Lord of the Ralphs

by John McNally

  “You okay there?” Norm asked. “Don’t tell me you’re having a seizure.” He looked at Ralph. “Is your friend having a seizure?”

  Ralph, ignoring my violent shivering, said, “Bozo’s Circus? Never seen it. Is it any good?”

  “What do you mean you’ve never seen it?” I said. “Are you crazy? Everyone’s seen it.”

  Bozo’s Circus was one of the top-rated shows in all of Chicago—so popular, in fact, that there was a ten year wait for tickets. I hadn’t met a kid who didn’t run straight home for lunch to watch the show’s ringleader announce, “Bozo’s Circus is on the air!” The ringleader would then blow his whistle, prompting the band to start playing the show’s theme song. Bozo’s own famous catch-phrase, before cutting to a cartoon, was to put his face close to the camera and ask, “Who’s your favorite clown?” to which a hundred kids would scream back, “Bozo!” Bozo would reply in his gravely voice, “Hey, that’s me!” and start laughing like a crazy person.

  I was shivering because I felt like that crazy person. There was no telling what I would have done to be able to see Bozo in person. My earliest memories were not of my mother, my father, or my sister. They were of Bozo. Bozo was a celebrity in Chicago, as big as they got. Bigger than Mayor J. Daley had been. Bigger than the Pope. The first word I ever spoke was Batman. The second? Bozo.

  Ralph shook his head. “Nope. Never seen it.”

  “How much you selling those for?” I asked.

  Norm fanned the tickets, staring down at them and frowning, then he looked up at me and said, “Two hundred dollars each.”

  I must have made a noise like a wild animal caught in a trap because a dog sitting in one of the cars in the parking lot started howling.

  “Two hundred dollars?” Ralph asked. “Now, what’s this show called again?”

  “Bozo’s Circus,” I said impatiently. “Bozo’s! Circus!”

  “Okay,” Ralph said. “You don’t have to snap at me.”

  I wasn’t a violent kid—in fact, I was a good kid, too good, as Ralph liked to tell me—but I had a sudden urge to punch Norm as hard as I could in his face, grab the tickets, and take off running with them.

  Two hundred dollars? These tickets were sent to people for free! After a ten year wait! What if I threatened to turn him in? Maybe, I reasoned, Norm would simply give me a ticket in return for me keeping my trap shut.

  I knew that this was only a fantasy. Ralph had told me dozens of stories about Norm, how he had gotten kicked out of grade school for stabbing a teacher in the thigh with a pencil; how, after getting in trouble with the police for breaking his neighbor’s window with a baseball, he had set the family’s dog house on fire (the dog, fortunately, was sleeping inside the real house); how he had flattened his parole officer’s tires; how he had set a dozen paper bags full of dog crap outside the doors of St. Albert’s one Sunday and then set them on fire mere moments before mass was over; how he had eaten a hundred thumb-tacks on a dare. The stories were Biblical. For Ralph, however, these were inspirational tales, a list of deeds Ralph himself aspired to do one day. From my perspective, the stories painted the portrait of a man who was the complete opposite of me, a man, in other words, who would do anything. I had a difficult time speaking up whenever a teacher called on me because my heart fluttered so hard and I would start to feel queasy. That was the kind of boy I was. Nervous. Afraid of not having the right answer. What was I going to do to Norm? Nothing.

  “Two hundred dollars,” Ralph said, staring at the tickets. “How’d you get them in the first place?”

  “When I was in high school, I saw Gus Saviano scalping Peter Frampton tickets, and I thought, dude, that’s brilliant…”

  “Didn’t you beat him up once?” Ralph asked.

  “Yeah. Anyway, I started thinking…what’s the hottest ticket in town? I was home for lunch, sitting in front of the TV…”

  “What were you eating?” Ralph asked.

  “SpaghettiOs. Why?”

  “Just trying to paint a picture here,” Ralph said.

  “So I’m home for lunch, eating SpaghettiOs, when Bozo’s Circus comes back on from a commercial, and I thought, bingo. That’s it. Nobody’s selling Bozo tickets. So I spent the next week writing away for tickets. I used my mom’s name, my dad’s name, my aunt’s name. I even used your name. You should be getting your tickets any day now.”

  Ralph looked at me and waggled his eyebrows.

  “My tickets, I should say,” Norm added. He stuck his tickets back inside the envelope and said, “You kids know of any takers, you know where to reach me.”

  Ralph and I started walking home. I tried explaining to Ralph the legend of Bob Bell, the actor who played Bozo—how he was a notoriously private man; how the fact that he refused to make public appearances beyond Bozo’s Circus only added to his allure of the show; how, like the members of KISS, no one knew what the man looked like without his Bozo make-up on.

  “I’m sure his wife knows,” Ralph said.

  “Besides his wife, I mean,” I said.

  Ralph said, “What? You think this guy goes to the A&P dressed like Bozo?”

  “No,” I said, “but since no one knows what he looks like without his make-up on, no one would know it’s Bozo they’re looking at.”

  “What kind of name is Bozo, anyway?” Ralph asked. “Sounds Polish to me.”

  “I’m sure it’s made up,” I said.

  Ralph said, “All names are made up. But it’s got to come from somewhere. Maybe it’s Ukrainian.”

  “Maybe it’s French!” I said, exasperated.

  “French, huh?” Ralph said. “I think maybe you’re right. They love their mimes, that’s for sure. Anything having to do with guys wearing make-up, they eat it up. Does this Bozo character ever walk against the wind or pretend he’s trapped inside of a box?”

  “No!” I said. “He’s a clown!”

  “Okay, okay. Pipe down.”

  “No, you pipe down,” I said.

  Ralph stopped, glared at me. No one ever told Ralph to pipe down. “No, you pipe down,” he said, stabbing my chest with his forefinger.

  And that was that. For the rest of the walk home, we both piped down.

  For days after Norm had shown us those tickets, I couldn’t sleep and I could barely eat. At night, I fell asleep dreaming that I might get picked to play the Grand Prize Game on Bozo’s Circus. The Grand Prize Game was comprised of a series of evenly spaced buckets, six of them, into which the contestant would toss a ping-pong ball. Each time the ball landed successfully in a bucket, the kid received a set of prizes. The further away the bucket, the better the prizes. The kid who made it all the way to bucket number six would win a brand-new Schwinn ten-speed, along with however much money had accumulated in the bucket, the total amount being a dollar for each day that someone hadn’t gotten a ping-pong ball in bucket number six.

  Sometimes they picked a kid who was too small and couldn’t even make the first bucket. When this happened, I would scream at the TV and pull on my hair, frustrated that the game was being wasted on someone who probably had no idea where he or she even was, let alone the point of the game. “Come on,” I would yell. “What were you thinking?” Other times, the kid was too old, and all he needed to do was lean forward and drop the ball into bucket number six. This, too, caused me to scream. Why couldn’t they see, when the “magic arrows” landed on his pimply head, that he was too tall to play the game? “It’s rigged!” I’d yell. “He’s probably the band leader’s son! What’s going on here?” My mother would walk into the room and say, “Take it easy, Hank. It’s just a TV show.”

  I practiced the game at home by lining up six make-shift buckets—a combination of empty tubs for margarine, my father’s beer mugs, and an old grease-stained bucket from Kentucky Fried Chicken that I kept hidden in my closet. Since my buckets were of various sizes, my challenge was far greater than that of any kid on TV, and yet I still made all six buckets without a problem.

  �
��What were you thinking?” I yelled, day after day. “What’s your problem?”

  “Hank,” Mom would say, “Just settle down.”

  Since I couldn’t sleep anymore, I started getting ready for school at 4:30 each morning, and then, with so much time on my hands, I would play with some of my old toys. One Thursday morning, I mindlessly placed my Dr. Zaius action figure on top of my Evel Knievel motorcycle. Dr. Zaius was the orangutan from Planet of the Apes, and though I normally would have had him giving a lecture about nasty, stupid human beings to the two chimps, Cornelius and Zira, today I wanted to see him attempt to jump all of my mother’s new crockery on Knievel’s motorcycle. Just as I was cranking the wheel that revved up the motorcycle, the phone rang. It was six in the morning. My parents were still asleep. When I let go of the crank to answer the phone, Dr. Zaius blasted off on his Harley, flying up the ramp and landing in the dog’s bowl of Gravy Train.

  “Hank,” Ralph said. “Is that you?”

  “What time is it?” I asked. “What’re you doing up so early?”

  “Listen,” he said. “Meet me in front of White Hen. But hurry.”

  Without waking my mother or father to tell them where I was going, and forgetting to remove the orange-colored monkey from the dog bowl, I sneaked out of the house and ran all four blocks to White Hen Pantry. Norm was sitting in his car, revving the engine, while Ralph stood by the trunk, whistling a tune I didn’t know.

  “What is it?” I asked, out of breath. It was bone-chillingly cold again, and each time I opened my mouth, the air that escaped looked like smoke.

  “You okay there?” Ralph asked. “You need CPR?”

  “I’m fine,” I gasped. “What do you want?”

  And then Ralph explained it to me. Norm, unable to unload any the tickets for his asking price, wanted me and Ralph to hang around outside WGN and try to sell them for fifty bucks each. If we sold six of them, we could have the remaining two and go to the show. But if we didn’t sell all six, he wouldn’t give us the tickets. Norm had recently had a run-in with the Cook County police and didn’t want to risk another one—otherwise, he’d have gone there himself.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, laughing, and pushed Ralph so hard he slammed against the trunk.

  “Ow!” Ralph said. “Take it easy.”

  “What about school?” I asked.

  “Forget about school. This is more important.”

  I laughed again. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. “I just need to tell my mom where I’m going,” I said, but Ralph shook his head.

  “No time for that,” he said. “We need to go now or this ain’t gonna happen.”

  The very idea of not telling my mom where I was going gave me an instant stomach ache, as if someone had poked a newly sharpened pencil into my belly button and then broke it off, but my desire to see Bozo in person, along with the possibility of getting to play the Grand Prize Game, snuffed out my worries. It was possible that Mom might turn on the TV at half past noon and see me, her beloved son, beaming between a set of Magic Arrows. And what mother wouldn’t have been proud of her son in that moment?

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I had no idea where WGN studio even was, but the drive took forever. We passed a dozen banquet halls, two dozen beef sandwich joints, a couple of psychics. Every time we passed a White Castle, Norm told us a story about eating too many of their sliders and how long he had to sit on the toilet the next day.

  “Those things’ll kill you,” Norm said. “One time I spent a total of eighteen hours in the can. I’m not kidding you. I kept track. Eighteen hours! I actually fell asleep in there once with my pants down around my ankles. All I kept thinking was, Why? Why did I eat twenty-two cheeseburgers? Oh, sure, they’re small and square and full of holes, but don’t let that fool you.” Norm squinted at the car in front of us, as if suddenly realizing we were at a stand-still, and honked his horn. “Move your crapmobile!” he yelled. “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

  We stopped for a while at a Dunkin’ Donuts, but Norm only bought donuts and coffee for himself.

  “Aren’t there union rules that workers need to be fed?” I asked Ralph.

  Norm sat in the front seat, shoving an entire jelly donut into his mouth. He wheeled around and, with his mouth full, said, “Do I look like a Rockefeller? Is my first name Nelson?” He swallowed and said, “I’ve got overhead. Gas, for instance. Time. You think my time is cheap? And what if I get a flat tire driving there? Ever think about that?” He turned back around and jerked the gear shift in reverse.

  We reached the television studio at 10:30, an hour and a half before the show was to start, but only a half-hour before people were supposed to start getting in line, according to the tickets. Norm circled back to Addison, where there was more traffic, and dropped us off on a corner, but not before popping the trunk.

  “I made a few signs for you clowns,” he said. “I’ll be back at 1:00, okay? If you even think about going to that show without selling all six tickets, I’ll skin you two alive.”

  “He bought a new knife last week,” Ralph said calmly to me. “A Barlow. Right, Norm?”

  Norm nodded.

  “Will do!” I said, taking the envelope from Norm and getting out of the car. As soon as Ralph removed the signs and shut the trunk, Norm peeled out in front of a city bus, almost killing everyone on board.

  A steady stream of cars flew by, but no one stopped. A couple of homeless guys and a woman wearing a babushka wandered past. I couldn’t help thinking that not far away, only a short walk from where I now stood, were Bozo, Cookie the Cook, Mr. Bob the bandleader, maybe even Wizzo the Wizard. I was starting to hyperventilate a little.

  “You’re panting like a dog,” Ralph said. “Hey, you didn’t eat any White Castles last night, did you? You gonna puke?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Ralph held up the tickets, fanned like playing cards.

  Each time someone drove past or walked near us, Ralph would say, “Getcha Bozo tickets right ch’ere.” Into the window of a car that had slowed down, Ralph yelled, “NEED A TICKET?” The driver, a young woman who hadn’t seen us standing on the sidewalk, screamed and sped off. Ralph looked at me, shrugged, and said, “Getcha Bozo tickets right ch’ere.”

  “Why are you talking like that?” I asked.

  “Norm gave me a script to memorize,” Ralph said. “He used to work in a carnival.” When two men wearing matching blue suits approached us, Ralph said, “Just a few minutes left, gents, don’t miss a moment of the big top. A mere fifty bucks buys you one of these six tickets. Follow your neighbors, they know a good show when they see one. You’ll see clowns of all denominations, clowns of all stripes, clowns of all orientations and affiliations, yes sir, they’re just waiting for you to go inside to get things rolling. The best value on the midway is right ch’ere. Don’t go off to your local tavern thinking you can come back here later and talk me down. No, sir, the show’s gonna start any minute now. The timer is ticking. Once I’m gone, you can kiss this special price goodbye. Kiss it like you would your ex-wife. Kiss it like you would your dead grandmother. They’re not gonna let you in once they shut their doors. That’s a fact, Jack. That’s the honest to God’s truth.”

  One man grabbed Ralph’s arm, and the other grabbed mine.

  “This way,” the one holding Ralph barked.

  “Our posters,” Ralph said.

  “Leave them,” the guy holding me answered.

  They walked us all the way to the WGN building. At first I thought maybe they recognized me for what I was—the world’s biggest Bozo fan—and that they were going to take us backstage to meet the great clown himself, but then the guy holding onto Ralph said, “You didn’t think someone working here would drive by and see what you were doing?”

  The guy holding me said, “Where do you think you are? A Shaun Cassidy concert?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “We hate Shaun Cassidy.”

  Inside WGN
was a long hall packed full of parents and kids standing in line, and a little further down were two extra-wide, extra-tall doors: the entrance to the studio itself. Instead of heading into the studio, Ralph and I were yanked down another hallway, where nothing much was going on, and into a room, where an old man wearing a white shirt with a badge and dark pants sat staring at a bank of tiny TV sets, on which appeared not a single clown.

  “Let me see those tickets,” the seated man said.

  “Fifty bucks apiece,” said Ralph. “No pay, no play.”

  The man reached out and snatched them out of Ralph’s hand before Ralph could do anything about it. “Well, now, this is a first, isn’t it?” the man said to guys in the blue suits. He shook his head and said, “Scalping Bozo.”

  “Kind of ingenious, actually,” the guy holding me said. “Which one of you two is the mastermind?”

  Ralph said, “Sorry. Can’t tell you,” but then he cut his eyes toward me and tilted his head a little my way.

  Everyone looked over at me.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I said.

  The guy with the white shirt, who was clearly the boss, stared at both of us for a good long while before opening his desk drawer and placing the tickets inside. The sound of the drawer shutting was like someone pulling the plug on my life support machine. I knew right then that I would never get to go to a taping of Bozo’s Circus. Even if I were to wait ten years for tickets, my name would be on a list, followed by four words: “DON’T LET HIM IN!”

  The guys in blue suits separated us, the way I’d seen murderers separated on television shows, to ask us questions. Was Ralph telling them that it was all my idea, or was he keeping his mouth shut? As for me, I gave up Norm as soon as I was asked whose idea it had been. I also explained to them Norm’s scheme of having tickets mailed to a bunch of other people he knew, including Ralph. I was not a loyal kid. I would have ratted out my own parents to save myself.

  “Norm told me I could have one of the tickets if we sold six of them,” I said, sniffling. “That’s all I wanted.”