Clown Girl

by Monica Drake

  But I was a kid just home from the fair. “I’ve got my chicken back,” I said. I held her up by the neck and flashed a smile. What did I think—that they’d cheer?

  Somebody groaned. One chicken hit the ground and kicked up a cloud of ash. Then another fell, like an apple off a tree. A man pushed his way out of the group. Another followed, then came two teenage girls with a baby. One girl gave her chicken to the baby, tucked it into the blankets. The crowd dispersed. Chickens dropped to the street, long and yellow and lifeless.

  Behind me, One-Night said, “Can I have that?” I turned to see a skinny woman throw a chicken at the open door of the ice-cream truck. But while the chicken venture capitalists wandered away, one man came fast down the road. He was big, in a stained white muscle shirt, and walked like he had some place to be.

  Herman turned to go inside. He said, “OK, Nita, the chicken show’s over. You manage the stragglers.”

  The new guy tapped Herman on the shoulder. Herman shook the man off like a gnat. “We don’t need a rubber chicken,” he said. “And we don’t want your stray mutt.” He hunched his shoulder, as though to shake away another shoulder tap.

  “Rubber chicken, my ass.” The man pulled back his fist and swung. Herman turned into it. Fist and face, they met with a crack. Herman’s head jerked and his ponytail made a silky leap just as his knees buckled, his mouth opened. He went down. Clocked.

  “Shit, man?” Herman tried to crab-walk backward in the ash and dirt. His hands were black, his clothes covered in soot. The red fist painted on his jaw started to swell and he worked his mouth, open and closed. “ What’s up?”

  The man stood in the burnt dirt and waited for Herman to get up again.

  I said, “Jesus, should I get the cops?”

  One-Night Stan quick-shifted his ice-cream truck into gear, a fast bleat of “Home on the Range,” and moseyed.

  Herman’s eyes went wide. “No cops,” he hissed, still on the ground, a hand to his mouth.

  “Bad piss.” The man pointed one fat finger at Herman. “You sold bad piss. Cost me my job, my girlfriend, weekends with my kid. You think that’s a joke?”

  Herman, through his slack jaw, said, “Get out of here, Nita. It’s not your business.”

  “Bad piss?” I said.

  The guy said, “If I wanted dirty piss, I’d use my own.”

  “It wasn’t dirty, man. I swear.” Herman stood up and leaned to one side, then tipped the other way, a sapling in the wind.

  “Joke’s on me, asshole. Uppers, downers, foreign shit. Rehab, that’s what they say now. I’m supposed to go to rehab for drugs I don’t even know what the hell they are.”

  Foreign shit? My Chinese pills, the nearly empty urine jug. I put it together.

  The man said, “ Know how much that costs? More than drugs, that’s how much. More than clean piss.”

  Herman rubbed his jaw.

  “That’s a warning, asshole,” the guy said. “I won’t kill you this time. I’m not looking for life in prison. But mess with me again, your ass is meat.”

  The man left in a cloud of soot. Chicken dealers watched from the street. The street was littered with chickens, a regular rubber slaughterhouse. I followed Herman as he staggered into the house, went right to the freezer, twisted the ice tray, and dumped ice on the countertop.

  “You sold my urine?”

  He put the ice in a plastic Baggie. Herman had a lot of plastic Baggies around his house. “Nita, lay off.”

  I reached past him, into the fridge, grabbed my orange jug, and gave it a shake. The jug was nearly empty. Again? “You gave me a urine test. That’s what you did. You gave me a test and made yourself some cash.”

  “Nita, you’re on drugs, and want to blame me for what happens?” Through his swollen jaw, behind the ice pack, he said, “Typical drug addict’s lack of accountability.”

  “Herman, I was collecting that for a reason. For my health.”

  “Maybe if you’d lay off the drugs, your health’d improve. Tell you, it’s the last thing I suspected, you on a bunch of shit… Listen, it doesn’t matter whose fault this was. I don’t blame you that guy almost killed me—”

  “Blame me?” I said.

  “—but here’s the deal: You can’t live here anymore. Find another place. I love you, Nita, but you’re bad juju. We can’t have it.”

  “You sell my urine and I’m bad juju?” I had to laugh, a bitter laugh. “You’re insane. You’re right, I can’t live here.”

  I went into my mudroom. “I’ll move out,” I yelled. “Right now, even.” I bundled up an armful of Rex’s costumes and shoved them in my pink vinyl prop bag on top of my balloons, the silver gun, and the makeup. I reached up into the closet and slid down the clay bust of Rex. The sock was still in place as a cork, my savings inside.

  Herman was in the kitchen when I cut through. He leaned against the counter, a smoke dangling from his fat split lip. He held the ice pack to the side of his jaw. Water dripped off his elbow and puddled at his feet. “Where you goin’?” His speech was chopped by the smoke between his lips and his frozen, swollen jaw.

  I said, “Like I’d tell a urine thief my new address.” I went out the side door.

  He followed. My big shoes slapped the charred yard. What did I care? I kicked the ground on purpose, walked in a flurry of ash, stomped my way to the ambulance and flung open the double doors.

  Herman said, “Listen, Nita. I don’t want things to end badly.”

  The ambulance was hot inside after two days closed up in the sun. I knocked costumes and Goo Glue off the padded, backward-facing chair, and put the bust on the chair, as though that bust of Rex, with his sly smile, were an EMT ready to work.

  Herman said, “We can do this in a good way.”

  I turned around. “You steal my medical homework, clean out my urine till, and throw me out. Think that has an upside?” I started to make a bed for myself on the cot.

  He leaned against the open back door, ice pack to his jaw. In the broken voice of his thick and frozen tongue, he said, “You goin’ to sleep out here?”

  I didn’t answer.

  He said, “’at’s cool.”

  “Thanks for the blessing, Hermes, but you don’t own the street.”

  “No, sure don’t,” he said. After a minute, he added, “Nita? Listen—you kin still come in. Use the bat’room, or whatever.”

  I turned to look at him then. “Are you joking?”

  He shook his head. Held his ice pack.

  I said, “That’s real generous, Herman. But know what? You should pay me to use your toilet, that’s what you should do. I’d rather pee in the street.”

  “Nita, be reas-noble. Y’burned up the yard,” he said, with his jaw still swelling further. “Almost burnt the house down. Date cops, bring people around, rubber chickens, stray dogs. I been answerin’ the door all day. I got my jaw busted. The least you could do is let the urine thing go. So I sold a li’l piss, so what?”

  “I’m not dating cops,” I said. As I said the words, the bandage on my arm held me as though Jerrod’s hand were still there. A cop. The only cop. I was burned up and scabby, in my worn clown suit, but I had the bandage and I had the memory, a moment of being taken care of. A kiss. A breath. I said, “You’d think I could put aside a little piss and expect it to be there when I got back. That’s all I wanted. To keep one measly thing.”

  19.

  Sexy Rex and the Emergency Comforts

  IT WAS TIME FOR A NEW SHTICK, THE BIG FISH, THE whole schmeer that would turn my clown career around. The Juicy Caboosey show was on the back burner, literally, with the suit scorched to ruination.

  My metamorphosis sketch, the Kafka interpretation—that was a good act. It was an excellent act and close to my heart, but it was complicated, subtle, and moody, not the quick break-out piece for an unknown clown. I needed something simple and fast. I was a sinking ship. The ambulance was a fine campsite but I couldn’t call it home.

  It was time
to go High Concept.

  Early morning, I left Chance in Herman’s burnt-up yard and went to Hoagies and Stogies. Two bleary-eyed men were schnockered at the bar. John Denver sang from the jukebox. I had my toothbrush in one hand, the orange piss jug in the other hand, and my pink bag over my shoulder.

  After only one day in my new digs, already I’d lost the urine-collection tray again, either in Herman’s house, or perhaps aswim in the sea of costumes in the ambulance. I cut across the tavern’s dirty carpet and headed for the bathroom.

  Mad Addie, behind the bar, wrapped her knuckles against the counter. “Customers only, customers only,” she said. Her voice was like an exotic bird, raspy and sharp. She tapped one finger against a sign on the wall: Toilets For Customers Only.

  The old men looked up. I went back to the bar and bought a pint.

  After I paid, I took the jug to the bathroom. So what if the first piss of the morning was meant to go down the drain? I’d gotten nowhere yet on my urine savings plan, and needed every drop. I crouched in the stall and used all the Kegel muscles I had to direct my piss in a steady stream into the mouth of the jug. I flicked stray piss off my hand, wiped my hand on my thigh. I brushed my teeth, then went back out, sat at the bar two stools down from the drunk geezers, and drank my pint.

  “Could you put this on ice?” I asked, held up the jug and gave it a slosh.

  “We’re not a U-Store-It,” Addie said. She tapped another sign. We’re Not a Storage Fasility, the sign said. She dropped her smokes and cursed.

  “How about a few cubes then?”

  When she gave me a cupful of ice, I pushed five ice cubes one after the other into the mouth of the jug.

  I took my time with the breakfast pint and waited until I had to pee again, to get my money’s worth. Beer would fuel my urine factory. Why leave with a full bladder?

  The tavern windows were covered with dusty red and white checked curtains. The curtains blocked the world from drinkers and hid drunks from the world. There was just enough space at the top to see the sky beyond the blue-tinted glass. I stared out the windows at the wide-open sky and tried to think big. This was still America. There had to be a way to make a name for myself, maybe get on late-night TV, or at least find a surefire gimmick to shine on the moneyed streets of King’s Row.

  I’d work with what I had: if religion is the opiate of the masses, religious balloon tricks would be the speedball, the crack cocaine, the glue-sniffing toxic fumes. It was time to call on the greatest of the great masters.

  How hard could it be to tie a balloon version of Leonardo da Vinci’s prize painting, The Last Supper? Everybody loves The Last Supper. I pulled a balloon from my pocket and gave it a warm-up snap. Mad Addie leaned against the back wall and watched from a distance.

  If I did this right, who knew? Maybe I’d be the next place of pilgrimage. The faithful would come from miles to see God and da Vinci work through my balloon-blowing lungs. I’d make it a salon act, for starters, small-scale and personal.

  Traditionally, there’s been no delicacy to balloon art. That’s where I’d revolutionize things. Chiaroscuro, sfumato: I’d find a way to translate da Vinci’s painterly tricks into rubber and air.

  Maybe I’d pioneer a line of designer balloon colors in da Vinci’s palette. Why stop there? I could have a van Gogh line, a Gauguin line, Toulouse-Lautrec and Tintoretto.

  I blew the balloon halfway up and left space inside to create the right balance between air and emptiness. What could be more delicate than a composition made of air and a lack of air? Instead of leaning on the big twists—neck, elbow, waist—I’d find the small articulations, the pinkie fingers, the back of the hand, the turn of an ankle. The Last Supper is all about gestures.

  I sipped my beer, and made the first tiny twist in one end of a yellow balloon.

  Da Vinci’s Last Supper is a tangle of bodies; I worked from memory. There were six disciples on either side, bodies clustered in a knot of infighting, power struggles, and deceit. The clustering part would be easy. Only Jesus, in the middle, stood on his own. After Jesus, I’d tie a sheep and put the sheep on the table.

  Maybe da Vinci didn’t serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.

  I tied a balloon-sheep Jesus.

  Judas had to be handled carefully. I used a green balloon for envy. Art critics would understand. I was so careful with the air; I found the right balance and left room in the balloon to work. I made a tiny twist. That would be Judas’s hand, laid on the shoulder of his neighbor.

  I tried to remember the lean in his back, the turn of his head. I hunched over my work, and made a hundred tiny twists. The final piece would be a sculpture in the round, without what they call frontality—it had to work from all sides.

  Where were Judas’s hips, his thighs, his cock? I invented the areas that would be covered by the table. Tiny, tiny twists. I’d need more than one balloon. I had the scale wrong. What I made looked like a cluster of grapes. I took out some of the twists and started again. The balloon grew tight, the twists tricky. I wanted his foot to be perfect, full of everything Judas stood for.

  And the balloon burst loud as a dropped rack of pint glasses in the morning tavern, zipped out of my hand, and whistled through the room. One old man belched. Mad Addie pushed her way off the wall like a lazy swimmer. She cut through the haze of the tavern air.

  She eyeballed me, opened a drawer in the back of the bar, and took out a big black marker. She reached a skinny arm and wrote along the bottom of a cardboard sign taped to the wall: No Balloon Tricks. No Clowns.

  Then she turned to me and tapped the words.

  “Oh, shit,” an old man said. His bleary eyes opened wide. “They’re on to me.”

  I said, “No clowns? But that’s your whole clientele.” The other old man at the bar gave a slow, drunken stare. I said, “I see where this is going—and if fun is outlawed, only outlaws will have fun.” I had to restrain myself from hitting the mechanical wolf whistle call in my pocket.

  “I’m having a damn good time,” Mad Addie croaked, without a smile. “And I’ll eighty-six you if you try it again. How’s that for an act?” Smoke trickled from her nostrils. “You’re lucky to be here at all, after that pool table stunt.”

  I rubbed two uninflated balloons together between my thumb and first finger. My career was calling, loud and insistent. I sipped the cool, thin beer. My heart beat fast.

  I’d hone the da Vinci trick until it was irresistible. Once I had a following, I’d pull out the Kafka interpretation, because that’s what it was really all about—resisting a world that wanted to change me into vermin, into a madly typing secretary, all elbows and sweat on the brow. I’d been a secretary back before I found the clown circuit. Kafka was the voice of my resistance, my own religion, my grand opus.

  As I stared out the top of the tavern windows, above the red and white curtains, I saw a person, a head, move into view and for a moment block the sun. Long brown curls, a strong jaw. It was a head too high up for any mortal.

  Rex Galore!

  Who else? Like a vision, a god, he swam along, gliding, high outside the tavern windows. He floated against the sun, turned the whole world into a stage.

  I didn’t mind being audience to Rex.

  I left Jesus the Lamb on the bar, grabbed my urine jug, bag, and toothbrush, and ran to the door. Rex was far down the sidewalk, moving fast on a unicycle with a backpack on his back.

  “Rex!” I yelled, and ran after him. The urine in the jug sloshed as I ran and the beer in my gut did the same. I ran and sloshed and ran and sloshed, and yelled again, “Rex!”

  He made a tight turn on the nearly empty sidewalk, then pedaled one swipe back, one forward, one back, one forward, to balance in place, and squinted in my direction.

  Poor Rex—were his eyes failing? I waved the hand with the toothbrush in it. Finally, he seemed to see me. Again I ran toward him, sloshing inside. He
pedaled slowly back my way.

  I laughed when we met up, my head tipped up to look up at his face. Rex cast a shadow where I stood, and he was in the glow of the sun, every split end and curl illuminated.

  “Get down here,” I said. I needed to touch him to know he was real.

  He looked down at me and said, “ What happened to your hair?”

  I laughed again, and shrugged. “Oh, Rex. I burned it up.” I ran my fingers over the singed ends. I couldn’t quit laughing. My hair would grow back, but everything inside, it tickled. Luscious. Delightful. My knight on his horse was home. He climbed off the unicycle. I put my orange jug on the ground, threw my arms around him, and pressed my face into the heat of his chest.

  “You smell like a tavern,” he said, and sniffed my burned hair. “Or a barbecue.”

  “Hoagies and Stogies,” I murmured. The cotton of his T- shirt caught on my lip. I wanted to tear that shirt off, feel his skin. Hold him forever.

  He pushed me back to look at my face. “Who’re you drinking with this early?”

  I smiled up at him. “Don’t be jealous. I was by myself.” I cuddled against him. He smelled like summer. I said, “Unless you count these two old men,” and I giggled again.

  “I’m not jealous,” he said. “Just, I’ve never known you to hit the taverns for breakfast. Or solo.”

  I pulled the toothbrush from my pocket. “I needed a place to brush my teeth.”

  We walked together toward Herman’s. Rex put an arm over my shoulders and steered his unicycle in the other hand. We were a family then, the three of us—me, Rex, and the unicycle, that skinny metallic child.

  “Plumbing out at Herman’s place?” Rex asked.

  “Ah, well,” I said. “No, the plumbing’s not out. But we are. We’re kicked out, Rexie.”

  He said, “How could I be kicked out? I haven’t even been in town all month.”

  I walked along beside him and cradled the orange jug of pee in one arm. “I lost Chance, for days, but got her back yesterday. Can you believe it?”

  He didn’t let me change the subject. “Where are you staying, if you’re kicked out?”