Rex put his arms around me. I couldn’t get enough. “I had a rash, maybe from wearing makeup in the heat, I don’t know—but I was sweating and there were all these blood clots, like big lumps of brown Jell-O, and I didn’t know what they were. I put them on a paper towel, thought they might be the baby. In the hospital they said they were just big blood clots. Somebody called an ambulance.”
“You should’ve called me,” he said.
I had called him, about a hundred times. But now I shrugged and said, “There was nothing you could do. They gave me what they called a ‘procedure.’ A ‘D&C,’ they call it.”
Rex didn’t even say anything about how we couldn’t afford the hospital bill. He leaned his chin against my shoulder. I said, “They kept calling our baby the ‘product of conception.’ That’s what the D&C was for—to get rid of the product of conception.” I put my hand in his hand and spread out his fingers. His hands were cracked. He pressed into my bare back. I twisted, and tugged at his T-shirt. “Let me feel your skin,” I said.
He pulled the T-shirt over his head.
“Pants too.”
We were all elbows and knees as we wiggled out of our clothes. In the street, the ice-cream truck sang, and William called out a “Hello, what’s up,” while in our tiny house with both of us naked, I held on to Rex’s sweaty skin and drank him in, head to toe. I’d been starved.
“You smell like summer.” I pressed my nose into his warm sweat.
He laughed, said, “So that’s why they call you Sniffles,” as he pulled away.
I whispered, “Don’t. I like it. Rex Galore Concentrate.” Rex-essence in distilled form was better than valerian or pipsissiwa or any other herb. I held his shoulders and put my nose back to the soft skin of his underarm, but he only laughed.
“It’s concentrate, all right. Three day’s worth, one on the bus.” He said, “That tickles.”
“You could sell your sweat as an aphrodisiac.”
“Only to a crazy girl.” He had me wrapped in his arms. “And I wouldn’t want anyone else to have it.”
William and One-Night were a murmur of voices. A car went by.
“It’s like we’re in an eggshell. Like we haven’t hatched, we’re incubating together.”
“A double yolk,” he said.
Perfect. Another guy wouldn’t have a clue what I meant, would think I was weird for saying we were in an eggshell. Another guy wouldn’t get naked on a pile of costumes in an ambulance on the street.
I kissed his sweat. A curled chest hair clung to my lip.
He said, “Nita, just so you know, I’m only here for a few days. I have to go back down.”
“Speaking of going down…” I kissed the line of hair along his belly. His cock straightened and pointed, a long, fat finger.
Rex tried to pull me back up toward him, his hands on my shoulders. All business, he said, “For a show. Listen to this, Nita—it’s an audition, held at UC Berkeley, a joint deal with Clown College. They’re giving out four Emmett Kelly Awards. If I make the audition, I’d be a Community Arts Advancement scholar.”
I didn’t let him pull me up. “Let’s talk work later.”
He said, “Hey! Listen. For the application, I need an act.”
I tasted all the time I’d lost, apart from Rex; it was a world, an ocean, a story in the smell and hair and skin. His hands relaxed, and he dropped back into the swirl of costumes.
Outside, a baby cried. A woman yelled, “I told you not to stay all the damn day.” A second voice said, “I know, I know…”
I straddled Rex, and one of my knees hit the wheel well. The other pressed into the side of the cot. He held my thighs, gave in to me. Sweat ran down my back. We were two lizards, making love in the heat of our terrarium as the sun moved higher into the midday sky. It was nice. Hot. My cure.
Afterward, I fell asleep in that heat and it was as deep as if I’d been drugged. It was the first time in over a month that I relaxed enough to sleep. I couldn’t stay awake, had to give in.
Minutes, hours, or years later, through my eyelashes I saw Rex on his knees, jeans halfway on, no underwear. He sat back and pulled the jeans up, then rocked forward onto his knees to zip the zipper.
“You’re going out to piss?” I asked.
He said, “Shh, shush. Keep sleeping. You need it.”
I said, “With you.” I reached for his leg, wrapped my fingers around the denim.
“Come inside, we’ll sleep inside,” he said.
I said, “I can’t. We’re kicked out. Remember?”
He pulled his shirt on. “Nita, I don’t think Herman’ll mind if I crash in the back room. I’ve been sleeping on a couch for three weeks. Spent twelve hours on the bus to get up here. I can’t sleep in a pile of costumes.”
Rex was leaving me, again, so soon?
He said, “Don’t look like that. I’ll be inside. After I get some shut-eye, we can get some food or something. A beer maybe.”
I pulled a purple satin cape over my naked body, part of a costume. What if he talked to Herman? What if Nadia-Italia ratted me out?
He said, “You’ll sleep better without me. You can stretch out, relax…”
There was a gummy stain on the cape, glow-in-the-dark fake skin that melted off during an act. I picked at the spot like a scab, and said, “Don’t go. Please. Just stay.” I wanted him with me and I didn’t want him mingling and the moment was crucial.
He climbed out the back doors. I rocked forward, onto my knees, following him as though caught in his wake. A kid rode a bike in the street. I pulled the cape around me more tightly, the satin a cool skin. “So what—you’ll live inside, and I’ll live out here?”
He straightened his shirt and ran a hand through his hair. “It’s only for right now, Noodle. We’ll get our own place. Here, or in San Fran. Whatever.”
I hugged the satin cape, wiggled my toes. “When?”
“When we get the money. After this Berkeley gig, when we hear back from the school, see if I’m in, and if they give me a little scratch. Then we’ll know what we have to work with, OK?”
I patted the costumes beneath my bare ass. “Just get in here. Sleeping doesn’t take money.”
He said, “Nita, I’ve been on the road all month. I need a bed.”
I was out of options. “Well, when you’re in there,” I said, “avoid Herman. And Nadia- Italia. She’s nuts. Totally unreliable.” It was all I could do.
“Thanks for the warning.” He turned toward the house, saw the yard. “Hey—what happened?” The scorch.
“Don’t ask. A real sore spot with Hermes…Nothing you want to bring up, right?”
Rex started to let the doors drop closed. Then I could only hear his voice, see one hand that still held the door. “Are those my maple juggling torches?” he said. “Like, toast?”
I pretended not to hear. I called, “Rex?” He pulled the door open and came back into view in a reprise, the Rex Galore Show. I said, “Can I go with you, when you go to the Berkeley gig?”
He put a hand on my ankle and rubbed my shin. His hand was muscled and strong. “It’s expensive, Nita. If you come down for a visit, how’re we going to save cash for a real move?”
“Earn it. That’s the easy part.” I’d been working since I was fourteen.
“We have to take it one step at a time. Think of now as an investment. I’ll go down, get the scholarship, and then we’ll put the other pieces in place.”
One door fell closed. Again I leaned forward and said, “Rex?”
“Yes?” he waited, with the second door half-closed, his fingers curled around the door, part of his face still visible. Behind him a woman parked her car.
I said, “We’re doing OK, mostly. Right? Because we’re in it together. The clown stuff. We’ll get where we want to be.”
Rex nodded and squinted in the sun.
I said, “Promise me you won’t talk to Herman. And if I need anything, from in the room, I’ll come knock on the window. You could pass things out, right?”
“Sure. Ill pass things out.” He bent toward me, gave me a kiss, then let the ambulance door swing closed.
20.
Sliding the Slippery Slope
THE AMBULANCE WAS AN EMPTY HULL, A WOMB WITHOUT a baby. I lay naked on the costumes, arms and legs heavy in the heat. I was a body but not the baby in the ambulance’s womb; I was fetal tissue, placental residue. The satin of the purple cape draped over my belly, soft and smooth. Voices sang like birds up and down the block. I tried to sleep. After a while, I heard the low cascade of Rex’s laugh not far from the ambulance window. He was outside?
I earned a new place in heaven anytime I made Rex laugh like that, low and for real.
So he was coming back to the van? Maybe he was ready to hang out. Ready to let me wrap my leg around his under the table in an air-conditioned diner. I pulled back the shade. Rex was on the porch, his bag at his feet, and the unicycle lay across the walkway like he hadn’t even been inside yet. He talked to a skinny little joker in a striped tank top. The guy had his back my way. Rex stood, legs wide, and balanced a single scorched juggling pin upside down on the palm of his hand. Rex’s face was open and animated, eyebrows moving. The other guy was in black cutoffs with big boots, white legs and a bowler hat.
But wait a minute—it wasn’t a guy. Those were Crack’s bandy legs! The bowler was from our Chaplin routine. She and Rex yukked it up on the porch, and Rex leaned against the rail like he had all the time in the world.
I fished around in the costumes on the floor for something like clothes: a velvet robe, gigantic yellow pants, a chef’s hat that wouldn’t do at all. I wanted Rex to look at me, but not like that. I kept fishing. Outside, Crack waved an arm down the street, maybe told a story. Her voice moved up and down with muffled words. Rex listened like it mattered.
I found a red sequined clown dress, pure wrinkles, three sizes too big, with sequins missing in a patch on the ass, and an orange ruffle around the neckline, but at least the dress was somewhere on the road to sexy. I slid the dress on and tied the straps together in back with a scarf to make it fit.
I gave myself a hit of powder, a dash of eyeliner, and just as I drew the makeup brush along the curve in my lower lip, almost ready, there was a knock on the ambulance’s metal hull in three hard, echoing raps:
Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung
.
The walls reverberated. I jumped! My hand drew a red line across my cheek. Shit.
The knocking started again,
Ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung
. I rubbed my cheek with the butt of my palm. The back door swung open. Sunlight cut in, and against the sun was the silhouette of Crack in her bowler.
“Yoo-hoo!” the silhouette said. “My little blessing in disguise. All gussied up?”
“It’d be a whole lot better, next time, if you knock on the glass.” I tapped a knuckle against the window to show her how delicate a sound that glass made:
ting, ting, ting
. “Like a door chime.”
She slapped the side of the van door again.
Ka-chung
. I wiped red makeup off the side of my face. She said, “You look great, but a day late and a dollar short. Where’ve you been?”
“Me?” Since when did Crack care where I’d been? I said, “Well, I was at Hoagies and Stogies, and then I ran into Rex…and we were here—”
She cut me off. “One job. A piece of cake.” Slowly, annunciating as though I had to read her lips, she said, “All I asked you to do was show up. Is that so hard?”
“One job? Ah, crapsters! I forgot.” After the photo shoot, she’d thrown the job at me. Ages ago. “I never wrote it down.”
“And whose fault is that? I promised ’em three girls, they got nothing. Except me. I count for, like, maybe half a girl. But I did my best, put on something pretty.”
“Matey didn’t show?”
“Matey’s off the scene for a while. A broken arm. Clown-bashing, she says, if you believe that for a minute.”
I said, “I’m sorry, Crack, really.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it in a small town.” She shook her head. “The clown business runs on reputation. That’s one word-of-mouth job that won’t come our way again.”
“So it’s one job…” There was a time, before I met Crack, when one job could be my whole month’s income.
“Right, and they tell two people, and let’s say those people hire somebody else for their next bash and we lose how many more contacts by not being at that gig? It’s about face time, Sniff. Business.”
I said, “Look, I’m sorry—”
She cut me off. “Personally, I don’t care how you feel. I care how you work. In my circus I need all fools on board, especially until Matey’s up and running again. But look, see? I’m done lecturing, ready to deal: here’s a way to make it up to me, and make it up to yourself cash-wise at the same time. Two guys, they want a clown date. You and me.”
She knew exactly what I’d say. “Crack, I’m not a hooker.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” She tugged on my orange dress. “Finish your lips, girl, you’re good to go.”
I leaned into the mirror to finish my lips, but not for Crack. A quick glance out the side window showed me Rex had gone inside. I said, “I’m an artist, a clown artist. It’s about art, not sex.”
“It’s about money, and ego. Don’t kid yourself.”
It was about Rex at the moment and, yes, Rex and me, we needed money. I gave my burnt hair a fluff.
“Listen, I’m not asking you to blow the guy, just spend a little time. He’s a fetishist, and there’s cash in it, no joke.”
“No sex?” I said. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”
“No sex and big cash.” Crack drew an X across the front of her striped tank top. “Cross my heart, or whatever God gave me in place of a heart.” Her voice boomed. She blocked my exit. I was a rabbit in a pen, a raccoon in a trap. “For the guy, it’s the same as sex just having his fetish catered to.”
“Like, how big?” I said.
“How big what? It’s not like I checked out the guy’s goods—he hasn’t ponied up the bills yet.” She hooked her thumbs under the armholes of her tank top and gave a snap.
“I don’t want to see his goods,” I said. “I mean, how big’s the cash? What kind of money?” The more fast money I made, the sooner I’d surprise Rex, impress him with a bankroll, and the sooner we’d start our life together.
I needed to get Rex out of the neighborhood before he found out more than he wanted to know—or more than I wanted him to know.
Crack said, “I tell you, the guy’s giving money away. We’ll get one rate up front, get him to buy a few drinks, then renegotiate scratch as the night goes on…No lie, Sniff. What’s this about?” She poked a finger into the scorched mound of the Pendulous Breasts.
I shrugged. “That? I call it the Juicy Caboosey Show. Still working it out.” The outfit needed a few patches after the fire.
“Well, hey, why save it for the opera?” she said. “The thing is, there’s no money in art, but there’s an art to making money and it’s in my blood. In yours too, I’d say, with the Caboose Suit. You just ain’t actualized yet. Stick with me, I’ll show you how.”
If it was enough money, it could be my last gig with Crack. I’d cut her loose. “OK,” I said. “But those are the rules: no sex, and a big paycheck.” Then right away I changed my mind. Who was I kidding? A clown date was all about sex. They always were. I said, “No, I can’t do it. I don’t do dates. I have to draw the line…” I said, “Never, never, never.”
I was an artist.
Crack said, “Listen, it’s an easy deal. I’m cutting you in, and I’ll say it frank here—you got one thing I ain’t got, and that’s natural good clown looks. Guys like it.” She said, “So you know those old buildings at the edge of King’s Row?”
The Ruins? Our Ruins. A private place made public, or perhaps a public place made private in my mind and memories. “Sure.”
“Cool,” she said. “Meet us there tomorrow night, nine o’clock. He’s got a big green van.”
A big green van, at The Ruins. And nothing would ruin them more than a cheap clown date in the place of my grand romance. I wavered: “I can’t do it, Crack.”
“It’s easy. Just look sexy, play it up, something like you got on now, maybe. Oh, shit,” Crack said. “I hate to be the hair-bringer of bad tidings, but…”
“Harbinger,” I said. My dress fell off one shoulder. I pulled it into place.
“Who?” Crack asked. She ducked behind the open ambulance door, and looked through the frosted, cross-marked window.
I said, “You said the hair-bringer. It’s harbinger.”
“Harbinger’s the hairbringer?”
“No, you’d be the harbinger. Harbinger of bad tidings.”
“I don’t know about that, but what I’m getting at is, bad news—a cop, at six o’clock, heading our way. We’ll talk later.” She hid beside the open door.
I stepped out of the van, one bare foot at a time, and a pile of clothes followed, stuck to my hot skin. My knees were numb from kneeling. Tucked beside Crack, I peered around the side of the open back door. It was Jerrod, urine funnel in front of him like a white plastic shield. He turned where the sidewalk met Herman’s crumbling cement walkway and went right up to Herman’s house. That was the last straw.
“I know that guy,” I said. I had to stop him. “I’ll do the gig.” I needed the cash, to get life moving again. There was no more time to waste as a trapped rabbit. Berkeley, here we come.
He was about to knock on the door. How could I insist I wasn’t dating cops if Jerrod asked for me by my clown name? “Jerrod.”
He dropped his hand and turned, looked surprised, flashed a smile and sauntered over. Crack and I were kids in costume playing in the street, the ambulance our toy box. Jerrod tapped a light
hello
on the side of the ambulance. It sang like a bell.
“You must be Harbinger,” Crack said. She tipped her hat. “And I must be going. See you later, Sniff. Good luck.” She ducked out.
Jerrod said, “Who’s your friend?” He pointed toward Crack’s fleeing, striped back.
I took the urine funnel and threw it over my shoulder into the mess of props. “Jerrod, what’re you doing coming around here? It’s not OK with my housemates.”
“Well, last I checked this was a city street. As a cop, it’s my job to hit the streets.” He showed me his open hands, Mr. Innocent. “Besides, you left your halo in the car. Thought I’d bring it by.”
“I’m serious. You can’t knock on my door, carry my stuff around…” I picked up a handful of fallen scarves, an errant feather boa.
“So they didn’t kick you out…” With a palm to the doorjamb, he leaned into the ambulance, took a look around. “ You got a great setup right here. Who needs the house?” He picked up my purple satin cape and swung it over his shoulders. Superman.
I reached to take the cape back, moved in close just as he handed it over, and our fingers brushed. Sparked. Silently greeted. I pulled my hand back, bundled the cape, looked away. I didn’t tell him that I already lived on the street, slept in the ambulance, broke a vagrancy law every night. Instead I said, “I’m in a tenuous situation here. Your presence? It doesn’t help.”
Jerrod said, “Sniff, you’ve got to recognize it—you’re not in jail.”
Not yet, I thought.
“You can choose your own friends.”
Fast, I said. “It’s the cop thing.”
He said, “I’m not always a cop. Right now, I’m off duty.” He reached to fumble with his badge.
I kept an eye on the house and folded a long scarf into tiny squares. “You’re still in uniform, and even if you weren’t…”
Jerrod watched me work. He said, “What about you—are you working now, or just favoring the clown wear?”
I hoisted the fallen shoulder strap of my big red clown dress. “Doesn’t matter, I’m still a clown, same as you’re still a cop, on the job or off. And clowns, cops…We’re from opposite sides of the tracks.”
Jerrod said, “Sniffles, if it’s what you want—and not just what your friends want—then fine. I’ll walk the other side of the street, but you could stand to look past the costume, the police work…When I see you in clown clothes I know there’s more.” He nodded toward the house. “That’s got to be worth something.”
“Of course it is, but…Just go on. Walk your beat. There’s nothing to see here, right?”
“Except you,” he said.
The front door of Herman’s swung open. Rex stepped out. Rex! My savior. This was my chance to clear things up, maybe introduce the two of them, make it known who was my man.
“Rex!” I called. Rex, my king, took one look at Jerrod, and his whole body jumped. His shoulders tightened. Even his curls tightened. With a fast step backward, he went inside and slammed the door.
Rex was scared?
Jerrod didn’t flinch, but stayed strong and steady. “See that?” he said. “Still think you’re the only outsider on the block? I know what it’s like to walk Baloneytown in costume all day. I get the stares. People run. Hide. They drop their plastic whatever-that-is.” He tapped the urine-collection funnel. “Or else they come at me with expectations. Either way, let’s just say I don’t get many dates…”
He said, “People don’t see me as a guy, doing my job. They see the job.” He pulled a loose thread on my oversized dress. “I understand more than you think.”
Inside, Herman’s shadow moved past the living room window. Sun hit the glass. The orange curtain gave a flutter, and my heart did the same. Rex was hiding, peering out, watching me talk to a cop.
Rex, rendered audience.
Over Jerrod’s shoulder the orange curtain dropped, as though a play had just ended, an act over. Rex’s act. The one I was meant to star in. I didn’t want it to be over! Rex and me, we had a whole show ahead of us, a life. Jerrod touched my arm. I held my breath.