Clown Girl (25 page)

“That’s great.” He pointed at the bust under my arm. “You keep your slut money in my head. What’s that, irony? Art and ideas, sex, money and commerce. That’s so, so like you.” He brushed me away with one big hand.

“What, you’re too big for money now?” As I sidestepped his brush-off, barefoot, I teetered. The heavy ceramic head slipped in my hands. Rex’s head smashed on Herman’s sidewalk. Dollars scattered like spent tickets.

“Shit. Pick that up, would you?” Rex said. “Someone’s going to hit us up, or think we’re doing a drug deal.”

Nadia-Italia’s laugh screeched from the darkened porch like a bad gag gift. I wiped my eyes again and said, “It’s your money. You pick it up.”

“Whatever. Forget it.” Rex kept going up onto the porch. He said, “Guess I’m on my own.” He was a king, head held high. He was a prince, a dog, a man I didn’t even know, and he didn’t look back as our future, my hours spent in clown wage-slavery, rustled like garbage in the gutter.

23.

Harsh Medicine; or, My Strabat

REX COULD DO WHAT HE WANTED, BUT WHEN A BALONEYTOWN wild child swooped out of the dark and nabbed a twenty, I chased the kid off, got down on my knees, and picked up the cash. Let Nadia-Italia laugh, but no way would I watch the fruits of my clowndom drift like yesterday’s lottery tabs. My bad leg whined with the motion. Rex triggered Herman’s floodlight and made himself the star of a one-man show. His curls caught the high beam, his muscles were sculpted with shadows.

Nadia-Italia, still hidden in the dark, said, “Hey, superstar, how’s’bout a smoke.” She giggled. Stoned. Rex’s dream audience. Three little pigtails poked up where she slumped on the couch.

Rex stopped to dig through his pockets.

He said, “How’bout a trade. A little more of that smoke you got for a few of these,” and shook a cigarette out of the pack.

I tried to ignore their production. “Jee-zus,” Italia said. “Check this shit out.” She giggled again. I looked up then.

“This shit,” as she called it, was Chance, on the porch. Chance sat up and begged for nothing, looking at nobody. She stood up and did her soon-to-be famous hula dance, pawed the air, and bounced left and right.

Nadia-Italia snorted and laughed and said, “Hey, baby, Momma’s got your treats!”

Momma? Chance wobbled toward Italia’s outstretched hand.

“Munchies,” Italia said. “Yummy.” Chance ran in a mad scramble, the length of the porch and back.

Chance, my drug-sniffing canine, so easily swayed!

I said, “You’re feeding my dog pot?”

“She got into the stash,” Italia slurred. “Her party habit.”

“You do that on purpose…”

Rex said, “You’re always the victim, aren’t you? It’s not about Chance, it’s about you. Feeding your dog pot. It’s about your Kafka trip, your little dream.”

“Look at her, Rex.” Chance was goggle-eyed. Nadia-Italia wasn’t much better off and let her own head loll against the split fat couch. “It’s not about me.” I left the busted bust of Rex on the sidewalk, shoved dollars into my prop bag. I said, “This is what I put up with. She’s trying to kill our baby.”

“Our baby?” Rex said, and paused. “I don’t think she’s the one—”

“Our dog!” I wanted to scream. It felt good to scream. He knew what I meant.

He said, “You overreact. I’m beat. I can’t take it anymore, Nita.” He went in the house.

“Rex?” I called after him.

He was out of sight by the time he called back, “We’ll talk in the morning.”

Morning? That was hours away. Forever. I’d waited so long for Rex to come home, but he felt no urgency. Nadia-Italia followed Rex, said, “Cha-cha, clownster,” and pulled the front door closed.

Rex as I knew him—high artist, Clown God—wouldn’t waste time as an idea thief. Chance smacked dry lips. We needed hydrogen peroxide, pronto-presto. I walked barefoot to where my clown shoes lay like discarded party favors. Chance watched invisible angels in the night sky, head bobbing and loose.

At the Lucky Trucker Motel and Sundries I carried her into the store. “No dog in here,” the man at the register said. “No dog, no dog!” He flung one arm out like a wing.

A bottle of hydrogen peroxide waited on a dusty shelf. I ducked, snagged the bottle. There was a line at the register. I waved the peroxide. “Just this. One thing.”

“No dog,” he said again, “you wait in line.” The man’s teeth were a mix of gold and yellow.

“My dog is dying. Look.” I held Chance up like a puppet, the store our puppet theater. A strand of drool found its way to the floor.

Two scrawny men and a woman with shaking, veined hands all laughed. A man with a mullet and a quart of beer said, “Nice act, stooge, take it to Nashville.” He put his money on the counter. Even an old woman who watched TV in the corner, who never spoke any language at all, even she laughed.

I held my ripped dress closer and cradled Chance. “It’s serious!” They laughed harder.

And that laugh echoed what I felt inside as more real than my blood, my heartbeat: that I was a joke. In protest I said, “It’s not a joke.” But the laugh only grew. And who laughed the loudest? A hooker in a torn red dress at the back of the line, naturally. My doppelgänger. Each minute, I sank a little deeper into Baloneytown.

There was my face in the aluminum rim of the hot-foods incubator, around jo-jos and chicken. I was reflected in the glass of the Coke cooler and the grease-smeared deli case, all powdery makeup, black liner, and big red lips, the face of a clown hooker right out of an old-time jail-time act. My one Caboosey boob hung free.

The doppelgänger said, “Tha’ poodle part a your show?”

The only show was my life, and it was a bomb. The only routine was the daily one. I’d been in clown costume so long, I wasn’t an artist. I was a freak. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t blink. I felt as though I were falling, a high-wire dive, safety ropes unfurling and unraveling left and right, loose and looped. This is a strabat: an aerialist’s finale, when all could be lost.

There was nobody to be my net, to close the curtains, to know me without the makeup. Rex saw me as a muse in the worst way—a place to steal material.

Mr. Galore.

I couldn’t think of his name without love. But Rex, as I saw him, was a big projection: I wanted the artist’s life and thought I’d found it on the blank screen of his painted face.

My name is Sniffles, and I’m a clownaholic…

Man is what he believes. All I knew was: Christian clowns, hookers, coulrophiles, and the fetishized silence of mime—I was bigger than the roles.

In the Lucky Trucker I took a tip from Jerrod and said, “Just because I’m a clown doesn’t mean I have to put up with abuse.” I picked up a box of travel-sized baby wipes.

“Still have to wait in line, though,” a drunk, wobbling woman hiccuped. Her hair was spun asbestos, her nose a withered apple. She spoke from experience.

Baloneytown was crowded with worn-out clowns, good intentions, and bad choices. The mistakes were easy and I’d made them all, sure, but the Lucky Trucker vaudeville team testified to Matey’s truth: S&M and clowning dovetailed into one and the same.

And the lives? Dog years.

Yes, I should’ve waited in line at the Lucky Trucker, and I would have waited if Chance weren’t digesting Herman’s pot as I stood there. I slid a bill on the counter next to the Turkey Jerky, and way overpaid in the hope that the dollars made up for my rudeness. Out in front, by the overflowing trash can and broken pay phone, I tipped Chance’s head back. She took her medicine, a harsh cure for an easy mistake, and as she foamed at the mouth I tried to come up with a cure for my own mistakes aplenty.

Chance’s steps were sloppy as we started back to the ambulance. She vomited white foam laced with dabs of pot like green sprinkles on snowy cupcakes. I opened the box of baby wipes, ran one over my cheek, and wiped makeup away. I tucked the used wipe in my bra and got out another. One swipe at a time, I cleaned up my act.

Near Herman’s, there was a fast glint and flicker of a UFO, and just as quickly the UFO crashed in a scatter of broken glass. Herman’s voice came out of the dark: “Fuck.”

A shadow ran, the soft pad of tennis shoes. I matched Chance’s tipsy stride. From somewhere, the ice-cream truck song started up in fast gear. It was either a late night sweet tooth emergency or a giveaway of a getaway car. Nearer, I saw Herman, soaking wet in the street on the ground, surrounded by glass, a hand to his head.

“Ah,” I said. “Another bashing? I thought clowns were the only fools targeted on the street.”

Herman muttered, “Never should’ve diversified… ” Chance waddled and vomited, weaving and slow. Herman said, “You know this is about…your piss…harassment.” His forehead sported a goose egg.

Like his bad deal was my fault? I said, “Drugs, urine, and ice cream all in one vehicle—a regular Baloneytown variety store.” I kicked a piece of mason jar glass. “It cut your head, Hermes. And God, it reeks.”

He pulled his fingers away, squinted at the blood. I reached inside my bunched-up dress to unfasten the boob bib, the only thing more battered than Herman looked at the moment. I slipped the top over my head, and when I let go the single Pendulous Breast fell to the ground.

“We’ve got to get you out of the street before a car comes. You can rest in the ambulance. Put your arm over my back.” I bent to pick him up. As I brushed against him, pee seeped onto my dress.

“No.” He climbed to his feet. I offered a shoulder. He said, “If I’m going…to die…” He had to catch his breath. “I want to be …not in a clown-bulance.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Not yet, anyway.” Like a cowboy into the sunset Herman staggered toward the glow of the porch light.

I stayed where he left me, in the dark, outside that circle of light, and listened to the ice-cream truck ramble far away with a sound tiny as a music box, oddly optimistic, almost cheerful. The sidewalk was dotted with Chance’s pot-laced vomit, each tuft white and reflective as the moon, marking the path I’d walked like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, except in my story every dollop was a single-sized serving of pot soufflé laced with incriminating evidence. If the cops traced the path to Herman’s grow operation, we’d be cited with distributing a controlled substance through dog puke.

We? Yes. It was Herman’s operation, but the lot of us would go down. It’d be the Big Bust, starring Herman, front and center. I’d be a bit player blinking into the footlights. Then,
voilà
! Curtains! The co-op would fall into a Baloneytown real estate deal: confiscated, put up for silent auction, and sold back to B-town Barons for chump change. We’d all be in stripes. Not the fun-loving stripes of clowns, Pixy Stix, and barber poles, but the state-issued stripes of convicts.

In short, the house, the yard, us—we’d all go to pot.

I saw something move behind a window upstairs, Herman or Natalia. They, my friends, were hucksters, drug dealers, and bullies. But in that world of defeatism I was the jester, the fall guy, the rubber chicken. I was the one who put on face paint and shades, limping in one big shoe.

I was the one who’d accepted a tiny free room in the back of the house from an ex-boyfriend on the verge of arrest. Who chose to wait while Rex spent my money in another town. What kind of life was that?

Chance and I went back to our cabin in the ambulance.

I kneeled in front of the EMT chair,in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and wiped the rest of the makeup away. My skin was raw, pink and new. The ambulance had a single round light in the middle of the ceiling. The light cast long shadows under my nose, ears, eyes, and chin, and in the shadows I was young and I was a crone, in the exact same moment. That’s it, I thought: life is short. The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

Clown dates and corporate gigs weren’t the answer. Maybe money wasn’t the answer. I needed to remember who I’d been back before I came to live in makeup, before I devoted myself to Rex, a vague future and a badly dressed present.

I’d start over, with the clothes on my back. Well, I’d take a few more clothes, out of the sea of fabric in the back of the ambulance. Why not? And then I’d take my lovely, half-trained, left-handed, purebred schipperke. I couldn’t leave Chance—no, I’d take my Chance and my chances both. And I had the money I’d saved for Rex’s career at Clown College, in stacks of twenties.

Behind the medicine chest, separating the front from the back seats, there were two sliding Plexiglas windows. With the flat of my palm, I slid one window open. I leaned through, reached a long, thin arm, and pulled up the lock on the driver’s side door.

I got out of the back of the ambulance and went around to the front, to sit in the driver’s seat. Rex always drove, though the ambulance was at least as much mine as it was his—like everything, we bought it with corporate clowning money. Whoring money, if you saw it that way. I flipped down the sun visor. A set of keys fell to my lap.

So I had clothes and my dog and money, and I had the ambulance, that portable home, our mobile circus full of storage compartments, complete with shades on the windows and a bed in back. And then I had myself, my health, more or less, Kafka and da Vinci and all the big ideas.

What was I waiting for?

The streets of Baloneytown were dark and empty. I drove slow and easy down the same roads I’d walked a hundred times. Driving, I rode a little higher off the ground, and all the old storefronts and empty lots seemed suddenly so close together, the neighborhood incredibly small. To live here, to stay, would be to consign myself to the life of a moth banging against a window-pane; there was a whole world just outside.

I’d take time out of costume, try to learn to merge the roles—beauty and art, comedy and sex—until I could make myself whole again.

I passed Hoagies and Stogies. At one side of the bar the little dusty red and white checkered curtains were parted, creating a tiny stage. Inside, as though on stage, a man sat at a small table near the window under the red and blue of a beer light. His shoulders were hunched, head bowed over a newspaper. He had a hoagie on an open wrapper in a woven straw plate on the table. I pulled to the curb. The man turned a page. He wiped his mouth on a napkin. Put the napkin down and crumpled it against his palm.

I’d recognize those hunched shoulders anywhere: it was Jerrod, out of uniform. Alone, he looked so serious, and human. A vulnerable cop.

I turned off the idling ambulance. When I went in the bar Mad Addie, behind the counter, barely gave a glance. She didn’t tap her
No Clowns
sign or flick cigarillo ash. I walked to Jerrod’s table.

I was at his elbow before Jerrod looked up.

Then he was startled. “Can I help you?”

And I felt calm. I felt calm for the first time since…since… since the night I’d kissed Jerrod. Even my heart felt fine, relaxed. I thought about what the Buddhists said, that when you meet your soul mate you’ll be at ease. Not agitated or nervous. Not the way I felt around Rex Galore. With a steady voice, an easy breath, I said, “I don’t need any help.”