Sightings (12 page)

Yet despite their eccentricities, my parents were right, they were good people – at least good clowns – and Aunt Clown always offered to help wash dishes or set the table. And better still, she left intricate balloon animals on my pillow on the days she changed the sheets – a menagerie of latex walruses and white-handed gibbons greeting me every few nights.

Yet the Clowns couldn't stay cooped up in the house forever. Most mornings they'd load up their Volkswagen and tour the city, working the street corners, “prostituting ourselves,” Uncle Clown often grumbled, “turning tricks for cash.”

But it was more than that, more than simple tricks.

They actually made quarters leap from behind people's ears, pulled rubber chickens out of their armpits. They had the unique talent of juggling apples and oranges and pears all at once, as if they alone kept the universe in motion. In the evenings we'd all watch television while Uncle Clown – pre-nightcap – struggled through a few sets of push-ups. And other nights – post-nightcap – when he was feeling extra loose, he and Aunt Clown would sit us down in the backyard and put on their show.

They only had so many routines, but we clapped and cheered even at the ones we'd already seen. That handheld tape recorder played the same calliope music again and again, but we pretended we were hearing it for the first time.

“Sophie,” Uncle Clown often gasped, his throat laced with whiskey. “What's that . . . quarter doing behind your ear?”

He'd remove it, of course, amid our clapping, and after his grand finale – involving a unicycle, six bowling pins, three shots of tequila, and a hula-hoop set aflame – he and Aunt Clown would take a knee, waving their hands in the air, perfectly synced with the music.

While Mom, Dad, and I wished they didn't feel the need to perform for us, we couldn't do anything to stop them.

“Look, just enjoy it,” Uncle Clown begged, sweating like an iceberg. “It's all we know to do to pay the rent.”

And then one day the water pipes burst.

A Sunday, after Uncle Clown had done two hundred push-ups the previous night in preparation for what he called his “reunion tour,” which was actually just a brief appearance at Clarence Robards's eighth birthday party. Still, it was $50.00, and neither he nor Aunt Clown was in a position to pass it up. Mr. and Mrs. Robards had been quite clear in their expectations – “We don't want a lot of circus tricks,” they'd informed him. “Just pull some quarters from their ears.”

Thankfully, this was Uncle Clown's forte.

“Like riding a horse,” Uncle Clown whispered, sitting me down in the kitchen that Saturday night as he practiced pulling all kinds of currency from behind my earlobes.

For a brief moment, everything seemed almost right in the world – people were laughing, money was falling out of my ears – but then we woke the next morning to find the bathroom pipes hissing sprits of water, the cold mist collecting across the tiles, covering the entire room in a slick glaze.

“This ship's going down!” Uncle Clown yowled, his idea of a joke. But when Dad came pounding up the stairs, he was less than thrilled by the water damage.

I stepped into the hallway to find Uncle Clown dancing in the spray, rubbing a scrub brush along his polka-dotted jumpsuit while singing “I'm so Excited” by the Pointer Sisters. Dad kept a hand pressed to his forehead and began counting backward from ten.

Aunt Clown witnessed the scene and urged her husband to stop the routine.

“Please,” she begged. “This isn't a laughing matter.”

“Yeah, you're right, hon,” Uncle Clown said, laughing harder. “Because we've just had so many laughing matters lately, haven't we?”

Neither of them had to say anything.

They wore their pain on their polka-dotted sleeves.

Mom joined us next, and Uncle Clown started in on the second verse of the song while Dad fought his way toward the shower drain, reaching a hand into the grate. Water sprayed in all directions – a seltzer bottle gone berserk – but eventually Dad got the bright idea of turning off the water pump before tackling the drain head-on. He returned to the bathroom to find my uncle toweling himself off, his jumpsuit deflated under the weight of the water.

He was still bellowing: “You're not fully clean until you're Zestfully . . .”

“Please, stop,” Aunt Clown begged, and while Uncle Clown tried to bite back his grin, his face paint refused to back down.

“So some pipes rusted through, big deal,” Uncle Clown shrugged to my father. “Tell you what, I'll pitch in the fifty we get from the Robards gig, how's that? Fix'er right up. No sense crying over old pipes, am I right?”

“Not old pipes,” my father grunted, tugging fistfuls of red hair from the shower drain. The pyramid continued to grow beside him, a floor mat's worth of Uncle Clown's shedding fur.

“Oh, so what? You're going to try to pin this on me?” Uncle Clown asked. “You think a few strands of somebody's hair are going to make pipes burst like that?”

“Somebody's
hair?” Dad gasped, leaping to his feet and slamming the last chunk of red coils onto the edge of the tub. “Who the hell else around here has red hair?”

He had a good point – Aunt Clown's hair was blue.

“Oh, so now the man's a plumber,” Uncle Clown laughed. “And a barber, too, apparently.”

“Look, I know you're going through a rough patch,” my father began, “but please understand that we want to help you through any way we . . .”

“Oh, shove it up your . . .”

Anticipating his colorful language, Aunt Clown reached for her slide whistle, overpowering him with a single breath.

Nobody laughed at the sound.

“Now look here . . .” Dad gritted, stepping toward him.

“No, you look here,” Uncle Clown countered, pointing to his flower lapel.

A stream of water squirted Dad in the eye, and this time, he was far less of a good sport.

Dad and Uncle Clown fought their way out of the bathroom, we three spectators shouting and pleading with them to stop.

Dad had my uncle in a chokehold, and soon they were somersaulting down the stairs, crashing into walls and shattering picture frames before returning to solid ground. They shook off the glass and leapt to their feet once more, Dad stomping on Uncle Clown's gigantic shoes, pinning him in place like a punching bag. My father absorbed the scattershot blows, but when he returned fire, he always aimed directly for Uncle Clown's nose, a high-pitched “honkahonka” erupting with each well placed punched. They rolled to the floor once more, their hulking bodies flattening the nearby whoopee cushions, farting sounds erupting, adding to the soundtrack that already included grunts and gasps and moans. I'd never seen my father fight anyone – he'd told me violence was barbaric – but suddenly there he was kneeing my uncle in the stomach, pressing the clown's chalk-white face into the wall.

“Say uncle,” Uncle Clown gasped, though, twisted against the couch, he was in no position to call any shots. “Say uncle, damn you.”

My father didn't, though eventually he relented, releasing my uncle from the chokehold without even making him say uncle.

Mom, Aunt Clown, and I were left to stare out at the destruction: empty seltzer bottles piled high, a unicycle half-crushed beneath a chair. Juggling balls were scattered like landmines, hand buzzers like brass knuckles.

It looked like some kind of face-painted massacre.

My father limped into the kitchen, returning with an ice pack.

“Hey, put some ice on that eye,” he said, tossing the pack to my uncle. “Nobody's going to pay to see a black eye on a clown.”

Uncle Clown caught the ice pack with one hand, nodding as he lifted it to his face.

“Hey,” Uncle Clown called to him. “Thanks for not killing me back there.”

He winked like he was joking, though his eyes appeared to have taken on some seltzer.

Dad nodded, then sifted through the mess on the floor until stumbling upon Uncle Clown's endless chain of handkerchiefs. He handed it over.

“Thanks, partner,” Uncle Clown said, blowing his nose and releasing a solitary “honka.”

Nobody said anything then – a silence so deep that even the whoopee cushions had the good sense to deflate inconspicuously.

As I stood there, watching my aunt press the ice pack to her husband's eye while Mom moved Dad to the den, I realized – with some comfort – that we were back to what we'd always been.

Not better, not worse – just a family in desperate need of a punch line.

This must have been seventh grade or so.

My father had just left to fulfill his dream of becoming an impressionist painter somewhere in the Vermont wilderness, and my football coach, Coach Housen, was busy telling us to “Whip their dicks!” and “Smack their asses!” among various other phrases that didn't make a lot of sense to those of us sitting in the locker room.

“You know what I'm talking about,” Housen clapped. “I want you to get out there and slap those fannies like you mean it, really dig your shoulder in right around the groin. And here's the rub, boys: you gotta commit! Either commit or go home and nurse off your mother's teat. None of this pantywaist bullwonky. I want nothing less than long term commitment. Bend 'em over. Ride 'em cowboy style. Wrap 'em up and sink your teeth directly into their peters,” he barked, snapping his teeth like a vise, crossing his arms.

“Any questions?”

We had about a million questions.

Why were we putting our shoulders into their groins?

Sink our teeth into their . . . peters?

“No questions? All right, hands in,” Coach called. All thirty of us gathered round, our cleats clicking against the smooth cement. We piled sweaty hand atop sweaty hand.

“Okay. All together, now. Whip their dicks, on three . . .”

Housen was the harmless type. Bewildered, out of touch, but at the end of each practice he'd have us take a knee while he preached some on-the-spot sermon about what he'd witnessed out on the field that day. Something related to our dedication, our sacrifice, our grit.

“And remember,” he concluded each sermon. “We win as a team and we lose as a team, but whatever the score, we'll always
be
a team.”

Turned out what we did best was lose as a team.

After our stunning defeat against Central Christian (52–0), Housen lined us up on the end zone so that we might learn from our mistakes.

“I don't care if your parents
are
waiting in the car,” he paced, his hands buried deep into his windbreaker. “No one's leaving this goddamn field till we learn how to play defense.” We were mud-soaked and tired and cold. Shivering. Our shoulder pads weighed us down, our helmets cramped our ears.

“Yancey,” he hollered to me. “Show us some defensive mobility, would ya?”

Some what? Did second string kickers even have that?

“Come on, Yancey, knock it off with the dillydallying.”

Dillydallying?

I crouched on all fours.

“Like this, Coach?”

“Jesus, Yancey. Really?” he asked, throwing his hat to the grass. “Like this.”

He demonstrated for me, clenching his fists and managing a slow rocking motion, his pelvis leading.

“All together now!”

We clenched our fists, tensing our buttocks and pumping forward from our crotches.

Housen nodded.

“Now we're getting it. Take it nice and slow. Sometimes you gotta go in for the tackle balls first. Lead with those hips, boys, lead with those hips. Don't be afraid to use those butt muscles.”

We slow-humped the chilly September air until there was nothing left to hump. Humped, grunting, thrusting, thoroughly exhausted as the rain trickled down the glossy slope of our helmets.

After ten minutes or so of demonstrating defensive mobility, Hans Rochester, a back tackle, said, “Coach, I think we gotta go.” He pointed to a crowd of bewildered parents gathering by the fence.