ClownFellas (2 page)

As Captain Spotty drove toward Little Bigtop, New York's infamous clown neighborhood, Earl did everything he could to calm himself down after having a knife shoved in his face by the deranged jester. Although the vet's phobia was getting worse by the minute, his nervousness seemed to amuse Spotty to no end.

“You're coulrophobic, huh? So are you one of those schmucks who believe that clowns hide in your closet at night and feed only on puppies and children?”

Earl shook his head. “No, it's just I—”

“Well, I'll have you know those rumors are grossly exaggerated. I haven't eaten a puppy in years. And children give me gas.”

Spotty giggled at him. Earl didn't think it was funny.

The clown came inches away from running over a jaywalker without batting an eye. “So if you're afraid of clowns, why'd you agree to take a job with the Bozo Family?”

Earl shrugged. “My wife's been out of work since the recession last year, so we're up to our eyeballs in debt.” He didn't like talking to the clown about his personal life, but talking seemed to ease his anxiety, so he continued. “My youngest daughter goes to a school for autistic children. It's expensive. My mother-in-law has cancer treatments I'm responsible for. That's even more expensive. Without this job, we'd probably be out on the street in a matter of weeks.”

“The Bronx Zoo doesn't pay you enough?”

“Not as much as your boss,” Earl said.

“That's for sure,” Spotty said. He lifted his scruffy porkpie hat and untangled a cockroach that was entwined in his frizzy green mop of hair. “When it comes to something he loves, Don Bozo spares no expense. And there's nothing that man loves more than Happytooth—that pet lion of his.”

“If you don't mind me asking, why did your boss choose me? Doesn't he already have a vet that takes care of his lion?”

“He did have one, but the putz didn't catch the tumor until it was the size of a cantaloupe.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means he wasn't doing his job. When you don't do your job, Bozo gets pissed. And when Bozo gets pissed, he feeds your ass to Happytooth.”

“Oh…”

Earl's anxiety flared up again. Although he was considered an expert in the field of wildlife medicine, he never thought he'd have to stake his life on his veterinary skills.

The Bronx Zoo didn't pay him as well as Don Bozo, but at least they didn't feed him to the animals he failed to cure. Earl was just thankful that this was only a onetime gig. If it were a permanent position, the vet figured his life span would probably be cut pretty short.

“You ever been to Little Bigtop before?”

Earl shook his head.

“No, I guess you wouldn't have, you being afraid of clowns and all. It used to be a lot nicer in the early days, but the place started going downhill once they let all the riffraff in. Still, I couldn't imagine living anywhere else.”

Earl saw a cockroach crawling on his knee, wiggling its antennae as it explored the sweat-drenched fabric of his pants. He raised his fist to smash it, but then stopped in midair as Spotty said, “What do you think you're doing?”

The bug turned to Spotty, looking up at him as if it were a kitten caught in a mischievous act.

“Luigi, leave the vet alone,” he said to the roach. “Get back over here.”

On command, the cockroach fluttered its wings and returned to Spotty's coat.

Pretending he was raising his hand to do something other than smash the clown's pet bug, Earl scratched the back of his neck.

“I've been training them since they were larvae,” said the clown, smiling at Luigi and stroking its upper abdomen with a bright-green fingernail. “They're like my children.”

Earl nodded, still scratching his neck.

Spotty looked the vet in the eyes. “Nothing personal, but if you try to smash any of them again you're going to find yourself at the bottom of the East River.”

Earl put his hands in his lap and examined his surroundings to make sure there weren't any more cockroaches crawling near him that might get accidentally squished. There was no telling how serious the mad clown really was about his pet bugs.

Although Earl despised clowns, his youngest daughter, Mandy, adored them. She had dozens of clown dolls, she decorated her room with clown faces, had clown sheets and a clown lamp. She even dressed up as a clown every Halloween. Earl couldn't have been more ashamed of himself for being terrified of his own daughter when he took her out trick-or-treating each year.

“Read me a bedtime story, Daddy,” Mandy said to Earl, tugging on his pants.

“Why don't you ask your mother? I'm kind of busy…”

“You're better at telling stories than Mommy. She doesn't do the funny voices.”

She smiled up at him. He couldn't resist her cute little freckled face. “Okay, I'll read it to you out here, on the couch.”

“No, you have to tuck me in. It's not a bedtime story if you don't tuck me in.”

Earl didn't want to go into his daughter's room. He couldn't even look inside when he passed it in the hallway. It might have brought his daughter great joy to be surrounded by clowns, but Earl saw it as a gateway to Hell.

“Pleeeasse…,” Mandy said.

Earl's hands were shaking. He tried to come up with an excuse not to go, but nothing came to mind. “Okay. Go brush your teeth and I'll meet you in bed.”

“Yay!” Mandy slid across the carpet in her yellow circus socks as she ran to her bedroom as fast as she could.

Earl's heart was pounding. Nobody, not even his wife, could understand how doing as simple a thing as reading his daughter a bedtime story would bring him such anxiety. And from somebody who worked with dangerous animals all day! There was only one thing that would calm his nerves. He went to the kitchen, opened the liquor cabinet, and threw back two shots of Wild Turkey.

He went upstairs, entered his daughter's room, and sat down on the edge of her bed. He did not allow his eyes to wander too much. There were clowns all around him, staring at him. He swore he could hear them giggling.

“Read this, Daddy,” Mandy said, handing him a book.

It was called
A Day at the Circus
and had a picture of a wild-eyed giggling clown on the cover.

“Hold on a minute, honey,” Earl said, handing her back the book. “I forgot to do something.”

Then Earl went back downstairs and took another shot.

While driving in the car with Captain Spotty, the memory gave him an idea.

“Do you have anything to drink?” Earl asked the clown.

“What, like some apple juice or something?”

“No, some whiskey,” Earl said. “For my nerves.”

Spotty laughed. He dug under his seat and pulled out a black-labeled bottle. “Try some of this.”

Earl took a swig. The burning sensation fried his throat and stomach. He spit the rest of it out. “What is this?”

Spotty laughed even harder. “Clown hooch. Best in Little Bigtop.”

“It tastes like gasoline.”

“It practically is. Vanillas like you don't have a taste for it.”

“It's terrible,” Earl said, but he still forced another shot down his throat.

“Yeah, well take it easy on that.” Earl took the bottle away from him. “The boss don't like people drinking on the job.”

There was an explosion of color as they entered Little Bigtop. Earl felt like Dorothy, traveling from the drab black-and-white Kansas landscape into the vibrant, magical Land of Oz. Only to Earl it was a horror show.

Clowns were on every street corner. Little girl clowns played hopscotch on the side of the road, their baby-pink pigtails flopping up and down as they hopped. Fruit vendor clowns juggled apples and pears back and forth to one another, entertaining their customers. A morbidly obese clown in a purple suit held a cluster of balloons as big as a wrecking ball, while teenager clowns with rainbow Mohawks tried to pop them as they rode past on their skateboards. There were a few ordinary humans walking around, but the clowns outnumbered them ten to one. Earl was completely surrounded.

“So how's the coulrophobia treatin' ya?” teased Captain Spotty.

“I'm fine,” Earl said, lying out his ass.

Spotty stopped the car at a red light, right next to a particularly creepy clown in a blue polka-dot trench coat.

“How about now?” Spotty asked. “Still fine?”

The clown peered into the passenger-side window at Earl, gawking at him with spinning yellow eyes. His red nose, as long as a Coney Island hot dog, pressed against the glass with a squeak. He was just smiling at Earl, waving his floppy hand. Spotty laughed his ass off.

“What's he want?” Earl asked, inching away from the window. “Why's he looking at me like that?”

The long-nosed clown opened his coat, as if offering to sell him something. But before Earl could see what was hiding in the trench coat, a pie hit the clown in the side of the face.

“Look out,” Spotty said, hitting the gas and speeding through the red light.

Blood sprayed from the long-nosed clown's throat in a geyser and painted the side of the car as Spotty pulled away.

“What the heck was that?” Earl turned back to see the clown falling to the ground, clutching his pie-covered neck. “What was in that pie?”

It was the teenage clowns on skateboards who'd done the deed. They sped away from the scene, turning down an alley before anyone could get a good look at their faces.

“Razor blades,” Spotty said.

He was too far back for Earl to see for sure, but it looked as though the long-nosed clown was no longer moving, lying limp in a pool of his own blood.

“Why'd they kill him?”

“Who knows…Probably some turf war. The joker was probably dealing in the wrong territory.”

“Do they work for your boss?”

Spotty chuckled. “Those guys? You kidding me? They're nothing but a couple a two-bit street clowns. The Bozo Family's got more style than that.”

“How so?”

“Get outta here, I'm not telling no
vanilla
about the family business,” Spotty said. He paused, then went ahead and told him anyway. “For starters, razor blade pies are for turks. Anybody can make them. You wanna whack a guy with style, you use a real pie. Something professionally crafted.” Spotty opened his glove compartment. “Like this.”

Steam poured into Earl's face. Inside the glove box rested a hot cherry pie, baking in there as if it were an oven.

Earl reached his hand inside to touch it. “What is it?”

“Get outta there.” Spotty slapped his hand away. “That's no shoddy street clown pie. That there's the real deal. I call her the cherry bomb.”

“It smells delicious.”

“It tastes delicious, too. But I don't recommend taking a bite. The crust is made of plastic explosive dough. Throw that baby and it'll take out half a city block.”

After Spotty closed the glove box, Earl moved his knees as far away from the dashboard as he could get them.

Little Bigtop was once a major tourist attraction, but now it was a hotbed for criminal activity. A place of sin and debauchery. A place you'd never want to bring your kids. The farther into the neighborhood they went, the more this became evident to Earl Berryman. The buildings, though painted in bright colors, were old and crumbling. The sidewalks smelled like a sewer, even from a moving vehicle. Half of the shops were long-closed and abandoned, with boarded-up windows and three layers of clown graffiti.

“This is the side of the neighborhood most vanillas never see,” said Spotty. “The clown ghetto.”

Earl stared out the car window, watching the Bigtop citizens as they passed them by. Homeless clowns soaked in urine and cheap booze slept on bus stop benches. Laughy-gas junkies hid in alleyways, giggling together as they inhaled their next fix. Prostitutes with cherry-red hair and neon-green fishnet stockings lured customers to their doorways. It was quite a depressing sight, despite the fact everyone was smiling all the time.

“Tragic, ain't it?” Spotty said. “I grew up around here. It's not the Little Bigtop it used to be, that's for sure.”

It was a bit nicer once they got to Bozo territory, but not by much. Spotty pulled up to a large building designed to look like a circus tent. It was the center of operations for the Bozo Family. They called it The Greatest Show on Earth.

“Welcome to The Show,” Spotty said, putting his little car in park.

Earl didn't get out of the car right away. He stared straight ahead, taking deep breaths, trying to calm his nerves. All he had to do was perform a single operation, but it would surely be the most difficult of his career.

“Don't act so nervous when you're in there,” Spotty told him. “The boss don't like nervous people. They make
him
nervous.”

Captain Spotty got out of the car, circled to the other side, and opened the passenger-side door.

Before Earl stepped out, he looked up at the clown. “Bozo isn't really going to kill me if the operation fails, is he?”

The clown shrugged.

“Who knows,” he said. “You might get lucky. He might only chop your arms off.”

Then he grabbed the vet by the elbow and pulled him out of the car.

Inside the tent-shaped building was a vast auditorium designed for circus acts, but it didn't look as if anything had been performed there for a long time. Three clowns sat at a table off to the side, playing a game of go-fish with cards the size of magazine covers.

“Go fish, ya mook,” said a plump clown with a thick green beard and a grumpy expression.

“You don't got no threes?” asked a squeaky-voiced clown. A tall yellow-checkered hat stood an arm's length above his head.

“I keep tellin' ya. No threes. You think I'm lying over here?”

“Yeah, and if you don't make with the threes you're gonna be pushin' up daisies.”

“Oh yeah?”

The two clowns stood up from their chairs and raised their white fists. The one with the hat had glittery fingernails and round rosy cheeks. Earl couldn't tell if the two were just joking around with each other or really starting a fight.

Captain Spotty led the veterinarian toward the table and said, “Boys, calm down. We got company over here.”

The green-bearded clown looked over at Earl. “What's with the vanilla?”

“He's the boss's new vet,” Spotty said. “Come to help Happytooth.”

They looked at Earl, but he shook his head. “I'm not the new vet. I'm just here to do one operation.”

“I thought the boss needed a new vet,” said the grumpy clown. “This guy's not the new vet?”

“I already have a job at the zoo,” Earl said.

“What, working for clowns too good for ya?” asked the tall-hat clown.

Earl turned to Spotty. “I thought I just had to remove the tumor?”

Spotty ignored the question. He pointed at the clown with the tall hat. “This is Hats Rizzo.” Then he pointed to the one with the green beard. “And Jackie the Grump.” The other clown was sitting by himself on the far side of the table, quietly smoking a cotton candy cigarette as he built a house of cards the size of a milk crate. “And over there's Vinnie Blue Nose.”

The blue-nosed clown didn't look up, just taking a slow drag on his cigarette as he calmly placed another card on top of the stack.

“Wait here,” Spotty told the vet. “I'll let the boss know you arrived.”

As the shabby clown walked toward a door on the other side of the auditorium, Earl said, “Hold up. He doesn't really want me to stay on as his normal vet, does he?”

Captain Spotty just held up his hand in response. Earl didn't like being left alone with the three clowns. Although they weren't quite as scary as Spotty, they seemed even less friendly.

Hats and Jackie went back to their card game. For a moment, Earl thought he could just avoid them and stand in the back until the boss arrived, but then Hats Rizzo pointed at the chair next to him.

“Take a seat,” Hats said.

Earl didn't move.

When Hats looked back at him, Earl said, “It's okay. I'll stand.”

“I said
take a seat.
”

The vet went to the table, set down his case of medical equipment, and dropped down into the chair. A loud farting sound rumbled beneath him. The two clowns burst into laughter.

Hats sniffed at the air. “Who cut the cheese in here?”

The clowns laughed even harder as Earl pulled the whoopee cushion out from under him and held it over the table.

Jackie the Grump said, “I can't believe he fell for it.” It looked weird seeing Jackie laugh so hard with that grumpy clown face of his.

Earl tossed the whoopee cushion onto the table and sighed as the two clowns pointed and slapped their knees. He didn't look them in the eyes.

“Why aren't you laughing?” Hats asked the vet.

Earl didn't know how to respond.

Hats grabbed Earl by the cheeks with his cold rubbery hand. “It's a joke. You're supposed to laugh at jokes.”

Earl didn't laugh. The clowns were offended.

When Hats let go of the vet's mug, his jokey demeanor turned from happy to annoyed. He stared him in the eyes.

“That was a grade-A prank right there. It should've left you in stitches. It left Jackie in stitches and that guy's a schmuck.”

The smile fell from Jackie's face. “Hey…”

Earl turned to the blue-nosed clown, but the guy wasn't even paying attention. He just stacked card over card onto his paper mansion.

Hats wouldn't let it go. “How could you not laugh at that? Was my joke not good enough for ya?”

Earl shrugged.

Hats leaned in closer. “You don't think I'm funny? Is that it? What, am I not a clown to you?”

Earl shrugged again. “I don't know.”

Hats jumped out of his chair. “What d'ya mean ya don't know!”

Before Hats could grab the vet by the scruff of his neck, a rigid voice said, “Sit down.”

It was Vinnie Blue Nose who said it. He put his cigarette out in the ashtray next to him. Hats didn't move a muscle.

“But the guy disrespected my sense of humor,” Hats whined. “He didn't laugh at my joke.”

“Your jokes stink,” Blue Nose said.

Jackie the Grump burst into laughter as he shuffled the deck of cards.

Hats Rizzo pointed his glittery finger at the blue-nosed clown. “They're better than yours, ya prick. You don't even have a sense of humor. What kind of clown doesn't have a sense of humor?”

Vinnie looked up at the clown. One glance with his hard eyes and Hats had to turn away.

“Just leave the guy alone,” said Blue Nose. “He's here to do a job. Show a little respect.”

Hats kicked the table and Vinnie's house of cards tumbled over. “Fuck your respect.”

He spit at Earl's shoes and stormed away from the table, heading for the exit. Vinnie Blue Nose picked up the cards and started a new construction, letting the incident wash over him like nothing happened.

Earl had never seen a clown like Vinnie Blue Nose before. The guy wasn't the wacky, giggling clown stereotype one would expect. He seemed like a real professional. Calm. Relaxed. No time for jokes. He wore a neatly pressed pin-striped suit that matched his dark-blue nose and clean-cut hair. A guy who'd definitely earned his rank as top capo of the Bozo crime family.

“Hats, you idiot…,” Jackie the Grump said to himself, shaking his scruffy head. “Disrespecting a capo like that…You're gonna get yourself killed.”