Carnival Clown
The art of his being humiliated had a long American tradition. Children, mostly, after having stood in line for a good while, threw up to three baseballs at a rusty red button, which, if hit, caused the lifting of a release-lever. Then the clown, sitting upon a wooden platform, was plunged into water, bare-chested but clothed. To both encourage and frustrate their efforts, he shouted vile things at them from a distance which taxed most of their ability to aim accurately.
If they wore glasses, he made fun of that. If they were fat, he made fun of that. If they were accompanied by a look-alike parent, he mocked their parentage. He mocked their clothes, their looks, their food, their weaknesses worn on their sleeves like trinkets. Inspired by the rotten things he said to them, what further perpetuated the lengthening of persons queued up to assault him, in direct opposition and in contradistinction to the abuses which he hurled, was that, surrounded by a steel mesh cage, the taunting clown was unflappable.
He began the dialogue. They never said a thing. It was he who first and only spoke. They never said a word. Their tongues were tied, and no matter what, he was the perpetrator of small but everyday crimes, breaches into the grim and inherently sadistic side of human nature. At such a summertime event, in the name of amusement and entertainment, where the perpetuum of human ugliness was never quite fully realized, he was the mid-wife.
In the name of comedy, he was the lance that released their pus. He was the spike that dug into the boil. He brought out the venal in the innocent. Were he ever to have wept upon the platform, were he ever to have heaved a sigh of despair, to have cast a terrified glance of hopelessness upon the chest-high water beneath him; were he ever to have spoken aloud a line of remembered poetry, the catapulting concatenated concatenation of lobs slung by a moment’s hatred would have stopped completely. The little boys would have immediately understood that, like shooting springtime robins through their hearts with slender pointed arrows, their actions were wrong and, lowering their bows amid a fluff of bloodied feathers, the event would come to a standstill.
Instead, when the clown saw a muscly man standing beside his stepson all set to prove his sexual rights to the boy’s mother, a woman standing in the offing by the taffy-pulling booth, or removed even farther beside the vat of sausage and peppers pouring forth clouds of greasy smoke, too embarrassed herself to watch up close this sad display of intergenerational virility, he aimed his battery of invective, slogans, and curses for the strong man’s breastbone.
The steady stream of coin he made was like a heap of pencil shavings beside the full joy he knew when the speeding baseball hit the dirty red spot and down he went in the tub.
But the muscly man’s strength was waning. His teeth were loosening at the roots. His gut in age was already slipping past the edge of his belt. He was a slave to his violent passions awakened by the clown, who fell into the water as passively as stone.
