Clown Girl - Monica Drake [52]
It was true; Crack was the only reason I could lend Rex cash to travel to Clown College.
She leaned in closer. “What’s on your face, motor oil?”
I put a hand to my skin. My fingers came away black and oily. The trash can, the rubber glove. The greasy reminder of porn in a Baloneytown alley.
She pulled my head back, looked into my eyes, and asked, “You OK in there? You’re pale as a ghost.” Crack and the photographer laughed. She let go of my hair, smacked me in the butt. “It’ll work out. Don’t worry so much. Now go freshen up before Matey gets here. You look like you been crying all night.”
It still showed? I took my bag back to the mirror on the wall beside the toilet.
“Make it pretty,” she said. “Sexy. Like the ad says, a good time, right? A party. Put a little heart, like this one.” She pointed to the heart on her cheek, bit the edge of her fingernail, and spit it on the floor.
The photographer pointed his camera at me. Flash. “Sad clown on the way to the john,” he said, through yellow teeth. Did he mean the toilet or a hooker’s john? In the mirror’s chipped reflection my orange wig, parted far to the left, now was decorated with a row of twisted curls in Crack’s design.
“One thing,” she called over. “I’ve got a job for us day after tomorrow. Noon. Supereasy. Clown clothes, clown face. All you have to do is show up, but it’s a high-buck gig; I promised ’em three girls.”
Three girls. I wiped white pancake off my blotchy skin. I opened my kit and began again. In the mirror I watched Crack sit on the photographer’s lap. She ran her tongue over her deep fuchsia lips.
The door swung open. “Ta da!” Matey flung herself into the room and slid on the nest of the photographer’s white sheets mixed with empty beer bottles and ashes. “Whoa!” She caught herself from falling. Her pink bag swung on her shoulder. “Badaboom!”
“Ah,” Crack said, and jumped up again to clap her hands. “Our favorite S&M clown.”
Matey took a fast bow. Her hair was slicked up onto her head and decorated with Christmas ribbon. Her dress was tight, cut low, and her fishnets snagged. “Thanks, but don’t flatter me,” she said. “Every clown’s an S&M clown, even the ones that don’t know it yet.” She dumped her pink bag upside down on the floor near the slice of mirror where I worked on my face.
“I’m not,” I said. I feathered in a heavy, cobalt blue line of eyeliner.
Matey dug through her things until she found a cake of white paint. She looked up, rolled her eyes, and said, “And then the other ones that don’t know it yet.” Her wrists were freshly bruised, her arms tough and knotted. Her dress fit like a plastic bag around a pack of carrot sticks.
Crack put her hands on my shoulders, gave me a backslap. “Sniff here’s the high artiste.” She winked. “Remember? Riding our sorry gravy train until the local Shakespeare troop comes along.”
Matey bit down the end of a fat covered brush and pulled the cover off with her mouth. “Can’t separate it out,” she said. “Every clown’s a bottom and every bottom’s a fool, and there’s money in taking the underdog role.”
I leaned in toward the mirror, didn’t say anything. That wasn’t how I saw it. Sure, a clown’s an underdog, but that didn’t make every clown a fool. It was an art, in my book, to take on the role of the oppressed. We spoke up for those without a voice. We were those without a voice—voluntarily relinquishing speech—and we illuminated the plight of the impoverished through every act. I let it go. Instead, I changed the subject. “Which one am I?” I drew my left eyebrow in a high, puzzled arch.
“Which what?” Crack reached for her makeup kit. “Bottom or fool?” She pulled out a tiny mirror and put another layer of mascara on her giant fake lashes. She used a special oversized mascara brush for her oversized lashes, carried in a big tube.
“No. Trixie, Twinkie, or Bubbles?” I asked. “Who, in the show?”
She shrugged.