The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [89]
Balloon: stationed in the park, professionally merry and loudly attired, was a clown. And not just any clown—this was a clown who specialized in twisting long, sausagelike balloons into labyrinthine knots resembling various creatures, as per the request of the child for whom each balloon creation was intended. A child would say, “Make me a giraffe,” and the clown, upon receiving fifty cents’ compensation, would snap from his balloon pouch one of the stretchy raw balloons, pull and knead some more elasticity into it, inflate it with his mighty lungs, and then, with a few artful squeaky jerks, sculpt a sort of expressionistic abstraction of a giraffe, which was usually discernibly enough a giraffe to please the child. Then he would tie a string to the navel of the balloon and deliver the floating animal to his young customer, whereupon a parent or guardian would often loosely tie it around the child’s wrist to prevent its accidental ascension. The clown was standing by a waist-high wrought-iron fence at an intersection of two pedestrian paths in the park, and he had tied samples of his work to the railing of the fence. All around him, tethered to their posts, floated his colorful menagerie, an assortment of animals, but with the overrepresentation of mammals typical to the human zoological imagination: lions, giraffes, bears, dolphins, kangaroos, etc.—but I remember there was one particularly impressive, multiballooned magnum opus, an outlandishly intricate octopus, each tentacle represented by a different balloon, which incited the passersby to point at it and say, “Wow—this guy is good.” I was mesmerized watching the man at work—call it animal magnetism. I asked Lydia to pay the clown to twist up one of his creations for me. She obliged.
“Well now,” said the clown as we approached, “would the monkey like a balloon?”
“He’s a chimpanzee,” Lydia corrected him.
“Well excuse me!” he said through an exhalation of boisterous laughter.
Laugh, clown, laugh.
“Monkeys have tails,” she said. “Apes don’t have tails.”
Lydia handed him fifty cents, which he deposited, clink-clink, into a fanny pack.
“Now what kind of animal would you like me to make for you?” said the clown to me.
A human, I communicated.
“What?” said the clown.
Lydia, who could understand my gestures and noises, translated:
“He said he wants a person.”
“Gee,” said the clown, snapping a fresh balloon from the dispenser he wears on his belt, “I’ve been making balloon animals ever since I was debarred from practicing law, and that’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me to make a balloon human!”
Make me a human! Bruno demanded.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said the clown, these words half-muffled as he puts the limp red bag to his lips and puffs it into a long, ellipsoidal tube of air.
Twist, squeak, squeak, twist, scrunch, squeak—and behold! My own balloon person!
He had created a miniature pink effigy of a human being: what the clown had succeeded in creating for me looked something like the internationally recognized pictogram for the men’s restroom. Simple, featureless, classically proportioned and racially indistinct, standing, frontally or antipodally we cannot tell, with his feet together and his arms at his sides, with maybe a hint of masculine aggressiveness implicit in his stance: Ecce Homo—Behold the Man.
Leaving the clown, Lydia tied my floating pink man around my wrist with his string. As we walked down the path in the park, Lydia held my left hand, and my balloon man bobbed on a string two feet in the air above my right wrist.
Then we purchased ice cream cones. Lydia selected strawberry ice cream and I, now a man, deliberately opted for a manlier flavor: chocolate. We consumed our ice cream while sitting on a park bench, watching people jog past us on the path.