at my head. Betsy collected bottles, always having a head-smasher within arm’s reach. She would grab for the heaviest bottle, the one with all the quarters in it, to whip at my head. It must have had a hundred bucks in it. Don’t think I wasn’t eyeballing that one, either. Its coins could have bought my bus ticket to clown school and back. It was one of those wine bottles from Italy, wrapped in its own wicker basket by children with nubby fingers. You could hang it up.
There were bottles with wax dripped down them in colorful layers, years of flaming candles formed into mounds, the wax so thick on some of them that there was only a hint of the original bottle’s shape left behind. Some of the bottles had shells in them. Shells and sea glass stomped into pieces so Betsy could cram them down the neck of the bottle. My mom said that Betsy only filled all those bottles because she had so much fun emptying them. A lot of the time my mom breaks her own “if you can’t say anything nice…” rule. Sometimes you have to.
Betsy would spend hours ripping up tiny pieces of masking tape and sticking them to the emptied Blue Nun bottles, until every inch of glass was covered for all the tape. Magical faux finishes appeared when she began rubbing over the tape with shoe polish on a paper towel. It created this cracked brown look over the surface, dark in some places, lighter in others, and I must admit that even I was a little taken aback by the results.
“Betsy, I love that one over there. The one with the dark brown shoe polish all on the tape.”
“It’s sable brown,” she’d say. “The shoe polish. Sable. Like my hair.” Betsy’s hair was flat-tire black, nothing at all like the chocolaty brown shoe polish shining off the bottle in the corner. She acted like she invented it, too, this whole tape and shoe polish process, not wanting to share her medium with the world. Activities such as tape-rubbing are supposed to make old people happy, or give schoolchildren something accessible to create. When crafts are elevated and held to any sort of standards, the whole world suffers (witness the bonsai community).
Betsy would soon be involved in macramé, a then emerging form involving knotting pieces of twine into patterns. Once she was convinced that her style of knotting twine was exclusive to her, Betsy began fashioning macramé bottle holders. It was the next logical evolution of her talents, creating new places to put new bottles. Once a year she sold the completed pieces at BraätFest, a local French-Canadian church bazaar with a dubious Germanic moniker.
The artisans who rented BraätFest booths sold an assortment of crocheted toilet paper cozies, shouting wooden WELCOME! signs, potpourri baskets and — for the first time this year — macramé art. Betsy sold the most with her bottle holders. Seems a lot of people at church needed a place to put their empty bottles and dressing them up in waxy twine was the perfect idea.
My mother never attended a church bazaar on principle but would always volunteer to clean up after. She would be furious, scratching at a piece of scotch tape stuck to the nose of a statue of Saint Agatha. “Jesus smashed the temple in Jesus Christ Superstar because people were making money in God’s house, remember? All those girls were dancing, remember? And the drugs and the guns and the mirrors! All in His Father’s house! Jesus was so mad, so mad He smashed the mirrors!”
Everything I believe about Christianity is from the movie Jesus Christ Superstar; it’s a good reference point.
“Jesus said, ‘Not in my Father’s house, you don’t! No way, José!’ and Jesus flipped those tables and yelled at those vendors, ‘Get out! Get ouuuut!’ he says. Remember? Same thing with the bingo. And these goddamn church bazaars.” She looked around when she said goddamn to see if anyone witnessed her breaking the third commandment.
Blasphemy is big in my family of devout Catholics, especially the older ones. They took these phrases with them from Canada, these insane combinations of words. Phrases that reached the height of irreverence, these little Canuck sacrileges that flew out of my grandmother’s mouth. “Eee, Mutarde si marde Tabernak,” “Ah, siboire,” and “Ett, Crisse,” were spoken from the safety of her La-Z-Boy without fear of heavenly repercussion.
I didn’t know what the words meant as a kid but, roughly translated, Memere and Ma Tantes were saying things like “Mustard shits on the tabernacle,” and “Shit on the Holy Host!” with zero regard for the third or fourth commandments. My parents said “Mutard si merde,” and “Ah, siboire,” all the time and when I would ask what the words meant they would tell me, “It means ‘mustard seeds.’ But don’t say it.” To this day, I don’t say mustard seeds.
My mother was kneeling at Saint Agatha’s feet with a dust rag, wiping between the cemented folds of her hem. “Eee mutard si merde. Jesus would flip these tables if He knew what was going on in here… but He knows. Oh, Heeee knows… People playing roulette in the house of God. Gambling!” She was right. I wanted to flip the stupid tables myself. It was all so bright and finicky, covered by the smell of church basement coffee percolators being emptied, their insides scrubbed with church basement cleaning liquid and steel wool.
“And Betsy Pagan! Oh, I’m sure she’s gonna give ten percent back to the church with her stupid bottles, I mean, who couldn’t do that? I could do that! Wax on bottles? Stupid. And it only gets everywhere, see? Look… look… I mean, it got all over Saint Agatha’s basement floor, that’s all I know. Goddam bottles.” She looked up to the eyes of the statue, little home-permed curls pressed in sweaty rings around her forehead. “Oh, Saint Agatha, as if you didn’t have to see enough suffering already,” she said, crossing herself once before standing, then again right after. “They cut her tits off, ya know.”
My mother didn’t know about Betsy’s macramé bottle holders yet, and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. She was convinced that the Pagans were up to something at all times because they didn’t have a crucifix hanging in their house or a picture of a lamb or anything. Just the bottles. “And that lipstick!” my mother would say, and I would always know the exact shade Betsy had on that day. “That lipstick! S-L-U-T R-E-D, that’s the shade.”
The same Slut Red I dreamed of stealing, to stain a smile onto the inch of skin surrounding my mouth, allowing for entrance to the school of my dreams. I will get in, I thought every day as I waited for the mailman to come with my information packet.
The application form for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College is the same form used for evaluating patients before admitting them to psychiatric hospitals.
The written evaluation begins innocently enough, lulling you into a clown-ready state, a rubber-nosed frenzy of fantasy and longing, before they slam you with the hard questions. (There must be some sort of practical exam done later, after you’ve wowed them with your credentials on paper.)
The full-color catalog of classes they sent had course titles that damn near killed me from anxiety. Intro to Pratfalling with Professor Stumbly. Advanced Team Juggling with Miss Scorchy. Stilting 101 with Clementine Shorty. Judging by the pictures, student clowns went everywhere on stilts, bright smiles beaming through painted frowns.
Their make-up was high quality product expertly applied and I would’ve killed them for it given the chance. Glossy candid shots exposed the student clowns in their off time: combing their wigs, drinking out of cans, stilting around with red rubber balls that swirled in the background of every picture. In their breakfast photo they were eating noodles; I wanted to join them immediately.
After licking the pen tip real hard, I started filling out the application for my life.
NAME: Francis Stewart Plinkin/Zilcho the Clown — I wasn’t sure if they needed my real name or my clown name, so I put both.
AGE: 18 — I put eighteen
