brussels, discontent brewed in the cities and jungles of the Congo. My family became caught in a crossfire between Niggers and Wouzoungous (as the Congolese call Whites). The natives hungered for Wouzoungou scalps and justice… and my father’s Caucasian, blue-eyed blonde-haired scalp would do them just fine. All the while, Belgian paratroopers raided, raped, and pillaged towns with orders to kill Africans such as my mother and my brothers in order to save Belgian Nationals.
With angels on our side, we escaped. I was only six months old. It paid to have a white father.
We left everything behind: cousins, aunties, close family friends, Mum’s thriving transportation enterprise and a monkey named Gigi, who apparently enjoyed feeding me from the bottle and adopted me as a son.
Our flight took us to Belgium, where we united with Daniel and my grandparents. This was the first time they ever go to hold and see me. We lived with them in Brussels until I turned three.
Though too young to remember, the family portrait must have made for mishmash hodgepodge conversation — two African boys, a Caucasian boy, a black mother, a white father, two white grandparents with silver hair and me, a Mulato with ginger hair. We stood as colorfully psychedelic as the current fashion of the late sixties.
From Belgium, we jouneyed briefly in Holland, then in Fribourg, Switzerland for about six months, before moving to England permanently. We left Daniel behind with grandma and grandpa, and lived safely in London under the protection of the new Congolese consulate.
Africa fell into the past. The British capital transformed into new, promising start for us, offering peace, security and apple crumble with custard.
My first memories were not of Buckingham Palace, The Houses of Parliament, or Spam sandwiches, but of…
…Another day, another disagreement, another fight between them. Their compressed tempers finally triggered off an emotional volcano that spewed verbal lava.
I could never seem to define the face that was my dad. It’s always a shadow or a silhouette, but he held Mum by the scruff of the neck. She gasped for air, all the while coughing and cursing.
I didn’t now where Rudy and Jean-Pierre were. I wished they were here. I cried and begged my parents to stop.
They ignored me, slipped and fell in the commotion. A head banged against the wall. One body tumbled to the ground.
Another scuffle. A hat with a shiny badge rolled to my feet. From nowhere, a woman police officer held Mum back. I couldn’t tell if Mum was furious at the police or at Dad, probably both.
Everyone except Mum vanished from the hall. The black front door banged shut and the silhouettes disappeared into the frosted panes. Car doors slammed outside. Engines accelerate into the distance, sirens blaring.
Only sniffles whispering from my nose reached my ears, all else was quiet. I tried to be a man and not whimper but I was afraid, confused, maybe even angry.
Mum cried. It made me sniffle even more. She lay seated on the floor with her back against the wall and her head down, her hair ruffled, face covered in mascara. I knelt next to her and held her hand, not because I need comforting, but because I wanted to comfort her, to be strong for her.
Dad was arrested. He spent time in jail before they extradited him to Belgium… READ WHAT FELLOW WRITERS AND AUTHORS SAID ABOUT THIS PASSAGE
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