Clown Girl - Monica Drake [6]
“Bleeding?” I asked, and my voice cracked as it climbed past that knot of throated sadness mixed with hope. One word, mumbled. Then two: “Am I?”
He said, “You’re not bleeding. “Do you have I D?”
My Clown Union card was tucked in my polka-dot bra. I didn’t move for it.
The cop took the cup from my hand—from our hands—and set the cup on the ground. Where he peeled his hand from mine, the air was suddenly cool in the empty space that had been our sweaty warmth. I wanted him to hold my hand again, to say that I’d be okay, to anchor me in the world. Instead he reached in the loose pocket of my saggy polyester high-waters, the clown clothes, and his cinnamon smell surrounded me. His cop fingers brushed my thigh through the thin cloth of the pocket lining. He pulled out a handkerchief tied to a handkerchief tied to a handkerchief tied to another handkerchief, never ending.
The kids were a silent pack, watching. Adults looked too now because cop action is the adult entertainment version of a clown show and holds everyone’s attention. He pushed the clothesline of pastel handkerchiefs back into my pocket. The sun was a gilded halo around his head, his forehead lined and anxious. He hit the wolf whistle in my pocket, and the whistle screamed out its two notes, one up, one down. The sexy call.
The crowd roared. I felt sick. I lay back against the cop’s arm.
“Her name?” he asked again, and looked around. “Does anybody know her name?” A juggling ball rolled out of my pink prop bag into the feet of the crowd. A kid went after it, chasing the ball the way a dog would.
“Sniffles?”
A voice in the crowd. It was Matey. Matey speaking up. Matey, my co-worker, who didn’t even know my real name.
2.
My Chicken, My Child!; or, Clown Bashing Lite
AT THE HOSPITAL DON’T SHOW UP IN CLOWN GEAR, PAINTED with the lush designs of clown face, because if you do, even clean underwear and an ambulance ride won’t win your credibility back. They brought me in on a gurney. Somebody said, “She looks a little pale. Ha ha!” He thought I was passed out. I saw him through my eyelashes, hoped he wasn’t my doctor.
Don’t tell them you’ve lost your rubber chicken—don’t let on that the rubber chicken matters, even if that chicken was half your act, your only child, love made manifest.
I told the EMT s about the rubber chicken on the ride over. “Somebody has to find it,” I pleaded. “I can’t lose my chicken.” They didn’t blink.
In the hospital, the EMTs unbuckled the gurney seat belt straps. I half-sat up, sick and limp, then climbed onto an ER cot and closed my eyes again. My mouth was dry, clouded with words I wouldn’t say.
“Another clown bashing?” a triage nurse asked. She lifted my arm and slid on the blood pressure cuff. There’d been a string of clown bashings in town. Hate crimes. Meringue pies full of scrap iron, fire extinguishers at full blast. Gary Lewis and his pack of Playboys, they had it wrong—not everybody loves a clown. The crimes were never prosecuted; clowns didn’t come forward. What do you say? Officer, a joke’s a joke, but only when it’s consensual!
The blood pressure cuff squeezed my bicep tight as a fist, like a dime-store security guard with a shoplifter. The black balloon of the armband throbbed against my pulse. A second nurse shook his head. “Self-destructed, this one.” With a sharp bite, he slid a needle in the back of my hand to hook up a saline drip.
Some people hate clowns, others are afraid, though hate and fear are really one and the same. Those coulrophobics, with their Fear of One Who Walks on Stilts. Fear of one with special skills, clown skills. My only skills.
Nobody cared about my chicken, my child.
The blood pressure cuff dropped away in the release of a deep exhale. The first nurse swabbed my makeup off. She hit me with a damp cotton ball in fast jabs. My face was reflected in the chrome of instruments. The jabbing swabber