CARFUL OF CLOWNS
david mckenna
We were late for work, but I had the window down and my eyes open for attractive men, a rare species in the hick county where we live and especially at the newspaper office, where I’ve long since exhausted all possibilities for romance.
“There’s one,” I said, pointing to a bronzed muscleman outside the Wawa. “I’ll bet he’s a lifeguard in Margate.”
“I’d let you ask, but you’d jump out and pretend you were drowning in the parking lot,” Amy said.
These days I carry a toothbrush in my handbag, even to work, and Amy says Im “the was the biggest whore on the Jersey shore.“ Have toothbrush, will travel.
This time we were ten miles from work on one of those cloudy July afternoons that sometimes climax with a thunderstorm, the most excitement you can hope for around here.
“I’ll just ask him where he sunbathes,” I said. “What kind of lotion he uses.”
“No,“ she said. “We’ll wind up in some nightclub with a bunch of macho muscleheads.”
And that was that. I was her prisoner until my own car was repaired. This being South Jersey, that was likely to be another week. I slumped in my seat and had resigned myself to another night of editing stories about freeholders and sewage treatment plants when a carful of clowns appeared, hugging the back bumper of Amy’s car.
This was on a road near the Atlantic City Expressway that’s allegedly haunted because it runs through an Indian burial ground. If you ask me, the whole state’s a burial ground, so imagine my surprise when I saw four guys in polka-dot baggies and greasepaint hanging out the windows and gesturing for us to pull over.
“Is this a good sign, or what?” I said. “A carful of clowns wants us to stop.”
Amy laughed, but I could see she was less than elated. A sweet girl in some ways and a good copy editor, but incapable of processing anything out of the ordinary. Her idea of wild was singing “Midnight Train to Georgia“ on Karaoke Night at Arnie’s Oyster House in Egg Harbor City.
“Let’s see what they want,” I said. “The one with the blue wig is kind of cute.”
Amy wasn’t so much smiling as gritting her teeth. “What if they’re murderers or something?” she said. I think she meant for the question to sound like a joke, but her voice trembled.
“They’re probably on drugs,” she added.
“What if they’re not?” I said. “ What if you won a radio contest? Maybe they liked your Save the whales’ bumper sticker and want to give you money.”
Amy, you see, is obsessed with victims Eskimos, snail darters, sexually harassed secretaries and quick to express contempt for those who abuse power. I think her righteousness is a cover for the conformist sensibility of one who can’t handle anything vital or spontaneous. Her version of political correctness is in fact a projection of her deap-seated insecurity and unacknowledged anger.
I could write editorials, don’t you think? Those pompous little essays that make small points about issues that can’t be affected even minimally by the written word. But the dead asses who run the newspaper won’t let me.
Anyway, there it was, the ultimate illustration of Amy’s sensibility: fear of pulling over for a carful of clowns.
Instead, she veered onto the expressway entrance in an apparent panic. I watched the clowns, still waving their arms and smiling, as their car disappeared behind the pine trees. So much for good signs.
Big, rude raindrops were smacking the windshield before we’d driven another mile. The shower quickly became a torrent. Steam was sneaking from under the hood. I remember thinking what a good thing it was, all that rain cooling off the poor hot car.
Then I noticed that the oil light on the dash was lit, and realized the engine was too hot and rain wasn’t going to help it. That we were going to be stranded in a downpour, about six miles from our exit.
Any other day we would have taken the slow route to work, and stopped at a Wawa for something to snack on.
“Nice going,” I said. “If you’d stayed on the pike instead of flipping out, we could have made it to a gas station.“
I should have held my tongue and said “Such is life,” but I was pissed off at Amy for being such a bore.
“I took the expressway because we were late,” she said. “Don’t scold me because you missed your chance to get ... gang-banged by a bunch of clowns.”
Instead of letting that remark pass, I said, “If you got laid once in a while, you wouldn’t be such a tight-ass about surprises.”
She parked near a mile marker, across from the tree line. Thick steam continued pouring from the front end despite the relentless rain. A steady stream of cars whizzed by, their tires skimming the wet concrete with a merciless hiss.
Amy, I knew, could sit for hours, like Blanche DuBois waiting for a kind stranger. So when the steam dissipated, I climbed out to take a look under the hood.
Her car was a squat European number that looked like a toy and rattled like a tank. Fuel-efficient, but a real pain in the ass, with hoses and other little parts that needed frequent replacement. I’m no mechanic, but I know enough not to own a car that requires a lot of maintenance.
Two minutes outside and I was soaked. “There’s a crack in the hose that runs from your radiator to your engine,” I said, climbing back in next to Amy. “I think all the water leaked out.”
“Wonderful,” she said, assuming the pouty tone of one who’s mad at the world. “It’s raining so hard we’ll probably drown in a flash flood, but my car is out of water.”
Actually, it was worse than that, but I wasn’t about to tell her she might have ruined the engine by driving while it was overheated. So I combed the knots out of my hair and fixed my makeup, figuring it wouldn’t be long before some nazi-handsome state trooper rescued us.
The guys who pulled up behind us in a red van were costume jewelry makers, not cops, and definitely not nazis. They introduced themselves as Irving and Schlomo, Israeli emigres, on their way to Atlantic City to try their luck at the blackjack tables.
No sooner had we climbed in than Schlomo, the younger looking guy riding shotgun, offered us a pastrami on rye from Famous Deli in Philadelphia and told the story of their lives, which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
But first a word about their appearance, which might explain why I felt spooked even before Schlomo opened his mouth. The nondescript button-up shirts with brown trousers and wingtips. The tight, paper-thin sports jackets with visible stitching. That pervasive House of Bargains smell. Right away I thought prison, or psychiatric hospital, but that’s not what made me nervous.
Both of them were rail-thin and totally bald. Schlomo, with his high cheekbones and beautiful eyes, looked like a burnt-out Monty Clift. He took off his red Phillies, scratched his head and started talking, real slow: “Diamong cutting is our ... trade. Four years ago I move from Russia to Tel Aviv, where I went into business with Irving.”
Irving drove with both hands on the wheel and a black yamulka perched on his skull. He was small and grim, with thick glasses that made his steely brown eyes look extra bold. Obviously no one to mess with. You could picture him in the trenches at Stalingrad, 50 below zero, one meal a month, mowing down nazis with a machine gun.
I majored in 20th century history, in case you were wondering. It dawned on me in my senior year that history is bunk and education a very lucrative scam. That, if you must know, is how I wound up in journalism. What a dead end. Next year, I swear, a public relations job and some real money.
“So why did you guys leave Israel?” I said, swallowing a mouthful of pastrami. Too much mustard, but not bad.
“When Russian empire fell, many Jews left for Israel,” Schlomo said after a long pause. In my mind, I was already calling him Slow-mo.
“Thousands every week,” he continued. “Sometimes it seemed half of them were diamond cutters.”
Oh. A supply-and-demand problem. There are almost as many cutters in Israel now as there are diamonds. Like journalists in America. A dime a dozen. You can’t make shit unless you land a job with the New York Times.
“Is no more milk and honey in Israel,” Slow-mo said ruefully. “Is dog-eat-dog.”
“And now youre in the costume jewelry business?” Amy said like a good little reporter.
She’s actually a big, pretty redhead with a tiny voice, and freckled skin that won’t tan. But next to those guys, she looked like a Coppertone ad. I’m tall and thin and sassy. I don’t have a problem attracting men, but the Meditteranean types usually go for Amy.
“Why costume jewelry?” Amy asked.
Irving chuckled and said, “That was two years ago.” His accent was much heavier than Schlomos. ”We are now in the business of staying alive.”
Slow-mo took it from there. “We came to New York, desperate for work, and met a wholesaler named ... Napoleon Pettibone. A most unscrupulous man.”
By the time Slow-mo got to the meat of the story, the clouds had parted and a rainbow was glowing over the casino hotels a few miles east. I wondered if Amy realized we’d missed our exit.
“We missed our exit,” she said, without seeming to care. She was picking up a sickness vibe from Schlomo how could she not? and I could see it was turning her on. These guys were super-victims, you could almost smell it.
Slow-mo said this Pettibone put them to work spraying a toxic lacquer on costume jewelry, 12 hours a day in some sweatshop in Brooklyn. In no time theyd contracted inoperable lung cancer and were driving down to Philly for radiation treatments once a week.
“Today we stop at casino instead of driving straight home,“ Slow-mo said. “Life is too short to miss out on good time.“
He turned his big, sensitive eyes on Amy. “I make joke,” he said, smiling sadly. “You like?”
Amy was speechless, but I could see tears welling up. “Yes I do,” she said earnestly. “Very much so.”
“Perhaps we lose money,” Irving said with a fierce, gap-toothed grin. “But you cannot take it with you, no?”
Slow-mo’s laugh sounded like it came from deep within a cave and ended in a long, raspy cough. He pointed toward the A.C. skyline and said, ”Maybe there is ... how you say ... pot of gold at end of rainbow.”
How perfect for Amy. Too paranoid to stop for a carful of clowns, she was having the time of her life with a couple of terminal cases who probably glowed in the dark. She eyed Slow-mo like a long-lost love.
I was ready to tell Irving to drop me off on the shoulder of the road. Fortunately, a state trooper’s car passed us at that moment.
“Flash your headlights, Irving,” I said, rolling down a side window and waving at the cop. “I’ll get him to radio for a tow truck and drive us back to our car.”
But no. Amy had decided to continue into Atlantic City to gather material for a human interest story about the dying Israelis. She asked me to drive back with the cop and then with the tow truck driver to Sluggo’s, a service station just down the pike from the newsroom.
“You’re an editor,” I reminded her. “Let the beat reporters handle that sort of thing.”
”This storys too good to pass up,” she whispered. “How do these guys pay their medical bills? How do they survive?”
“We’re already an hour late.” I said. “The desk needs you.”
“The desk will get the stories read,” she said with uncharacteristic rashness. “Tell them I’m taking care of the car.”
Amy didn’t make it to work that night, but she called me the next day with a full background report. Irving and Slow-mo had depleted their savings on medical bills and were surviving on the largesse of American relatives. And their case against Pettibone was still in court after more than a year. What a joke, Amy said, our so-called justice system! How touching that the Israelis had maintained a naive faith in their adopted countrys laws.
“Did you sleep with Slow-mo?”
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation. “He’s the bravest, sweetest man I ever met. He has a special quality.”
I knew what that quality was: terminal illness. But I let her ramble. On the casino floor, theyd run into a high-rolling American relative of Slow-mo who apparently secured complimentary lodging for the Israelis. A luxury suite, in fact. At some point, Amy and Slow-mo left Irving at the gaming tables and stole away for a few “blissful” hours upstairs.
I usually ask for sex details, but this was too kinky even for me.
Slow-mo drove Amy home early in the morning and promised to call her after his next radiation treatment.
Now Amy was agonizing. “I have this great story about how immigrants are victimized by business owners,” she whined. ”There’s even an Atlantic City angle. But I think I’m too ... involved to write it.”
Oh Lord, I thought, what would Woodward and Bernstein do? The dilemma was resolved the next day, however, when I was proofing the weekend section and happened upon a small photo of Irving and Schlomo next to an item in the ”Casino Scene column:
“Never heard of them? Well, Irving and Schlomo are well-known as ’The Clown Princes of Kiev’ in Russia and Israel. One foreign critic described their zany stage antics as a cross between Martin and Lewis and Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot. Be forewarned: This wacky, bald-headed duo will joke about anything, from cruising for American babes to terminal cancer. Catch them this Friday and Saturday only at the Kumquat Comedy Club, in the Grand Dame Casino Hotel. Youll hate yourself for laughing, but you won’t be able to help it.”
Indeed. I had to laugh, remembering how spooked I’d been. Its tough to say who was the bigger clown, Slow-mo or Amy. Maybe it was me. I’m supposed to be cynical.
I almost rushed to the desk to show the weekend section to Amy, knowing she never reads anything that isn’t so-called hard news. The latest on clitorectemies in Cameroon, that sort of thing.
A rare twinge of pity stopped me. She was already stuck with an $800 bill from Sluggo’s for a cracked block, whatever that is. It might have been too much for her, the lowdown on Slow-mo.
Thank God, she decided writing a story would be “unethical” and didn’t mention Slow-mo for a week. He didn’t phone her, of course, and she was upset. By now the Clown Princes of Kiev were probably opening for Bobby Vinton, the Polish Prince, at Lake Tahoe.
“Slow-mo called me an hour ago, Amy,” I told her. “Here at work. He said he can’t see you again, it wouldn’t be fair to you given his slim prospects for survival. He said Tell Amy, all my love and shalom.’ ”
Amy liked that a lot. The only thing more fun would have been if Slow-mo died in her arms. For weeks she wore a hurtful glow of misty-eyed contentment.
Lately, she’s been reverting to type: drab, smug, and suspicious, but with her quirky fetish for unfortunates still intact. I’m thinking of setting her up with the one-eyed gimp who sits outside the Kumquat Club selling fuzzy dice and ceramic figurines of well-known comedians. I hope he doesn’t stock Irving and Slow-mo dolls.
