Clown Girl

by Monica Drake

  “That’s a few of’em around here.” I heard her gum crack. “The ones that got hair.”

  “His pants hang too long?” I offered.

  She said, “Well, I guess that might narrow it. I’ll keep an eye out. A cop that needs a tailor.”

  I said, “Listen, he’s got something of mine I need to get back. He’s not too tall. He has freckles on his arms. He smells like cinnamon and Sunday breakfast.” It was all I could come up with.

  “Honey, we’re not writing personal ads. If you don’t got a name or a badge number, I can’t help you.” Click.

  GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED ACUPUNCTURE WAS UPSTAIRS in an old house, over a needle exchange, part of a methadone program at the ragged edge of Baloneytown. DownSide Up: Sharp-Shooters Rehab Day Treatment Center, a sign said. Clean Up With Our Services Before We Attend Yours.

  Treatment in the clinic was dirt cheap. “More if you can, free if you can’t” was the motto, and as far as I could tell the government didn’t even ask what it paid for—that’s how little they wanted to know.

  I wanted a quick fix for my busted crotch, an easy cure, cheap and fast, that would send me back out ready to hit the pavement and tie balloons, juggle pins, make lots of funny.

  The clinic’s wooden porch steps were steeped in sun-hot piss. I took a breath, straightened my big straw hat, then started in. Each step up, my inner thigh burned. W. C. Fields, a tiny devil’s voice in my ear, slurred, “Suffering sciatica.” I pushed my cane against the stairs one at a time, lifted my bum leg, and pulled on the shaky wooden handrail. I wore one regular-sized, black Keds tennis shoe and one size fifteen clown shoe turned orthopedic; it helped my hip to have a wider base so my foot could spread inside. That big shoe made sense out on the flatlands of Baloneytown’s sidewalks, but once I reached the clinic, the rubber toe of the clown-sized Keds caught against the lip of every wooden step.

  Inside, the needle exchange wasn’t open yet. Men and women sat in orange plastic chairs around what had once been a living room. A man with a purple welt on his cheek cleaned his teeth with his driver’s license. A pale girl in a black dress tweaked her nose ring. Over her head, a giant sign said, No Drugs, No Weapons, No Money Exchanged. No Loitering, No Cell Phones, No Beepers. No Alcohol, No Hand Signals, No Whistling. No Profanity, No Name Calling, No Racial Slurs. No Remaining on Premises Once Your Business is Over. If You Are Visibly Under the Influence of Controlled Substances, You Will Be Removed. ABSOLUTELY NO HORSEPLAY WHATSOEVER.

  The waiting room was decorated with flyers of runaways, missing wives, and men who slipped the guard at outpatient centers. Needs medication, every flyer claimed. A picture of a red-haired girl said across the bottom, We love you. We won’t lock you up. Below that, a second hand had scrawled, Yeah, rite, Suckah. A few plaques said, In Loving Memory of.

  There was a stack of pamphlets, From Here to Paternity: Surviving Early Fatherhood, and a glossy poster that read, Be Up-Beat, Not Beat-Up! with a picture of three happy women, heads tipped back, perfect makeup. A Friendly Message from BAPP: Baloneytown Abuse Prevention Program.

  I stole a tack from the BAPP poster and added my own cry for help: Missing, Rubber Chicken. Plucky.

  When I reached the front of the line, the receptionist gave me a clipboard with a form to fill out and a greasy pen dug from a cup on her desk. I sat lightly along the front of an orange chair, bad leg out in front. On the form, where it asked, Employment, I put Clown. Then I crossed that off. I wrote Entertainer. Crossed that off. Wrote Performing Artist.

  I marked: No Hepatitis, No AIDS, No Heavy Bruising. No Asthma or Glaucoma or Diabetes. No Jaundice, No Needle Sharing. Heart Trouble? I tailored my answer: Maybe.

  Pregnant? I marked No. Newly not pregnant. ABSOLUTELY NOT PREGNANT WHATSOEVER.

  I handed in the forms and sat back down. I dropped my pink prop bag on the floor, leaned my cane against the wall, put my hands in the loose pockets of my pants, and ran my fingers over clown toys: three miniature juggling balls, a tube of skin-safe glue, a wad of balloons. I pulled an orange balloon from my pocket, gave it a quick stretch, and started to blow. A nervous habit.

  I let the orange balloon deflate against my palm in a squeaking fart sound.

  “What’s that?” the receptionist asked. She pointed at the big sign on the wall: No whistling. I tucked the balloon back in my pocket and sat on my hands, palms flat against the sticky orange chair, until the receptionist called my name.

  THE ACUPUNCTURIST WAS RAIL THIN. HIS HAIR BRUSHED the sloped ceiling of the attic room. He ran a hand through his hair, then knocked his head against the ceiling and his hair ruffled forward again. “Criminy,” he said, under his breath, and adjusted his tiny glasses. He held the papers I’d just filled out downstairs. There was a rice paper screen set up in the middle of the room, where the ceiling was highest. A portable air conditioner hummed. The acupuncturist looked at my papers, frowned, and said, “Tell me, what’s the problem, exactly?” His eyes were sad, forehead weathered by concern. He was a bleeding heart ready to save the world, the kind that gravitated to the sad streets of Baloneytown like litter blowing through a parking lot.

  I’d written groin in the space on the form under “problem.” He already had that. I said, “Well, the bigger problem is money; I can’t afford treatment and can’t afford to miss work.”

  He had his pen ready, a page blank. He sat on a tall stool, put his right ankle on top of his left knee, and rested his clipboard against his calf. He wore soft leather loafers with comfy brown socks. He looked ready to play a little folk guitar.

  I sat on the paper-covered table and grabbed the tendon at the inside of my thigh. “I fell,” I said. “I’ve strained something.” I grabbed my thigh again and sucked in my breath.

  He said, “Let me see your tongue.”

  “My tongue?”

  He nodded and shook his hair out of his eyes. The logic lost me. I opened my mouth, held my tongue out. The acupuncturist leaned in close, then leaned back and wrote on a blank page. He leaned close again, tipped his head sideways, and peered into my mouth like a spelunker ready to spelunk.

  When it’d gone on too long, I ran my tongue over my dry teeth and said, “The problem’s in my leg, at my hip.”

  He furrowed his brow, looked down, and wrote like a man deep in inspiration, a fast flurry of scribbles. “How do you sleep?”

  “Little.”

  “How ’s your hearing? Do your ears ring at night?”

  I said again, “It’s a leg muscle bothering me.”

  “Healing one part of the system involves the system as a whole. Now tell me, do you eat regularly?”

  I said, “I don’t even like the smell of food. I’ve been known to faint at the first whiff of Wiggly Fries.” My brain started to hum in tune with the drone of the air conditioner.

  “Smelling is ingesting, it’s all the same.” He held a flashlight to my eyes, one at a time, and moved the flashlight back and forth. “Do you know your neighbors? Are you part of a community?”

  “I know some neighbors.” I knew the Baloneytown criminals, and now had made the acquaintance of a neighborhood cop, that grown-up golden boy. The acupuncturist jiggled one knee, shook his leg and shook the clipboard as he read. “How does it feel to be…”—he looked at the forms—“…a performance artist?”

  “A clown,” I said. “And it’s tops, in fact. I wouldn’t do anything else. But lately I can’t think. My head is fuzzy. I’ve been wiped out, like a weak crop in a bad year.”

  He held my wrist and took my pulse. “You’re exhausted.” He wrote a note on his chart, then took my pulse again from the same wrist but a different place. “Ah! Interesting.” He shifted his fingers back and forth, fretwork on his folk guitar, and counted under his breath. His fingers were warm, finding the beat of my heart.

  He wrote more notes and nodded. “Perfect. You have a perfect example of what we call Heart and Kidney out of Balance Syndrome.”

  “My leg?” I said.

  “A
person has six pulses. On you, the heart pulse is the strongest. The kidney pulse is almost nonexistent. The heart is fire, the kidneys water. With too much fire,” he said, and used one long-fingered hand to gesture like a plant unfolding in fast motion, “and not enough water,”—his other hand made a sort of pooling movement below—“your system will become disrupted. Heart and Kidney out of Balance Syndrome.” He held both hands up, as though announcing a beautiful thing. “Your heart and kidneys aren’t communicating.”

  I said, “Well, I do have heart trouble.”

  He took out a stethoscope and pressed the cold metal disk to the skin of my back. “Your heart sounds OK. Let me see your tongue again.”

  I opened my mouth, held my tongue out.

  “Yes. Exactly!” he said, and pointed with one long pinkie at my tongue. “You have a narrow split down the center.” He wrote in his notes, then looked at me. He said, “I do too.” He opened his mouth and showed me his tongue and I saw a line down the middle of it but didn’t know enough to tell if the line was particularly narrow.

  Softly, he said, “People like us, we’re genetically predisposed toward stress on the heart.” He seemed happy to learn we had something in common, our ailing hearts.

  “Well, that’s cold comfort. Least I’ve got genetic relations.”

  He smiled. “It’s not heart disease. Maybe you’re lonely.”

  Lonely? I wasn’t lonely. I had Rex. But here it was—another clown fetishist. In a minute he’d hand me a card. Ask me out. Try the old line about acupuncture for a long-playing, extended dance version of the massive orgasm.

  I’d heard it before.

  “Have you experienced a loss?” He looked into my eyes. “Abandonment issues, perhaps, or childhood trauma?”

  Ah, the sensitive shtick. In through the heart pulse. I wouldn’t fall for it. “No.” But even as I said it, I touched one hand to the photos tucked in my bra.

  His eyes followed my hand, he flushed, wrinkled his nose, and tapped his tiny glasses. “Sometimes, we bury our feelings…” He looked at me like I was a sad clown on worn velvet, then offered his own half smile.

  He offered me pity. Did I need his pity? I said, “I’m so far from lonely, it’s not even funny,” and reached into my pink bag for a pack of exploding gum, the rubber ham sandwich, or any trick to take the focus off me. My hand wrapped around the silver gun. I pulled it out—voilà!

  The acupuncturist jumped back and threw up his arms. He hiccuped, hit his head against the sloped roof, and tripped into a wastebasket. “Take a deep breath, don’t do anything rash, your whole future’s ahead of you, let’s talk, we’re here for you,” he said, as though reciting an office training memo on emergency situations.

  I pulled the trigger. The acupuncturist gave a yipe. A flag shot out. “Bang,” it said on the flag.

  He looked at the flag, frowned, and straightened his glasses with one shaking hand. “That,” he said, as he eased his way back toward me, “was not even funny. That’s the definition of not funny.” His glasses were still crooked. His flyaway hair flew.

  I twirled the gun to roll the flag, then pushed the flag back into the barrel with the heel of my hand. “It’s a muzzle loader.”

  He rubbed a hand on the back of his skull. “Totally toxic.” He put a hand to his heart, reached up to a shelf for a brown bottle, unscrewed the cap, and took a healthy swig.

  It was my turn to look with pity.

  “Being a little melodramatic, aren’t you?” I said. “It doesn’t even look like a real gun. Note the ‘Made in China’ sticker?”

  He held a hand out in front of himself, palm flat against the air like a mime marking the hard edge of a box, and his fingers trembled. When he put the bottle down, he reached for the gun. He wrapped trembling fingers around the barrel, took the gun from me gently, and put it on the counter. He leaned in close. “You know, I should call the police,” he said quietly.

  “The police?” My first thought was a secret one, curious, hopeful, and nervous: Mr. Cinnamon?

  The acupuncturist’s breath was the bite of alcohol, the musk of herbs. “We don’t tolerate hostility in the clinic.”

  I said, “It’s a classic joke, old-time clown stuff. You must’ve never been to the circus.”

  “I’ll let it go this time,” he said and took another sip off the bottle. Licked his thin, pale lips. “But you need to find a little help with that. You only alienate yourself.” His arms were scrawny, and for a minute I sensed acupuncture needles maybe weren’t his only needle friends.

  He said, “For now, lay on the table, on your back. Remove your, uh, your other shoe.” He stood up, put the clipboard aside. He didn’t give me his card, didn’t ask me out or offer his phone number. Maybe I’d headed that one off.

  I lay back against the loud rattle of the paper sheet. The acupuncturist breathed out deeply as he tapped tiny needles into the crook of my hand, between my thumb and fingers. The needles didn’t hurt, but they felt like someone had tapped my funny bone, touched a nerve. It was a warm spread of pain that made me want to laugh and cringe and gag all at once—comedy and tragedy, aligned in every cell. I willed myself not to flinch. The silver gun was a pale glimmer on the shelf, tucked between chrome-topped jars of cotton balls and Band-Aids. An ambulance passed outside. The wail of the ambulance grew loud, then faded, as somebody else’s emergency moved into the distance.

  The acupuncturist turned off a lamp on my side of the room and said, “I’ll leave you to rest for twenty minutes.”

  Then I was alone, covered in needles, afraid to move. My heart raced. I wanted to sit up or roll over. My mouth was cottony. My heart spoke again in Morse code: heart trouble, heart trouble, heart trouble…die or go crazy, die or go crazy…The acupuncturist didn’t understand. It wasn’t loneliness, it was something more. I had to tell them—yes, I had heart trouble. Real trouble. I hadn’t filled out the forms right. Nitroglycerin and potassium! Where was the bottle he drank from? I needed medicines. I needed to relax, wanted a balloon, to stretch and tie an animal, twist balloon knots until I was at ease again.

  My body weighed a thousand pounds, I hadn’t slept since Rex left town. In the smoke of a warm incense, I tried to quit listening to the story of my own frantic heart. I let go of the noise in the street, sirens and buses. My arms and legs and spine were heavy against the table. I felt then like two bodies, one outer and one inner, one smaller than even my bones, one large and ballooning. I was a balloon sheep, St. Sebastian of the acupuncture needles. The Virgin Mary. Skin was a membrane thin as rubber. I could see the inside of my eyelids, calm and dark, spotted with orange.

  “OK, that’s it.” The acupuncturist snapped on the lamp. I twitched, suddenly awake. He pulled needles from my feet, hands, and head.

  “That’s it?” I was an inflated balloon in a skin-colored casing, too empty to sit up.

  “I’ve found some medicine that’ll help.” He handed me a palm-sized red box with a picture of a person’s profile on it. “It’s Chinese, to boost the system.” As he said “boost” he made a gesture like a weight lifter, like Natalia-Italia-Nadia flexing her narcissist muscle—shoulder dropped, one curled fist. He said, “Take ten at a time, up to thirty a day. Great stuff.”

  I took the box, opened it, and shook out an amber jar with a cork lid sealed under heavy wax. The writing was in Chinese. “This’ll fix my leg?”

  “Your leg? Ah, that. Ice it and apply heat. Back and forth. While you’re watching TV or whatever.” It was the same advice as Crack gave. He held my popgun out by the barrel and said, “Lay off the hostility. We store hostility in our hips and joints. It doesn’t do any good. Notice when you’re alienating yourself. And be glad you’re not dying. Earlier, I had a client with walking pneumonia, one collapsed lung. He may not make it. At least you’re not him, right?”

  This was my prescription: empathy with boundaries, gratitude for what I had. The gun quivered in my hand. I stuck it back in my bag.

  ON THE WAY HOME I
SAW THE LAWN MOWER MAN PUSHING his lawn mower down the center of the empty road in his long, loping walk. He called over, “Hey, Clown Girl, ready to have your chicken-scratch lawn mowed?”

  I adjusted my daisy sunglasses. “Don’t think we can do it.”

  He stopped in the street. I limped forward, slow progress.

  “What’d you do? Looks like you got a case of the jake leg coming on.” He watched me limp toward him in my oversized shoe, one hand on my hat. “Get the right fit on that shoe, might walk a little easier. Goddamn, how big is that sucker anyway?”

  I waved a hand. “I’m fine.”

  “Well then, how’bout this. How’s about you buy this mower off me. Twenty bucks, and you can mow the lawn yourself as many times as you need. It’s a good mower. I use it all day, some days.”

  I knew then where he came from: For-Salesville. My head still buzzed with the hum of bees, but now I had the jar of Chinese pills deep in the pocket of my striped pants. I took a step, leaned on the cane.

  He said, “Got a brand-new blade too. Cuts grass like butter.”

  I said, “It looks old.”

  “Sure, from back when they knew how to make a lawn mower. Won’t quit on you. Like an old Checker cab, or a Singer sewing machine.”

  I hung my cane over the lawn mower’s handle. Twenty dollars. At least I’d know what I was getting—a simple thing. I didn’t care what Herman would say; I’d take my turn at the lawn, but not with the push mower while the weeds were high, while the sun was blasting, with a strained groin and the invisible hand that clutched my heart, squeezed my lungs, kept my breath shallow, and left the buzz in my brain. I pulled a twenty from the envelope stashed inside my pink shoulder bag. Clown money. Rex money.

  “Nice hat,” the lawn mower man said. “Got some holes in it, though.”

  I nodded, meaning, I know. He put the bill in his pocket and nodded back, meaning Good-bye.

  The sidewalks were uneven and the tires on the lawn mower hard as tires on a shopping cart. The machine rattled under my hands as I pushed it home. The rattle in my hands was a larger reverberation of the hum in my head. I leaned into the mower like a crutch. The single oversized Keds spanked the asphalt.