by Monica Drake
In short, the house, the yard, us—we’d all go to pot.
I saw something move behind a window upstairs, Herman or Natalia. They, my friends, were hucksters, drug dealers, and bullies. But in that world of defeatism I was the jester, the fall guy, the rubber chicken. I was the one who put on face paint and shades, limping in one big shoe.
I was the one who’d accepted a tiny free room in the back of the house from an ex-boyfriend on the verge of arrest. Who chose to wait while Rex spent my money in another town. What kind of life was that?
Chance and I went back to our cabin in the ambulance.
I kneeled in front of the EMT chair,in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and wiped the rest of the makeup away. My skin was raw, pink and new. The ambulance had a single round light in the middle of the ceiling. The light cast long shadows under my nose, ears, eyes, and chin, and in the shadows I was young and I was a crone, in the exact same moment. That’s it, I thought: life is short. The only value of wasted time is knowledge.
Clown dates and corporate gigs weren’t the answer. Maybe money wasn’t the answer. I needed to remember who I’d been back before I came to live in makeup, before I devoted myself to Rex, a vague future and a badly dressed present.
I’d start over, with the clothes on my back. Well, I’d take a few more clothes, out of the sea of fabric in the back of the ambulance. Why not? And then I’d take my lovely, half-trained, left-handed, purebred schipperke. I couldn’t leave Chance—no, I’d take my Chance and my chances both. And I had the money I’d saved for Rex’s career at Clown College, in stacks of twenties.
Behind the medicine chest, separating the front from the back seats, there were two sliding Plexiglas windows. With the flat of my palm, I slid one window open. I leaned through, reached a long, thin arm, and pulled up the lock on the driver’s side door.
I got out of the back of the ambulance and went around to the front, to sit in the driver’s seat. Rex always drove, though the ambulance was at least as much mine as it was his—like everything, we bought it with corporate clowning money. Whoring money, if you saw it that way. I flipped down the sun visor. A set of keys fell to my lap.
So I had clothes and my dog and money, and I had the ambulance, that portable home, our mobile circus full of storage compartments, complete with shades on the windows and a bed in back. And then I had myself, my health, more or less, Kafka and da Vinci and all the big ideas.
What was I waiting for?
The streets of Baloneytown were dark and empty. I drove slow and easy down the same roads I’d walked a hundred times. Driving, I rode a little higher off the ground, and all the old storefronts and empty lots seemed suddenly so close together, the neighborhood incredibly small. To live here, to stay, would be to consign myself to the life of a moth banging against a window-pane; there was a whole world just outside.
I’d take time out of costume, try to learn to merge the roles—beauty and art, comedy and sex—until I could make myself whole again.
I passed Hoagies and Stogies. At one side of the bar the little dusty red and white checkered curtains were parted, creating a tiny stage. Inside, as though on stage, a man sat at a small table near the window under the red and blue of a beer light. His shoulders were hunched, head bowed over a newspaper. He had a hoagie on an open wrapper in a woven straw plate on the table. I pulled to the curb. The man turned a page. He wiped his mouth on a napkin. Put the napkin down and crumpled it against his palm.
I’d recognize those hunched shoulders anywhere: it was Jerrod, out of uniform. Alone, he looked so serious, and human. A vulnerable cop.
I turned off the idling ambulance. When I went in the bar Mad Addie, behind the counter, barely gave a glance. She didn’t tap her No Clowns sign or flick cigarillo ash. I walked to Jerrod’s table.
I was at his elbow before Jerrod looked up.
Then he was startled. “Can I help you?”
And I felt calm. I felt calm for the first time since…since… since the night I’d kissed Jerrod. Even my heart felt fine, relaxed. I thought about what the Buddhists said, that when you meet your soul mate you’ll be at ease. Not agitated or nervous. Not the way I felt around Rex Galore. With a steady voice, an easy breath, I said, “I don’t need any help.”
It was true. I didn’t need help for the first time in ages.
At the sound of my voice, Jerrod blinked, maybe startled, then smiled, and closed his paper. He pushed the paper wrapper with his sandwich on it an inch farther away. “Sniffles?”
I said, “Nita.”
He said, “You need a…?”
Then I laughed. “No, that’s my name. Really, I don’t need anything.” I didn’t.
He pulled a chair over, gave it a pat. I took a seat. He said, “I didn’t recognize you right off. You threw me.”
“That’s OK. I don’t recognize myself, just now.” In the guise of myself, I was somebody else, somebody I hadn’t been in years. And as the great clown question goes, if that’s me in the mirror, then who am I? I was new, unmasked.
It was a fine, though dangerous, way to walk through the world: accountable.
If life were a Chaplin film the frame I lived in would’ve closed like an aperture at this moment, shrunk to a small circle or maybe even a heart shape, until it was just Jerrod and me, our faces lit, ready to live happily ever after. Ah, zounds! If only it were that simple. Instead, we sat under the flickering beer light on our separate chairs, close together but apart, cop and clown, clown and cop, out of costume though still a little guarded and a little exposed, as though the cop and the clown were there in both of us. I kept breathing, and had to hold on, to relax, to teach myself new tricks. The bartender slid a glass of beer on the table. I took a sip.
Jerrod, half-shy, held back a smile. He said, “Well, I couldn’t have picked you out of a lineup, after all.”
I wiped a bit of beer from my lip, then said, “That’s OK. Maybe you’ll never have to.”
Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts Portland, Oregon
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At Hawthorne Books, we’re serious about literature. We suspected that good writers were being ignored and cast aside as a result of consolidation in the publishing industry, and in 2001 we decided to find these writers and give them a voice. We publish American literary fiction and narrative non-fiction, although we won’t turn down a good international title if we find one. All of our books are published as affordable original trade paperbacks, but feature details not typically found even in casebound titles from bigger houses: acid-free papers; sewn bindings which will not crack; heavy, laminated covers with French flaps and built-in bookmarks. You can probably buy Hawthorne Books wherever you buy books, or from our Web site (hawthornebooks.com) postpaid1 and for a substantial discount. If you like to read, we think you’ll enjoy our books. If you like to write—well, send us something. We’re always looking.
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Copyright ©2006 Monica Drake
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Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
eISBN : 978-0-979-01888-6
1. Clowns—Fiction.
2. Women performance artists—Fiction.
I. Title.
pS3604.R354C55 2007
813’.54-DC22
2006020248
Hawthorne Books
& Literary Arts
9 1221 Sw 10th Avenue
8 Suite 408
7 Portland, OR 97205
6 hawthornebooks.com
5 Form :
4 Pinch, Portland, OR
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