“I don’t get it,” Buggy said. “Are the jokes so bad that even laughy-gas won’t help?”
“They are pretty bad…,” Snuffy said.
Buggy agreed. “Okay, then turn the gas all the way up.”
“All the way? That might be enough to kill them.”
“I don’t care,” Buggy said. “Nobody’s leaving here until they laugh their gumballs off.”
“Whatever you say…”
Snuffy turned the laughy-gas all the way up. It got so thick in there that even Buggy was beginning to feel woozy.
Goldstein said, “Have you ever noticed how I haven’t performed at all for the last thirty years because I’m a law-abiding citizen who would never do comedy illegally unless it was against my will?”
Somebody giggled after that joke. Goldstein paused, surprised to hear somebody actually laugh. Then another person giggled. Within a minute, the whole crowd was laughing.
“Have you ever noticed how the underground comedy club on Hundred and Second Street has a back room that’s perfect for imprisoning retired comedians who don’t do what they’re told?”
The audience laughed harder, slapping their knees as if he’d just told the funniest joke they’d ever head. Goldstein had no idea why his cries for help were being mistaken as humor.
“Have you ever noticed how I’ve been kidnapped and held hostage for the past week in order to do this show I never wanted to do and am now desperately trying to get you to call the police but none of you seems to notice or care?”
The audience screamed with laugher. They fell out of their seats and rolled on the ground. The clowns in the audience weren’t as susceptible to the laughy-gas as normal humans, but the humans were becoming spastic. They laughed so hard they couldn’t breathe. They choked and spasmed. Blood shot out of their lungs.
When Buggy noticed what was happening to the members of the audience, he gave Snuffy the signal to cut the gas. Then he stepped back so he wouldn’t inhale so much of it himself.
“Have you ever noticed how a clown named Buggy Buttons is the one responsible for imprisoning me? Call the cops and have him arrested immediately.”
Buggy heard that joke. He looked back at the comedian and realized what was going on. Goldstein was trying to get the crowd to call for help.
“That little prick,” Buggy said. “I’m going to kill him.”
Buggy clenched his fists. He was wondering if it was possible to whack him on stage in front of everyone and still get away with it.
“Erff…,” Mittens said.
“Don’t worry, Mittens. I’ll let you have a piece when I’m through with him.”
With the audience nearly paralyzed with laughter, Buggy decided that they wouldn’t even notice if he dragged Goldstein off the stage and out the back door. He would toss him in his trunk and nobody would ever hear from him again.
“Have you ever noticed how there’s an angry clown headed to the stage right now who will kill me if he gets his hands on me?” Goldstein said.
Just before Buggy could get to the stage, the side doors broke open and dozens of policemen poured inside.
“It’s a raid!” Snuffy cried.
Buggy jumped on the ground as the cops flooded the room.
“Kill the pig bastards!” yelled Winky.
Winky’s men pulled out handguns and fired at the cops, foot-long hot dogs dangling out of each of their mouths.
“Don’t shoot, you idiots,” Buggy yelled.
But Winky was too trigger-happy to stop. He didn’t realize how much worse the charges were going to be for everyone involved now that a firefight had broken out.
As bullets flew overhead, Uncle Jojo and his men crawled across the room toward the back exit. When they passed Buggy, Jojo said, “You’re dead, Bugs.”
“Erff…,” Mittens said, lying behind his life support machine with his belly in the air.
“Your dog’s dead, too,” Jojo said.
After Jojo made his escape, Reverend Jellybottom followed after him, as well as any other clowns close enough to the exit.
Winky and his crew of clowns continued eating hot dogs and firing at the cops, even after the cops shot both of Winky’s legs out from under him. The crowd was between them, right in the middle of the crossfire. But they didn’t run for cover. They just kept laughing and slapping their knees. Bullets tore through their bodies, but their laughter continued. One vanilla woman was shot right in the voice box. There was no noise coming out of her throat, but she kept laughing.
That’s when the Happy Juice flowing through Bobby Goldstein’s system finally kicked in. He was cowering behind the podium when it happened. Nobody really noticed until it was too late. It turned out that Goldstein was one of the unlucky 10 percent of people who have a bad reaction to Happy Juice. When he transformed, he didn’t become a normal clown. His body bulged and twisted into a monstrous, deranged mutant clown with muscles the size of bowling balls. His hair turned banana yellow and his eyes bulged out of his head like those of a giant alien slug.
“Have you ever noticed how human heads pop like grapes when you smash them together?” asked the Goldstein monster in a deep, demonic voice.
Then he leapt from the stage into the middle of the audience and crushed two human skulls with his bare hands.
“I think it’s time we took our leave, Mittens,” Buggy said.
With the mutated Goldstein keeping the cops occupied, Buggy lifted Mittens up off the ground and sneaked toward the back door.
“What do you say we hop on the nearest train and get the hell out of town?” Buggy asked his bulldog.
“Erff…,” Mittens said. Not even the gunfight was enough to excite the dog.
Just before exiting out the back door, Buggy looked back at the chaos he was leaving behind. The whole room was filled with laughing, applauding people, who didn’t seem to think anything they watched was real as Winky and the cops blasted each other full of bullet holes and a monstrous freak rampaged through the room, ripping arms and legs off anyone he could get ahold of.
Then Buggy found himself doing something he hadn’t done in a long time: He started to laugh. At first, he thought it was the laughy-gas taking effect, but then he realized it was something else. He realized that what he was witnessing was actually pretty funny. Maybe it was because he loved the idea of seeing all the people he hated in this business finally get their comeuppance—from the ego-driven comedian to the annoying yuppie clientele to his idiot staff who always messed things up to the cops who always tried to shut him down. Or maybe it was just the simple fact that his sense of humor had suddenly become morbid. Either way, Buggy opened his mouth and let out a deep, satisfying laugh.
And he didn’t stop laughing—not when he left the club and hopped on the first train out of town, nor when they strapped the straitjacket on him six weeks later. Buggy had finally gotten his sense of humor back and it was a damn shame he wasn’t able to put it to good use before his unexpected retirement.
Part Five
The Unwhackable Bingo Ballbreaker
Chapter 101
The clown woke in a pool of his own blood with a bullet in the back of his head.
At first, he thought it was just a bad hangover, that the warm fluid he lay in was just vomit or urine. But then he remembered he gave up drinking a few months back—the alcohol made him too violent and he was really trying to make an effort to cut back on the violence. Then he thought maybe he’d been sleepwalking. It wasn’t uncommon for the big lug to get up during the night and rearrange his furniture or cook a giant meal for eighteen people and then fall asleep in some random place in his house. For all he knew, he’d wrapped himself up in a warm blanket of homemade soup on his living room floor. He was used to doing that kind of thing.
When he opened his eyes and noticed that the warm fluid he lay in was actually a pool of his own blood, the clown just chuckled and went back to sleep. He was used to that kind of thing as well.
“So that�
��s Bingo Ballbreaker?” the clown heard somebody say in his half sleep.
There were people in his apartment with him. He couldn’t recognize them by their voices, but they were there, standing over him. All he could see of them from his prone position were the rubber gloves on their hands and galoshes over their feet.
“I guess so,” said another voice. “Damn, look at the size of him. He’s even bigger than I thought.”
“So he’s the guy who took out the whole Tortorello crew single-handedly?”
“Yeah, they say the Tortorellos shot him twelve times and he just kept coming.”
“How’d he even survive that?”
“They don’t call him unwhackable for nothing. Every single hit man who’s ever been sent after him ended up dead. Some people say the clown can’t be killed. Like he’s bulletproof or something.”
Bingo blinked a few times. He thought about saying something to his guests, but he was still really tired and his head was really sore. He just wanted to lie there for a few more minutes.
“Well, somebody finally got him. He’s dead now.”
“Yeah, and good riddance. I’m going to feel a lot safer sleeping at night knowing this freak isn’t walking around town anymore.”
Bingo wondered why the guy had to go and hurt his feelings like that. Just because he was covered in scars and too big to be allowed on an airplane without paying for two seats didn’t give the guy the right to call him a freak in his own home.
One of the intruders put down a sheet of plastic and said, “Get his legs. I want to get this done with so we can get out of here as soon as possible.”
“How the heck are we going to even lift him? The guy’s got to weigh as much as a horse?”
The other guy sighed. “Yeah…Maybe we should cut him into quarters first.”
Bingo sat up and stretched out his back, moaning at the tightness in his muscles from sleeping on the floor all night. When his guests saw him move, they jumped back.
“What the hell!” one of them cried.
“He’s not dead!” yelled the other.
Bingo cracked his knuckles, then cracked his neck. When he stood up, he towered over the men like some kind of clown-shaped Godzilla.
“How the heck is he still alive?”
Bingo rubbed the wound on the back of his head and pulled out a .38 slug from the hole in his bald scalp. A normal person would’ve died on the spot if they were shot with a .38 at that close a range. But Bingo’s skull was so abnormally thick that it stopped the bullet flat, leaving him with only a small headache and a bit of memory loss.
The two men winced when they saw the clown casually remove the bullet from his head and drop it on the floor as if it were a mere splinter. Then Bingo looked at them. He didn’t recognize either of the men. At first he thought they were clowns, but after blinking a couple of times he realized they were actually normal humans wearing clown makeup. One was in a red wig, the other in a blue. He figured they must have been Carnies or from one of the big vanilla families across town. Either way, Bingo didn’t care. He was thirsty and just wanted to get some cool liquid to wet his dry throat.
When Bingo turned away from them, the two men dressed as clowns looked at each other. He could hear them whispering to each other.
“I thought he was supposed to be dead?”
“He was supposed to be dead!”
Bingo wasn’t in the mood to go all the way to his kitchen fridge, so he grabbed a container of warm milk from his dinner table. When he took a sip, he immediately regretted it. He didn’t know how long it had been sitting there, but it had long since gone sour. He gulped it down anyway, then took another sip. The rancid curds were oddly soothing on his throat, but didn’t do much to quench his thirst.
“What do we do?” the blue-wigged man whispered.
“I don’t know,” said the red-wigged man.
“Let’s just go.”
“We can’t. We’ve already been paid.”
When Bingo turned around, the blue-wigged man panicked and pulled out a gun and fired. A bullet hit the clown in the lower abdomen. He didn’t fall or hardly even move. He just looked down at the fresh bullet hole and back up at his guests.
“Hey, cut it out,” Bingo said, only slightly annoyed. Then he took another sip of the old milk before dropping it back on the table.
The man in the blue wig just stood there, shaking so hard he nearly dropped his piece. If it wasn’t for the red-wigged guy taking the gun away from him he probably would’ve emptied the weapon into the eight-foot clown. If he did that, there was a good chance that he might have really started to piss Bingo off.
Bingo went to his couch and sat down, opening up a drawer in his coffee table.
“So either of you two gents going to tell me what the heck happened here?” he asked as he removed his blood-soaked T-shirt. The two men noticed dozens of old wounds sprinkled across his white muscled flesh.
The clown pulled out a pair of pliers and a jar of alcohol. He dipped the pliers in the alcohol to kill any germs that might have been lingering, then shoved them into his new wound to remove the bullet that came from Blue Wig’s gun. It didn’t take much effort. It hadn’t even gone an inch deep.
“You’d know better than us, wouldn’t you?” Red Wig asked.
Bingo shrugged. “I guess my memory’s gotten a little jumbled up. I can’t seem to recall much of anything that happened in the past few days or so.”
The clown dropped the slug in the drawer. Before he closed it, the two men got a good look at the collection of bullets he had in there. The pile was at least three inches deep, all slugs he’d removed himself over the years. There had to be at least fifty in there. Maybe a hundred. And those were probably just the ones he happened to remove himself.
“You got whacked,” Red Wig said. “Or at least you were whacked. You obviously survived it.”
“Yeah, but who did it?” Bingo stood up and went into his kitchen to get something to drink. “Obviously not you two.”
He returned with a quart of grape juice, lifting his baseball-sized red nose as he drank.
“We’re just the cleaners,” said Red Wig. “Freelance. Our clients wanted to remain anonymous, so we have no idea who tried to kill you. We just came to take care of the body.”
Bingo grunted and took another sip of grape juice. He tried to remember what could’ve happened. Somebody shot him in his own apartment while he had his back turned. Either the person was a contract killer who’d picked his lock and sneaked up behind him when he wasn’t paying attention or the person was somebody he knew well. He had no idea who would want him dead. He worked for the Bozo Family, so there was no way anyone would have dared whack him unless it was somebody within the Bozo Family. But he was loyal and never failed to get a job done. There was no way they’d want to whack him unless he did something stupid like break Jimmy Bozo’s neck for pissing him off one too many times, but he had no recollection of doing such a thing. Plus, there’s no way the Bozos would have hired some vanilla cleaners to dispose of the body. They would’ve done it themselves.
“Well, I guess I’ll never know then,” Bingo said. He leaned back and put his feet up on the coffee table.
The cleaners didn’t know what to make of Bingo. They thought he’d be a lot more angry at the people who’d tried to kill him.
“So that’s it? You’re just going to let it slide?”
“Yeah.” Bingo shrugged and grabbed a jawbreaker from the candy dish on the table. “No harm done. Maybe the son of a bitch will turn up and try again someday. I’ll get him then.”
Red Wig said, “I thought you were the kind of guy who’d track a man to the end of the earth if he did you wrong.”
“I don’t have time for that.” Bingo popped the jawbreaker into his mouth and sucked on it as he spoke. “Do you know how many people I’d have to chase down if I went after everyone who ever tried to kill me? I’d never get anything done.”
Then he dug his remote
out of the cushions of his cereal-stained pawnshop couch and turned on the television to a football game. The Bigtop Bouncers were playing. They weren’t the best football team in the league, but they were always the most fun to watch. Clowns weren’t the best athletes, but their antics totally changed the game.
As the large clown watched the TV, the two men just stood there, too awkward to leave or even say anything.
“You think the Bouncers stand a chance this year?” Bingo asked.
Not sure how to respond, Red Wig stuttered, “Yeah…Sure.”
“You know, I played football when I was in high school,” Bingo said. “They kicked me off, though. Said I played too rough.”
“Oh yeah?” Red Wig didn’t know what else to say.
“So I put a few people in the hospital. Big deal. If they didn’t want to get hurt then they should’ve joined the water ballet team.”
The cleaners just wanted to get out of there, but couldn’t figure out how to leave. They were too scared to ask and too afraid what would happen to them if they tried to run.
Bingo waved them over. “Come take a load off. The game’s only just started.”
“Actually…,” Red Wig said. “We should probably get going now.”
“Nah, you can stay,” Bingo said. “I hate watching football alone.”
“Thanks. We appreciate the offer, but we really need to go. We got another job to do. Several, in fact.”
Bingo gestured to the couch. “Sit.”
The two men didn’t know what else to do. They inched their way to the couch and sat down as far away from the clown as they could.
“What the hell’s going on?” Blue Wig whispered to his partner. “Is he going to kill us?”
“I think he just wants us to watch football,” whispered Red Wig.
“But why? What’s wrong with him?”
“Just do it.”
The two men sat there, staring at the television screen. They were too nervous to actually pay attention to the game. At any second, they expected Bingo to get up and crush both of their skulls with his wrecking ball fists.
ClownFellas Page 27
