Happy ?
ost people are like Joe. They believe that all one must do to become a clown is splash some colorful grease paint on the face and put on some odd clothes. They have no notion of the centuries of development that have refined the art of the clown.
--The Official Clown's Manual, 3rd Revised Edition, 1992
Mary asks: "What are you doing here?"
Asking you to marry me, I say.
She shakes her head and says: "Ffffffffffffff!"
Her door slams in my face.
It says: 14B.
I knock again. The door opens again.
"You're a clown," she says.
"Yup," I say. Because it's true. I am.
"No, I mean you're a clown." She says: "How many times have you come around and knocked on my door in the last year?"
Many times, I admit. Many, many. But I don't know how many.
So I say (needing something to say): "You're in denial."
"Denial about what?"
"Mmmmm...about how much you love me?"
"Ffffffffffffff!"
The door slams in my face again.
I knock again. Door opens again.
"But I've got the secret," I say.
"There are no secrets," she says, firmly.
Mary has spent much time and energy trying to believe this. But she's Catholic. Still Catholic. No matter how hard she tries to forget it. And, if you're Catholic, even a lapsed and fugitive one like Mary, you always know that there are secrets out there. Big ones. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Most of all, that they are the secrets most worth having. Big secrets.
And Mary, for whatever else she is or is not, had been or had been not, might be or might be not, always had an instinct for having those things most worth having.
Fade out.
An hour or so later. Fade in on: a comfortably furnished apartment. Mary's comfortably furnished apartment. Elegant, even.
Mary's cat stares at me from across the carpet. The elegant carpet. Me and the cat, we're sitting on the floor. A good spot for a cat. Good spot for a clown, too. Depending on the crowd. And the conditions. And the clown.
Mary sits on her couch, holding a glass of wine. Looking down upon us: me and the cat. Very regal. Queen and her court. Some guy is sitting next to her. Tall and dark and kind of dumb looking. Lawyer or something like that. Dumb looking but very solvent. She says he's her boyfriend. Usurper.
So I ask: "What's he doing here?"
Mary says back: "You keep asking that. He lives here."
Now she and he, intent and quiet, watch me and the cat on the floor.
So I say: "Living in sin? What would the Church say? The Pope? Everybody in the Vatican? The Mafia? Chef Boyardee?"
Her: "I haven't been to mass in seven years. They would say the same thing they said seven years ago. Which is why I haven't been to mass in seven years."
Her boyfriend turns to her: "You're Catholic?"
I stare in disbelief.
"You're living with this guy and he doesn't even know you're Roman Catholic? You've slept with someone who doesn't even know what religion you are? What kind of relationship could you two possibly have?"
Mary yawns, then: "A very physical one."
The boyfriend dips the bottle of beer he is holding in my direction. Like I'm a lab specimen or something: hello and welcome to my petri dish.
Him: "He Catholic, too?"
Mary's eyes focus on me, her lids drop slightly.
"No...he's a clown."
There. The disappearing look. Whenever she looks at me like that. Poof. Disappear into the ether. Then: she rolls her eyes upwards. Impatient. Wants it to be over with. Know that look.
I look toward the cat. The cat's eyelids drop. Then it, too, yawns.
I shrug and say: "I was a clown when you met me."
She: "Yes, but I thought you'd get over it."
Mary's Yes. She will never say Yeah. Only Yes. Proper. Good upbringing. East Coast chick. Andover, Massachusetts. The best Catholic schools. The best Catholic boys. Then she came to L.A.. Ends up getting involved with a clown. That's why they call it L.A..
Her eyeballs still all fixed on the ceiling. I look at the tight black pants she wears. Cling to her shapely legs. Tight fit around the crotch. Female topography. The goods. Makes me feel warm all over. Nostalgia for the spot. Where did our love go?
Mary is shapely. Mary's shape: curvy soft. Shape most pleasing to me. Not only to me. Lawyer there seems quite fond of it, too. Many, many fond of Mary's shape. Many. And she knows it. The goods.
Her (coldly, logically, rationally, shapelessly): "We all aspire. Some of us actually achieve."
"Asking me to change, to stop clowning, that's like asking you to stop being Catholic."
"I gave up being Catholic," she says firmly, eyes coming down from the ceiling and fixing on me.
"You stopped going. That's not the same thing."
Not the same thing at all. Asking somebody to stop being Catholic is like asking somebody to stop walking around on two legs. To stop breathing. Catholicism is in the DNA. Go ahead. Try and reconfigure your DNA. Takes more than a vague longing and a pair of pliers.
"And anyway," Mary says, ignoring this, "I'm not asking you to stop being a clown. I'm asking you to stop coming around and bothering me."
But we. We. Were. In. Love.
"Prove it," Mary smiles a sardonic catch-me-if-you-can smile.
Defense Exhibits A, B and C introduced into evidence:
Defendant's Exhibit A: snapshot of Mary and me at the beach, cheek-to-cheek. Her in stylish one-piece bathing suit, long legs, beautiful eyes, smile, white teeth. Shapely. Happy, happy, happy. Me: usual clown outfit, baggy white pants, oversized floppy shoes, red wig, bulbous red nose and ever-present bicycle horn. Honk, honk.
Defendant's Exhibit B: key chain which reads "Strength through Joy." A gift. From her to me. Her dad's a very successful abusive alcoholic entrepreneur. Makes money mass-producing keychains with absurd slogans like this one. Exhorting the minions to joy. Given to me in a cozy moment, over a cozy dinner, in a cozy restaurant.
--Touch my heart, I said then.
--Consider it touched, she smiled then.
Kissed me then. Kiss, kiss, kiss.
Defendant's Exhibit C: pair of panties. Well, a thong actually. "Butt floss," she called it. Not sure if it's really hers. Maybe not. Doesn't matter. I associate it with her. It's the thought that counts.
I produce them, lay them out on the carpet, carefully. Delicately. Precious gifts. Like a priest. Wine and bread. Sacramental. Introibo ad altare Dei. My offerings.
Mary shrugs: "That was then. This is now."
Me (ignoring her sacrilegious attitude, doing my best un-clownlike voice): "You know who your mother named you after...the Blessed Virgin."
Her: "So if your parents had named you 'Jesus H. Christ' would you go around trying to part the Red Sea and turn water into wine?"
Then the lawyer (clearing his throat): "If you don't mind me asking, what exactly are you doing here?"
"Asking Mary to marry me."
He asks: "If you want a Church wedding, don't you have to be Catholic too?"
Typical lawyer. Details, details. Mastermind of details. Parts always greater than the whole. Yawn.
Mary: "He doesn't want to marry me. We lived together for 6 months. Didn't want to marry me then. Never said anything about living in sin then. Or the beloved Holy Church, either."
Mary's look at me: COBOL stare. No longer warm. No longer luminating. Her look can say things. It can speak: recite poetry and verse, long and windy prose, murmur children's rhymes, give directions to the nearest 7-11. Yes, it can say many things. But now it utters one thing in particular. A funeral oration. I am a statistic. Nevermore, nevermore. Her COBOL stare says I'm merely another piece of road kill on the lonely highway to her heart.
Where did our love go?
Him (curiously): "So what's he doing here?"
Her (shrugging): "Drinking all our beer."
Very witty repartee. Ho-hum. No wonder they're relationship is merely physical. I sigh and take a swig of my beer. Second beer already. Or third? Fourth?
Him (again): "So what's he doing here?"
Mary fixes her big brown eyes on me with sudden great gusto. Bright idea striking her. Voila. The answer!
"I'm the best he ever had," she says, simply.
Wondrously she laughs a wondrous laugh. Eyes alight. Warming to the thought. Finding strength and amusement and much meaning in the saying of it. Her and me: conqueror and conquered. Her: Cortez. Me: Mexico.
Without hesitating, I huff: "No, you're not."
Of course, she is. The best. Ever, ever. By far. How to move, how to moan, how to coo coo coo with her coo. She wrote the manual. Some coo.
Her laugh again. And again. Ripples across the room. Waves of warmth. Cat looks up from licking itself. Good hearing her laugh. Like old times. Under the covers. Smell of her bedwarmed flesh. Likes the chase best. Romance. Catnip to the kitten. Only thing we were any good at together. Much giggling and laughter then. Only difference between the clown and the lover is the grease paint. And the red rubber nose. And the bicycle horn.
Mary's laughter dies down. Pause. Silence. Then: lull in the conversation. Silence. Deadly silence. There is a ticking sound. Tick, tick, tick. The lawyer? Lifts beer to his lips. He seems so mechanical. Time server. Runs perhaps on Pentium II microprocessor. Not polite to ask.
More silence...
Fortunately I'm a professional: I have the resources and training to deal with this. From The Official Clown's Manual (3rd Revised Edition, 1992), Rule #1 for the professional clown: "The accomplished clown should be able to use any object to enhance the humor of his illogical universe."
Thinking rapidly, I stick my thumb into the top of my bottle of beer and shake it rapidly, then let a flurry of foam shoot out all over Mary's elegant carpet. The cat ducks under the sofa.
Mary blinking at me. Livid. Boyfriend looking confused.
"Do that...or anything like that...again and I'll cut your nuts off and nail them to the wall," says Mary, annunciating her words very calmly, precisely. Deadly serious. Mary can be quite crude when she wants to be. Earthy. It's a Catholic thing.
To my chagrin, I remember too late Rule Number #2 from The Official Clown's Manual: "Nothing is less humorous than somebody trying to be funny."
They don't understand. Can't see my fear of silences. It's a clown thing. Part of my professional training, actually.
"The clown's two deadliest enemies are reality," said Mister Zeno, "and silence. And where you find one, you always find the other. The clown's first and foremost responsibility is to meet and defeat each of these threats to clowns, clowning and all clowndom. Make no mistake: wherever there is too much reality or too much silence, laughter and gaiety are in mortal danger, my friends."
"Clowning 101." Cue flashback sequence. Cut to: memories of Clown School. Clown U. The International Clowning Academy (I.C.A). Mister Zeno: Master Clown. Mister Zeno kicking back in class. Chair squeaking, large floppy clown shoes propped up on his desk. Holes in the soles, bits of dried gum. Lighting a Marlboro and exhaling it all over the place. Marlboro hangs from corner of mouth, from out of the red red lipstick swabbed all over his mouth.
"Yes, reality is the enemy," says Mister Zeno, "for any serious clown."
Mister Zeno exhales a lot more Marlboro into the air. Then peers back at us with a long and piercing blue-eyed gaze. Out from behind all the white grease paint and bulbous red nose. All grease paint and pathos: a true clown.
"And if you're gonna be a clown, you better be damn serious about it," he says, morose.
Mister Zeno needs a drink. The Master Clown never looked much good sober. Never looked sober sober. Always looked much more sober when he was sauced.
On the blackboard behind him are the important dates in the History of the Clown: discovery of the bicycle horn; discovery of the red rubber nose; discovery of grease paint; first use of oversized, floppy shoes; invention of the tricycle; invention of the balloon, etc. etc.
Mister Zeno lectures us on the cosmology of clowning: "One of the great secrets that historians of clowndom have uncovered is that there is a book or two missing from the Bible. In one of them, in the New Testament, Jesus actually says 'Blessed are the joymakers and especially the clownfolk.' There is also a Book of the Old Testament missing. Alongside those great old prophets such as Isaiah, Hezekiah, Obadiah and Jeremiah belongs our prophet, the prophet of clowns, Bozomiah. Also missing, the 11th Commandment: keep 'em laughing."
End flashback sequence. Cut to me, the clown, sprawled on Mary's soggy carpet. Having just returned from the fridge with a fresh beer.
Me (nodding to the lawyer): "So what do you see in this guy...I mean, other than the fact that he has an extended credit line and caters to your every whim?"
Her (clinical): "There is one thing I find immensely attractive about him: I know that he'd never fool around on me."
Me (indignant): "But neither would I!"
Her (sensibly): "Probably not. But you liked to look an awful lot."
Me (sputtering): "Look? What's wrong with looking? Why the whole world is all about looking. Imagine a lookless world."
Besides, Mary herself is a notorious looker. Not merely the luscious lookee. Perhaps sometimes even more than a looker. Flirt extraordinaire. Perhaps sometimes even more than a flirt. Bed swerver. Others. In the dark. In other places. Boys. Maybe girls. Sinful secrets. Excitement. Equals guilt like E=mc2.
"What's good for the goose is not necessarily always what's good for the gander," is what I imagine her saying: in my head.
But what she really says is: "Looking can lead to more than looking."
Once upon a time she liked looking at me. Especially me. Long, possessive looks. Had first met her after one of my performances. If you're a clown and a woman has seen you perform, seen you go through your routines, it's a piece of cake. Don't know what makes women tick. Don't. But if you can make them laugh or make them cry, you have their full and undivided attention. With women, attention is everything: the lingua franca of the gender.
And Mary had seen some of my best routines.
"I loved 'Man Stuck in an Elevator'," she gushed to me after the show. "And 'The Friendly Freeway Shooter' was really hilarious."
My moves to "The Friendly Freeway Shooter" had to be especially sharp. You could lose the audience easily in that one. End up with a tragic silence instead of cacophonous raucousness, i.e., the laughter that is any clown's trademark. Especially crucial to that routine was the proper and skillful and extremely nuanced use of the bicycle horn.
After retrieving another beer from the refrigerator, I sprawl back on the carpet and look deeply into Mary's eyes and ask: "Where did our love go?"
Mary presents Plaintiff's exhibits A, B and C:
Plaintiff's Exhibit A: "That time when we were in "Lucky's" supermarket and you jumped up and farted and clicked your heels at the same time and acted like it was some kind of Olympic kind of achievement or something."
Defendant's Response: "Hey, it was. It was an Olympic kind of achievement."
Plaintiff's Exhibit B: "Foul language. We'd be in some nice restaurant someplace, things would be very nice, and all of the sudden you would start blurting out words, rude words, nasty words. Sometimes even spelling them out."
Defendant's Response: Well, there was that. Yelling out words, actually: "Buttocks!" "Sphincter!" "Fellatio!" Now, come on. Who ever hears anybody yell out words like that? Round, obscene, raucous words. Words which cast a critical reflection on the absurdity of taking the human condition too seriously. Why that's not obscenity: it's philosophy! Only a clown can do it. It's a clown's job. What else would you have a clown do? Trim the lawn, take out the trash, make some decaf?
Plaintiff's Exhibit C: "You were always broke. Not only did I have to pay the rent and buy all the food but I'd also have to pay for all your grease paint and those horrendous dry cleaning bills for your baggy pants and frizzy wigs. And instead of being grateful, you'd always invite all your deadbeat clown friends over and party till all hours, yelling, screaming, puking and passing out on the kitchen floor. And if that wasn't bad enough, they'd wake up in the middle of the night and start crying or moaning or yelling at each other."
Defendant's Response: Ah, the good old days. Wistful feeling comes over me.
"And if laughter's the source of life," Mary asks. "Why are you clowns so damn unhappy all the time?"
Ouch. Thrust to mine very heart. Touche.
(Briefly consider clever response, something to do with "Happy Unhappiness" or, alternatively, "Unhappy Happiness," as in: being a secret that clowns and Catholics have in common. Reject the idea though. Too clever by half. Rule #3 in The Official Clown's Manual: "There's nothing particularly funny about cleverness.")
My rejoinder: it's a secret, I say secretively.
Mary (firmly): "There are no secrets."
No more secrets. Not between us. She will never share another secret with me. Nor I with her. Her secret: believes in True Love. My secret: I want to be a banker when I grow up. No more secrets between us now.
The disappearing look. >La belle dame sans merci. Curtains closing. I hear a flock of birds rustling somewhere, flying off into the dusk. Not like the good times. In the good times, she would say something and I'd hear pigeons cooing on the windowsill of our hotel room. Coo coo cooing. Roll over and make love again.
Mary (again): "There are no secrets."
Mary's lips set very firmly: serious, seriouser, most serious. When she talks like that, there is a priest somewhere, back there in her childhood, consecrating the elements. Murmuring miraculous metamorphoses. The serious look. Mary: serious as a priest. Celebrating communion in her starched black and the cleric collar, her long lush auburn hair falling lushly, auburnly over the vestments. All the makings of a priest: love of secrets, fear of secrets.
One last effort. The old college try.
"Take me back?" I ask, mustering the most pathetic look I can muster. My longest possible clown face.
"I might consider it," says Mary.
The lawyer looks at her. Women. Unpredictable. Always the possibility of commuting your death sentence. Forget justice. Always appeal to the heart as the court of last resort. With the heart anything is possible. Women.
"But you'll have to give up the grease paint, the red rubber nose, the bicycle horn. Clowning. You'd have to give up being a clown."
Redemption: hanging before me. Like a carrot on a stick.
I am stricken: "You know I can't do that. Being a clown is the only thing I've ever been serious about."
Graduated summa cum laude from the I.C.A. (International Clowning Academy).
I'm crying. What ever happened to our love? Bitter tears.
"Oh, cut it out," Mary says, "The only tears you ever shed are painted ones."
Fade out. Fade in some time later.
Tears eventually dry. All tears do. I snuffle. Feeling sinful: worst thing a clown can do. Cry real tears. The 12th commandment of clowning: only painted tears. Look around to see if I have an audience. Somebody to feel sorry for me.
Mary is asleep on the boyfriend's lap. The boyfriend's head is thrown back on the couch. He's snoring.
Brief flashback sequence. Bits and pieces of the evening's conversation:
"I worshipped the ground you walked on..."
"He used to watch football all the time on the weekends..."
"I'd sing you songs..."
"He'd always be looking for creative ways to expel gases from his body..."
"I swore to uphold your fidelity and chastity..."
"Asked him about commitment four or five times and he'd always say "Please pass the olives...'"
Wish I had a drink. Another drink. But there's no more beer in their fridge. I drank them all. But I still wish I had a drink. And a woman. And a song.
I look for the cat. It's curled up in the easy chair. Purring, asleep.
I leave, shutting the door behind me. I tread down the hallway. Carpet quiet. Thinking: where did our love go? Stop. I look back at the door.
It says: 14B.