Send in the Clowns

Fair warning: you’re never going to look at clowns the same after this.

I’ve been having nightmares about clowns, and it’s probably karma. 

My son, Sam, saw his first clown at a backyard birthday party when he was two. When Sam walked into the backyard, he immediately fixed his gaze on the creepy, face-painted bastard—in its polka-dotted jumpsuit with its fire engine red tufts of hair—as it twisted balloons into something vaguely resembling woodland creatures from hell. 

Sam had never seen a clown in person before, as far as we knew, and his response was both automatic and reasonable. He saw the clown, he screamed, and he turned and ran like he was a prey animal. Textbook response to a clown encounter. 

I met a guy once who was in the Special Forces, and when he went out to eat, he always sat, back against a wall, with all exits in view. “The training becomes part of you,” he told me. Well, Sam did not have elite Special Forces situational awareness training. Still, he instinctively spent the rest of the birthday party maximizing the distance between himself and that soul-sucking clown, his eyes darting away only occasionally to make sure his escape routes were still viable.

This is Sam’s focus (and paranoia) whenever a clown is within a quarter mile.

His fear of clowns is more intense than mine ever was, but I get it. It’s the white face paint that’s most unnerving. It’s pallid and ghostly, a caricature of death. A clown practically winks while it pretends to be fun and goofy, seducing you with magic tricks and shenanigans so that it can plunge a silly straw into your heart and guzzle your lifeforce. 

You’d think this kind of empathy for my son’s fear would have prevented what I’m about to tell you, but, man, exhaustion and sleep deprivation can do a number. A few months after my son’s first clown encounter, he started crawling out of his crib at night. He refused to sleep. 

Every night was an hours-long battle of wills between Sam, my wife, and me, and he was handing us our asses. We tried reading, back rubs, and white noise. We played Enya on a loop. We provided nightlights, special blankets, and so many stuffed animals that I began to think the friggin’ things were fornicating. 

One night I snapped. “Sam,” I said, “if you don’t go to sleep, I’m hiring a clown to babysit you.” 

That got his attention, but he tried to call bullshit. “You don’t know any clowns.” He was right, I didn’t know any clowns. But I did know how to download a clown picture, pair it with the contact image for one of my actor friends, whom I renamed “Gizzards the Clown,” and use it to support my clown babysitter claim. 

No comment.

We slept well the next three nights. At least, my wife and I did. Not sure how Sam slept. (A few days later, Sam started climbing out of his crib again. Apparently, hanging out with us superseded any clown fears that possessed him.) 

To be clear, I’m not proud of this moment. I rate it somewhere near the bottom of my paternal lowlights, and I’m pretty sure I’m currently paying for that sin. I’ve been having the same nightmare about clowns the last few months. Not every night but every so often when my life starts feeling rough around the edges. 

It goes like this. I’m at a circus and a clown car putters out to the center ring. An army of clowns start exiting and lining up shoulder to shoulder. The ringmaster says that every clown has to pass a physical before the show can go on, and for some horrific reason, the ringmaster orders me to check all the clowns for hernias. And for an even more horrific reason, I obey the order. 

Suddenly, and instantly, all the clowns are naked from the waist down, and for some reason, they all have male genitals—testicles and penises a-swinging.  

Generally speaking—and I think we can all agree on this— testicles are hideous in the best-case scenario. Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Elvis Presley, Luis Guzman—not one set of aesthetically pleasing danglers among them, and certainly these men are the pinnacle of the modern male form. Now imagine sub-par huevos slathered in white grease paint, some of them polka-dotted, all of them accessorized with tufts of hair the color of fresh jelly beans. 

Each clown stands opposite me, waiting for the hernia check. My wife, being a woman, was unaware of the hernia check protocol when I shared the details of this dream. If, like my wife, you’ve never had to endure the indignity of a hernia check, all you need to know is that a doctor puts pressure on the clackers and asks the patient to cough. Something about the cough makes the hernia easier to detect. But I digress…

Here’s hopin’.

So I’m standing opposite this never ending line of half-naked clowns, I snap on a rubber glove, and I don’t even have to say “Cough” to the first clown. His balls honk like a horn as soon as I touch them, and then he laughs, but there’s no sound. He steps aside, and the next clown slides over. Honk! Silent laughter. He steps aside. The next clown slides over… And half-naked clowns keep exiting the clown car and getting in line. 

The storyteller in me is always looking for meaning. I imagine there’s something here about vulnerability or hidden pain or the disconnect between the internal and the external. But everytime I’m close to a satisfactory interpretation, I just hear the honk of a horn. Anyhow, I’m going to therapy next week. 

---

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read more about parenting misadventures, consider reading Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet, where I gloriously succeed and miserably fail to inspire my children’s imagination. Or Are you there, Judy Blume? It's me, Norm. in which the birds and the bees arrive much too early for my liking, and they come by way of Judy Friggin’ Blume. Or A Spicy Alternative to Antidepressants, where I, again, wrestle with demons in a not entirely un-clownish way. Or, if you want to try something different than I normally deliver here, consider reading my new dark crime comedy novella, Dig, which you can get on Amazon for less than a buck. And if you enjoyed any of this…

Or maybe…

Finally, have a great week and look for reasons to laugh!