19.
Sexy Rex and the Emergency Comforts
IT WAS TIME FOR A NEW SHTICK, THE BIG FISH, THE whole schmeer that would turn my clown career around. The Juicy Caboosey show was on the back burner, literally, with the suit scorched to ruination.
My metamorphosis sketch, the Kafka interpretation—that was a good act. It was an excellent act and close to my heart, but it was complicated, subtle, and moody, not the quick break-out piece for an unknown clown. I needed something simple and fast. I was a sinking ship. The ambulance was a fine campsite but I couldn’t call it home.
It was time to go High Concept.
Early morning, I left Chance in Herman’s burnt-up yard and went to Hoagies and Stogies. Two bleary-eyed men were schnockered at the bar. John Denver sang from the jukebox. I had my toothbrush in one hand, the orange piss jug in the other hand, and my pink bag over my shoulder.
After only one day in my new digs, already I’d lost the urine-collection tray again, either in Herman’s house, or perhaps aswim in the sea of costumes in the ambulance. I cut across the tavern’s dirty carpet and headed for the bathroom.
Mad Addie, behind the bar, wrapped her knuckles against the counter. “Customers only, customers only,” she said. Her voice was like an exotic bird, raspy and sharp. She tapped one finger against a sign on the wall:
Toilets For Customers Only
.
The old men looked up. I went back to the bar and bought a pint.
After I paid, I took the jug to the bathroom. So what if the first piss of the morning was meant to go down the drain? I’d gotten nowhere yet on my urine savings plan, and needed every drop. I crouched in the stall and used all the Kegel muscles I had to direct my piss in a steady stream into the mouth of the jug. I flicked stray piss off my hand, wiped my hand on my thigh. I brushed my teeth, then went back out, sat at the bar two stools down from the drunk geezers, and drank my pint.
“Could you put this on ice?” I asked, held up the jug and gave it a slosh.
“We’re not a U-Store-It,” Addie said. She tapped another sign.
We’re Not a Storage Fasility
, the sign said. She dropped her smokes and cursed.
“How about a few cubes then?”
When she gave me a cupful of ice, I pushed five ice cubes one after the other into the mouth of the jug.
I took my time with the breakfast pint and waited until I had to pee again, to get my money’s worth. Beer would fuel my urine factory. Why leave with a full bladder?
The tavern windows were covered with dusty red and white checked curtains. The curtains blocked the world from drinkers and hid drunks from the world. There was just enough space at the top to see the sky beyond the blue-tinted glass. I stared out the windows at the wide-open sky and tried to think big. This was still America. There had to be a way to make a name for myself, maybe get on late-night TV, or at least find a surefire gimmick to shine on the moneyed streets of King’s Row.
I’d work with what I had: if religion is the opiate of the masses, religious balloon tricks would be the speedball, the crack cocaine, the glue-sniffing toxic fumes. It was time to call on the greatest of the great masters.
How hard could it be to tie a balloon version of Leonardo da Vinci’s prize painting,
The Last Supper
? Everybody loves
The Last Supper
. I pulled a balloon from my pocket and gave it a warm-up snap. Mad Addie leaned against the back wall and watched from a distance.
If I did this right, who knew? Maybe I’d be the next place of pilgrimage. The faithful would come from miles to see God and da Vinci work through my balloon-blowing lungs. I’d make it a salon act, for starters, small-scale and personal.
Traditionally, there’s been no delicacy to balloon art. That’s where I’d revolutionize things. Chiaroscuro, sfumato: I’d find a way to translate da Vinci’s painterly tricks into rubber and air.
Maybe I’d pioneer a line of designer balloon colors in da Vinci’s palette. Why stop there? I could have a van Gogh line, a Gauguin line, Toulouse-Lautrec and Tintoretto.
I blew the balloon halfway up and left space inside to create the right balance between air and emptiness. What could be more delicate than a composition made of air and a lack of air? Instead of leaning on the big twists—neck, elbow, waist—I’d find the small articulations, the pinkie fingers, the back of the hand, the turn of an ankle.
The Last Supper
is all about gestures.
I sipped my beer, and made the first tiny twist in one end of a yellow balloon.
Da Vinci’s
Last Supper
is a tangle of bodies; I worked from memory. There were six disciples on either side, bodies clustered in a knot of infighting, power struggles, and deceit. The clustering part would be easy. Only Jesus, in the middle, stood on his own. After Jesus, I’d tie a sheep and put the sheep on the table.
Maybe da Vinci didn’t serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.
I tied a balloon-sheep Jesus.
Judas had to be handled carefully. I used a green balloon for envy. Art critics would understand. I was so careful with the air; I found the right balance and left room in the balloon to work. I made a tiny twist. That would be Judas’s hand, laid on the shoulder of his neighbor.
I tried to remember the lean in his back, the turn of his head. I hunched over my work, and made a hundred tiny twists. The final piece would be a sculpture in the round, without what they call
frontality
—it had to work from all sides.
Where were Judas’s hips, his thighs, his cock? I invented the areas that would be covered by the table. Tiny, tiny twists. I’d need more than one balloon. I had the scale wrong. What I made looked like a cluster of grapes. I took out some of the twists and started again. The balloon grew tight, the twists tricky. I wanted his foot to be perfect, full of everything Judas stood for.
And the balloon burst loud as a dropped rack of pint glasses in the morning tavern, zipped out of my hand, and whistled through the room. One old man belched. Mad Addie pushed her way off the wall like a lazy swimmer. She cut through the haze of the tavern air.
She eyeballed me, opened a drawer in the back of the bar, and took out a big black marker. She reached a skinny arm and wrote along the bottom of a cardboard sign taped to the wall:
No Balloon Tricks
.
No Clowns
.
Then she turned to me and tapped the words.
“Oh, shit,” an old man said. His bleary eyes opened wide. “They’re on to me.”
I said, “No clowns? But that’s your whole clientele.” The other old man at the bar gave a slow, drunken stare. I said, “I see where this is going—and if fun is outlawed, only outlaws will have fun.” I had to restrain myself from hitting the mechanical wolf whistle call in my pocket.
“I’m having a damn good time,” Mad Addie croaked, without a smile. “And I’ll eighty-six you if you try it again. How’s that for an act?” Smoke trickled from her nostrils. “You’re lucky to be here at all, after that pool table stunt.”
I rubbed two uninflated balloons together between my thumb and first finger. My career was calling, loud and insistent. I sipped the cool, thin beer. My heart beat fast.
I’d hone the da Vinci trick until it was irresistible. Once I had a following, I’d pull out the Kafka interpretation, because that’s what it was really all about—resisting a world that wanted to change me into vermin, into a madly typing secretary, all elbows and sweat on the brow. I’d been a secretary back before I found the clown circuit. Kafka was the voice of my resistance, my own religion, my grand opus.
As I stared out the top of the tavern windows, above the red and white curtains, I saw a person, a head, move into view and for a moment block the sun. Long brown curls, a strong jaw. It was a head too high up for any mortal.
Rex Galore!
Who else? Like a vision, a god, he swam along, gliding, high outside the tavern windows. He floated against the sun, turned the whole world into a stage.
I didn’t mind being audience to Rex.
I left Jesus the Lamb on the bar, grabbed my urine jug, bag, and toothbrush, and ran to the door. Rex was far down the sidewalk, moving fast on a unicycle with a backpack on his back.
“Rex!” I yelled, and ran after him. The urine in the jug sloshed as I ran and the beer in my gut did the same. I ran and sloshed and ran and sloshed, and yelled again, “Rex!”
He made a tight turn on the nearly empty sidewalk, then pedaled one swipe back, one forward, one back, one forward, to balance in place, and squinted in my direction.
Poor Rex—were his eyes failing? I waved the hand with the toothbrush in it. Finally, he seemed to see me. Again I ran toward him, sloshing inside. He pedaled slowly back my way.
I laughed when we met up, my head tipped up to look up at his face. Rex cast a shadow where I stood, and he was in the glow of the sun, every split end and curl illuminated.
“Get down here,” I said. I needed to touch him to know he was real.
He looked down at me and said, “ What happened to your hair?”
I laughed again, and shrugged. “Oh, Rex. I burned it up.” I ran my fingers over the singed ends. I couldn’t quit laughing. My hair would grow back, but everything inside, it tickled. Luscious. Delightful. My knight on his horse was home. He climbed off the unicycle. I put my orange jug on the ground, threw my arms around him, and pressed my face into the heat of his chest.
“You smell like a tavern,” he said, and sniffed my burned hair. “Or a barbecue.”
“Hoagies and Stogies,” I murmured. The cotton of his T- shirt caught on my lip. I wanted to tear that shirt off, feel his skin. Hold him forever.
He pushed me back to look at my face. “Who’re you drinking with this early?”
I smiled up at him. “Don’t be jealous. I was by myself.” I cuddled against him. He smelled like summer. I said, “Unless you count these two old men,” and I giggled again.
“I’m not jealous,” he said. “Just, I’ve never known you to hit the taverns for breakfast. Or solo.”
I pulled the toothbrush from my pocket. “I needed a place to brush my teeth.”
We walked together toward Herman’s. Rex put an arm over my shoulders and steered his unicycle in the other hand. We were a family then, the three of us—me, Rex, and the unicycle, that skinny metallic child.
“Plumbing out at Herman’s place?” Rex asked.
“Ah, well,” I said. “No, the plumbing’s not out. But we are. We’re kicked out, Rexie.”
He said, “How could I be kicked out? I haven’t even been in town all month.”
I walked along beside him and cradled the orange jug of pee in one arm. “I lost Chance, for days, but got her back yesterday. Can you believe it?”
He didn’t let me change the subject. “Where are you staying, if you’re kicked out?”
I said, “And I lost the rubber chicken. But look,
voilà
!” I pulled Plucky from my bag. She came out of the bag squished and folded in half, then found her shape. Resilience was the beauty of a rubber chicken.
Rex stopped walking. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Nita, tell me. Where are you staying that you can’t brush your teeth?”
We were close enough to the house. I pointed down the street. Rex squinted again, like he needed glasses. “That’s Herman’s,” he said finally.
“No, the ambulance.”
“The prop room?”
I nodded. Our own little
chapiteau
, the mobile circus.
He started walking again, faster this time, without his arm around me. “So you’re pregnant, drunk, and living in our car.” He looked up at the sky, “It’s great to be home.” It wasn’t the home-coming I’d expected, not at all.
I had to run a few steps to catch up with him. “I’m not drunk,” I said. I reached for his arm. He jerked away.
“You act drunk.”
I reached again and said, “I’m just happy you’re here. I can’t believe it.” I was shaking, I was that happy. I trailed along behind Rex and tried to snag his arm. He shook me off. “And there’s another thing, Rex. I’m not pregnant. There’s no baby. I lost it.” I imagined I’d look into his eyes and talk about it, not blurt the news out like a bad lunch. But there it was. He stopped. I bumped into him.
He said, “You ‘lost’ our baby?”
I nodded again. “Two weeks ago.”
His eyes, green flecked with brown like a winter pond, were paler in the sun. “But we saw its heartbeat,” he said.
That little black-and-white pulse on the ultrasound, the shrimp-curl of a head and body, the heartbeat of Rex and me alive in one creature, our future.
“I know.” My eyes grew blurry. I couldn’t open my mouth, couldn’t speak.
Rex wrapped a big hand around my head and pulled me into his chest. He petted my hair. I breathed in his skin, his sweat. Rex. We walked without talking. When we got the ambulance, he climbed in alongside me. I rearranged costumes and moved piles to make room.
He said, “Tell me what happened.”
I said, “You’re the only person I wanted to tell.”
When he kissed me, his lips were everything I remembered, all of Rex in that kiss. His eyes were on me. The heat of his hands.
“It was awful. I was working a car-lot opening. Good money,” I said, like I had to defend the gig, even though this time Rex didn’t even flinch at the kind of clown work. And it would’ve been good money, if I got through without an ambulance bill.
“I didn’t know anything, I’ve never been pregnant before, but that day I had cramps so bad I had to sit on a curb. Right away, the first second, somebody yelled, ‘Hey, the clown’s sitting down,’ and they called the manager out of his office.”
Rex unbuttoned my shirt. I let the satin fall away. The ambulance was golden where light crept in around the shades.
“It was a nightmare, Rex.” I leaned into his hands.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Sorry you had to go through that.”
“It gets worse,” I said. “When I stood up, I felt something like a lot of blood, and freaked, thought I was going to faint, made a beeline to the bathroom. I dripped blood on the white showroom floor. I had to get out of this leotard, and my hair was a big pile on my head, and my makeup was a mess.”