You bent-dicked wank-stain, do you hear me? “I hear you!” But I don’t understand him. I don’t have my nonsense net on hand. Do not make a mockery of this. “I’d never do that!” I shake my head as earnestly as possible, but people still laugh at me. This is serious. Take this seriously. So, if you mean it, say it like you mean it. I’m screaming that I mean it. “I’m a sex and love addict!” You’re a what? What the fuck’s that mean? “I love love like Charlie Sheen loves cocaine; it’s a problem.” Oof. Too witty! “But I know love—obviously, I do if I’m an addict—so who better to teach you how to make love and make love and touch love and find love and taste love other than an addict?” That’s ridiculous. That’s really bad. “I know the tricks ‘uh the trade.” What tricks are there? “First thing’s first: finger show. Show your Boo Boo what your fingers can do...do.” I wiggle my finger like I’m giving an EDM light show. I hear chuckles from the auditorium. What the hell are you talking about? “Love! It’s in the air. It’s everywhere. I can smell it. I’m like a bear—I can smell their periods. I’m like a bee. I can sense the pheromones.” Take off the nose.

I take off the red clown nose.

“Dillon, that was a disaster.” My heart thumps like canon fire, a 21-gun salute to the death of my ego.

With the nose comes an innocence and sincerity that devolves aggravation into confusion and panic; without the nose, reality returns, a barrage of eyes, whispers, worry, and hindsight.

My cheeks could iron a shirt; the heat in my head lightens my thoughts until they float away altogether, intellect gone AWOL. Simultaneously, I’m immobile, an immense weight anchoring me to the stage. I’m being drawn and quartered by my own debacle.

“You’re trying too fucking hard. Clowns aren’t that cunning. You can’t preplan a joke. This nose is a mask. When you’re wearing a happy mask, you don’t need to smile. It’s already smiling for you. When the nose is on, you don’t need to do anything extra—just be what the nose makes of you. That’ll be good enough.”

“I know—”

“But you don’t, so I’m telling you,” interjects Nigel.

“I’m trying.”

“Clearly...Too fucking hard.”

When Kitty broke up with me, she said, you’re an inept lover, who can’t get enough of it, but I’ve had enough. Entering my closet, she dragged out my safe. I’m taking my safe back. She dumped its contents on my floor—a wad of cash, a hard drive, a baggie of weed, and a red plastic clown nose, shaped like a cherry, with two holes for breathing on the bottom side and an elastic band that goes over the ears.

After Kitty lugged away the weighty safe, bumping into every wall on her way out of my house—and out of my life—the entire energy in my room shifted hues. The shadows grew blacker; the yellow glow of my incandescent light bulbs dimmed to an eerie streetlight orange; a cloud eclipsed the moonlight streaming in through my open window, but, dammit it all, was Kitty’s British accent sexy! It didn’t matter one god-damned bit what she said; her voice was velveteen music. Unfortunately, however, that night, the music had a sad melody, and so I took off my clothes, underwear and all, popped on my clown nose, slid under my covers and cried. Despite my tears, I was under the impression that vocal exoticism could soften any blow, from you have cancer to you’re fired. However, after one month of clown class with the equally British Nigel, that impression faded.

Every word those crooked teeth click at me flattens the disks in my spine until I’m compressed to the floor in a puddle of sweat and piss. Fear, admiration, and “daddy problems” are the foundation of my verging-on-psychotic desire to please this master clown, Nigel. From the moment I met him, I wanted Nigel to believe in and value my talent, but the more I fail under his watchful eye, the deeper I dig my own grave, the stiffer my on-stage rigor mortis becomes. The harder I clown, the quicker I bomb, which opens the void beneath the stage like a trapdoor that swallows me into its idealess abyss of utter stage fright paralysis. Sleepless nights of paranoia. Waking nightmares. Public shame. Every time I laugh—or induce laughter in others—my joy’s quickly overwhelmed by critical self-examination and an obsession with recreating that moment.

 
Per usual, I’m the first to arrive. The theatre’s two hundred seat auditorium is quiet, and my footsteps echo as I walk across the empty stage. I hop down and into the audience, where I set my bag on a seat and begin assembling my clown. First, the shoes. My clown wears Uggs, basic beige, fluffy on the inside. Then, the pants. No pants for my clown—all leg. Next, the top. I shimmy into my Clint Eastwood poncho. Between where the poncho ends and the Uggs begin, I show off my legs, hairy, unworked-out, thin and boney. Finally, the hair. Some clowns wear hats or do clever hairdos, but I simply skip one step in my morning routine, a tedious coiffure that conceals my bald spot with a brown powder product that makes my scalp itch. In clown, I wear the shiny skin circle on the crown of my head like a kippah, with pride, like a good mensch should. It’s a funny aesthetic, and my scalp doesn’t itch, so clown class is a win-win for male pattern baldness. At last, the nose. I pull the elastic string over the back of my small head and settle it just above my ears. I secure the nose with a wiggle and suddenly, very subtly, I am my clown. My eyes widen, I smile through the pain, stand erect, crane my neck back, and push out my pelvis.

When the nose goes on, I am gone. Now, I’m a clown, a particular clown that is the manifestation of my anxieties about clowning specifically. It can be funny to try too hard, but trying too hard to try hard? There’s a line to be drawn somewhere, and I’m desperately hunting down that line. Nigel says clowning is synonymous with failing, but, in clown, there is a right and a wrong way to fail, and I feel like I’ve failed Nigel by failing to fail correctly.

Nigel swings open the auditorium door. I pull off my nose to greet him as myself.

“Hey, guy.”

Usually, Nigel starts conversations with some wit, some discharge of welled-up comedic genius, but today all I get’s an unenthusiastic Hello. His shirt’s unevenly buttoned, his pants have grease stains around the knees, and his hair’s done—or undone, like a maestro piano composer. His face’s puffy and standing still appears to dizzy him. As if a time bomb is about to detonate, Nigel digs, frantically, through his bag for a red nose and quickly pops it on. His disheveled manner takes on new meaning. The nose has zapped him with life, like Frankenstein’s...Clown. He’s now awake, exuberant, reactive.

“Let’s skart shall be?” he asks. In class, the clown he embodies is the ringleader. His word is law; if he tells you to shut up, you shut up; if he tells you to crawl, you crawl; if he tells you to cry, you better damn well try. Nigel clasps my shoulder—he smells a bit like booze.

“Class doesn’t start until—” I begin to respond.

“What’s some extra prasticks between strudent and treacher? Good be could for you.” The ringleader’s got vocal dyslexia; it’s charming. I comply. When the ringleader suggests, it’s a command.

I slap on my nose and ascend the stage. I was going to have to noodle. To noodle is to wriggle and writhe on stage in the painstaking glare of a critical audience until an “angel” passes by and graces one with an opportunity to do something funny, and if it is funny, they’ve successful followed the noodle to a big juicy comedic meatball. “To noodle” can be compared to “to die.”

My clown’s squirrely, so immediately I’m engaged in the I’ve-gotta-to-pee dance. Nigel tells me that the theme for my noodle is—he arranges random words into a sentence—why here, why not there? I freeze. Of course I freeze; part of noodling is nothing-ing. Do nothing. Something will save me. God will save me. God is good. But is God real? These thoughts of God could be the impetus I need! I allow my face to reveal the immense struggle in my mind. God Gods God, heaven, stars, religion, worship, priest, pope, Good God, Bad God, Jesus, God, prayer, monarchy, king, queen, prince, crown, God, crown crow crown! The crown of my head, the chakra center connected to spirituality and God tingled—no it itched. An itch is an angel. It had come; the angel had passed over me.

“Whyyy here!” I exclaim while lifting my shirt to reveal my thicket of chest hair, “Why not there?” I spin around and point directly at the itch on the crown of my head, dead-center of my bald spot. Nigel snorts. For a moment, I assume his snort’s mocking me, but I turn back around just in time to see him compose himself after a hearty laugh. He removes his nose. Well done! “Well done?” Yes, that’s what I said. “I’m not your waiter, sir,” I say, earnestly. I get him again. He chuckles and shakes his head. That shouldn’t be funny, but yet and for it is. What do you do for a living Mr... “I don’t have a name.” My clown hasn’t discovered his name yet. A clown’s name is its only title, no Mr. or Dr. or Sir or Majesty—just the name to epitomize all of a clown’s essence. Is this a rite of passage, to discover my clown name with my mentor? Does this mean I’m worthy?

“I’m Dan-ish.” Dan-ish? “Yes, a little Dan, a little ish.” Where are you from Dan-ish? “Holland!” Dan-ish is Danish then? I wink at Nigel and bite my lip. “Ow.” I bit too hard. Nigel acknowledges my reactiveness to stimuli with a nod. A clown should never ignore pain or mishaps. What do you do Dan-ish. “I’m a singer.” Oh, what do you sing? “Hymns and... K-pop.” What else do you do? “Duh, uh, well, archery, duh!” Nigel snorts more. He hadn’t seen archery coming. Archery? Wow, show me archery? I mime a bow and arrow, set the arrow, draw the string, and aim. “Fuck you, Cow.” I let an arrow soar into an imaginary cow. “Fuck you, Chicken. Fuck you, Kitty.” You killed a cat? Nigel asks, incredulously, but mostly entertained. “No, Kitty’s my girlfriend.” Three for three—I’d nailed it. “Wait, I lied, she’s my ex-girlfriend.” Thank you for telling the truth. She didn’t want to stay with me, and that makes sense, because I don’t even want to stay with me. Do you have any tricks, Dan-ish? “Tricks? Yeah, I got tricks. See there’s uh, nothing up my sleeves—I don’t have sleeves, shhh. So for my feat, I will—with the sheer force of my will—uh-huh, remove my...depression. Watch me now!” Other students begin to file through the theatre doors. We’ll watch that later. Good Dan-ish—very nice. Nose up. I comply. Nigel’s still cracking up. See how that works? You let your impulses take over. Really good. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Throughout class, I continuously fall short of funny, but my preclass success has left me smiling ear to ear.

Nigel’s only a tyrant in his attempt to bring to fruition all one’s potential. He loves his students and wants them to thrive. In Buddhism, a teacher is all-knowing. Anything the teacher demands of the student—however irrational—is an integral cog in the machine towards enlightenment. Every hurtful quip and embarrassing task Nigel hollers is for the good of my developing clown. Faith in one’s teacher is paramount, so I’ll take whatever he dishes out and follow his directions even if they lead to an X marks the spot that drives me off of a cliff. He’d known all the right things to say today. Every line was bait and hook, spoken for the purpose of pulling, from me, more and more of who my clown is and the logic he lives by.

Now that I’ve seen my potential, however, my anxiety quotient’s growing tenfold. I have a reputation to uphold. How can I repeat the genius I left on stage? There’s no point in preplanning; Nigel recognizes when something has been prepared. Must I revert back to failing and flailing and falling, or will instinct take the wheel again? It certainly didn’t during class. I cannot let Nigel down.

It’s not easy to fall asleep when there’s no practical way to work on being funny. That persistent be funnier repeats itself like a mantra behind closed eyelids, but doesn’t really accomplish anything. I need to go for a walk, to clear my mind, to remember what being a clown’s all about. The only means of practicing clown is deep understanding of a clown’s purpose: to reflect the parts of humanity we shy away from. A clown’s job is to reveal that mask-wearer’s fears, insecurities, or secrets in an improvised—that means unscripted—comedic performance. Nothing’s more nude than a clown.

On my walk, I see many clowns in their natural habitats. Despite an absence of red noses, the world’s full of clowns. I wonder if the man knows that coughing while he graffities an alleyway’s comedic irony, or if the woman sitting outside a cafeì understands that checking her bill, double-checking her bill, putting on glasses to check the bill, then switching to a different pair of glasses to check the bill is a classic bit. Does the homeless guy sitting crisscross applesauce watching television through a shop window realize he’s the paragon of innocence and unawareness that all clowns must cultivate? Does the man holding a woman’s head against a brick wall while he shoves his hand up her dress realize physical comedy happens in threes?

The woman’s crying. I stand not five feet from this scene. The man’s breathing hard down her neck. Occasionally, he shushes to quiet her. It quiets me more so. Does the busker on the corner not notice? Is no one going to stop this? I’m being drawn and quartered again. I’m no hero. I’m just a guy. I’m scarcely a clown. I’m really no one of importance. Why can’t Christ intervene? I went to church on Easter. Help me out, Christ. Do your fucking job.

“Stop.” The most pathetic gargled hoarse version of that word jumps ship before I can stop it. The man listens. He keeps his back to me.

“Fuck off.” Man, that British dialect’s really quite scathing. People say “Fuck off” all the time, but when someone means it, you know.

“No, man. I mean...you fuck off.” He pivots. Nigel looks me up and down. His head’s dipped low, and his eyes look up his forehead at me. He’s not very lucid. His eyes are red, and his glare lands nowhere in particular.

“Dillon.”

“Nigel.” The word pounds in my head. What lesson is teacher teaching? Nigel Nigel Nigel, my mentor, a father, my idol, a clown, more than anything, a man, like me, with a past and a story and family and friends, but a man like me, nonetheless, and nevertheless committing acts of horror I can put an end to if I separate my lips or separate the demon from teacher, but I cannot commit this act of separation, I cannot leave him, for I don’t know this story—this could be anything—a game, a bit, stage combat, hell, maybe they’re just kinking around, and this is how they get their groove on, but something in me cannot act. Maybe he’s right, the man I want to be. Maybe she deserves it, and he’s right, maybe this is one of my tests—a test of clown sensibility, to find humor in horror, and so find it I will, find it I will, because I can’t imagine I’m perceiving correctly right now, right now between a man and a man is a woman, a frail scared woman with straight black hair.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, my wife. Always trying to drive drunk. Just getting us in a taxi.”

“Ok,” I say. I stand there, staring at my idol, who no longer glows, but seems to eat the colors around him like a black hole.

“Goodnight, then,” says Nigel turning towards the street, hailing a taxi.

“Night,” I whisper. I cannot imagine speaking in more than whisper ever again. My poor mother. She raised me better. She, a singular she, raised me so much better. I should know better than to worship a Golden Calf, a pyrite calf, a sick serial swine. How can I ever use the voice given to me by a monster? Nigel opened my mind and cracked my shell. Together, we found my voice, but that voice is now a fallacy, but not using it makes me just as monstrous and he is, but opposing him means losing him, but I don’t need his guidance, but he was so good to me, but he was abusive in his approach, but how could I ever look him in the eye, see my reflection, and not spit at the both of us?

I return home. I take off my clothes. I light a candle. I watch the flame cling to wick. I can see the shadows from the flickering flame on my cheekbone. In the flame, I place my clown nose, which melts into and melds with the candle wax. I dip my finger into the hot liquid plastic. It burns, and it should.