IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me that Rainbow Sunshine might be traceable, but here she is. Her non-clowning name is Amber Hearst and she is a member of a sex-positive feminist clown collective called Circus Her-Kiss. They hail from Ann Arbor and clown for female-only audiences all around the Upper Midwest and parts of the Lower. Amber Hearst is a proud lesbian and the girlfriend of Dianne Elaine Padgett, also known as the clown Dazzle. I ponder my options. Rainbow Sunshine can still be mine, in the way that she has been, in the realm of fantasy. There exist online seventeen photos of her in various seductive poses and various stages of undress. With these tools, I can build on my fantasy interactions with her for years to come. Another possibility, however, is to engage my next-booth neighbor on this third day of the convention, perhaps begin with some casual clown-based chitchat, then a nonthreatening compliment on her makeup technique, sort of feel her out, and depending on her perceived interest, suggest we maybe grab a drink. If she agrees, I say it has to be directly after work, because I’ve got another commitment later that night, then suggest that to save time, she might want to keep her makeup on. Then take it from there.
I screw up my courage and speak to the clown woman. It turns out her name is Laurie and she once worked in a small traveling circus called something or other (I wasn’t really listening) until she grew too old for professional clowning. The careers of female clowns, just like gymnasts and ballerinas, are over by their early twenties. It is a grossly unfair, sexist double standard, that a male clown can work well into his eighties and is often paired with inappropriately young female clown spouses in the onstage clown romances. I commiserate with Laurie, who at thirty is still a reasonably attractive clown. This seems to buy me some points, and I invite her out for a drink after work. Immediately after work. She accepts.
“I feel a little embarrassed sitting in a bar in this makeup,” Laurie says.
“Don’t be silly. You’re the loveliest woman here. Clown or otherwise.”
“OK,” she says. “Thanks.”
“So, what kind of clown are you?”
“Was I, you mean.”
“Are you. I stand by your current clownfulness. I think the forced retirement of mature female clowns is a national disgrace.”
She smiles.
“Well, I am what is termed a juggling ingenue.”
“You juggle?”
“I do. I also excel at pratfalling and confetti bucketing.”
I discreetly adjust my penis.
“I do love clowns,” I say.
It’s testing the waters. There is plausible deniability if she were to take it the wrong way, which would be the right way.
“Do you?” she says.
I have no idea how she means that. The clown makeup makes it difficult to read subtlety of expression. She is forever smiling like a monster from hell.
“I do,” I say.
“Ugh,” she says. “I’m too old to be wearing this stupid makeup! I look pathetic.”
“No,” I say, casually and briefly touching her hand.
There is a silence.
“You live close to here?” she asks.
“My place is quite small.”
I don’t want to tell her I have no bed in case I am misreading the situation, but I need to get that information in. Sex in my sleeping chair is an unpleasant affair, I’d imagine.
“A studio?”
“A very small studio. I don’t even have room for a bed! Can you believe it? Now, that’s small!”
“Oh,” she says.
Is she disappointed? Repulsed by my poverty? Damn her monstrous, unreadable makeup. It puts me off my game.
“How about you?” I ask. “You live nearby?”
“West 50s floor-through. My parents help me with it, I’m embarrassed to say.”
She’s telling me my poverty is nothing of which to be ashamed.
“Nice,” I say. “Lovely to have parents.”
“Right?” she says and laughs.
I laugh. We sip our drinks in silence for an uncomfortable few minutes. Then we both laugh again. Then we both stop. It is an exceedingly odd moment.
“You want to see it?” she asks, finally.
“See what?” I say, still trying to avoid a misstep.
“Oh,” she says.
She seems hurt, although she is still smiling a big, red makeup smile. Did I kill this by pretending not to understand her invitation? I take the plunge.
“Oh, did you mean see your apartment?” I say.
“Um,” she says. “Y’know, I don’t know. I just thought you might be interested in seeing a prewar floor-through. If you like architecture, that is.”
“I’m not much of an architecture guy—”
Why did I say that? It just came out. I just didn’t want her to think I’m an architecture guy. I don’t know why that was important to me. I just wanted to seem regular. It was a mistake.
“Oh, OK,” she says.
“But, you know what?” I say. “I do love the West 50s.”
What does that even mean? What do I even mean? I hope she doesn’t ask.
“Oh, really?”
She seems excited. This is hopeful.
“Yeah, the West 50s is a great ten blocks!” she adds.
“It is,” I agree.
How will my obituary read? I ponder this as we make our way west. I imagine it often. Not only the obituary but the online praise in the form of tweets from folks in the film industry. The Rest in Powers, the cited snippets of profundity from my writings, mentions of my selflessness, my friendship, the times I brought soup or consoled the brokenhearted (I must remember to do some of that sometime), the teeth-gnashing about how I was too young, how I was “a critic’s critic.” I imagine myself trending. Just for a little while. Just for one day. I’m not greedy. There’s still much to do in this life to arrive at an acceptable trending number, but the discovery and elucidation of the work of Ingo Cutbirth will go a long way to that end. It will be a glorious day. They will be sorry I’ve gone while so many lesser and more evil white men continue to thrive in the film criticism industry. There are even some evil minority film critics, but I can’t say this out loud. I cannot wait to witness this outpouring of grief and love. Even though I will not be here to witness it, I still believe I will be here to witness it.
At Laurie’s apartment, which is disappointingly not in the least clown-themed, I am poured a glass of wine. It is white, which is, of course, wine for people who don’t like wine, but I don’t tell Laurie that. White is toy wine. It is wine for children. It is wine for imbeciles. She lights several candles and excuses herself to go change into something more comfortable.
“No need to take off the makeup on my account,” I say.
“What do you mean?” she says, turning in the doorway.
“What? Just that I’m fine with the makeup staying on is all.”
“You’re fine with it?”
“Yes. If you are, of course.”
“Oh dear. B., are you a…are you a clown fetishist?”
“What? No! Does such a thing even exist? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course not. That’s sick. I apologize for men in general, I’ll say that right now, if this is the kind of thing you’ve had to put up with, especially white men, of course—and I don’t mean clown-white men, ha ha—seriously, though, that’s disgusting. Really. And this is such a lovely apartment.”
“OK. My mistake. So I’ll be right back. Make yourself comfy.”
“Thanks.”
She exits into the bedroom, and I leave. What else is there to do?
I SIT AWAKE in my chair all night. What I did was wrong and perhaps even hurtful to Laurie the Clown. In some ways, I feel I neglected to see her as a human being, but instead saw her simply as an object, there for my sexual gratification. This goes against everything I stand for as a man, and as a feminist. I feel shame, so I attempt, in my guilt-drenched mind, to become a better person by confronting my demons. It is a dark night of the soul, as Francis Scott Key once sang. No, not Key, Fitzgerald—something is wrong with my mind—and he didn’t sing it, but instead wrote it, and besides, he was not even the person to have coined it. Credit for that must go to Saint John of the Cross, the discalced Carmelite who wrote the original poem. But whoever said it first, I am having one and that is the important thing at this juncture. “His shoes displaced, he became discalced” is a clever little bit I’ve been trying to work into a conversation for several decades now. It’s not really that good, as I hear it in my head again. In truth, I just want someone to know I know the word. Perhaps a think piece about the Discalced Contessa or Discalced in the Park or even Eight Men Out, where I can mention Discalced Joe Jackson. I scribble some thoughts onto my chair-side notepad:
Words to include in something:
Discalced
Chiaroscuro (this one should be simple!)
Facticity
Jactitation
Rarotongan
Opprobrious
My mind is a tornado of confused thought and emotions. I jactitate and worry I will never sleep again.
But I do. Almost immediately.
I wake up, unstrap myself, piss, stare out the window, then climb back into the chair to continue with my dark night of the souling. Why do I even find myself attracted to clowns? I do not as a rule enjoy clowns or clowning. I am philosophically in opposition to comedy of any kind. Some might counter that, well, don’t you love Apatow? But Apatow does not make comedies. Far from it. For comedy is, by its nature, cruel and dismissive. Humor looks only at appearance, at surface. It judges. It humiliates and shames. There is no kindness in comedy. It must have a victim, even if that victim is the self. Clowning embodies all the meanness of non-clowning but with the added offense of the physically grotesque.
And yet.
What is it I feel if I see a woman in that makeup? When I saw Rainbow Sunshine? When I saw Laurie the Clown? When I see the several naked female clowns I’m currently seeing online? I am that monster who can never fully understand itself: the white human male.
It pops into my head that I am also champing at the bit for an opportunity to properly pronounce piranha in a conversation. Peerrr-on-ya. It’s staggering how many people don’t know how to speak Portuguese.
More words I hope to properly pronounce in front of people:
Leerstelle
Flaneur
Cibosity
Nocebo
Shimpo
Trompe l’oeil
ON THE FINAL day of the clown convention, Clown Laurie’s booth remains shuttered. Perhaps she is staying away because of me. I do feel badly but at the same time am relieved. Life is easier without her here. A strange thing does transpire, however. Several women come up and talk to me about clown shoes. They are all in their thirties, I would say, and they all behave oddly. They ask questions about the shoes, but their attitudes are standoffish and angry. It occurs to me that any one of them might be Laurie sans makeup. After all, I don’t know what she looks like, and truth be told, I cannot even recall how she wore her hair. I believe she was a tad shorter than I, and maybe nine stone, give or take a pebble. It could be any of these women. If one of them is (or all of them are) Laurie, what game is she (are they) playing? A chill runs down my spine. Or is it up my spine? Perhaps I’d best hide outside of her prewar building and wait for her to emerge, so I can once and for all recognize her out of makeup. I noticed a laundromat across the street. So that will be helpful.
Barassini and Tsai are at their time-share, so back home, I sit in my sleep chair trying to summon the movie on my own, utilizing Barassini’s tape. Car horns. Sirens. The pings of the radiator. I insert earplugs, thus reducing the external noise and elevating the hiss of my tinnitus. Again, I try to summon. When I realize I cannot hear the tape with the earplugs in, I remove them. After a time, it comes. The opening shot: It’s snowing over the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The camera drifts lazily from screen right, searching for…No, wait. That is not the first scene. The first scene is the Galveston hurricane of 1900. A man fights the wind as he walks along the seawall in front of a perfectly replicated miniature of the Hotel Galvez. It’s comical as his top hat is repeatedly blown off. He chases it each time and each time redons it, only to have it immediately blown off again. This speaks volumes about class pretensions, even as the world around him is…No. This comes later because we already know this dandy is the father of the meteorologist, so how do we learn this? In a flashback? If so, this comes much, much later. Think!
It must be later, because it explains the meteorologist’s obsession with weather, as it is the Galveston hurricane that killed his father. A spectacular scene: It is impossible to fathom not only the skill necessary to animate such a violent storm but to manage the tonal shift as it moves seamlessly from the light comedy of the man chasing his hat to the brutality of the storm picking him up and carrying him, ass over teakettle, over Galveston, allowing the audience to see, from his now bird’s-eye point of view, the horrific devastation of the city below. It is unparalleled in all of cinema. That it ends with his now lifeless body dropped from the sky at the feet of his small son tells the audience, with nary a word, everything they need to know about the child’s obsessive drive to find order in the seeming chaos of the universe. So then how does the movie begin, and why am I confusing the chronology? I do remember it occurring early in the film. As did the birth of Molloy in a shack in the Pine Barrens. I remember the snowy sky raining infants, which smashed into the snow-covered ground, leaving smudges of brilliant crimson (but wasn’t it black and white?). There was also the St. Augustine Monster washing up on the shore of…what is the beach called? The boys on their bicycles. That was in the 1890s, so before Galveston. But that was not the first scene, either. There was the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876. Did that come first? All the various time-travel elements in the film make it complicated, perhaps even impossible, to determine a timeline. Perhaps there is no first, in that there is no beginning, in that there is always something before. If only I had access to the so-called “time window” invented by the meteorologist where he can predict precisely what happened and what will. Wait. Did he have a name? I cannot think of one instance in which anyone called him by name. Even when Sylvia finds that yellowed newspaper photo of him posing among all the other meteorologists, his name at the bottom is smudged. Ingo makes a point of showing that. Why is he nameless? And Jesus and a nameless ape / Collide and share the selfsame shape / That nocht terrestrial can escape? So wrote Hugh MacDiarmid in what is perhaps the most influential poem of my Weltanschauung. Is the meteorologist a Nameless Ape? Is that what Ingo is telling us? Does his gift of prophecy come from the Christian Son of God, rather than that simple (or, rather, complex) technology?