by Joshua Cohen
The face of this contradictory nature—the rictus face and embodiment of this democratic paradox—is the clown, who must always remain relatable to his audience, while also serving as an agent of anarchy, the sworn enemy of all continuity and sense.
The clown, then, is the politician of the circus: working both sides of the aisle.
RBandB&BC Clown Alley—which is the traditional name for its battery of clowns—officially recognizes three clown types: the Characters, the Whitefaces, and the Auguste. The Characters are the utility clowns, whose roles find their sources in normal, or occupational, life: They’re the clown construction workers and clown car drivers, the clown tramps, clown hobos, clown firefighters, and clown cops. The Whitefaces, by contrast, are the more classical clowns, whose pale-all-over-not-just-on-the-face appearance and demeanor derive from the harlequinade and the commedia dell’arte: They’re the self-appointed aristocrats of clowning; smart, crafty, clannish joculators, slightly pompous about their heritage.
And then there’s the Auguste. There can be any number of Characters and Whitefaces in every Clown Alley, but there can only be one Auguste: He’s the sad clown, the tragic clown, the grotesque, whose name betrays him as older or “venerable,” with hair typically red and shocked straight out on the sides, and just three ovoids of white around the mouth and eyes, as if to imply an estate—a Whiteface estate—from which he’s been excluded. He’s the dumb clown, the dim clown, clumsy, klutzy, casually rude, who can never do anything right. That said, the Auguste is the most difficult clown type to play. This is because the Auguste has to be especially good at appearing bad or incompetent, without hurting himself, or hurting others. In the traditional division of labor in Clown Alley, the Whitefaces tell the Auguste what to do, they give him a task, and the Auguste manages—invariably—to screw it up. They order him to reach for a rope, and he reaches, and misses, and takes a tumble. The Character clowns are gathered for a meeting in the center ring, and the Auguste wants to join them; he wants to sit, like they’re sitting, in a proper chair, and he goes for the one chair still vacant, but at the last moment the Whitefaces tug it out from under him, and he falls on his ass, and we in the audience can’t help but sympathize.
Meanwhile, in the other rings, all of the circus infrastructure—all of the platforms and harnesses, all of the safety nets—are being dismantled.
JOHNATHAN LEE IVERSON, RINGMASTER
And to a large degree the cynical side of me goes, Yeah yeah, America doesn’t deserve a Ringling Bros. It really doesn’t. Because for 146 years we’ve been teaching you. Yeah. How we can all live together, how we can all work together, to make something beautiful. How every person matters, every job, and this is what we’re mourning. Not a show but a society. Lots of shows close down but this is a society. Black, white, woman, man, performer, or crew, everyone’s equal here, everyone’s important. You know, since I’ve been here I’ve developed a great affection for animals, but seriously, I’m from New York City, I’m from Harlem; before the circus the most exotic animal I’d ever been around was a squirrel, so I’m not going to get into that cage with the cats, I’m not going to get up on that trapeze bar, but we each have our own role, which gives us dignity. My first dressing roommate, Mark, was as white as day and he wouldn’t go on to perform unless this one member of the floor crew, Rafael Suarez, who’s Mexican, had rigged his apparatus, and they didn’t even speak the same language; they just talked with their hands. But they had this mutual respect. This sense of responsibility for each other. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in the circus, about humanity, about being an artist, about making art and how to sell art, which is also an art, which the circus did a lot to invent, this was the most profound. That you’re responsible. I am. We are. For each other. You understand? And that’s what the circus is. Just what its name says it is. What does it mean? From the Latin. From the Greek. It’s a circle.
FROM THE DIARIES
GROUNDHOG DAY PROTESTS 2017
Stand in the sun in a parkinglot as if to make an antique photo. Daily the sun shines your shadow onto the asphalt. Where it makes no impression. Stand atop this asphalt for a year, you’d feel like you made no impression. Not even a negative. Washington is not sensitive.
“Whose streets? His streets. Whose streets? Sour streets.”
“No justice! No peace!” The more I yell, the more the threat feels like a description.
“Lock me up! Lock me up!”
A wee pig awoke in our stomachs and jumped out of our mouths. Now let’s chant his name.
THE LAST LAST SUMMER
ON DONALD TRUMP AND THE FALL OF ATLANTIC CITY
THE GOVERNMENTS THAT GET THEMED into casino-hotel-resort properties tend not to be democracies, but oligarchies, aristocracies, monarchies, Africa-and-Asia-devouring empires. Pharaonic Egypt, Doge-age Venice, imperial Rome, Mughal India. Atlantic City has incarnations of the latter two—Caesars Atlantic City and the Trump Taj Mahal—with the Taj being the last property in the city to bear the Republican candidate’s name, though it’s owned by distressed-asset czar Carl Icahn, who also owns the Tropicana, a crumbling heap styled after the Casa de Justicia of some amorphous banana republic. The worse the regime, the better the chance of its simulacrum’s survival. Atlantic City’s Revel, a hulking fin-like erection of concrete, steel, and glass that cost in the neighborhood of $2.4 billion, opened in 2012 only to close in 2014, which just goes to show that an abstract noun, verb, or imperative in search of punctuation (Revel!) doesn’t have quite the same cachet as a lost homicidal culture.
Today, the fake ruins of Rome and India are among the cleanest, safest havens to be found in the real ruins of Atlantic City—a dying city that lives for summer. I was returning there, to my family there, still unsure as to whether this summer would be my last or its last or both.
Now, given the fact that AC’s been so perpetually press-maligned that I can remember nearly every summer of the sixteen I spent there being deemed, by someone, “crucial,” “decisive,” “definitive,” or “the last,” this suspicion of mine might seem, especially to fellow Jersey Shore natives, irresponsible and even idiotic—so I will clarify: I don’t mean that I thought that after this summer of big media scrutiny but little new money the city would burn, or that the Atlantic Ocean would finally rise up and swallow it. I just thought that, come Labor Day, the city’s bad-luck streak would only break for worse and no one would care.
After the legalization of Indian tribal and nontribal casinos in Connecticut in the 1990s and in Pennsylvania in the 2000s; after the legalization of tribal casinos in upstate New York in the ’90s and of nontribal casinos in the 2010s; after the damage done to the city by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and all the myriad, still-ongoing depredations of the global so-called Great Recession that resulted in the closing of four of the city’s casinos in 2014 (the Revel, the Showboat, the Atlantic Club, and Trump Plaza), leaving AC with the highest rate of foreclosure of any urban area in the country between fourth-quarter 2014 and the present; this summer—the summer of 2016—already felt like the fall. Maybe this wouldn’t be the last summer that White House Subs or Chef Vola’s would ever be serving, but it might be the last summer that I, as a sane, unarmed, and relatively pacific human being, would still feel comfortable traveling to them for a cheesesteak or veal parm on foot—taking the stairs down from the overlit Boardwalk to the underlit streets of what’s officially become the most dangerous city in Jersey, now that Camden has stopped reporting its crime statistics to the FBI. It occurred to me that if and when AC is ever visitable or enjoyable again, my parents will probably have retired south to Cape May, and the few acquaintances of mine who still live on Absecon Island—the island of which AC is the northernmost town—will probably have left.
But what ultimately had me convinced that AC—whose historical cycle of boom and bust recapitulates each year in the cycle of “season” and “offseason”—would not be the same, or ev
en recognizable, was the perfect-storm convergence of a few maybe-related, maybe-unrelated events.
First, the budget deadline: If AC couldn’t produce a balanced budget for state approval by October 24—and most residents here were convinced that it couldn’t, and that Governor Chris Christie wouldn’t let it—then the State of New Jersey would assume control of all its offices and operations, commencing with what AC’s mayor, Don Guardian (and the ACLU, and the NAACP), regards as an unconstitutional takeover of city government. Should this happen, AC would be the first city in Jersey history to be run from Trenton (besides Trenton). The state would have the power to renegotiate all of AC’s contracts, including its union contracts, and to privatize, meaning to peddle, its assets—like the water company, the Atlantic City Municipal Utilities Authority, and the defunct airport, Bader Field—in the hopes of paying off the city’s $550 million debt and reducing its $100 million budget deficit.
Second, the ballot referendum: On November 8, two weeks and one day after this likely state takeover, Jersey voters would go to the polls to decide whether or not to approve the New Jersey Casino Expansion Amendment, which seeks to expand casino gaming—until now restricted to Atlantic County—to two other Jersey counties able to provide suitable casino siting at least seventy-two miles from AC. If the amendment is approved—and as of this writing the opinion split appears to be 50/50—get ready for grand-opening celebrations of casinos in the Meadowlands. The logic is that AC has already lost about $2.5 billion in gaming revenue to neighboring states over the past decade, and it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising schmuck puts up a betting parlor in Manhattan; the establishment of new casinos up north along the Jersey side of the Hudson might forestall that. Or it might not—but it would certainly ensure that the citizens of the largest city in the country will stop trekking almost two and a half hours on a defunct-bathroom Greyhound, or almost three hours on an Amtrak that because of track deficiencies must be routed through Philly, to lose their shirts.
Of course, November 8 would bring another decision, and not just for Jersey.
I called Mom and Dad, fueled up the car, and left New York, driving Turnpike (Exit 11) to Parkway (Exit 38) to the AC Expressway. There wasn’t any traffic.
* * *
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BACK IN THE (BILL) Clintonian 1990s, when the billboards flanking the Expressway and the Black and White Horse Pikes weren’t bared to struts or advertising YOUR AD HERE, when my father made his money suing the casinos and my mother made hers giving accent-reduction lessons to South Asian immigrants who worked at the casinos, when my parents’ friends and professional peers and just about every other adult bowing to my left and right and in front of and behind me in synagogue either regulated the casinos (for the state’s Casino Control Commission and Division of Gaming Enforcement), managed the casinos (their gaming floors, food and beverage, and entertainment), or supplied goods and services to and for the casinos (ice, linens, waste management), AC—the city itself—remained a mystery to me, a paradox. It was a place where everyone made a living, and yet where no one liked to live. A place of fantasy (strippers!) and yet of bewildering strictures (you can purchase alcohol 24/7 in stores and bars, but not in strip clubs, though you can BYO alcohol into strip clubs!).
It was, to my teenage self, about a two-dozen-block strip of Boardwalk and two major if seedier streets, Atlantic and Pacific, which I’d visit for fun or trouble before heading out for the less crowded, less polluted beaches or home, making in the course of a single weekend night the same trip that most of the adults I knew made every weekday: between AC (population 39,260) and the whiter, more affluent Downbeach towns of Absecon Island or the whiter, more affluent mainland. The adults were just going to work; their children, or I’ll just speak for myself, had drugs to buy and girls to meet.
I also became a casino employee, but only after I was sure I was leaving. The summer of 1998, the summer between high school and college, I worked at Resorts, a casino that lacked an apostrophe so as to appear, I’m guessing, less possessive: of my time, and of the customers’ cash. I was a coin cashier, and my job was to stand, fully tuxedoed, inside an excruciatingly bright and noisy barred cell furnished with a tiny surface of faux marble (because marbling camouflages grime, and cash is grimy) and a small round aperture through which slots players handed me their buckets, white plastic troughs emblazoned with the Resorts logo and surfeited with their winnings. I would dump each bucket’s lode into the churning maw of my automatic counter, which, while it tallied up the coins, also separated them, shunting the nickels and quarters—the preferred denominations of slots—into vast plastic bags that hung to the floor like the distended gullets of pelicans. I’d read the total from the counter’s display and pay the players their rightful take in whichever form they requested it: bills, or—I was supposed to encourage this—chips, which at the time were regarded as the easiest monetary substitutes for players to immediately put back into circulation and thus be parted from. Fiat currencies would soon leave the slot floor altogether, with the introduction of new self-service machines that wouldn’t take or pay out with coins at all, but instead took, and paid out to, casino-issued credit cards. At that point, in the mid-2000s, the honorable trade of the coin cashier, like that of the blacksmith (who now only posed for photos at Bally’s Wild Wild West Casino) and the riverboat captain (who now only posed for photos at the Showboat), just vanished.
It should be noted, however, that before the casinos phased out coins and we coin cashiers were replaced with self-service machines, we spent all our shifts servicing our lesser machines, trying to declog them—especially on the graveyard shifts, when more and more players came in with buckets they’d use as ashtrays, so that their coinage was interspersed with butts (smoking was banned in 2008), and when more and more players, too late for the dinner buffet but too early for the breakfast buffet, came in with buckets of fast food they reused to hold their jackpots. They’d sit at the slots, pulling the levers or pushing the buttons while poking around in their buckets for fried-chicken drumsticks or BBQ ribs, and shake off the stuck metal before indulging. Coin cashiers were trained to contain these situations, and so were expected to go sifting through the winnings to remove any bones and burnt ends and shreds of skin and breading. Those were the simplest things, the simplest of the foreign objects, to watch out for, mostly because they came in buckets from KFC or in foam clamshell containers from Burger King or McDonald’s. Other containers, such as shoeboxes or backpacks, were tougher to monitor, and if I—in the over-air-conditioned heat of the moment, under verbal fire from an interminable line of intoxicated zombies—ended up missing anything, any noncoin article, especially if I ended up missing something sizable buried at the bottom, like a phone or a wristwatch or a med-alert bracelet, it would (usually) announce itself by jamming up the counter, and clearing the jam would (usually) blank the total, in which case I’d have to pay out a quarter-bag’s max: $100. Obviously, then, it would be in a slot player’s interest, if he or she hadn’t won quite $100, to make sure that stray cutlery or a spare key or other sabotage debris were always lurking below the coinage. Obviously too, the casinos knew this trick, and we coin cashiers knew that we were responsible for catching it—that we were being camera-surveilled from every conceivable angle and so might be disciplined, or terminated, for not catching it. But still: I was leaving for college in the fall, and there were midnights, there were dawns, I was finding bloody Band-Aids. Shift after shift, my totals rarely matched up, the amount in coins I’d taken in always considerably less than the amount in bills and chips I’d paid out from my drawers, because I kept having to hand over the $100 black chips or, more often, the crisp, sharp Franklins. Though I hate to credit a Philly boy, it was Franklin who put it best: “Neglect is natural to the man who is not to be benefited by his own care or diligence.”
On breaks I ate in the Resorts basement at the employee buffet—which was “free,
” because it featured leftovers from the customer buffets—and after my shifts I hung out with the only two cashiers around my age, the only two who after clocking out wouldn’t dash for the jitney home. Everyone else I worked with was older—nice people, family people, immigrant or first-generation Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Vietnamese, and Thai, who weren’t going to squander their precious off-time arguing with pizza-faced white co-workers over pizzas at Tony’s about what was better, hand jobs or DIY jerking.
Some nights I’d blow all my earnings at AC Dolls or Bare Exposure (which enigmatically, or out of legal exigency, once briefly called itself Bare Exposures). Some nights I’d blow just half my earnings on a room above the Chelsea or at the El Rancho (the one motel that’d never carded me and yet is now, deliciously, called the Passport Inn)—a room from which I’d call a few friends (males), who’d come and drink and smoke pot with me; a room from which I’d call a few friends (females), who’d never come.
Such are my memories, or at least the ones I’ve offered around like cocktail franks to folks in New York and other cities I’ve lived in, whenever someone asked where I was from and I answered AC and they said, “Hey, that must’ve been interesting,” or, “Wow, that must’ve been nuts.” With age, and after becoming assimilated to circumstances I’d never imagined for myself as a kid from the Shore (in Europe! with a girlfriend! as a journalist! as a novelist!), I realized that I’d unintentionally adopted their perspective myself—a sense of the Shore in general and AC specifically as strange, even freakish—and so made a habit of sharing, of performing, only the extremes. I gratified what I perceived to be my more sophisticated audiences with only the most outlandish anecdotes of my immaturity there, never mentioning, for example, that I was educated at the island’s particularly good Jewish school and not in its particularly bad, racially tense public school system, and that my parents were—are—kind, pleasant, generous, intellectual people who weren’t always 100 percent aware of—because I wasn’t always 100 percent transparent about—all the nose-dirtying I got up to after-hours.