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You’ll find them on any warm Saturday or Sunday afternoon in New York’s Washington Square, in a fringe of chess games, sun worshipers, singers, flashers, hustlers, and a bunch of youngsters muttering “Smoke? Smoke?” to anyone who is not indigenous (which is almost everyone, since this is where the tourists come to hang out, trying to feel indigenous while enjoying the show). At first, he may not be able to tell the Calypso Tumblers apart from the other performers vying for crowd participation. So you look for the biggest crowd that grows in the park. And you listen to insist on the British West Indies babble. Singing in unison, applause. A glimpse of a body catapulting madly through the air. Nearby, an aspiring break-dancer with a relentless barker tries to ward off onlookers, earning little more than a glance… suitors, timeless upstarts to the degree that they should know better, they should concede that when it’s time. of the Show. , Calypso glasses own Washington Square.

At the heart of things is Alex Bartlette, a handsome boy from St Kitts, complete with dreadlocks and gleefully aggressive jokes. Says he’s 35 years old, 5’7″ and 175 pounds. None of that is apparent; he looks younger, more compact. Shirtless, he shows a torso and arms befitting a middleweight lineup at Nationals But his things are functional, because Alex is not only the leader, promoter and director of the group, but he is also its star artist. He is also one of the most incredible athletes I have ever seen. More than anything, it’s what I saw Alex do one summer afternoon, which stopped me there to watch a while longer.

A staccato of forward and backward aerials, executed so naturally, with such ease, as if it had just occurred to him at that moment to do so. Vertical push-ups: more than twenty, the last half dozen with the forearms resting on the pavement. Alex goes up the steps with his hands, jumps those steps with his hands. He juggles three or four raw eggs and catches one behind his neck and tossing it back into the air, before catching it (now scrambled) in his mouth. With a running start – just shoes on concrete and no trampoline – she launches herself onto a pole held over six feet tall, flipping over and landing on his feet. Alex culminates the act of him doing the same thing over a row of nine women drawn from the audience.

You may have seen some of this at the Arnold Fitness Expo a few years ago, where the act included a guy named Abdul who did a mind-boggling one-arm move. plank grind on top of wobbly piles of bricks. It wasn’t easy getting the boys there; It took him a year of pleading to get a tape of Alex to send to Jim Lorimer. It’s not that the Calypso Tumblers are strangers to the media; In addition to appearing in nearly every New York newspaper (in addition to a host of foreign newspapers), they have had numerous television appearances, including Arsenio Hall, Good Morning America, The Today Show and NBC Showtime at the Apollo. They have performed at major festivals, carnivals, and corporate functions, in the US and abroad. And they’re a big hit at the Arnold, where attention is hard to steal if you’re not Trish Stratus or beyond surreal. But in the midst of these spikes, despite their fantastic marketability, the Calypso Tumblers still make a daily living as street performers, begging an audience together, passing each other hats. Seems like a terrible waste to me.

Alex took me to his gym, an unassuming little strip in Jersey City. He doesn’t come here much, but then again, he doesn’t need to. If intensity rules, Alex’s street performance efforts are on par with the regimen of any SynthOlympian, few of whom could handle a vertical bend. And who needs body throw squats like these? So Alex avoids the heavyweights, even though he’s obviously capable of it. Most of his training consisted of just two moves: lat pulldowns and sit-ups on steep incline planks. Also, I don’t recall seeing him eat anything that day except some fruit and a few hard-boiled eggs, which he unceremoniously peeled and popped into his mouth as he steered his Ford Explorer toward the Holland Tunnel. “Your body won’t take this forever,” I told him. “The pavement is going to kill you. Sooner or later your joints are going to shoot out. I have advanced arthritis in my right shoulder just from lifting non-competitive weights. You’re thirty-five years old now. What will you be doing in five years?” Alex smiled. “Real estate. I have property on St. Kitts.”

He had grown up there, in a family with ten siblings. Superb genetics and a hectic childhood of island life, where you’d fight in the streets for a dollar and engage in body acrobatics on the beach, gave him the physical foundation to brave the pavement of New York. Alex didn’t find the Calypso Tumblers when he arrived in 1986; that had been done five years earlier by MC John “Dr. Juice” Allicock, who would guide him from some rudimentary stunts to marvels in the air. Aware of his flair and attractiveness, Alex sometimes moves with an informed arrogance. He knows everyone-the policemen, the salesmen, the swindlers. Young women give him phone numbers, occasionally with condoms. He is a player in a landscape characterized by anonymity. He should know that there are much greater possibilities beyond this, perhaps he does, but he finds the thing on the street pleasant and will return to it again and again.

I couldn’t help but think of Alex and his boys while attending the Mr. Olympia in Las Vegas last fall. At the Mandalay and elsewhere, I watched dozens of hulking types roam the casinos, ostentatiously bloated by a site-injected splendor so excessive as to have abdicated their function; I could imagine them flailing helplessly as the turtles flipped onto their backs. Yet no doubt these same fellows would laugh at the stunts of John Grimek and his ancestors, old geezers who had felt the absurd need to do stuff with his strength, to amuse himself by proving his usefulness… that “physical culture” crap. Meanwhile, all over Vegas I see billboards announcing star appearances by singers, comedians, and conjurers in casinos and hotels, none of whom risk life and limb with every performance, few of whom are truly electrifying, and it is very likely that everyone will earn more in a week. of what Alex earns in a year.

“They’ll probably be treated like royalty too,” I tell him. “Limousines, the best restaurants, maybe even all the showgirls they want…” It’s a warm November morning in Battery Park. Alex and the boys are working on the boardwalk as they usually do on weekdays, though visitors to the Statue and Ellis Island are dwindling with the season and the terrible events of two months prior. Alex isn’t paying much attention to my talk about show business. “Excuse me for a minute,” he says, hyperenunciating each syllable. I have to take care of business. And he trots toward the queue that forms for the boat, addressing the crowd with the mock formality of a nonexistent park official: “All aboard, please line up behind this rope… thank you, they are so polite- I to love Polite people… I must inform you that the Statue and Ellis Island are closed for security reasons. The ship will circle around you…” Alex pauses to flirt with one or two of the women, making a big fuss in his knowing tone about how pretty they are, his angels. “Now, while you wait, my friends and I will sacrifice our own personal safety to entertain you. If you like what you see, clap your hands. Like this: “He claps, and the other Tumblers take their places, clapping too.” whose like what you see, please clap your hands anyway…”

Alex has them now; the crowd raves over him, if only in curious amusement at his unabashed charm. The ship hasn’t docked yet and then he has to throw up, so these people aren’t going anywhere, not for a few minutes. And the queue is building, a captive public -street-style. Show time. King Calypso stops a dumpster, jumps on it, takes off his shirt, and begins.

December 2001

Postscript: In 2007, the Calypso Tumblers appeared to great acclaim on “America’s Got Talent.”

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