Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (3 page)

Now, I know I’m definitely insulting the Canadians, who are the host country of the foremost clown college and pinnacle of the clowning arts as the birthplace of Cirque du So Lame. I know that miming and clowning are two very distinct “arts.” But I’m just gonna fucking lump them together anyway! What, like I’m scared they’re gonna come after me? Well, yes, actually. Yes, I am. Once again images from television and film haunted me for my formative years. Maybe this is a pattern linking my fears to rape, but actually I first learned what rape was from an episode of the aforementioned
Little House
where a lowlife clown from a traveling circus raped some girl in a barn. The thing about both is that usually they are male and wear makeup, which in itself weirds my ass out. Trust me, I love me a glam tranny, lashes and lipstick, but somehow it’s the caricatured faces painted on that are cause for alarm. For example, a clown or mime rapist can have a growly sex face on but over it is a biiiiig happy smile painted on. So creepy. Like, beyond. I can’t handle it.

Mimes freak me out because I’m so talkative that the mute thing alone wigs me out. I loved the scene in
Tootsie
where Dustin Hoffman is all depressed missing Jessica Lange and is strolling through Central Park and sees a mime and just fucking pushes him down. Growing up there were always mimes in Central Park. It was like what hippies are to San Francisco children: loathsome. The king of all mimes, of course, was Marcel Marceau.

My dad was traveling on the now-defunct Concorde on a business trip. He is so not a fame fucker and is always clueless about celebs, but I got in the habit of asking him who he sat next to on those flights because it was almost always someone famous. Once he sat next to “this rock star guy” who he said was named “Stung.” It was Sting. Another time Michael Jackson was in front of him,
avec
entourage. Countless actors, models, designers. My dad didn’t know exactly who they were so I had to grill him on roles in movies until he’d be like, “Oh yeah! That one! The gal who boiled the rabbit in that movie with Michael Douglas!”

Then one day he comes home and says he sat next to, of all the glamorous passengers in the world, mime royalty: Marcel Marceau. Who ironically talked my dad’s ear off
THE ENTIRE FLIGHT.
He also ate a meal whose main ingredient was apparently raw cloves of garlic and proceeded to breathe a brown cloud of stink over my poor father for hours and hours. My dad sat and nodded, nostrils flared in horror, as he thought to himself, AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE A FUCKING MIME?!

Typical. See, like a priest who butt-fucks little boys, anything extreme is prone to snap in the other direction. No talking allowed in your profession? Then you won’t shut up!

As for clowns, same deal. If you have to be 100 percent cheery and smiley
ALL. THE. FUCKING. TIME.,
then you probably are kind of a dick. You know how your friend who scooped ice cream that stoner summer at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory still can’t look at banana fudge ripple after so many binges? My theory is that it’s like that for people, like clowns, who have to be so damn perky all the time. They are allergic to perk offstage. Year after year there are new images of scary clowns. The Matthew Barney creepy clowns also played into my fears, as did random police blotter mentions of routine armed robberies by clowns, and even Chucky, which was a doll and not a clown but carried the same idea of innocence that was corrupted and brutal and knife wielding. Funnily enough, I had made a conscious effort not to pass on this fear as I know it’s bizarre and could hamper my kids’ birthday party experiences. But no such luck. Without a word from me, my younger daughter, Ivy, froze at a party when Silly Billy yelled at her three-year-old self for whispering with her friend instead of paying attention to His Majesty’s balloon-twisting antics. In tears, she left the kiddies’ pit around him and retreated to the sofa safety of her mom’s lap. My friend Marcie then tried to comfort her when Silly Billy turned and snapped at us to STFU.

“Gee,” Marcie said. “I’ve never been bitched out by a clown before.”

I subsequently learned that Billy and his family were the subjects of the documentary
Capturing the Friedmans,
and that allegedly Silly Billy’s brother, another clown, was a child molester. Good times! When on occasion I have to stomach the circus, it’s not the lion and tigers and tightrope and trapeze and motorcycle guy in a Globe of Death that freak me out. It’s the clowns. If I never see a big red shoe again it’ll be a blessing. I also wonder if all those clown rapists wore squeaky red noses during the rape. Like the victim could reach up and honk it for help. Food for thought. Cotton candy and yellow popcorn. Vomit.

3

The revolving door of my childhood sitters began to spin in the late seventies, when my mother, who cooked, cleaned, and took care of us by herself, decided to get som e extra help and put an ad on the bulletin board at Juilliard and the School of American Ballet. It was before they built the sleek new dorm the two schools now share at Lincoln Center and many gifted kids from around the country couldn’t matriculate if they couldn’t find housing in New York. So I spent my whole childhood with an au pair living with us, along with her flute or toe shoes.

The first was Ann. With thighs you could floss your teeth with, the Jamaican-by-way-of-Liverpool Brit was a gorgeous dancer who lived in the small room upstairs and babysat my brother, Willie, and me when she wasn’t studying. My mom recalls her as elegant and sweet, a nice person to have around and a hard worker. There was just one small problem. She put the “Ann” in “anorexia.” When we brought her on a ski trip to Idaho, and Willie and I were in ski school, she decided to sweat off the carrot she’d eaten in the scalding Jacuzzi. For four hours.

My parents were skiing down to the base when they spied the blackboard by the chairlift at the bottom. In large chalk letters it read: COCO AND ARIE KOPELMAN: CALL LODGE ASAP! Panic. They had no clue what had gone down—was Willie neck-braced in one of those ski patrol sleds? Had I choked on a tater tot in the kiddie mountain cafeteria? They raced to the courtesy phone. Ann had passed out. Unconscious post-soakage in 104-degree bubbles. She’d been spatula’d off the tiles and luckily made a full recovery. But this was only the beginning of the chaos.

When we got back to New York, my parents decided to repaint the apartment, and they were under contract to use the company the building recommended. My mom took me to an interview for kindergarten (yes, this is normal in New York) as tarps were laid out and paint poured in pans.

Cut to my dad at the office with one of his biggest clients, a Midwestern fat cat hailing from a rectangular-shaped red state. Mid-schmooze and presentation, his secretary came in with a worried look.

“Mr. Kopelman?”

“We’re in the middle of an important meeting,” he explained.

She stood nervously in the doorway. “Um, it’s your sitter.”

He looked concerned.

“Excuse me for one moment,” he said apologetically, rising to take the call outside.

“
Mr. Kopelman!
” Ann screamed into the phone in her English accent.

“Ann, what’s wrong? Are the kids okay?”

“The children are fine—” she sputtered between gasps.

“Okay, what’s wrong?!” he asked.

“THE PAINTER IS TRYING TO RAPE ME!”

“What?!”

“The painter! He’s trying to
rape me
.”

Gulp.
Holy shit.

“Where are you now?” my dad asked, trying to remain calm.

“I’ve locked myself in your bathroom with a carving knife!” she wailed, her voice quivering.

My dad swallowed hard. Fuck.

“I’m on my way.”

As he grabbed his coat, he went sheepishly to face his client.

“I-I’m terribly sorry,” he stammered. “But I have an emergency.”

“Everything okay?” the midwesterner from Purina Cat Chow inquired.

“No, unfortunately. I’m afraid I have to go,” my dad replied. “My painter is raping my babysitter.”

The client shook his head. “Only in New York.”

After sprinting home fifteen blocks, my dad busted open the door to find the painter had bailed and Ann was crouched and sobbing with a hunter-green handprint on her boob and the thigh of her jeans. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibits A and B. She was a mess. Bawling. My mom and I came home to complete chaos and my parents called the painting company, freaking out.

“She’s lyin’,” the owner said to my mother. “You should see what goes down with my guys. You should
see
! I got ladies up and down Park Avenue callin’ for painters. They open the door in the nude. Buck nekkid.”

Ew. My mom tried to shake the image of some rich matron trying to toss a Benjamin Moore–covered roller aside and throwing the Polish painter on her Léron linens, untying her Pratesi robe, and unhooking his overalls.

“Perhaps, but that’s not what happened here,” my mother asserted. “She had green paw prints all over her clothes.”

“She prolly came on to him. They always do.”

No apologies, nothing.

The next day came the wrath of Ann’s six-foot-five Rasta boyfriend pacing our living room like a caged panther, gripping his dreadlock-covered head as if he had a migraine that would make his whole noggin explode onto our carpet, covering our shellacked walls with his brain’s bloody mist.

“I’M GONNA FOOKIN’ KEEL HEEM! HE IS A DEAD MON! I’M GONNA FOOKIN KEEL HEEM!” he screamed. “GEEVE ME HEEZ NAME! HE IS A DEAD MON. HE. IS. A. DEAD. MON.”

“Okay, calm down . . . ,” my dad begged, attempting to soothe the sheer unbridled ire that was the nuclear mushroom cloud erupting in the living room. “Killing him does what? Then you go to jail and you can’t see Ann anymore. Then your life is ruined. What good does that do?”

Her boyfriend channeled his extreme rage into deep breaths that morphed into hyperventilation.

“
Geeve me his name!
” he yelled. For the record, it was Rudy.

“It’s not worth it,” my dad continued. This went on for another hour until my parents had a promise from Ann’s boyfriend he’d drop it and not track this guy’s ass down and machete him to Polish pieces.

“What a day,” my mom said with a sigh after the mollified couple had left. “How is this our life? We spent the whole afternoon talking this Rastafarian out of committing murder.”

Shortly after her near-ravaging, Ann’s studies ended. It was time for a clean start.

Enter Sue. Her hair was blond, her sweet home Alabama. With huge blue eyes and a virginal demeanor, my parents were thrilled when she smiled in the doorway for the interview. They spoke with her twang-talkin’ warm, kind parents, who sent them homemade jams, and she happily installed herself in Ann’s old room.

It started out okay. She was very sweet, and seemed to be happy in potentially overwhelming New York and not longing too much for the calmer pace of the Deep South. But there was one small detail that hadn’t come up in the Q & A session she’d had with my parents. She was a sex fiend.

The first evidence of this was when a neighbor called my parents.

“I’m . . . afraid my maid has witnessed some inappropriate behavior by your babysitter,” she confessed.

Huh? Sue? Southern belle Sue?

The neighbor arranged a sit-down between my parents and her nervous maid, who recounted how one evening as she was drawing the curtains by her window, which looked out on our building’s roof, she saw little Sue running about stark naked, giggling and being chased by a large black man.

“I’m the Big Bad Wolf!” he bellowed as she ran from his grasp, laughing.

“What are you gonna do to me, Big Bad Wolf?”

“The Big Bad Wolf is gonna fuck your brains out!” They ran in circles as the maid crossed herself in the window and called her boss right away.

My parents gulped. Time to talk with Sue.

“Um, Sue, you can’t bring men into this building. This is a co-op and we have very strict rules about guests.”

“I’m sorry!” she cried, weeping. “Pleeeeeeease don’t tell my parents!
Pleeeeease!
”

My parents looked at each other.

“I won’t do it again, I
promise,
” she swore.

A few weeks later, my mom brought me home from school, and from the second we got off the elevator, she smelled the stench. “PU!” I recalled her saying. (Remember that? What happened to PU? And what did it stand for? Random.) Within seconds, Willie emerged. He was matted with sweat and waddling in a T-shirt and a bulging diaper that contained heaps of what we call in Latin
rhea explosiva
.

“Oh my god,” my mom exclaimed, scooping up her little son. “
Sue?
SUUUUUUUE!”

My mom’s voice rang through the apartment. Clearly Willie had been majorly neglected, considering he was coated in perspiration and poo. “SUE! SUE?” We followed my mom as she looked for her. Willie’s nursery. Nope. The bathroom. No. My room? Nada. Nowhere to be found. She walked down the hallway and saw the door to the den was closed. Just as my mom reached for the doorknob, Sue opened the door with a startled look on her face and her bra showing through her half-buttoned shirt. My mom pushed the door open and there was our doorman, Joe, sans uniform top, zipping the fly of his gray pants with the gold stripe down the side. It was unclear where the doorman hat was. Maybe Sue wore it with nothing else as they porked.

Willie and I stood with wide eyes as my mom asked Joe to please leave and told Sue there was going to be a Talk that evening.

“Pleeeeease don’t tell my parents!” Sue said beseechingly.

“I thought I told you this is not acceptable!” my dad said.

“You said I couldn’t bring in people from outside the building,” she said between tears in her defense. “So I found someone in the building.”

After a last warning my pushover parents acquiesced to her pleas and let her stay. But the worst was yet to come.

.

Sue’s pal Nightingale was trouble. She was a tall, striking brunette with that disco-era big hair worn with two combs. I liked her because she always came over after my parents left and would bring us frozen Kit Kat bars. As Sue and Nightingale watched our cracked-out shit-eating grins as we tore off the dark orange paper and foil wrappers, they realized something. Chocolate = kiddie currency. With those four cocoa-dipped bars, they could buy our silence.

Nightingale had wads of money. Why? Because rather than work for peanuts as an au pair wiping asses, she worked two blocks from our apartment, at the Playboy Club on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, a huge mansion that is now the Polish embassy. But in the 1970s, it housed a different genre of poles.