Clown Girl

by Monica Drake

  I bought my first bag of balloons and the flimsy paperback Balloon Tying for Christ as a sure way to fill contracted time. Next thing I knew, I was a corporate clown. I worked for an international cookie company, a burger chain, a mortgage investment bank. I met Matey and Crack on the job. Crack had an agent. She waggled a finger, flashed a few paychecks, and at her side I turned full-on commercial clown as a temporary deal. For the street fair gig, she hooked us up with the Neighborhood Business Association.

  I twisted another sheep head, another pillowed body; the kids screamed. My arms were heavy. The world moved closer, noises louder and colors glaring migraine bright. I fell to my knees, fell on my flock of sheep. Balloons squeaked and squirted out from beneath my weight and danced into the air. They shifted, drifting around me. The kids laughed. Of course they laughed! The rubber chicken poked a leg out of my bag as the bag slipped from my shoulder.

  Tiny hands brushed against my clothes. Their voices were as one, the cackle of an amplified gag gift, a screeching giggle box. They pressed the squirting daisy, pulled the pom-poms used as hair. One kid took the chicken and swung it over his head. I reached, but could barely breathe in a claustrophobic cloud of peanut butter, grape jam, and soft, sour milk breath. I looked around for the architect, my fan. Any coulrophile would do.

  When I caught the eye of a passing stranger, I tipped an invisible glass to my lips. Water. I needed water. The guy kept going. Another looked. I pointed my thumb to my mouth, hand in a fist, pinkie cocked. A drink. I needed a drink.

  Clown games.

  Nobody would hold my gaze. No adults anyway. They looked in the window over my head, at ceramics, coffee cups, and baby clothes. Where were the fetishists when I needed one? There’s no easier way to be invisible than through the embarrassment of clown gear mixed with a plea for audience involvement. Finally, as I curled on my drifting bed of sheep, a man slipped me his card. The card fell into my hand. Call me, he’d written, with his number.

  A golf course designer. A golf course spatial use and planning consultant.

  I grabbed his wrist and broke my clown rule—I spoke. “A drink,” I whispered.

  He smiled. “A drink. Sounds good. Let me know when.”

  I held on. My fingers pressed tighter around the metal accordion of his watchband. I whispered, “No, I need a drink now. Water…” I said, “I’m sick.”

  He reached for his card back and shook his wrist free. So long to the dream date! The fetish was broken, the fantasy gone; I was only a sick girl in makeshift clown clothes. He said, “Hey,” out loud to nobody, and backed away. His silver watch flashed in the sun. “The clown’s sick.”

  No Florence Nightingale, this clown-stalking links designer.

  Matey and Crack turned. The stuffed purple parrot swung on Matey’s pirate-clown shoulder and the world receded into a wash of soft colors. The wail of the girl in her fake leopard sundress grew dim. There was a hum that wouldn’t stop. I closed my eyes, cheek pressed into the hot hard gravel of the sidewalk. It was coming for me—the short, meaningless life of an insect. Sheep bodies touched my skin lightly, carefully, like a priest’s last rites, like gentle kisses. Swimming or drowning, there’s not much difference. I was flooded with grease-laden festival air, the bodies, the heat, the weight of air itself. I drifted toward balloon heaven. I was that transitory thing, an underinflated sheep, an empty carcass not meant to last.

  W.C. Fields wandered across my mind’s eye. He shook a stogie, and in his slow, drunken drawl said, “Hey, don’t worry about your heart…it’ll last as long as you live.” He took a swig off a flask, turned away, and disappeared.

  “My heart!” I said out loud, suddenly worried.

  “You’ll be OK,” somebody else said, a real-world voice.

  Rex Galore? My clown mate, my savior. A word from Rex and I’d revive; Rex had found me on the street. He was back in town. A hand brushed my face, trailed by the bite of cinnamon.

  “Relax,” he said. “Take a deep breath. You’ll make it.”

  I wanted to believe his words, to be the truth of the story he told.

  I opened my eyes to the blue of a shirt sleeve, a hand reaching out. It wasn’t Rex. It was a cop. A cop had cleared the kids back.

  House Rule Number One where I lived: Don’t talk to cops.

  But the cop put his fingers to my pulse. My head was woozy. The cop gave me water. It was a magic trick, the way he pulled the paper cup pulled from the crowd; the cup was suddenly in the cop’s hand, then in mine. “Help is on the way,” he said and wrapped his fingers around my fingers to hold the cup. A magical cop. Hair on the back of his fingers was sparse, golden as jewelry. His eyes were pale blue. With his second hand he propped up my head. I rested against his palm like a pillow. “Can you tell me your name?” he asked.

  Anonymity. It’s in the Clown Code of Ethics: I will always try to remain anonymous while in makeup and costume, though there may be times when it is not reasonably possible to do so. These were my promises: I wouldn’t talk to cops and I wouldn’t speak in costume.

  I opened my mouth and said, “Nita.”

  He said, “You need a…?”

  “Nita,” I whispered again, with all the energy I had. The only thing holding the cup in my hand was the cop’s hand around mine. Between our two hands our skin grew hot, sweat mingled. He leaned in close. He smelled like cinnamon streusel, apple pancakes. Delicious.

  “What do you need?”

  His hand, and his help, made me both sad and happy at the same time, and I couldn’t hold on to the mix; I felt something inside lift. I was still on the ground while a heat in my body struggled to climb up. The feeling caught in my throat and closed down there, like a sob. Clotted. I couldn’t speak if I wanted to.

  He squinted, teetered, then caught his balance poised in a crouch. His breath brushed my skin. Ah! Too much. I took another deep, cinnamon-streusel breath. The cop was so close I could’ve kissed him. For one minute I didn’t see him as a cop but as a man, concerned, all sweet skin and golden hair. The cop’s eyes narrowed as he waited and listened. Patient. I asked, “Do I know you?”

  He was young enough, but still when he narrowed his eyes his skin there turned into a weathered, radiant arc of wrinkles. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ve never met.” I saw the blue of the uniform again. He was a cop, doing his job. I was a citizen in trouble.

  Rex Galore was what I needed. My Clown Prince. That strong giant, Rex, darling shaman and showman; a touch of his hand would make everything right. Rex was far away. All I had was a cop, a flatfoot, an outsider to our outsider lifestyle.

  “Bleeding?” I asked, and my voice cracked as it climbed past that knot of throated sadness mixed with hope. One word, mumbled. Then two: “Am I?”

  He said, “You’re not bleeding. “Do you have I D?”

  My Clown Union card was tucked in my polka-dot bra. I didn’t move for it.

  The cop took the cup from my hand—from our hands—and set the cup on the ground. Where he peeled his hand from mine, the air was suddenly cool in the empty space that had been our sweaty warmth. I wanted him to hold my hand again, to say that I’d be okay, to anchor me in the world. Instead he reached in the loose pocket of my saggy polyester high-waters, the clown clothes, and his cinnamon smell surrounded me. His cop fingers brushed my thigh through the thin cloth of the pocket lining. He pulled out a handkerchief tied to a handkerchief tied to a handkerchief tied to another handkerchief, never ending.

  The kids were a silent pack, watching. Adults looked too now because cop action is the adult entertainment version of a clown show and holds everyone’s attention. He pushed the clothesline of pastel handkerchiefs back into my pocket. The sun was a gilded halo around his head, his forehead lined and anxious. He hit the wolf whistle in my pocket, and the whistle screamed out its two notes, one up, one down. The sexy call.

  The crowd roared. I felt sick. I lay back against the cop’s arm.

  “Her name?” he asked again, and
looked around. “Does anybody know her name?” A juggling ball rolled out of my pink prop bag into the feet of the crowd. A kid went after it, chasing the ball the way a dog would.

  “Sniffles?”

  A voice in the crowd. It was Matey. Matey speaking up. Matey, my co-worker, who didn’t even know my real name.

  2.

  My Chicken, My Child!; or, Clown Bashing Lite

  AT THE HOSPITAL DON’T SHOW UP IN CLOWN GEAR, PAINTED with the lush designs of clown face, because if you do, even clean underwear and an ambulance ride won’t win your credibility back. They brought me in on a gurney. Somebody said, “She looks a little pale. Ha ha!” He thought I was passed out. I saw him through my eyelashes, hoped he wasn’t my doctor.

  Don’t tell them you’ve lost your rubber chicken—don’t let on that the rubber chicken matters, even if that chicken was half your act, your only child, love made manifest.

  I told the EMT s about the rubber chicken on the ride over. “Somebody has to find it,” I pleaded. “I can’t lose my chicken.” They didn’t blink.

  In the hospital, the EMTs unbuckled the gurney seat belt straps. I half-sat up, sick and limp, then climbed onto an ER cot and closed my eyes again. My mouth was dry, clouded with words I wouldn’t say.

  “Another clown bashing?” a triage nurse asked. She lifted my arm and slid on the blood pressure cuff. There’d been a string of clown bashings in town. Hate crimes. Meringue pies full of scrap iron, fire extinguishers at full blast. Gary Lewis and his pack of Playboys, they had it wrong—not everybody loves a clown. The crimes were never prosecuted; clowns didn’t come forward. What do you say? Officer, a joke’s a joke, but only when it’s consensual!

  The blood pressure cuff squeezed my bicep tight as a fist, like a dime-store security guard with a shoplifter. The black balloon of the armband throbbed against my pulse. A second nurse shook his head. “Self-destructed, this one.” With a sharp bite, he slid a needle in the back of my hand to hook up a saline drip.

  Some people hate clowns, others are afraid, though hate and fear are really one and the same. Those coulrophobics, with their Fear of One Who Walks on Stilts. Fear of one with special skills, clown skills. My only skills.

  Nobody cared about my chicken, my child.

  The blood pressure cuff dropped away in the release of a deep exhale. The first nurse swabbed my makeup off. She hit me with a damp cotton ball in fast jabs. My face was reflected in the chrome of instruments. The jabbing swabber left white streaks along my chin and blue-black rings that seeped into the creases around my eyes. My lips were still pomegranate red, more like a tweaking hooker than a clown. The intake nurse said, “Rest quietly. Breathe. Let yourself hydrate.”

  I sipped the air-conditioned air of the hospital like water, in tiny breaths. My heart knocked against my chest like a bird against a window.

  She said, “Do you have I D?”

  I sat up, fished a hand around inside my sun-hot bra, and pulled out two curled photos. The first photo was of a couple standing on the end of a pier, far away and blurred. Unrecognizable. It was a photo of my parents, so young they weren’t even my parents yet, so young they were still in black and white. So young they were still alive, hadn’t met their fate on a winding California highway. This was the only picture I had of them and I kept it against my skin, close to my heart. The second photo was of Rex Galore in full costume and full color, breathing fire, and when I saw the photo all over again it was as though he were the one who made me warm that day, not the sun at all but Rex’s breath against my skin, his fire act. I dropped the photos on the cot and fished in my bra again until I found my Clown Union card plastered to the sweat of my lower left boob. It came up stuck to my prize patron saint trading card, St. Julian. There was ink on my skin where the card stuck, transferred and reversed into a tattoo by the heat.

  The union card lay damp and ragged in the nurse’s clean palm. She put it on the counter.

  “I don’t leave home without it,” I said.

  The nurse didn’t say “crazy” but she did say “social worker.” She patted my leg. “Let’s get someone for you to talk to, all right?”

  “Talk to?” Talk therapy was clown treatment. I could barely hear over the knock and flutter of my own pounding heart, the buzz in my head. I needed a doctor. I gathered my wheezy breath. “Do most people take a fast ride here in the Blood Mobile just for the conversation?”

  If I had a broken bone, a concussion, or was in shock, they wouldn’t sign me up with their social worker. What if I were an old man, overweight, near the end of a life of beef and sherry? That’d show a history of self-induced statistics toward cardiac arrest—slow suicide. But still, that man would get more than a layman’s priest.

  I was a clown and got clown treatment: placating voices, a lack of concern. It was Clown Bashing Lite. I said, “If I were a sacred yellow Hopi clown, my people wouldn’t treat me like this.”

  The face swabber came at me again with her damp cotton ball. “Treat you like what, dear?”

  Dear?

  “That’s exactly what I mean!” I pointed at her. I couldn’t explain. She wouldn’t understand, and nothing would change anyway. But if I were a Hopi clown, it might be said that I looked into the grave and climbed back out, traversed a fine tightrope and made it back for an encore. I’d earn a place of honor.

  Instead, the male nurse told the swabber, “She fainted on the street. Fell down.” He made an arm gesture, like a tree falling, from elbow to palm. “Maybe hit her head.”

  The fall was a symptom, not the cause. I said, “I didn’t hit my head.”

  My left arm pulsed and buzzed, my head hummed; my heart beat against my breastbone like a fist throwing a punch. I caught my breath and said, “How about a doctor? Could I talk to a doctor?”

  The triage nurse said, “Do you have family we could call?”

  The photos lay curled on the cot. I had all the family I needed in Rex Galore. Better than a phone call, they could bring Rex home, fly him up from San Francisco, steal him away from his interview with Clown College. Then I’d be cured.

  When Rex was in town, I’d tell him about the baby we lost. I’d look into his painted face, his brown eyes circled with blue. I’d tell him about the rubber chicken, our pet Plucky, our only child, now gone. After I told him, I’d sleep.

  I hadn’t slept in a week.

  I needed to lie down with the solidness of Rex’s bony knuckles, his knobby knees next to mine, his skinny butt and wide acrobat’s shoulders and the length of him stretched out on the bed beside me. His arm would be an awkward rock of a pillow below my head. My chest was tight and my hands were numb. With clumsy hands, I scrawled Rex’s name and a phone number, the number for a clown hostel. I’d seen the hostel once, where it sat on a field of green and overlooked the blue of the San Francisco Bay.

  The nurse said, “Long distance?” Like she expected instead a whole family nearby, maybe packed into a tiny Studebaker idling in the hospital parking lot.

  “He’s the only family I’ve got,” I said.

  The second photo, my parents? That was ancient, ancient history.

  A doctor listened to my chest. Only then did they hook me to an EKG. The EKG spit out a code of dancing lights. On the electrocardiogram, I watched my heart like a muted mouth open wide; it screamed one silent word repeatedly. The emergency room doctor read my heart’s code, and made the translation: Ni-tro, Ni-tro, Ni-tro.

  That was the word, my heart’s demand, the blood pump’s room service order.

  Abnormal Sinus Rhythm, the doctor said. Too little blood pressure in the chambers. “We’ll set you up with a cardiologist,” he said. “Get a second opinion.”

  They gave me nitroglycerin. They gave me potassium. Eensy weensy pills to do a big, big job. I would’ve liked nitroglycerin first thing—that tiny tab of a pill under my tongue was better than breathing, better than food. In seconds it brought my arms into circulation, put my head on my spine, made my spine calm again down
my back, my chest at ease.

  Somebody said what I had was a Heart Attack. Cardiac arrest.

  I lay covered with a thin hospital blanket, shivering under the cooling water of the IV drip. In ICU, instead of heart attack, they said Wait for the cardiologist. Wait for his diagnosis. Then my condition became a heart problem, an episode, a bad spell. Anxiety.

  The staff said it was a flutter, palpitations, a murmur. That bird against the window. With each passing minute the need for potassium and nitroglycerin drifted into the faded corners of collective memory, off to intermission, a perpetual smoke break in the cafeteria of the False Alarm Wing.

  It happened, but nobody believed it.

  Don’t tell doctors your dreams, ever. Don’t tell them your menstrual cycle. Don’t say you felt anything in your head, or that you might’ve known. If they ask about street drugs, which they will, say no, no matter what. If you say, I feel anxious all the time, you’ll get Valium. Otherwise, you’ll get what they call “mood equalizers,” daily doses of who knows what, a gambler’s crapshoot in tinctures of chemicals.

  As a clown on the street, I had to keep my wits. I couldn’t take their chemicals.

  Don’t tell doctors anything.

  A woman came to my room and asked, “Are you a certified latex-free clown? I run activities in the children’s wing, and we’re always looking. So many kids have allergies these days—”

  I reached for my bag and pulled out a handful of balloons. She jumped back, like I’d released biological warfare, and left just as fast.

  The intake nurse found me in ICU. She dropped my torn slip of paper on the nightstand. “Mr. Galore is unavailable. We’ve tried a dozen times.”

  Worst of all—and what I did—don’t cry even when they don’t help you, even when they only want a urine sample to charge you for a drug test you don’t need, even when the third or fourth doctor asks you politely, again, about the cocaine you already told them all you don’t use.

  Clowns and coke, clowns as junkies and drunks—doctors can’t see it any other way, but I was an artist. The junkie drunk clown thing wasn’t in my bag of tricks.