LITMIR.BIZ

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worry about your heart…it’ll last as long as you live.” He took a swig off a flask, turned away, and disappeared.

      “My heart!” I said out loud, suddenly worried.

      “You’ll be OK,” somebody else said, a real-world voice.

      Rex Galore? My clown mate, my savior. A word from Rex and I’d revive; Rex had found me on the street. He was back in town. A hand brushed my face, trailed by the bite of cinnamon.

      “Relax,” he said. “Take a deep breath. You’ll make it.”

      I wanted to believe his words, to be the truth of the story he told.

      I opened my eyes to the blue of a shirt sleeve, a hand reaching out. It wasn’t Rex. It was a cop. A cop had cleared the kids back.

      House Rule Number One where I lived: Don’t talk to cops.

      But the cop put his fingers to my pulse. My head was woozy. The cop gave me water. It was a magic trick, the way he pulled the paper cup pulled from the crowd; the cup was suddenly in the cop’s hand, then in mine. “Help is on the way,” he said and wrapped his fingers around my fingers to hold the cup. A magical cop. Hair on the back of his fingers was sparse, golden as jewelry. His eyes were pale blue. With his second hand he propped up my head. I rested against his palm like a pillow. “Can you tell me your name?” he asked.

      Anonymity. It’s in the Clown Code of Ethics: I will always try to remain anonymous while in makeup and costume, though there may be times when it is not reasonably possible to do so. These were my promises: I wouldn’t talk to cops and I wouldn’t speak in costume.

      I opened my mouth and said, “Nita.”

      He said, “You need a…?”

      “Nita,” I whispered again, with all the energy I had. The only thing holding the cup in my hand was the cop’s hand around mine. Between our two hands our skin grew hot, sweat mingled. He leaned in close. He smelled like cinnamon streusel, apple pancakes. Delicious.

      “What do you need?”

      His hand, and his help, made me both sad and happy at the same time, and I couldn’t hold on to the mix; I felt something inside lift. I was still on the ground while a heat in my body struggled to climb up. The feeling caught in my throat and closed down there, like a sob. Clotted. I couldn’t speak if I wanted to.

      He squinted, teetered, then caught his balance poised in a crouch. His breath brushed my skin. Ah! Too much. I took another deep, cinnamon-streusel breath. The cop was so close I could’ve kissed him. For one minute I didn’t see him as a cop but as a man, concerned, all sweet skin and golden hair. The cop’s eyes narrowed as he waited and listened. Patient. I asked, “Do I know you?”

      He was young enough, but still when he narrowed his eyes his skin there turned into a weathered, radiant arc of wrinkles. He shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’ve never met.” I saw the blue of the uniform again. He was a cop, doing his job. I was a citizen in trouble.

      Rex Galore was what I needed. My Clown Prince. That strong giant, Rex, darling shaman and showman; a touch of his hand would make everything right. Rex was far away. All I had was a cop, a flatfoot, an outsider to our outsider lifestyle.

      “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 left white streaks along my chin and blue-black rings that seeped into the creases around my eyes. My lips were still pomegranate red, more like a tweaking hooker than a clown. The intake nurse said, “Rest quietly. Breathe. Let yourself hydrate.”

      I sipped the air-conditioned air of the hospital like water, in tiny breaths. My heart knocked against my chest like a bird against a window.

      She said, “Do you have I D?”

      I sat up, fished a hand around inside my sun-hot bra, and pulled out two curled photos. The first photo was of a couple standing on the end of a pier, far away and blurred. Unrecognizable. It was a photo of my parents, so young they weren’t

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