NOW I (WO)MAN our booth at the clown convention. There’s not much to do because the service sells itself: We carry all the best brands of clown shoes, and we make online ordering easy. Next-day delivery guaranteed, simple return policy, no questions asked. You can search by color (red/white/yellow, blue/orange/green, et chetera), size (fifty to one hundred and thirty-five), even gags (water squirt mechanism, honking, self-inflating balloons from the toe box). There really is no other online clown shoe seller that comes close to our selection. And, of course, we offer our patented collapsible traveling clown shoe. So it should be easy, except for one thing: Clowns out of makeup are the most vile people I’ve ever encountered. Seven out of ten road rage cases are perpetrated by clowns out of makeup.
At the trade show, I meet a woman in greasepaint, well, not in greasepaint, well, not only in greasepaint, but also selling it. So to be clear, both in greasepaint and in greasepaint. I picture her naked but with the clown makeup on, and instantly I realize a new fetish has been born. My synaptic train has a new stop: Clowntown. This is not at all like me, I think. Once home, I type clown fetish into my computer. I hesitate before hitting RETURN. There is no going back after RETURN; of this, from past experience, I am certain. The only thing the virtual world offers that the real world doesn’t is both complete privacy and a complete lack of privacy. I am alone with it but being watched: my activities recorded, files made, boxes ticked. But, alas, my needs are larger than my concern. It will all be there for me at the press of a button. I consider the button itself: ENTER/RETURN. I consider the world I am about to enter; I know I will return again and again. There is no end to it. And what deranged Pandora’s box will I be opening? Are there laws against clown porn? I think I’m safe as long as I don’t search underage clown porn, which I would never, ever do. I am not a monster. Yet once I taste clown, will I be able to go back to regular women, either in my fantasies or in reality? Will there come a point, if I ever manage to find a woman who will have me, when I will pull the clown white out from the bottom of my sock drawer and ask her to apply it, just so I can get hard? That will not go well. Best to not press RETURN and just accept that—
I take the plunge and…it is better than I could’ve imagined. Luscious naked clown women. So many choices! FYI, there are some naked male clowns, which it turns out are as disturbing as naked female clowns are alluring. I refine my search to exclude them and this time don’t hesitate to press RETURN. I come upon (both literally and figuratively!) the image of one young female clown who embodies everything I have ever wanted in a female naked clown. She goes by the name Rainbow Sunshine and she is…everything.
“TELL ME WHAT you see,” demands Barassini.
A noticeably younger Mudd and Molloy, boyish and charming, thin and fat respectively, perform on some small-town burlesque stage. This is either a flashback or just an earlier scene from the film. I don’t know how to tell. I don’t believe it matters. If Moutarde has taught us one thing, it is that rigid sequence is a fiction. My eyeball self hovers in the back of the house, then slowly glides toward the stage, over the heads of the audience. It is a beautiful and graceful shot, which I am magnificently performing. I am, I conclude, the Roger Deakins of memory.
“Africa is a fascinating place. I’ve booked us a trip,” says Mudd.
“I’m not going. I’m a-scared of Africa,” says Molloy.
“For heaven’s sake, why would you be scared?”
“I’m afraid of the dark!”
“It’s not actually the dark continent! That’s just an expression.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It means it’s unknown.”
“How do we know about it, then?”
“No, no. It means it’s a mystery.”
“The mystery is who took all the lightbulbs from Africa!”
“Oh, stop it. You’ll have a good time. There are many beautiful wild animals there.”
“Wild animals should be in zoos where they belong.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Animals need to run free.”
“I’m not saying we charge them to run. They don’t even have any place to keep a wallet. Except for the kangaroos.”
“There are no kangaroos in Africa.”
“Well, if the kangaroos won’t even go there, why should I? I’m smarter than a kangaroo.”
“I’m sure there is a kangaroo you’re smarter than.”
“Exactly. Thank you. Hey, wait a minute—”
“Think of all the natives. We’ll get to see Ubangis, Pygmies, Watusis—”
“Which tusis?”
“Watusis. Certainly you’ve heard of Watusis.”
“A herd of Watusis? That’s a lotta Watusis. I’ll stay in the car.”
“No, no. I’m asking if you know what Watusis are.”
The scene dissipates like smoke. I continue to float, now above nothing, terrifying blackness surrounding me.
“What now?” asks the voice, echoing out of the darkness.
“Nothing.”
“We have twenty minutes left.”
“There is nothing. Please let me out early. I feel anxious just hanging here.”
“We have twenty minutes,” repeats the voice. “Keep looking.”
So I wait and I hang and I look and nothing comes. To pass the time, I imagine naked Rainbow Sunshine gyrating on the Serengeti Plain and ejaculate. I don’t know if Barassini notices.
IN MY SLEEP chair, in the irrational panic that comes in the middle of the night, it occurs to me that maybe the reason I struggle to piece together the memory of Ingo’s film is that the forgotten parts have been “eaten” away by a brain-wasting disease, some sort of spongiform or perhaps something not yet identified, some undiscovered parasite. I imagine such a creature, were it contagious, might travel from brain to brain, eating memories and evacuating digested memories in the form of waste matter. In such an admittedly science fiction–type scenario, one might find oneself inheriting the degraded memories of others—junk memories, feces memories, if you will. And I am certain I have indeed stumbled upon such odd fragments in my own so-called “banks.” Snippets of assembly line work, the taste of rambutan jam, trying on several pairs of jeggings (I have only tried on one pair!). Perhaps these and other unexplained memory fragments are simply the result of my exceptional imagination and my oft-remarked-upon sense of empathy, but these thoughts are so convincing as to be troubling. Now, I am not a speculative fiction maven, although I do greatly respect the work of the African American genii Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Tananarive Due, who have rejiggered this frivolous form, transforming it into a tool with which to investigate societal and racial injustice. Their tomes are not meant for fanboys, those arrested adolescents who champ at their bits for the next installment of Star Wars or whichever other space opera, time travel blather is coming down the mass distraction pike, but rather for those seriously engaged in the struggle toward an equitable society. Or is it Octavia Spencer?
Malachi “Chick” Molloy is born in 1906. As a child, he is diagnosed with “the fidgets” and placed in a special facility, the Paramus School for Fidgeting Boys, where the treatment consists of spinning boards, hydrotherapy, insulin comas, leg restraints, and crafts. At thirteen, he escapes by self-administering a Mickey Finn, passing out in a basket of dirty sheets, and being removed from the premises for laundering. The powder quells his fidgets and allows him to be mistaken for bedding by a myopic laundry truck driver. Once in New York, he finds employment jittering down the streets wearing a sandwich board for Elixir Veronal, a barbiturate sleep aid manufactured by Bayer, with the slogan: If I only had Veronal, I’d be sleeping like a baby. On the back it reads, Veronal is safe for babies!
I am here on the street, too, suddenly embodied, no longer just a floating eyeball, wandering old New York, searching for Molloy. I want to interview him for my book. I know if I can find him, it will be a coup and the book’s success is all but guaranteed. But I cannot find him. I stop a policeman in a top hat (a top hat?) to ask if he knows Molloy. He answers in a thick Irish brogue, calls me “laddie” and says he’ll take me in for “malingering and truancy” if I don’t get immediately back to class at the Erasmus Darwin Negative High School of Aristotelian Poetics on DeKalb Avenue. I patiently explain to him that I am flattered but well beyond high school age. Not in this the Year of Our Lord 1923, you’re not, he says. I realize he is correct. In 1923, I am negative twenty-seven years old and in negative high school. In fact, at negative twenty-seven years old, I have been left forward nine times. Jesus, I need to graduate negative high school soon, so I can get into negative college. I panic and run to class.
IN A MOMENT of startling clarity, outside the hypnosis sessions, on a docent-led tour of the Long Island Chair Museum exhibit “Chairs That Look Like Giant Hands Through History,” I finally fully recall the first moments of Ingo’s miraculous film: When Docent Pamela is not looking, I brush some cracker crumbs that had dislodged themselves from my beard from the velvet seat of a Louis XVI chaise à main with my hand, then brush off my hand with my also hand. Sometimes the proper word eludes me and I utter or think something comically wrong, or wrong-sounding, or wrongheaded. Other. The word is other. Other hand. I wipe my other hand on my…cloth leg tubes? That can’t be right. Leg pants, perhaps. In any event, this simple action, my madeleine, if you will, transports me back in time:
Ingo drags on his cigaret (for this is how he spells it) as he puts his hand on my shoulder and pushes me down onto the chair, onto what appear to be cracker crumbs. The lights are offed, the blinds pulled, the projector whirring.
It begins. A jagged scrape of white on black, another and another and another. Then tiny scratches: as snow at night in a spotlight. Then picture. Black and white. Stained with dirt: A woman, more specifically, a doll of a woman, dressed as a woodland nymph, dancing erotically. It’s animated, using a technique sometimes called stop-motion. Perhaps you’ve heard of Ray Harryhausen, the great master of stop-motion animation. You might remember his work from the 1933 film King Kong. No, that was Wallis O’Brian. I misspoke. Or rather, I misthought. This occurs more and more frequently of late. I worry something bad is around the bend, that there is some underlying cause, some organic cause. Some dire cause. Why am I forgetting? Why do I wander my brain looking for missing words? Others, out of politeness or impatience, have begun to offer me word options.
“Valiant?” they say.
“Cornucopia?”
“Nixon?”
“Recursive?”
“The Great Gazoo?”
“Manifest Destiny?”
“Bruce Willis?”
It was Willis O’Brien. Willis with an i. O’Brien with an e. I am lost.
In any event, this film was thusly done using said technique. The doll dances crudely, with a spastic energy I find enervating. I’m willing to give Ingo more time. As an old black man, he deserves our respect. Although I still think it unlikely I’ll make all three months of it. African American, I mean.
After a minute and a half of this sex dance, the puppet embarks on a stiff-limbed cakewalk, looking every bit the Nazi goose-stepper but twenty-some-odd years too early to that particular party. I am about to use my trump card, which is to say, I am going to lie and say I have an appointment, when a hand-scrawled title skitters on the screen: Dancer Lucy Chalmers shows us a waltz!
Lucy Chalmers! The great and tragic mystery that was silent screen siren Lucy Chalmers. So few people with whom to discuss Lucy Chalmers these days. Star of a scant number of movies in the teens before she walked off a set one day, never to be seen again. Some say she was the unknown victim known as the Black Dahlia. No, wait, that was much later. Lucy Chalmers disappeared before Elizabeth Short was born. The Black Dahlia was Elizabeth Short. She was not unknown. That’s another story, I’m certain. Lucy Chalmers just walked off a set one day and was never seen again. She was a troubled girl with a tumultuous marriage to cowboy actor Art Acord. But it was her tempestuous personality from which she built her great emotive skills. Built is not right. I don’t know what the right word is here.
“Drew?” offers a chair museum passerby.
Yes, drew. Then one day, she was gone. Right off the set. Never heard from again. Some say she was raped and left for dead in a wheat field. Some say she changed her name and married a midwestern life insurance salesman who raped her and left her for dead in a wheat field. There were other theories. Many more than these two. But the point is nobody knows. Was she a heroin addict? Nobody knows that, either. Nobody knows, and this adds to the intrigue and to the tragedy. If there was a tragedy. She might have simply left Hollywood, sick of what the business was eventually to become. She might have had precognitive flashes of Kaufman, of Nolan. Nobody knows, but in any event, her presence keeps me from immediately begging off on the film. After the naming of the doll, it reappears and is somehow slightly more nimble. The goose-step is now a sexier goose-step. There is perhaps a bit of hip in it. One is smitten.
And just like that, the memory ends. The docent is explaining that, in its original form, the word chair meant seat.