Clown Girl - Monica Drake [1]
No matter what you’d bring to read, Monica would write something better, funnier, more surprising, and sexy. Every week, Monica Drake showed us how good stories could be. Tom taught us craft, but Monica taught us freedom. Courage. If my writing improved, it’s because her work was always better. If a story of mine got laughs, hers were always funnier. Monica moved away from Portland to study with Amy Hempel and Joy Williams, and now she has a first novel. Clown Girl. And all over again, Monica’s showing us just how funny and nuts and sad storytelling can be.
Writing this introduction, I’m not doing an old friend a favor—I’m paying a decade-old debt. This isn’t charity or flattery—this is honesty.
Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as Monica Drake is a blessing.
Clown Girl is more than a great book. Clown Girl is its own reality.
We should all have an arch enemy this brilliant.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Author of Fight Club
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
CARL JUNG
In a theater it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed—amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.
SøREN KIERKEGAARD
1.
The Clown Falls Down; or, Sniffles Stumbles
BALLOON TYING FOR CHRIST WAS THE CHEAPEST BALLOON manual I could find. The day I bought it, it was hidden on the lowest rung of a dusty spinner rack down at Callan’s Novelties, snuggled alongside shopworn how-to guides: Travel Europe by Clown Circuit!, Rubber Vomit Skits for Beginners, and Latex: The Beauty of Cuts, Bruises, Scars, and Contusions.
Want to tie the Virgin Mary? Start with a light blue balloon. For Jesus, use Easter green. There are tips on tying a crucifix, a lamb, even a Sacred Heart in two sizes, big or small. Ooo la la! These tricks are simple but smart. The grand finale is the pietà, Mary with a grown Jesus sprawled across her lap in a four-balloon extravaganza like a tangled link of sausages, or a Japanese bondage trick. The pietà or bondage, sacred and profane; in balloon art the two are that close together, one thin twist.
I studied all twenty pages of the flimsy, hand-stapled booklet. And so, ta da! By the chance of cheap pricing I’d come to specialize in religious tricks, clown iconography and chicanery extraordinaire! Most people, though, looked at my balloon art and saw what they wanted to see instead. It was Interpretive Art, abstract and expressionistic. The big plan? I had one. Someday I’d be able to tie all the great works, starting with da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks complete with Baby Jesus, John the Baptist, and a little balloon-twisted angel clustered together on a rocky perch. Already I’d invented my own version of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s image of God giving breath to Adam. Two balloons linked formed their famous outstretched fingers.
Saturday afternoon, in the thick of a street crowd, I tied a crown of thorns and handed the crown to a tiny girl in a fake leopard sundress. She put the crown on her head as a tiara. “Lovely, lovely,” the girl’s mother murmured, and tapped the crown with one jeweled hand.
Pure princess, in a crown meant for a martyr.
The mother pulled her tiny daughter away from the spill of day care overflow, five-year-olds out to celebrate the King’s Row street fair. The pack surged forward. My makeup was sweating off and my feet hit flat and hard against the cement in cheap, oversized shoes. The summer sun was hotter than I’d ever welcome in the city even on a Saturday. Unused balloons clumped together in the hothouse of my pink vinyl shoulder bag alongside juggling balls, a sleek silver gun, and the gentle rub of a rubber chicken. I pulled out a handful of balloons like gummed spaghetti.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,