During freshman or sophomore year of high school, our French teacher assigned us the task of writing a short story; nothing special, just a narrative written in French. Most of us dutifully cobbled together something semigrammatical that a child one-third our age might find tedious—“Il êtait un chat qui s’appelait Henri . . . ,” etc.—but not Tom C. He penned a stark little postmodern fable about an investigation into the murder of a clown, the kind of thing that Robbe-Grillet and Borges might have thrown together while listening to “Houses of the Holy.” All I remember of it with any certainty, besides that the French was high-flown and mostly wrong, is the final scene. The Inspector orders one of his assistants to remove the dead clown’s makeup so that the decedent’s identity can be ascertained, but the assistant reports back that it is impossible to remove the makeup because, as the story’s last line puts it, “Il est un clown biologique.” My familiarity with the collected works of the young Tom C. encourages me to assume that there had been an earlier scene in which the hyper-rational Inspector staked his reputation and his very sanity on the notion that penetrating the whiteface to discover the clown’s true identity would allow him to solve the case. I wonder what our French teacher thought when she read it. It being the ’70s, chances are she told her husband that this clown story her student had written was freaking her out, then took chemical steps to get mellow.
Twenty-two or twenty-three years later, the April 9, 2001 issue of The New Yorker featured a short story by Michael Chabon entitled “The God of Dark Laughter.” In that story, told with pitch-perfect command of the portentous mock-scholarly style appropriate to the form (in which phrases like “certain sacrificial artifacts pertaining to the worship of the proto-Urartian deity” serve the same function as compulsory figures once did in ice skating competitions), an improbably erudite small-town district attorney in western Pennsylvania investigates the murder of a clown. During the course of the investigation, much of it conducted by reading arcane books, the DA stumbles upon an ancient cult of clown-worshippers whose own clownish appearance is not just the result of makeup but of inbreeding that has produced hereditary natural whiteface. A coroner’s report theorizes that a depigmentation disorder known as vitiligo might have caused the white patches of skin he found on the dead clown’s nape and throat (the rest of the face being unavailable, as the murderer had peeled his victim’s head with a long, sharp knife). “Let the record show,” the DA adds, “that the contents of the victim’s makeup kit, when it was inventoried, included cold cream, rouge, red greasepaint, a powder puff, some brushes, cotton swabs, and five cans of foundation in a tint the label described as ‘Olive Male.’ There was no trace, however, of the white greasepaint with which clowns daub their grinning faces.” In other words, il est un clown biologique.
How to reckon with this congruence of tales? (In addition to the clown biologique, Chabon’s story also features a baboon, a scholarly charlatan, a clown-obsessed intruder who pays a dreamlike nighttime visit to the hero, and other figures who would be cozily at home in Tom C.’s oeuvre.) I can see how two writers of the same generation, sharing not only some of the same esoteric interests but also perhaps the same fear of clowns, might have arrived separately at the same idea and given it similar expression, one in precocious adolescence, the other in the early middle period of a distinguished writing career in which he has lately turned for inspiration to childhood enthusiasms like comic books and coulrophobia. I can even entertain the possibility that les clowns biologiques might actually exist, and that Tom C. and Chabon might have separately encountered them—knowingly or not—and rendered the encounters in fictional form.
Then there’s this: Chabon is married to Ayelet Waldman, who attended Wesleyan University in the 1980s, where in her freshman year she lived on the same hall as one Wilson “Bob” McDermut of Chicago, whom I have known since nursery school and who has known Tom C. almost as long. Bob remembers telling her about Tom C.’s French story at some point during that freshman year of college, so it may be that the clown biologique traveled by word of mouth from Tom C. to Bob to Waldman to Chabon, who would, according to the practical give and take of the storytelling trade, be welcome to make what he could of it. We cannot compare the texts in greater detail because the only copy of Tom C.’s story has been lost, presumably destroyed, and neither he nor I can remember much about it—other than that it was written in a crabbèd script and employed certain curious usages and spellings of an arcane nature which have long since passed from the knowledge of humankind. I do feel obliged to observe, though, that the story of the clown biologique really loses something if you don’t read it in the original French.
I guess I do not honestly believe that Tom C. influenced Chabon. But I like to think he did, because it would please me to know that the precocious aesthete and poetaster with whom I grew up persists as a literary subtext, even if the adult Tom C.—an insurance man and financial planner with a disused PhD in early modern German intellectual history, who has not drawn a Plume Clown or tossed off a rhymed couplet in many years—no longer bears much trace of the kid who believed it incumbent upon a thinking person to maintain a well-stocked Freak Out Box.
Phil, another hulking childhood friend from Chicago, actually became a clown in adulthood (which would make him non-biologique, of course). After years as an actor and improv comedian, he moved to Toronto and began studying with Sue Morrison, who apprenticed under Richard Pochinko, Canada’s great clown teacher, who died in 1989 and still commands a worshipful following in certain pratfall-taking circles. Pochinko studied with Jacques Lecoq, a French red-nose classicist, and with an American Indian clown sensei known as Jonsmith. Pochinko-derived clowns abound in Toronto, exploring variants of the master’s synthesis, which trails centuries-deep roots in the commedia dell’arte as well as in Old World and New World folk traditions.
The Pochinko school places therapeutic emphasis on finding your inner clown and ideological emphasis on tricksterish truth-seeking, neither of which necessarily subsumes itself to the showbiz priority of making ‘em laugh. Pochinko clowning can get itchy with the tension between different imperatives coexisting in one greasepainted skin. Phil told me a distinctively Torontonian war story about a soiree held at the performance space operated by Mump and Smoot, a duo known as “Canada’s Clowns of Horror,” who are Pochinko’s most successful students and—not coincidentally—his most practically showbiz-minded. Phil was slated to go on late in the show, which made for a trying backstage wait. “You have to be in your clown before you go on-stage,” he told me, “but it’s hard to be in clown backstage for an hour; it’s too tiring. So you don’t get into your clown, you just sit around, and you’re just you. Meanwhile, everybody else who’s on before you is in their clown, and they’re messing with you, because they’re clowns. And you’re like, ‘Okay, Jingles, whatever you say.’” The emcee clown for the show, an unpredictable fellow who prized his sense of himself as an edgy performer, took a break offstage during the first half of the show. During this break he reported a sudden inspiration: Phil, whose clown was a gentle stooge named Bunce, should come onstage just before intermission and hit him with a folding chair. Phil was hesitant, but the emcee insisted that it would work brilliantly, pulling together certain dramatic threads that had developed in the show’s first half. There was no time to explain further. They hurriedly rehearsed the chair routine before the emcee had to rush back onstage again.
When it came time to do the chair stunt in earnest, they missed connections and Phil-as-Bunce ended up whacking the emcee flush on the temple, rather than conking him lightly across the back. The audience gasped as the emcee went down like a steer under the stunner’s tool at a slaughterhouse. “I go offstage,” Phil told me, “then I come back a minute later—I’m still Bunce—and check him out. Under my breath I ask if he’s okay. No answer. The audience is freaking out. So I signal for intermission.” A few minutes later, with concerned clowns grouped around him, the emcee leaped up and exclaimed, �
�That was great!” as if he had been playing possum the whole time. But, Phil told me, “I think he was out cold for a while—I felt it when I hit him—but he tried to play it off like it had all been part of his idea.” The moral of the story? “A little more Mump and Smoot would have been good there. More theatricality, more rehearsing, not so much going by the seat of the pants for a big moment of psychological truth, or whatever he was after.”
A few years ago, when I was playing hooky from an academic conference held in Toronto, Phil took me to a party hosted by Sue Morrison. After visiting the refrigerator to get myself a beer and poking around the house a bit, I suddenly realized that everybody there except me was a clown. I had known there would be clowns present, of course, but an evening in bars had somehow distracted me from considering that there would come a moment when I found myself among them. In street clothes they looked like graduate students, and they seemed self-consciously arty, like actors in experimental theater or serious mimes. (I figure Bozo or Cooky in mufti, by contrast, would act like a plaid-jacketed Rotarian.) Still, they were clowns, and they talked shop. Somebody was saying that he had done a turn at a children’s show that had gone especially well because he had experienced a breakthrough onstage, a cathartic reversal of inner polarities—terror and joy, innocence and experience. The therapeutic triumph seemed to be the point of the story, although he did not fail to make clear that the kids had in fact loved him. “I killed,” he said. “I totally killed.”
Where was Tom C. when I needed him? Writing second-to-die life insurance policies. I could have used the Van Helsing–like assistance of the inventor of the Freak Out Box earlier that day, too, when Phil scared the hell out of me by putting on his nose. “Check this out,” he said, and turned away to fit it over his face. It was just a hollow red plastic ball on a thin white elastic, but when he turned to me it had transformed him. His features grew opaque and still, rearranging themselves around the nose. I was struck by the sudden quiet; we were in his apartment, and I could hear traffic sounds outside. The clown before me, a giant stranger who had devoured Phil, gave me a “What next?” look, distressingly full of possibility. If his tongue had unfurled sixteen feet out of his mouth while making an ah-ooga sound, or if his head had swiveled all the way around and then sailed off his neck at a crazy jack-in-the-box angle, I would have been frightened but not particularly surprised. Phil always liked softball, I was thinking, so I could probably find a bat somewhere in the apartment. Would aluminum or wood work better against a clown? It gets cold in Canada, so they might have a fireplace, and if there’s a fireplace there ought to be a poker. Or perhaps a steak knife from the kitchen. Or garlic—no, garlic doesn’t work against clowns. Nothing works against clowns. Then he took off the nose and he was almost entirely Phil again.
* * *
Original publication: The American Scholar, Fall 2004.
The Two Jameses
I GOT TO KNOW Boxing James, who used to manage fighters and promote fights, because he called me at home one day out of the blue to discuss a book I’d written about boxing. Our conversation led to a several-times-daily email correspondence, which eventually expanded to include a number of other fight people and boxing aficionados. When he’s in town, we have dinner. Ascetic, musical, bookish, committed to the avant-garde credo that a true artist in any form revolutionizes the very language he employs to say whatever he has to say, Boxing James makes for an unlikely recovering gangster. But anybody who does business in the fight world has to be a gangster at least some of the time. He has also worked in music, loan sharking, and “the skin business,” as he calls pornography and prostitution. He says he’s done with all that now. As far as I can tell, he has become a post-lowlife bodhisattva. Remarried to his first wife and profoundly in debt, he eats one meal a day, spends rigorous hours at the piano (he played jazz before he became a manager of heavy metal bands), and has given up exploiting other people’s weakness for profit.
James tells a story about a promising heavyweight prospect, a young Dominican who seemed to have it all: he was physically gifted, well-schooled as a boxer, good-looking, personable, and fluent in English. James, who managed him, thought he might just have the next big thing on his hands—the first Hispanic heavyweight champion of the world. After the prospect won his professional debut, James took a tape of the fight to Al Braverman, who was Don King’s director of boxing, a kingpin who could make things happen for a rising star. The prospect had won his debut easily, but they had watched no more than a minute or so of the tape before Braverman remarked, “Got a little muttski in him, doesn’t he?”
It came as news to James that his golden prospect was a quitter, a coward—by the unforgiving standards of boxing, that is, since by any normal standard he was uncommonly brave. We’ve all got at least a little muttski in us, but fighters can’t afford to be like everybody else. Braverman told James, “Don’t worry, we’ll build a wall around the kid,” meaning that they would handpick his opponents and try to put off the day when they had to put him in against a fighter shrewd enough to find his soft spot.
Six years and seventeen fights after Braverman pronounced on him, that day came. James’s fighter was matched against another contender in a bout that would determine which of them continued on to a shot at a heavyweight title. The other contender’s sharp-eyed trainer saw what Braverman had seen. Before the opening bell, the trainer looked James’s fighter in the eye, pointed to his own chest while shaking his head, and said, “No heart. You got no heart.” Everybody in the ring knew he was right. James’s fighter, the more talented of the two, was finished before the bell rang to open the first round.
Spend enough time around fight people and you acquire their habit of sensing weakness in others. It radiates from some people like a skunk’s musk, from others like the faintest indefinable odor. James cultivated his faculty for sensing it for so many years that now he can’t turn the faculty off. James, who left home early and never did get much of any other sort of education, at least in the formal sense, regrets that he can’t stop perceiving desperation in others, especially the desperation brought on by money trouble.
He works on cultivating a more humane perspective, though. There’s a street in the neighborhood where his wife works that’s lined with iffy businesses and menacing hangers-out. Even once he was out of the lowlife, James would drive down that street and see only business opportunities. He says it took years for him to see people on that street—poor people, people in trouble. He can still see their desperation, but now that he sees the people, too, he’s less tempted to strike instinctively into the openings it creates.
Corresponding with Boxing James and our circle of mutual boxing acquaintances can sometimes get me in trouble. A while ago, a fellow academic was giving me a hard time, threatening me with an ugly public squabble. I sent him an e-mail inviting him to either do as he threatened or give it up; you didn’t even have to be a fight person to sense the weakness coming off of him in waves, like an aura. Rereading my e-mail to him, I can see now that James and company were in my head. “We can do this or not do this” is the tipoff line. The guy’s return message ran to well over a thousand words, most of them devoted to a detailed analysis of my ethical and intellectual distress, but he might have saved himself the effort and just written “We’re not going to do this,” because we didn’t.
The fact of his weakness was not, all by itself, reason to exploit it. But there it was, like a slow opponent’s left glove held several inches too low, so I counterpunched into the hole. Next time I’ll think first; after all, I still have to work with him. Boxing James, who knows about these things, gave me a useful piece of advice about how to fix the situation so it’s less of a bother. He counseled me to throw the guy a bone by contriving to reveal a minor soft spot of my own to him—an invented one, of course, since you don’t want to be giving anybody an edge over you if you don’t have to—which would ease the tension by appearing to even the ledger of vulnerability between us.
<
br /> James can be dispassionately clear-minded about transactions like this because he treats human imperfection as a purely technical matter. True fight people do not regard the fact of weakness, whether it proceeds from a glass chin or insufficiently mastered fear or some other source, as a good or a bad thing. It’s simply part of human architecture, there to be perceived and then exploited. For fight people, human weakness is like market weakness: not a moral category, but merely an occasion for technique.
I call Boxing James by that name to distinguish him from Business James, the other scholar of weakness in my life. (By the way, although they do have the same first name, it’s not James.) If Boxing James is an artist who used to be a gangster, Business James is a political philosopher who exploits market weakness for a living. I couldn’t tell you exactly what he does, but it involves finding underpriced companies and using money collected from a crew of impossibly rich investors (I picture them as near-miss finalists for the role of James Bond villain) to make offers the companies’ owners can’t refuse, then managing those companies and buying up other companies to combine with them until they’re profitable, then selling them and renting a fleet of dump trucks to deliver the money to the bank.
Business James, an old friend I first got to know in college, is a Howard Dean man and a big donor to the Democrats who spends much of his time making beautiful financial music with Texas Republicans in the oil business. He’s a Darwinian pessimist committed to the premises of the welfare state, a money man who reads, a reading man who happens to make money. He makes a running joke of tracking the leading indicators of imminent apocalypse, everything from rising sea levels to the behavior of some older pro-Bush business associates whose secret bearishness on America has reached the point where they’re quietly moving significant elements of their fortunes offshore. He jokes about his own doomsaying, but he’s also not kidding. He owns high ground up north, far enough from Boston (where we both live) to afford his family pleasant weekends away from the city, but not so far away that he can’t get them there quickly in an emergency.
Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories Page 26
