Guest Blog Post by Jen Byrne -- Clown

“So,” the man said to the clown. “Are you going to be at Steve’s barbecue this weekend?”

The man seemed to be looking at the clown with more than casual interest. He wasn’t just making small talk. He appeared to be legitimately eager to spend time with the clown at Steve’s barbecue.

“I’m not sure,” the clown said, using an inside voice even though she was outside. She was trying not to seem overly enthusiastic, which is difficult to do when you’re a clown.

As clowns go, this one really was nothing special. She had curly, rainbow-colored hair, a standard red ball of a nose, and somewhat smeared white clown base with some lazy facial flourishes. Her clown style was spared being entirely generic only by sloppy artistry and sweat. Her mouth, which had been scribbled on in a hurry, was now slowly bleeding under the June sun. It looked less like a smile than dental work gone horribly wrong. 

“Well, let me know,” The man, who was at least ten years older than the clown but maybe more, nevertheless had a very nice body; the clown had seen it in a speedo during his performance in the amusement park’s high dive show. As for the clown’s own physique, it was largely concealed in the billowing clown onesie with pom-pom buttons and ruffled sleeves. “I probably won’t go if you don’t.”

The clown was beginning to wonder what was wrong with this man, whose name was Rusty. She was flattered that he seemed to enjoy talking to her, but it gave her serious pause that he had never seen her outside of the costume. Either he was the one guy in the world who truly only considered the quality of a woman’s soul, or his physical type had a honkable nose and multicolored Afro. In other words, he was a grade-A quality man or a clown fetishist freak.

This was a very perplexing situation for me. I never expected guys to be interested in me: usually, when a guy looked in my direction, I turned around to locate the prettier lady he was really looking at. Sure, guys flirted with me sometimes, but not to the point where I’d gotten jaded about it, or even expected it. I really didn’t expect to be flirted with while dressed as a third-rate clown. 

Of course, there was the very real possibility that this wasn’t a flirtation at all, that he was just being friendly to the kid’s clown to kill some time. Yet, that wasn’t the vibe I was getting. Saying things like “I probably won’t go unless you do,” in an intimate you-and-me kind of voice, wasn’t just clown small talk.

Plus, it seemed Michael had noticed, and Michael was getting jealous.

“I’m going to go on the log flume again,” he said. “Are you coming with me or not?”

Michael was the other clown who worked at this cut-rate, dirty water amusement park in a crappy town in South Jersey. It was not known to anyone outside the region, it sold terrible frozen pizza, and its rickety old roller coasters clicked along like arthritic joints. The whole place had a feeling of having been not-so-gently used, as though the whole park had been donated to Goodwill. 

“One second, Michael,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
I wasn’t entirely clear on the nature of Michael’s slightly possessive attitude toward me. As I mentioned, I wasn’t the kind of person who assumed people had crushes on me, so I figured it was a clown thing. Maybe because we had these drawn-on facial features that made us look genetically related, he considered us clown siblings. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t exactly a hardship, having my little flirtation interrupted so I could go on amusement rides in the middle of a workday. 

“I’ll let you know,” I said to Rusty with what I hoped was a jaunty wave. “I’m definitely thinking about it.”

“Great,” he said, and his tanned face crinkled into a delighted smile.  I said goodbye and ran over to my fellow clown.

“Dude is flirting with a clown – what’s his problem?” he said. “By the way, I made a balloon Dachshund today that looked just like a penis.”

“I bet the kid’s mom loved that,” I said. “Hey, maybe we should go on the pirate ship instead of the log flume. My makeup is coming off already. Do you think he was flirting?” 

This had to have been the easiest, and on some levels best, job I have ever had in my life. We’d been hired to make balloon animals for the kids at the park, but after a while, under what seemed like a total lack of supervision, we started to slack off in a big way. For one thing, the kids didn’t even seem that interested in balloon animals; it wasn’t as if there were lines for so-called “balloon sculpture” snaking around the corner, or lines at all. Plus, as employees of the park, we had free access to all rides. Our employers really should have stipulated, “Except while you’re working,” but they forgot that. So, we were basically spending most of our paid shift riding the rides with the kids, with intermittent periods of making balloon animals which, if they miraculously didn’t pop, were horribly mishappen. It was great. 

This was my era of doing genuinely odd jobs while struggling to get through college. At some point, after being repeatedly fired from “normal” jobs in customer service or food preparation, I had decided to seek out fringe stuff that didn’t require the elusive skill sets needed for these jobs, otherwise known as “common sense.” I can’t even begin to convey how bitterly I eventually came to hate “common sense” – I still do, if I’m being honest. Time and time again, I was fired from fairly straightforward jobs because I was terrible at cash register computation or multitasking skills or the ability to quickly prepare food without spilling everything. The worst part was that I was usually fired from these jobs by people who said things like “supposably” or “it’s a doggy-dog world,” even as they belittled my lack of common sense. So, I began to seek out work that kept me away from the deep fryer, the change drawer and the judgment of nametag-wearing middle management. Such work usually entailed some sort of ‘creative” activity, and when you seek out entry level creative work that isn’t stripping, you can be fairly sure that “creative” equals “little to no pay.”

The clown job at the park certainly offered little to no pay, but it also required little to no work. The toughest part about it involved the one actual item we had to produce.  I did not possess the fine motor facility to quickly and effectively twist, bend and knot a long balloon into a dog. Instead, my “dogs” often ended up looking like a clump of fast-growing tumor cells.

“Look, he’s a poodle,” I would explain to the skeptical and unenthused recipient of my handiwork. “He’s got the pom-pom poodle haircut, these are the little poufs, see?”

“Are these supposed to be the legs?” The kids might ask. “Why does it have 7 legs?”

“Um, he has the special power to run faster than any other poodle in the world,” I’d say. “It’s a Super Poodle.”

“Yeah, OK,” the disappointed child would concede. Sometimes I’d see them shrugging and handing the grotesque thing off to their mom a few minutes later, and the mom sort of examining it from all angles. I was lucky that there weren’t many type-A moms who felt compelled to complain or insist that I make their child a new balloon, a “better” balloon.” This wasn’t the kind of place where type A people brought their kids. This was a place for people who were no longer surprised by the heaping pile of shit that was life. Which, in my book, made it much cooler and more tolerable than Disneyworld.

Weekdays at the park were my personal favorite, because it was even less crowded during the week, and there were almost no lines to get on the rides. On these days, Mike and I would sail through one ride after another, casually chatting in between medium-intensity thrills. When we weren’t riding the rides or making the flawed animals, we would go and watch the high dive show.

I’ve heard this was later replaced by a lion and tiger show, which I guess was the park’s aspirational attempt to be a “real” amusement park. I think this is sad, because the dive show was unique, if not as flashy as a big cat show. I loved the look of the dark blue diving well as it sat dormant between shows, hinting at something mysterious and exciting to come. As a kid I had loved Sea World; I had been sad to hear how badly the killer whales were treated. With this dive show, I didn’t have to feel sad: it was like Sea World but with people. They knew what they were getting into.  

Towering above the deep well was a high diving board, which stood at I guess about 50 feet. The show would start out with prerecorded music and two blandly handsome brothers named Max and Chad who did beautiful, graceful dives from that nerve-wracking height. Then suddenly, a guy dressed like an exaggerated, rail-riding hobo from a movie would call out from the audience.

“These dives aren’t nothin’” he’d say. “I could do that stuff right now if I wanted.”

A comic back-and-forth between the professional divers and this obnoxious interloper would ensue. The heckler bum would then be invited up onto the diving platform with a challenge to do better. He would amble over with a ridiculous, ducklike walk and would clumsily mount the steps up to the high dive, pretending to almost fall a few times. He would occasionally look down and faux panic, hiding his eyes until prodded to continue up the steps. There, at the top of the steps, he would start to chicken out. Standing there in his ragged, dirty clothes, he would perform a cartoon pantomime of fear, and then eventually, he’d pretend to fall off the platform. This clumsy “accident” would lead him to execute a flawless triple somersault and plunge gracefully into the water, his entry so clean it barely made a ripple on the surface.This was Rusty.

From this point in the show, he was be “outed” as a member of the professional team and would continue to sail through the air with beautiful and perfect form. For me, though, the best part was always that first dive, where he revealed that he wasn’t just some disruptive klutz, but a talented and disciplined professional.

Probably, I admired his transformation because that was what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be: a clumsy weirdo who suddenly just breaks out with this transcendent grace and beauty. It envied his ability to pretend to be uncoordinated and clueless, and then to be able to shed that image in one amazing second.

Yet he wanted to spend time with me at Steve’s barbecue. Why? I pretty much broke my brain trying to figure it out. I watched the high dive show repeatedly, looking for clues. 

Watching him do his little comedy skit before his first dive, I started to think that maybe he felt like some sort of freak, too – a weird, laughable creature. He was kind of old for an athlete, and an athlete at a rundown amusement park is probably not a well-compensated athlete. It must have been exhausting and, maybe on some level, demeaning work for him. I wondered if he had something wrong with him that stopped him from getting a “normal” job, but there were no obvious defects. 

“You have such a gift,” I said at Steve’s barbecue, which I decided to go ahead and attend. I was so in awe of talent, and especially talent that was cultivated instead of given up on. He hadn’t only shown an ability for diving, he’d also decided to work hard and develop that skill over the course of years. He’d had failures and disappointments but had persevered. The miracle of all of those things coming together for a person seemed like some special sort of magic.  I tried to tell Rusty this.

“But I’m working at this crappy park – haven’t you noticed?” He was saying self-defeating and negative things, but he was smiling widely. “Ah, I guess it could be worse. I met you.”

Ohhh…. the “I met you” seduction strategy. I inwardly cringed at his premature use of it. To me, you sort of had to know someone well – or at least for a while – for “...or I wouldn’t have met you” to be used as the One Good Thing in a Not-So-Great Situation.  He’d met me one month ago, and technically, he was meeting the person beneath the clown for the first time at this party. 

He did seem happy to have met me, though. When I went up and introduced myself to him, he said, “Oh, wow,” in that borderline lewd guy way. “You’re cute.”

“I can’t imagine what you might have expected,” I said, starting to like him in spite of myself.

“You have such nice hair,” he said. 

It sucked that he mentioned the hair, because the hair wasn’t real. I mean, it was the material ‘hair’, but the color was beyond fake, and was a cheap trick for catching people’s attention. It’s funny, I was deliberately getting it bleached for just that reason, but when someone complimented me on it, I kind of hated it. It was like saying, “The best part of you is the part that isn’t really you.”

It wasn’t very realistic for me to have hair like a neon sign and then get hurt when people stopped to look at it, so I always tried to let it go. It was interesting to me, though, that this guy had actually seen me in two disguises – first the clown, and then underneath that, the hair. I was a Russian doll of fakery, and he wasn’t even close to reaching the tiniest, disappointingly hollow doll inside.