Make Me Laugh,
Clown
I’m afraid of clowns, I’m not ashamed of it.
Mrs. Lee, my third-grade teacher, once invited one particularly angry clown, Frosty, to perform at a classroom holiday party. This was the same teacher who had developed her own brand of discipline by placing a dog kennel, previously used by her then deceased Great Dane, next to her desk and locking children in it when they misbehaved.
Upon Frosty’s arrival, he bore a distinctive scent, one that as an adult I can now identify as gin, and when Sherry Pierce, the perfect third-grade girl who had hair she could sit on, mentioned this, he just looked at her and chuckled. The clown began his Clown Fun, which entailed knocking the kids on the head with a plastic squeaky hammer, pulling a mottled piece of red foam out from behind their ears, and creating balloon animals in obscene shapes. The clown got even testier when Michael Moorehouse, the obligatory chunky child, told the clown he wasn’t funny. Frosty immediately lunged into action, swiping Michael’s snack plate and saying, “I’ll show you funny, fatty,” and took a bite out of the green-frosted cupcake and reindeer cookie.
The clown trauma didn’t end there. It simply matured when I was at a friend’s birthday party the next year and witnessed the hired clown entertainment relieving himself in the backyard by a wooden fence while the cake was being cut. That was when I really began to understand about clowns, and that I should try to avoid them. That they were insidious creatures, agents of the devil. My aunt used to have two clown paintings in her living room, and this sealed my belief. Both paintings of the sad clowns boasted thick, bloodstained-red smiles hiding fanged, splintered, yellow, pointy teeth, and the single teardrop. I was convinced that as I passed those paintings, they would call to me, “Laurie, we’re your friends. Put your hand in front of our faces. We’ll show you what funny is.”
As an adult, I feel capable of defending myself against a mime with a jolt from a pretend stun gun or a very real sucker punch, and then running away very fast. Clowns, however, are a different story. They carry forces of the dark side with them, impenetrable by any act of retaliation. Pop a clown’s balloon, and he’ll only mutilate a bigger, nastier one. Lock him in the trunk of a car and he’ll multiply himself into six more clowns. Spit on a clown and he’ll only want to give you a hug. I hate clowns so much that I become immobile and hypnotized with fear as soon as I see one. I think all clowns should go to clown prison for all of the very real damage they’ve done to America’s youth. They already like wearing stripes, so that’s not a problem, and instead of ostrich meat, Sheriff Joe could just toss a pack of balloons and some cans of Silly String into the cell and say, “Here you go, creepy clowns. Make your own damn lunch!”
I’d rather take on a band of collection agents armed with copies of my credit history than mess with a clown. I’m convinced that there’s a Clown Underground Network, and if you mess with one, you’re messing with the whole hive. Word gets out. You’re flagged, and if you’re within a five-mile radius of a rainbow fright wig, it will seek you out and trail you relentlessly, trying to give you an imaginary flower. If you take it, you’ve succumbed to the Dark Clown Power. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself trying to stuff seventeen of your friends into a Volkswagen Jetta that you’ve just slapped a multicolored clown pride bumper sticker on.
I don’t understand what kind of person would want to be a clown, I really don’t. I don’t understand what’s hiding behind the red-rimmed eyes, the pasty white makeup. Maybe it’s better that I
don’t
know, that the secret isn’t revealed. I have a suspicion it’s not fit for human eyes. Some people pay up to five hundred dollars to go to clown camp for a week to take such classes as “Beginning Balloons,” “Advanced Balloons” (I’m sure Frosty took that one), and “Strategies to Scar Children So They Become Frightened, Emotionally Crippled Adults.” The literature for this camp states that it prepares its students for when someone walks up to them and says, “Make me laugh, Clown.” It goes on to say that “great clowns are not made in a week but a lifetime,” and the camp will help people “complete their clown selves.” There’s also a picture of an anorexic man in a shiny, black, scoop-necked unitard demonstrating a clown dance, and another one of “Bojo showing students how to walk into doors.” Most people I know don’t need to shell out five hundred dollars for clown college to learn that. They just need a couple of beers on an empty stomach.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never once been tempted to call on a striped demon to make me laugh. That’s like asking someone with periodontic disease to use your toothbrush. You’re just inviting danger. When I was a student at Arizona State University, I passed a clown standing on the mall and deliberately did not make eye contact. That persistent clown followed me from one end of the university to the other, showering me with balloon poodles and stick men, and trying to squirt me with battery acid from the flower on his lapel.
On the steps of the communications building, I finally turned around and assumed battle stance, my knees bent, my fists pulled. “No, clown!” I yelled. “No means NO!” The clown started to pretend cry, but I shook my finger at him. “You stay away from me!” I warned. That’s when I believe my name and likeness were distributed throughout the network, because two days later, while I was visiting my grandparents, my Pop Pop gave me a gift.
It was a clown doll with evil yellow eyes and a pointy hat, dressed in a polka-dot jumpsuit. The Network had gotten to my grandparents.
“Get it away from me,” I said, shielding myself with my hands. “You’re dabbling in clown stuff you don’t understand!”
“Put it outside, Nick,” my nana said to Pop Pop. “You know what happens when you make her nervous. I don’t want to clean up any mess.”
“NO!” I said, jumping up. “NEVER let a clown out of your sight! It always has to stay in your field of vision! Don’t turn your back to it!”
“She’s so cute, though,” Pop Pop said.
“She won’t be that cute when she comes alive at night and stuffs your windpipe full of confetti,” I warned. “Besides, how do you know it’s a she?”
“Oh,” Pop Pop said as he smiled, “because I named it Laurie.”
How I Can Relive
the Horror of High
School for $103
I remember that it was a hot June night; the lights on the football field were searing and white, making it seem a hundred degrees hotter than it really was. You could see the silhouettes of the moths and the bugs zipping around in bright circles, as well as the floating dust in the air as a result of a couple thousand people walking around. I was sitting on a metal folding chair, one of 547 that had been set up in the gravel in front of the field.
I was seventeen and an hour away from starting My Life. It was the early eighties; I was wearing white pumps. I was fanning myself with the ceremony program, trying to keep my face from melting into my lap. Someone called my name, I walked across the stage, grabbed my high school diploma without falling down (I didn’t drink then), and went back to fanning myself until the ceremony was over.
I walked off the field a high school graduate, met my mother and father in the swarm of Killer Parents that had descended on the field afterward, and lit up a cigarette in front of the principal who had tried to suspend me for smoking on school grounds a couple months before.
I had forgotten about that night for a long time. There was no reason to think about it, anyway. I had forgotten all about it until I got a letter in the mail with the return address listed as “First Class Reunions.”
Sweet Jesus, I thought when I found it in the mailbox that I hadn’t checked in a month, I’m going back to high school.
Well, I’ve changed a bit since I was in high school. Back then, I said no to using and selling drugs, I washed on a regular basis, and I still had good credit. Since then, my inner thighs have grown together, my lungs have filled with enough tar to pave the highways of the continental United States, I cannot have a phone installed without my father cosigning for it, and I have entirely forgotten what sex is like with another person and am convinced that I’d have to use WD-40 on my private parts should the opportunity present itself.
There was only one place that I could read this letter, and that was on the toilet, with a lit cigarette in my hand.
I opened it. “It’s time for your high school reunion!” the letter shrieked, and then went on to inform me that 546 of the people that I hated most in the world were coming together at some lah-de-dah resort for the entire weekend to talk about the good old days. It was going to cost me sixty dollars to sit across from someone like Jim Kroener (who bounced a basketball off my head when I was a junior), eat a bad Cornish hen dinner, and try to make polite adult conversation on Saturday. Then there was the option of the “no-host mixer” on Friday, which meant that I would have to fork out a small fortune to be able to control myself and not lunge at Jim Kroener’s eyes with a bottle opener in my hands. For the Grand Reunion Finale, the reunion committee had scheduled a Family Picnic on Sunday to “show off the kids.” I could also purchase a commemorative T-shirt for ten bucks, a photo memory album (for which I could send in a recent photo of myself) for thirteen bucks, and a Bio-Data book, whatever the hell
that
is, for another ten.
The grand total for the sentimental bonanza screeched in at $103, not including the Saturday 8:00 A.M. $57 golf tournament hosted by the school’s only “celebrity,” someone who played a season of football for U of A. The real celebrities of our graduating class are still serving fifteen to twenty in Florence State Penitentiary for an incompetent bank robbery in which the getaway car was a ’74 powder-blue Pinto.
The dinner was out; no way was I going to consider spending a Saturday night with a thousand Mr. and Ms. Livin’ Larges, flashing diamond rings, pictures of the offspring, and breast implants. No Thank You. The picnic was also out. I have no children (thank God for genetic sterility), but I could bring my rabid dogs in the hopes that they would attack Jim Kroener’s kids.
I decided that my only possible appearance would be at the no-host mixer, where instead of paying for drinks, I could just suck off the bottle in my purse.
Attached to the letter was the Bio-Data form that asked all of the vital inconsequential questions (name, occupation, marital status, children, tax bracket. Answers; Laurie, none, none, none, I don’t know, let me ask my dad). I briefly considered scrawling deceased over it in black marker, until I saw the part that asked for “Your Fondest High School Memory.” I jotted down the memory of when my best friend, Jamie, and I had to dissect a cat in biology class so we skinned it, made it into a marionette with the use of string and tongue depressors, took it for a walk down the hallway, and made it wave at people until one girl who saw it threw up in a big trash can. The Bio-Data form also asked for “Your Message to Your Classmates,” so I wrote an eloquent little paragraph that included the phrases “three-headed children,” “foreclosure,” “prostate cancer,” and “yuppie bastards.”
Also listed was the high school trivia contest, consisting of the questions “Who was the senior-class president?,” “Who was homecoming queen and king?,” and “Who was the valedictorian?,” the answers to which I had no idea, but I still know the names of all the girls in my class who had VD or got pregnant.
Finally, the letter advised me to “call the baby-sitter, go on that diet, make those hair and nail appointments, and mail in your registration form today!”
Well, my dogs don’t need a baby-sitter, like hell if I’m starving myself for a bunch of balding, overweight insurance salesmen and dental hygienists, and I’d pretty much have to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse smoking crack in my driveway before I stepped one foot inside a beauty salon to get my nails done.
Instead, what I plan on doing is getting Stinkin’ Drunk, bailing my man out of jail, and heading off to the ten-dollar no-host mixer. And maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll find and scrape up a dead cat on the way there so the entire class can remember the good old days just like I did.
In Bell-Bottoms
and Boots, You
Can
Go Home Again
“I’m not going in. I’m not. No way.”
Jeff stopped the car in the dead center of the parking lot and looked me square in the face. His face was white, his eyes were little balls of ice, and he was serious. “I am
not
going in,” he said.
“Shut up and park the car,” I replied. “We’re here now. I said park the damn car.”
“Did you see those banners?” he asked, motioning to the pirate’s flag that waved so precariously in front of us, belching, welcome back!!! “Did you see what was in there? Blondes in prom dresses! One of them had chopsticks in her hair! I thought I saw a lawyer! We’ll probably have to flash them a platinum American Express Card before we can even get through the door!”
Jeff was nervous. I could tell by the way he was pounding his fist into the steering wheel and by the way torrents of tears were plunging down his pallid cheeks. Yeah, he was nervous, if only because he graduated from the same high school that I did, though one year earlier. He knew exactly what was lying in wait, ready to ambush us as soon as we crossed into the wicked, unforgiving terrain of nostalgia. And he was only my date, as well as the only person who reluctantly agreed to travel through this seventh gate of hell with me to my high school reunion.
I was nervous. My hands were shaking as badly as they do after a night with a fifth, and this was compounded by the fact that I had never sent in the registration form or the fee required to attend the reunion. In essence, we were crashing. And like
hell
if we weren’t going. It was the first time in ten years that my face was clear, and I had brushed my teeth real careful so that my gums wouldn’t bleed.
“Jeff,” I said as delicately as my personality would allow me, “I have waited years for this, years to show these people what I’ve become and who I am, like that song that Gifford woman sings on those boat commercials.”
“You mean ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’? Is that the song you mean?” he quipped. “The song about your high school friends being jealous because you’re a receptionist and a drunk, and you get thrown out of bars nightly because you don’t agree that one o’clock is a good time to quit drinking? The song about all of your high school friends being jealous because you scare the hell out of every man you date with your foul mouth and violent physical outbursts, guaranteeing yourself a lonelier existence than both the Brontë sisters combined? Is that the song you mean?”
I hated Jeff right then because he had a point. In the years since I had graduated, my finest accomplishment had consisted of collecting enough Marlboro Miles to send away for a three-bedroom double-wide Marlboro mobile home, complete with floor-to-ceiling gold-veined mirrors in the master bedroom. There wasn’t exactly a whole lot of stuff in my life that I could brag about without sounding like a passage from the autobiography of Squeaky Fromme.
“So, Laurie, what have you been up to since high school?”
“Well, the DEA ransacked my house in 1986, all of my credit cards were taken away in 1988, and last year my boyfriend left me because he got a teenage red-headed hippie girl pregnant.”
And this was my life.
“Okay, Jeff,” I said. “I’ll pay for your drinks all night.”
“Why, look, here’s a parking space.”
We waltzed through the parking lot, past all of the leased Acuras and Lexuses, the sole of one of my cowboy boots fixed to the upper part with the aid of black electrical tape. We approached the banner and the name-tag table.
It was constipated with the aging, squealing officers of student council, and I quickly pushed Jeff ahead of me while they exchanged business cards. I grabbed a name tag off the table, peeled it, and slapped it over my left breast. I was now Jens Hansen, and I had crashed my high school reunion.
“Are you sure we’re at the right place?” Jeff whispered. “It looks like a Hair Club for Men convention.”
“Yes, we’re at the right place!” I hissed. “I think that’s Susan Woods trying to hoist her four-hundred-pound butt out of that innocent plastic chair.”
We decided that we needed a drink before we talked to anyone, so I sent Jeff to the bar to get himself a beer and to get me some mixer, ice, and a stirrer.
Before I could even mix my drink in the bushes, I heard, “Ha-ha-ha!
Laurie Notaro?
Is she still alive?” and I saw one of my best high school friends talking to our favorite teacher, who’d divorced his wife and three kids to marry the eighteen-year-old cheerleading captain a year after I graduated. Before I could get the dirt on him and his child bride, I bumped into another good friend of mine who was chatting with my high school enemy.
“Guess what!” my friend Joanne screamed when I saw her. “I gave birth! It was like shitting out a pumpkin, and I don’t recommend it!”
Joanne had gotten married, had a son, lived within two miles of my house, and liked being a housewife because she could smoke all day and watch TV. My rival had also gotten married, moved to Ventura, gotten divorced, hated her job as a special-ed high school teacher, and had to borrow a cotton floral number to wear to the occasion. Her life was still “really great, though.” She also had some girlie freak-out idea that she and I were soul sisters during high school. The only reason I might have liked her then was because she had a butt bigger than mine, and, standing next to her, I was a dish.
“Oh, I love palazzo pants!” she cried, motioning to my outfit. “I love all the new styles!”
“These aren’t palazzo pants,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “They’re 1972 black-polyester, silver-thread bell-bottoms. Ninety-nine cents. Family Thrift Store.”
She tried to recoup. “Well, look how big your purse is. You must be a mom too!”
“Hell, no!” I answered, flashing the neck of the Jack Daniel’s flask. “I just have a drinking problem.”
I mingled. I laughed loudly. I smoked a pack, with Jeff at my side. I realized that the more that people insisted that they loved their lives, the more they really hated them. I realized that I was the only one of our graduating class that still got carded for cigarettes. I realized that I was one of only three unclaimed women that had never gotten married, divorced, annulled, impregnated, Lamazed, dilated, or employed as a high school teacher. As the three of us stood together—myself, Kathy, and Laura—I figured that if we were overweight, had any types of careers or even decent jobs, and were of any ethnic origin whatsoever, we’d probably have our own sitcom on Fox Television called
We Have a Better Chance of Being Shot by a Terrorist Than We Do of Catching Ourselves a Man
or
Six Breasts for Hire.
As the night came to a close, I promised to stay in touch with Joanne and fumbled through my purse for a hidden pen. Frustrated, I dumped out the contents on a round table: cigarette packs, gum wrappers, unpaid bills, razors, the flask, and the pen. As I wrote down Joanne’s number, the president of the senior class, who had a fabulous and absolutely fulfilled life as a divorced high school teacher, turned from her audience and snickered, pointing to the razor. “You carry a
razor
with you?” she said in her typically condescending tone, one that hadn’t changed since we all had spiral perms.
“Well,” I replied, “you never know when you’re going to need to shave in a hurry.”
“And what’s
that
?” she asked, pointing to the bottle and gawking.
“Oh, this?” I said, picking it up and putting it back in its proper place. “I figure that this is a little more fun and a lot less expensive than getting involved in a failed marriage and then spending ninety percent of my time fighting about who gets the sectional sofa in the settlement.”
I then stood next to the homecoming queen for an entire fifteen minutes without even knowing it, because she had bought herself a brand-new face. I thought she was a LaToya Jackson female impersonator until Joanne told me different. Even though, at that moment, a flashback popped into my mind of her jumping onto a table in the cafeteria one day and belting out her own rendition of “Fame” to the freshmen and sophomores who were trying to eat their lunches, I felt such pity that I couldn’t even vomit on her.
As I walked back through the parking lot to Jeff’s car, a little drunk and almost out of cigarettes, I laughed, and Jeff and I agreed that the reunion wasn’t so bad. I didn’t have to make up anything about myself, because as pathetic as I think the thing called my life is, it kicked ass over having to pay a baby-sitter when I got home on Sunday morning. Not only that, everybody was especially impressed when they discovered that I had my own personal stalker.
“You know, Jeff,” I said, “That wasn’t so bad.”
“No,” he said as he opened my car door, “it wasn’t. In fact, if the homecoming queen was picking chunks of your dinner out of her hair at this very minute, it could have even been fun.”
We drove out of the parking lot and headed for the nearest bar for the last twenty minutes of drinking time. I lit my last cigarette effortlessly, with calm, smooth hands. They had stopped shaking, they were completely still, and I hadn’t even noticed.