He was an angry man. Hollow inside with a crummy and rough exterior. Plus he had an unpleasant ambient stink to him, not just in the olfactory sense. An empty shell of what he once was, a passionate young thespian with big dreams. Those dreams, though, had long ago been conclusively dashed like a glass vase in a concrete storm drain. Broken shards of a wasted life.
He had once been a performer of considerable promise, until things went sideways and the promise forgotten. There was the clash with a play director, plus the late appearances naively thinking he was bigger than the show, he was not, followed by additional self-induced work-related mishaps that spoiled each subsequent opportunity. He regressed from there spreading much of the same in a sordid, oblique path from whence he had intended. His route had gone gritty, but he stuck with it, much like a gambling addict with no cash or credit to his name so he pawns his car keys because there's no self-control left in the tank. 'I've already gone too far, so why stop now?' went the errant thinking. A tribute to his self-destructive stubbornness completely on display in his current iteration. But not a tribute to his self-awareness as that remained vacant.
Tonight, though, at least he had work. Sadly, just another lost evening backstage in a poorly lit entertainment venue of ill repute. He stared into the streaked mirror of the dank, dirty dressing room applying his low-quality face make up over his ruddy semi-shaven cheeks. He was one in a troop, an acting group of sorts, and none of them was pleasant. Not even in the remotest sense. Not here while working, not on the outside when on their own, or while eating a sandwich or watching a ballgame with hot dog and beverage in hand. They were an unpleasant lot. Yet here they were, at hand to carry out their duties, final touches of preparation while awaiting the summoning.
This was nobody's aspiration, to end up like this. Theater of this sort hardly counted as theater at all. Each clown, however, had arrived at this point in their lives by their own crummy combination of buffoonish decisions. The lead clown and his long expired aspiration for classical theater. His wonderful stentorian voice and its early glowing premonitions. None of it to fruition. He’d spent years of his hopeful youth developing the voice, training and practicing. But not for this, the magnificent waste being dispensed with as if it were nothing more than so much ballast dunnage on a dangerously decrepit ship. It finally came to one lazy Saturday morning some years ago.
"Hey, bozo, you want a job. A children's party. They need a mime or some such bullshit. You want it? Because it looks like you need it."
"Sit and spin. I'm an actor, not a fucking mime," he replied with blind arrogance in his best Shakespearian theater voice.
"Awful proud for a guy who's a month late on rent, no job prospects and you haven't left the apartment in a week. Being a mime might be a step up."
He took the job, applied white face and mascara, then moped over to the furnished address. The paycheck was disappointing, but not as disappointing as his life had become. So, he accepted the next offer of the same. One degradation led to another and he ended up here. Live dinner theater performing jackassery like juggling and riding unicycles.
A loud voice from a microphone could be heard from behind the closed door coming from the entertainment arena. “Send in the clowns." Applause followed.
The door opened dramatically with a loud bang as it slammed into his dressing area. The acting troop was addressed by a cacophonously hostile voice. “Come on you idiots, it’s your time,” the message was demeaningly relayed.
They were clowns, not idiots. Well, yes, they were idiots, but they were clowns. An acting troop of clowns, of all the rotten things. In their younger years they had all wanted to be performers in some capacity, but hell, not like this. Yet, this is how it turned out for them, none of it as planned, all of it degrading. Each with their own story of wrong turns, poor decisions, foulings and soiled opportunities. They clung together preferring to sink together than sink alone, but they were all unmistakably on the descent.
Send in the clowns, was the instruction. Something about the beckoning. It bothered him, even more than the underling calling them idiots. Why couldn't they just say 'Bring in the clowns?' It rubbed him wrong and stoked his ample temper. They were the expendables. Nobody cared about them. Fact is, they barely cared about themselves or each other.
“All right men, let’s go,” said their clown chief jabbing a grimy finger into the chest of their caller as he walked out the door. Each clown issuing their own degenerative retribution as they passed.
“Idiots,” the caller spoke under his breathe after the last of them passed, careful to get in the last word without inspiring any further rebuttal.
A brief pause before they made their performance entrance. The clowns stood lining the entryway in the formation ingrained by the innumerable prior humiliations. They knew what was expected of them. There would be no generating of self-worth at the end of this performance. Like so many other nights' shows, a personal regression awaited the conclusion of the evening. So goes the option for those who are out of options. You end up with what’s offered you rather than building on something of your own design. Humiliation and indignity awaited, both to be absorbed in their entirety.
Then he raised his well-trained smile, but there was no good humor behind it, only professional subterfuge. There was purpose, the earning of a paycheck which would allow him to while away the balance of the night with a cheap bottle of hooch. And here came the clowns.
It was a theater in the round with a 5-foot wall circumnavigating the performing area. An avant-garde dining experience. Spectators, 50 or so, raised in a stadium-like seating arrangement as if overlooking a diminutive bullfighting ring. These patrons of the low-grade arts had dined, wined and been served dessert. Now came their emotional release. They were eerily silent as the clowns entered. Tension mounted.
The lighting was such that the clowns entered into a well lit center stage. The audience, though, was seated in the dark as if behind a one-way mirror, was the lighting so cleverly arranged. No movement could be detected in the shadows. As the clown chief commenced with the opening lines, a spoken word portion of the program, he was nailed in the belly with the first projectile. A water balloon. His outfit was soaked from the crotch and thighs. It always started like this. A single toss in the opening sequence of his spoken word. Then an audience pause as if to see what would happen next. He also paused, and looked out into the darkness unable to tell from whence the balloon had originated. At that vary moment multiple arms were cocked with balloons ready to toss, still held in check by the clown's probing and searching eyeballs. Then he started again, eyes still searching, but now, this time, it was too much. The deluge began. The humiliation. They took it. Standing in place, heads slightly bent downward to protect from direct hits to the face. The rage welled up in them, the clowns, but it would be suppressed. Suppressed due to their training and acceptance of their position, their caste. They would take it because they understood it was their obligation to take it.
The white face, mascara and rouge ran thick that night as the projectiles seemingly never stopped. The water balloons had been distributed, a dozen per person were included with the price of the meal. For a nominal fee, another dozen. One patron had paid the nominal fee for all attendees to be equipped with the additional dozen balloons. The missives would eventually stop. Depletion would win the night.
[Inspired by a record title at a used vinyl shop in Atwater Village, Send In the Clowns. It sounded haunting and I could not easily shake it from my head.]
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