were beginning to appreciate the genius of youth. All over the news, on teevee, on That’s Incredible!, there were eleven-year-olds in post-graduate schools, preteen geniuses performing microsurgery and shattering ageist constructs, but these were the rich kids at Johns Hopkins Medical. Clown colleges most likely had a different take on early entry programs for geniuses. I licked the tip of the pen again, something I saw my dad do, and got serious. I didn’t even put on a full costume.
HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU MOVED IN THE LAST 10 YEARS? — There was the once, out of the project and two streets over to the tenement but I didn’t remember it. “Six times,” I wrote in my best handwriting. Logically, they would be seeking someone driven, with a penchant for travel, not some dead weight balloon-twister who’d be content to work the local birthday party circuit for the rest of his life. “Six times” should properly amaze the admissions clowns without going over the top.
HOW MANY JOBS HAVE YOU HELD IN THE PAST 10 YEARS? — “Six.” Obvious. I was on a roll. Willing to work. After a few more questions about the basics — location, gender, citizenship — I moved on to the next section where the innocence wore clean off.
The psycho-social part of the application was a mind-boggling collection of questions pertaining to abuse, buggery, IV drug use, and prison records. I laid myself on the floor, pressing my cheek to the shag until composure took me back to a place of readiness.
Marty Pagan and his friends were playing outside, giggling and chatting as I sat with my application. They were talking about me. Bottomfeeders. See what they say about me in six months when I’m famous and they’re going nowhere. So what if I can’t play hockey? Those helmets give me a headache and I don’t see any of them applying to colleges. Okay, focus. The pen was sweating in my hand and I was craving make-up.
HAVE YOU BEEN CONVICTED OF A FELONY IN THE LAST 10 YEARS? — “No.” Bonnie Beleau forced me to steal bath beads from Mammoth Mart once but I got away with it so I’m sure there’s no record. It was all Bonnie’s idea. She practically stuck them down my pants. Before I knew it, I was shoplifting, Bonnie going “Come on, come on,” the whole time and me, guilty as hell — I was sure they’d catch me — flushed and anxious as I passed the giant elephant who guarded the door. We popped the bath beads with our feet in the parking lot.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF A SEX CRIME? — Sex crimes! This was too much. Sex and crime in one question. I was eleven. What did they mean? I put “N/A” which my sister told me meant “No Answer.”
I tore through the rest of the application to see if there were any questions about juggling, rolling out the barrel, make-up application/removal, or any of the things I practiced every day. Nothing. Must be in the practical.
Page three was all about drugs. I put N/A in all the drug question boxes. If only I had been filling this out six years later, I would have been able to fill page three front and back, opening up my chances for full scholarship.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CONVICTED OF MOLESTING A CHILD? — Oh, my dear Lord. Wouldn’t that fall under sex crimes? I was going to put “No Answer,” but then I thought of how me and Scoot Ryder would kiss every day behind the garage. Real Hollywood kisses, our lips tight and our faces pressed together hard. I thought of the first time he parted my lips with his tongue; we were frenching. His mouth tasted like the Swedish Fish penny candies he had eaten on the walk over to my house, his tongue a film of red gelatin.
Our relationship lasted all through junior high, where Scoot was the reigning Metal God. He had a tattoo, a fucking tattoo in seventh grade. I would have followed him around with a mattress strapped to my back if I could’ve. When it came time to move from frenching to third base, Scoot got scared. “Won’t that make us gay?”
“Make us gay? What are you talking about?” I answered all of his questions with questions for years, keeping everything simple like we were making toast. Scoot was easy to distract. Technically we were both minors when our affair began in grade school but there were no arrests or convictions so I just wrote NO. To eliminate all doubt, I added an exclamation point. NO!
DO YOU HAVE ANY TATTOOS? — In the mirror I saw the stars scratched on to my cheeks in medium-brown mascara. “No.”
WHAT’S THE LONGEST YOU’VE BEEN IN PRISON? — The presumption that I was, of course, a former inmate seemed like a trick question so I put “N/A.” This process was so intense but I knew it had to be and I was willing to give them what they wanted. There has to be an initial screening process in place in order to weed out the good clowns (like Willie Whistle), from the bad clowns (like John Wayne Gacy).
My signature signed, I stuffed the finished questionnaire into an envelope, minus the $75.00 check for the non-refundable application fee. My mom said, “No way,” when I asked her for the money, despite the passion of my begging. “Mom, please! This is my life we’re talking about!” The “this is my life…” part was in a movie, so I used it.
In the movie, it worked; Judith Light’s character screamed, “This is MY life!” to the ex-husband character who caved immediately upon hearing the words. The magic phrase didn’t work on my mother. I forgot we had watched the movie together and that she hated Judith Light way more than she hated clowns.
She was not budging on the application fee even if it was my life. She got real close to my face, very serious. “Clowns have miserable lives, Francis. Clowns die drunk and alone in their big shoes.” That was it. My mother had put her fears to their finest point.
I guess parents don’t dream that their kids will be clowns. My mom and all her sisters wanted me to be a priest, and told me that God had chosen me for the cloth. She meant it, too. The priesthood.
“You were meant to be a priest,” she insisted. “Father Hazebrook said so. A clown, Francis? No way. No way am I bloodying my hands with your demise.” Suddenly she was Pontius Pilate, washing her hands in an imaginary bowl she kept on her vanity, miming as she railed against clowns, using my own weapons against me. “A clown! My God, Francis.” She started to fan herself with a magazine, real dramatic. I think the “bloodied hands” number was in a movie, too, a Jesus movie she saw.
She acted as if she knew a whole bunch of clowns before she’d met my dad. As if her teen life was filled with unexpected shaving-cream pies to the face. Even now she shivers when someone mentions clowning. So does my sister, all of her friends, and most of the kids at school. “Oh, clowns scare me to death!” my sister always said at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade when we were dragged up Fifth Avenue every year, exhausted and late from the three-hour drive, but she’s not dead yet.
It’s hip to act fearful of clowns and most Americans are not coulro-phobes, they’re compulsive liars. Clown hate is cool and runs unchecked in our society. If a clown molested you, okay then, clowning may not be your favorite form of entertainment. Getting diddled by a pervert in pointy make-up is a valid reason to harbor clown hate, and you should run from them for the rest of your life. Or you could face their sad painted faces head on and confront your fears. Whatever helps you sleep at night. I, personally, run to sedation rather than confrontation, but don’t listen to me. Seriously.
My mother, a notorious clown bigot, told me again that she would rather slice her face than give me the $75 application fee, enabling me to throw my life away. Then she started the miming again: slicing at her face with a butter knife, checking her wallet, and wiping away tears. She was good at it, using props and everything. Maybe she had her own broken dream of clowning before she handed her life over to the textile mills when she was twelve.
Everybody worked in one factory or another here, assembling pieces of parts that would go on to become the sole of a shoe or the fin of a rocket. I liked thinking
