Clown Girl - Monica Drake [51]
“As boss of this rig, I say it’s time to start. Do the glam-clown thing, a big-ticket item. You read me?”
“Glam clown?” I said. “No, no I don’t read you. Glamour and comedy, they’re opposite sides of the same coin. Sexy or absurd. One or the other. It’s not the stripper doing pratfalls, the clown with the pasties.”
“Look,” Crack said. “I’ll give you a clue: we’re in this for money.”
I nodded.
“Show her the graphics, Pete.” She snapped her fingers.
The photographer lifted a shaky hand and unrolled a poster on the table: For a Good Time, Call Trixie, Twinkie, and Bubbles! Crack’s cell phone number was printed at the bottom. In between was room for a photo.
I said, “Who’s Trixie, Twinkie, and Bubbles?” I’d never heard of these clowns, not in our neighborhood.
Crack and the turtle traded a shifty glance. The photographer smirked and Crack laughed out loud, a single note: “Ha! Could be anyone. That’s the whole deal of it—fantasy. Where the skirts are short and the party’s long,” she said. She tapped a finger to the poster as she said it, as though adding the words.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Us, Crack?”
She pulled a bottle from her pink prop bag and sprayed my red wig with a candy-smelling hair gel. “Look, grown-ups have money. They spend it. And they don’t care about rubber noses.” She combed her fingers through the fake hair, twisted the front of the wig, pulled the curls away from my face, and slid a bobby pin in to set a hank of the wig in one little pin curl. The knot on the back of my skull was hot and throbbing under her hands. “Corporate parties can’t hire strippers anymore, but they can hire clowns. Got it?” She said, “Can’t have a lady in a cake, but they can have heavily made-up chicks in Lycra paid to do anything.”
My head jerked each time she ran her fingers through the tangles of the plastic wig.
“That’s where we cut in. Opportunity. Trixie, Twinkie, and Bubbles! We’ll make a killing, I tell you—a killing!”
She stuffed Kleenex in my bra and pinned Rex’s acrobat pants back to make them snug over my thighs. I let her work, and thought about the stack of business cards on my shelf at home, the endless string of suggestions, dates, and phone numbers. The architect. Those spatial use and planning consultants. The dishwasher. So where were clowns on the titillation continuum? Somewhere between sex with a nun in full habit and a stripper, I’d guess, made-up and covered up. Not what I wanted to be.
“I don’t know about this, Crack. It doesn’t feel right. Doesn’t feel like art to me.”
“Art?” she said. “You’re joking? It’s the oldest art in the book. And listen, I know your best interest—you’re looking to make enough lettuce to hook up with Mr. Sexy Rex. Plan to do that by tying knots into a balloon Jesus?”
Christ.
I glanced down at Rex’s acrobat pants. The stripes of the cloth outlined the muscle of my thighs and made a tight V at my crotch, an arrow to my Mound of Venus. Stripes aren’t just for clowns and cons; stripes are also for prostitutes, all the way back to Leviticus. The mark of the sinner: striped stockings, striped cloaks. Indulgence and punishment.
Crack was right—I needed the cash. I was stuck. Trapped. Rexless. This was Rexless behavior I was caught up in.
She brushed my tangled wig and her fingers clawed their way through the synthetic strands. My neck was in a kink the way she held my head. I looked at Crack over my shoulder. Her eyes were circled in black. Her lips were brilliant red, her neck was marked with the creases of new wrinkles, age finding her already. “Got a problem with strippers?”
I said, “It’s not what I’m trying to be.” My voice was thin; the words fell apart, breaking as I spoke.
“You’ve already got a client,” she said, like this was a good thing. “We ain’t even started this joint venture yet, and already Lover Boy, from the Chaplin gig? He left a message on my cell—says he wants a private show, you and him. How’s that grab you?”
“Exactly—I don’t want him grabbing me! Crack, I don’t think it’s my thing—”
“What, to be a breadwinner?