Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (18 page)

The taped voice calls her “The Missing Link.”

This set Ted off completely. Not that it was an obvious rip-off, but that they dared to tell us this is the missing link. Ted says, “Missing link to what? To us? To people? Dey can’t tell us dis.”

Now I remember why
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
was a tragedy for Ted. Ted stared at the screen long after the movie had ended. Then he said, “Dis cannot be. How do dey dare tell us what aliens will look like? Dis is a crime.” A nervous usher said he could have his money back, but Ted said, “I don’t want my money back, dey must stop showing dis. Tink of de children.” We were told we couldn’t go back there anymore, and I believed them.

He has the same look about him now. I decide to get Ted out of the Midway before he shouts, “Tink of de children.” This place is designed to escalate instability—the lights, blaring rock music. Ted was going to blow.

A teenager screams and beats his chest after knocking over a milk bottle with a ball. His girlfriend gets a large orange stuffed dog.

Ted says, “Dere.
Dat
is de missing link.”

We’re almost to the Midway exit when I hear a voice, a voice like no other, a voice on its last vocal cord. Raw from screaming, but through sheer will still audible and direct.

“Hey. Hey, you!”

Everything in me says don’t turn, don’t turn, but like Orpheus exiting hell, I can’t resist, I have to know. I turn.

And there he sits … the dunking clown.

The dunking clown is a man dressed as a clown sitting in an enclosed booth. He’s perched approximately ten feet off the ground on a small platform over a tank of water five feet deep. On one side of the tank is a wooden arm that extends from under his seat, outside the confines of the booth, with a target painted on its end. The goal of the clown is to insult passersby until, from rage or ego, the patron purchases the use of three balls to be tossed at the target. If one hits the target, the arm pulls from under the seat and the clown drops into the water.

The clown wears bad makeup and the condition of the water appears far from hygienic. By all rights, it should be ignored. But I remember this guy. He’s been doing this since I was a kid. He’s amazing. He berates, goads, chides, embarrasses, harasses. His arsenal of insults knows no limits. He could get Gandhi to throw a ball. He’s that good.

I intentionally try to walk Ted past the dunk tank, his last nerve as threadbare as the clown’s last vocal cord. But the clown sees Ted.

“Hey, hey, you two wimpy turds.”

Ted’s politeness gets the best of him.

“Ja,” says Ted. “What is it you want?”

And the clown has him.

“Yeah. Yeah, you. What’s the matter, don’t you like me? Hey!”

“I like you chust fine.”

The clown starts in. “Come on, are you a Kraut?”

“I am from Holland.”

“We pulled your ass out of the war.”

“You should not speak.”

“Oh, I’ll speak. I’ll speak.”

The clown strategy is to get guys so enraged they can’t throw straight. They throw too hard. I’ve seen more than one irate patron dismiss the target entirely and try to hit the clown directly through the chicken wire that protects him.

What he doesn’t know is that Ted is a clown purist. Actually one of the best performers I have ever seen. This guy is wearing the face paint of a clown that should never speak. Between the ape lady and this disregard for one of the things he holds most sacred, Ted has gone beyond endurable limits.

Ted says something in Dutch that seemed to require even more phlegm than usual.

He then pays for three balls.

The clown is laughing, singing “Lili Marleen.”

Ted holds the ball over his head, soccer style.

This send the clown into hysterics.

The ball misses. Ted says, “Opebakkus.” It’s a Flemish word. I don’t know what it means but the only guy I ever heard use it in Belgium got punched in the nose.

The second toss misses as well.

“Hey, turd,” yells the clown, “is that your name?”

“My name is … Ted.”

The third ball hits the target and the clown drops into the filthy water.

The crowd cheers.

Ted rushes the glass and pounds on it.

“Take dat, shtupid little man. Dat’s for you.”

Okay, now I really have to get him out of here. This could escalate into a serious clown fight.

Ted is tanked up on cheese curds and he just kicked some clown ass. He now feels good about himself.

I take him to the horticulture building. We watch honeybees dance in a hive to inform the others where to find the clover. It seems to soothe Ted. He still thinks he should report that clown for wearing improper makeup.

We then look at the crop art. These are artworks made entirely by gluing seeds of different shapes and colors to a board. It’s a lot like three-dimensional paint-by-numbers. For some reason, the crop art people are a very leftist bunch. Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Louis Armstrong, Eleanor Roosevelt are all immortalized, unless they get watered, in seed. Ted takes comfort in this as well.

We watch a man selling knives. He announces that with each purchase, one gets a juicer, six steak knives, and a dicer. The demonstration includes “vege-gami,” a cucumber carved into a fish, a radish into a rose, a watermelon into a cityscape with seeds acting as windows of the tenements. Then we witness a knife sawing through a twelve-penny nail, a tin can, and a two-by-four board, then he uses the very same knife to cut paper-thin tomato slices. Ted decides to buy a knife. I tell him wait and buy the second set—the hawker had used the first set to cut through that nail.

I’m glad we saw the ape woman before the knives.

Then we’re off to the poultry barn to see what the fancy chickens are wearing this year. Their fashion heights are matched only by their attitudes. Divas all, but beautiful.

By some great fortune, the display of grand pianos is placed in the hog barn and we are treated to a sonata while gazing at the “world’s largest hog.”

Finally, we end up in the llama barn. It’s competition day to determine the prize llama. Llamas are often kept with sheep because they will defend a flock from coyotes and even wolves. They are supposedly as stubborn as mules, and we witness this firsthand. The llamas are first to run an obstacle course. It is designed to aggravate more than to test dexterity. Stepping over a “wall” maybe five inches high doesn’t appear that difficult, but to a llama this is more a matter of pride. The handlers pull the reins, but because their necks are so long, the llamas simply bend their heads forward, their feet remaining firmly planted. Few make it past the wall, even fewer beyond the kiddie pool, and only two finish the course entirely.

Next is a fashion show, with the llamas wearing sweaters knitted from their own wool. I think Ted will have a fit, but he seems to enjoy the designs. One reminds him of a sweater his Norwegian grandmother had made him. Finally, the last event: the costume parade.

The third place winner is announced first, a llama dressed in authentic Peruvian attire. The handler, a boy of about twelve, is also decked out in the Andean style of dress.

“Very nice,” says Ted.

“Pretty lame,” says the guy in front of us.

Second place goes to a duo sporting a Dutch theme. Ted seems a bit embarrassed. He says, “Oh, no.” The girl is dressed as a little Dutch girl, with blonde pigtails, a blue dress and apron, and wooden shoes. She dances to what sounds like Bavarian yodeling. The llama wears a nice Dutch boy hat, shirt and tie, and lederhosen, but the real showstoppers are the two windmills spinning at his sides. The audience applauds wildly. Ted is holding his head in his hands, possibly overwhelmed with pride in his country.

Then the lights dim. As first place is announced, music blares from the speakers and spotlights hit the star attraction: Batman and Robin. Yes, the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder. The “boy” is actually a girl dressed as Robin, sidekick to the Gotham crime fighter. The llama has blue taffeta cowling on its head, complete with ears and eye slots, a neck piece running the entire length of its neck, black tights adorning its spindly front legs, and a cape stretched across its back. But most impressive are the fake arms attached at its shoulders, held outstretched in front of its body, giving an illusion of flight. The crowd goes nuts. The llama is looking around, calmly chewing whatever it is chewing, as Robin nimbly dances around his mentor. Batman, in the smallest tights I have ever seen, “flies” across the arena. It is spectacular.

Ted whispers, “Unbelievable. I am amazed at dis. Truly.”

The guy in front of us tells Ted, “You should’ve seen last year. The winner was dressed like Kirby Puckett, center fielder for the Minnesota Twins. He had arms attached, too, with huge muscles, and a baseball bat. This Batman is pretty good, though.”

That’s when I think I hear something snap in Ted. Way deep.

“Dese llamas are brilliant, really. An art form unto demselves.”

The argumentative Ted is gone. We leave the llama barn.

He eats corn, pays a dollar to have a guy guess his weight, even makes a recording in the karaoke booth. “Dere is a huis in New Orleans, dey call de Rising Sun. It’s been de ruin of many a poor boy, und Gott, I hope I’m one.”

For a while he sleeps on a bench in front of the talent tent as a baton twirler dances to the theme song from
Rocky
. Snoozing away in his mustard-stained shirt, with his free yardstick between his knees, he looks like a happy Dutchman on a stick.

I sneak off to try to find an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt to give him if we come back next year.

When he wakes, we walk to the main entrance. On the way out, he says, “Bye-bye, Goldie.”

I am so proud. Holding that corndog, with his blank expression and that smile plastered on his face, he could’ve been a Minnesotan.

“C’mon, Ted, let’s go.”

“Okay.”

While I’ve got him in this mood, I’ll swing over to the gas station and buy some lottery tickets. Then can we look for gold.

But first, I have to remember where I parked that car.

HALLOWEEN  

We move to the country when I am eight, and we have to take the bus to school. The Catholic kids sit up front and the public kids in the back. All the Catholic kids are let off at St. Francis Catholic School, and the rest of us walk a block and a half to the public school. On the way past St. Francis, I put my fingers through the chain-link fence and watch to see how the Catholic kids play. I notice they play a lot like us, but I know in that church they had other games, games like Catechism, some weird cross between catacombs and hypnotism. And the girls run about all in their plaid dresses and the boys in their blue shorts and white shirts. I wonder if when Halloween comes, they all have to be little plaid witches, and holy ghosts with short pants and white shirts.

Suddenly …
whap!
A ruler strikes my fingers through the fence.

“Nuns! Run for your lives, it’s the Nuns!”

So when Halloween arrives and Mom asks me what I wanted to be, I pick the most frightening thing I can think of. I say, “A nun. I wanna be a nun.”

“No,” she says. “Kevin, nuns are peaceful, God-fearing people.”

Was she brainwashed, or what?

“A monk? Then can I be a monk?”

“Yes, that’s fine.”

For some reason a monk was okay.

I wasn’t that keen on being a monk. When selecting a Halloween costume, I always liked to choose what I feared most, in hopes of overcoming the terror by living inside the feared thing’s skin. A monk didn’t fit my criteria.

My brother always picked a costume to try out another way to exact vengeance on the human race. One year we both went as Richard Nixon.

Another year he went as the devil. The costume was a plastic mask and red suit from the drugstore. After he got the candy, he said, “Thank you. I’ll see you in hell.” He never said it like a threat, more like, “See ya later.” Then he stood in the doorway; his happy little blue eyes peering from inside the mask. The effect was unnerving. Neighbors were calling for days wondering if Steven was mad at them for some reason, and whatever that reason was, they were sorry.

This year he is a Choctaw warrior. Mostly because he likes the word “Choctaw.”

So, I am a reluctant monk, and my brother is a Choctaw warrior, out for trick or treat. We are not happy. Now that we live in the country, there are only two houses within walking distance. About a block from our house, I turn and see my mom is nowhere in sight. I flip my hood around, pull up my white turtleneck with the hole cut in the throat, and presto chango, I am a nun. I laugh out a guttural “Ave Maria” and sing “Climb every mountain” and “Dominique, ’nique, ’nique.” I have a ruler hidden in my sock. Look out world, now it’s the nun and the Choctaw warrior.

We arrive at the first home and knock on the door. A woman comes to the door.

“Trick or treat.”

“Oh, trick or treat. Well, look at you. What are you?”

My brother says something completely unintelligible, and then looks at me.

“He says he is a Choctaw warrior, you silly white woman,” I translate.