In the spring of 1999, I took my duffle bag of belongings, my suburban street smarts, and my quarter-page curriculum vitae, and moved downstate to my sister’s place in Manhattan. I soon realized I couldn’t sofa-surf in her studio forever because she told me I couldn’t sofa-surf in her studio forever, so I unfurled the Village Voice and discovered the following ad: CLOWN seeking 4th rmmte, must like mangy cats & balloons, Bklyn, $210.
A guy named Kevin answered the phone and said to come at nine p.m. “The Clown” would be home by then and he was “the decision maker.” As directed, I got off the L-train a few stops into Brooklyn and followed the serpentine footprint of the BQE, the pothole-ridden elevated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I made my way to a listing building crisscrossed by a rusty fire escape. Buzzer 2F was cracked and did not work. I was starting to see why the rent here was less than half the going rate.
I backtracked to a payphone outside a Chinese restaurant and called. Kevin apologized profusely. They didn’t get many (or did he say any?) visitors and he’d forgotten about the busted bell. When I returned, Kevin greeted me. Gangly, with thinning blonde hair, he continued to apologize for my waste of a quarter. As we ascended the narrow, twisting staircase to the second floor, he said, “Watch out for the fifth step.” I looked down. There was no fifth step.
He rammed his shoulder into the apartment door, which scraped the ground as it opened inward seventy degrees. I followed him into the kitchen. The refrigerator wasn’t full-sized, the cabinets didn’t close completely, and the linoleum floor clung to my soles like flypaper. Mangy Cat, a British Shorthair, hissed before scampering down the hall.
Roommate number two came out in a white undershirt, checkered shorts, and brown slippers. He put Chinese takeout and a half-full forty-ounce into the fridge, saying, “Hi, I’m Sam.”
Kevin poured me water from the tap. I sipped the metallic-tinged liquid, no doubt carrying an element from one of those blank slots on the Periodic Table. Kevin did odd jobs for their slumlord, such as not fixing the front bell and not fixing step number five.
Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.
Enter: The Clown.
To be clear, he didn’t burst into the apartment on a unicycle as the full-blown pie-throwing type. Sure, his face still had blotches of red paint and, yeah, he was about six feet, big-boned, with shoulder-length, stringy black hair and late-80s-serial-killer-style glasses. But he also wore street clothes and New Balance sneakers. He had taken the subway, not a tiny car teeming with twenty other performers. He had a real name, too. His personality, though, screamed all-caps CLOWN.
“Hi, hi. Nice to meet you, nice to meet you,” he said in falsetto. He pumped my hand up and down, and then, using Kevin and Sam as props, introduced himself to each of them in the same frenetic way, until he’d looped his way back to me for another round of greetings. I laughed and must’ve clapped because he said, “Ah, my favorite sound. Applause, a standing ovation, all for me. I know you were already standing, but technically a standing-O.”
His granny cart was overflowing with costumes and the day’s newspapers. He parked it against the kitchen table and ducked into a bathroom I hadn’t noticed. I heard water splashing.
“Sorry I’m all sweaty. I just came back from a show,” he declared in that same high-pitched voice—his normal one, I realized—and then reappeared. Remnants of clown paint still clung to the corners of his mouth. “Mondays and Tuesdays are usually the weekends for clowns but today I did a singing telegram in Manhattan, a birthday in Brownsville, and magic in Jamaica.” He was peeling off clothing now, thankfully only down to his tee. “You know the old saying, A clown’s work is never done. But I love it, I really do. So what about you? What do you do?”
“Me?” I’d forgotten this was an interview. I was doing low-level admin work at one of the city’s oldest and most boring life insurance companies. “I’m temping. What do you do?”
The Clown chuckled. “A sense of humor and a job, that’s good because Min, the guy moving out, is always unemployed. So have you murdered anyone? This is me saving money by doing my own background check.”
“Yes, but only for hire, so I’ll definitely make rent.”
Another chuckle. “Good, good. What other questions, guys? This is Kevin and Sam. We’ve lived together eight years, but we’re not gay. Soon we’ll have the record for the longest-running trio living together that aren’t gay. Ha, ha. But there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I’m not making fun. Don’t be offended. I’m not homophobic. Are you offended? Don’t be offended. You’ve got a good sense of humor. Well, maybe we’ll take you in. These guys don’t make jokes.”
Despite Kevin’s apologetic looks and attempts to interject, there was no stopping The Clown, who continued to insist that he was neither gay nor homophobic, that there was nothing wrong with being gay and a lot wrong with being homophobic, and that they were on the verge of breaking the record for three non-gay, non-homophobic men sharing a flat.
On my tour, The Clown made sweeping gestures as he announced the name of each room. “Now batting for the Yankees, number two, The Bathroom,” he said theatrically. “Get it? Number two? The Bathroom? I could’ve also said number one.”
“This is for storage,” Kevin noted. He pointed to the wide entrance of a room off the kitchen that was blocked by old newspapers, costumes, pillowy garbage bags and cardboard boxes, broken furniture, and scattered lumber Sam had found under the BQE. I wasn’t sure about the technical difference between pack rats and hoarders, but I was almost certain that in this case, it really didn’t matter.
Sam removed the beer from the fridge and showed us his room, which housed even more rotted wood. He had no nails. No power tools. Not even a hammer. Just an incline of loose boards propped up against the walls of his room. A ramp to nowhere. Kevin’s small room had a non-working fireplace. My potential room, even tinier, had a tapestry in lieu of a door.
Each paid a bit less than the fourth because their names were on the lease and they had to put down deposits, Kevin told me. Pre-war buildings like this one were “exempt from providing heat,” so they relied on plug-in space heaters—though we couldn’t have a TV and heater running at the same time. The shower was temporarily off-limits until they could identify why it leaked into apartment 1F below.
The Clown’s voice drifted from across the hall: “You a Yanks fan? You like Derek Jeter? If so, you can move in tomorrow. I’m just kidding. I like the Yankees but you don’t have to, but seriously you can move in tomorrow if you want. We should go to a game sometime.”
I peered into his room, which was inundated with newspapers. “I can’t toss them until I’ve read them from cover to cover and most days on my commute, I buy a Post, a Daily News, and the Times,” he explained. One stack was topped with his corded phone and answering machine. Another had a thirteen-inch rabbit-eared television on its summit. The window was covered by a sheet attached by clothespins to a jump rope that, in turn, was attached to the wall by duct tape. The floor was a labyrinth of videotapes, capes, magic wands, more newspapers, a large Tweety Bird head pitched sideways, garbage bags of costumes, and half-deflated balloon animals. Along the interior wall stood a bunkbed. An actual bunkbed.
My eyes focused on the bottom bed. Unmade, with Star Wars sheets. In lieu of a blanket, a red and yellow chicken costume.
“When the weather gets hot, I’ll need an extra person to be a costume character,” The Clown said. “It’s good under-the-table money. What do you think?” He karate-chopped the air.
“What?” I was still transfixed by the chicken costume.
The Clown did another air chop and pointed to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle get-up. It hung headfirst over a chairback like a seasick sailor. “This summer, wanna get paid in cash and kick some ass?”
A few months into my new life with The Clown and Co., I was making it in New York. I wasn’t twirling and tossing my bonnet in the air à la Mary Tyler Moore, but I was subsisting. I had lunch friends at the life insurance company, my sister’s boyfriend let me stay in his place one weekend they were out of town and I watched cable TV, and I had earned four months’ rent by cycling through The Clown’s costume wardrobe and picking up spare jobs he was too busy to take.
One blazing Saturday in July, a gas station in Bedford-Stuyvesant had its grand opening. A four-hour gig. When I arrived in Bed-Stuy, Winnie the Pooh, Indiana Jones, and Tinky Winky were milling about. I reported to The Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show, who pointed at the costume at the bottom of my granny cart and told me to “go out and get heat stroke.” I put on Elmo, which retained warmth like a mink coat. Fortunately, all I had to do was stay in the shade, wave mutely, and distribute helium balloons. Sesame Street was Easy Street.
Two hours later, The Swedish Chef wanted me to strut up the perimeter and corral cars into the station while wearing the second outfit The Clown had loaned me: Tweety Bird. I was skeptical I’d inspire drivers to notice their low gas gauges, but I wasn’t earning a month’s rent in one day for my powers of logic. I changed costumes and kept my beak shut.
As a species, birds lean toward the aerodynamic, but Tweety’s cavernous cranium caught every slight gust of wind. And being in that headspace was like being inside an unfumigated crawlspace. As cars ignored me, I held tightly to a dozen mylar balloons. The wind picked up. It was difficult to see through the grill in the neck, but I noticed that the balloon strings were tangled together. My head wobbled.
I was starting to understand the truth in the old saying, a clown’s work is never done.
A pack of preteens approached. The ringleader asked for a balloon. I gave an imperceptible nod, afraid of decapitation. As the others caught up, I began the laborious process of liberating a balloon from the ribbon boondoggle.
Suddenly, he shouted, “Let’s kick Tweety’s ass!” and slapped my head. The others swarmed from all directions, punching and slapping. The tangle of balloons climbed toward the sky.
While my birdbrains got scrambled, I breached the Costume Character Code of Conduct, shouted, Hey, and swung my velvet talons at the boys. They doubled over with laughter and I double-timed it to the diesel pumps. I never again followed orders from a Muppet.
For $210 a month, I had to accept a certain level of discomfort. Claustrophobia (newspapers kept accruing). The rodent problem (Mangy Cat was incompetent). No working radiators (always illegal apparently). A medley of bugs (new species even). But how did cockroaches find their way into our fridge?
I was still trying to solve this mystery when the birthday of their ex-roommate, Min, rolled around at the end of the summer. The Clown tried to convince me it was my party too since my birthday had been six weeks earlier. However, the cake Kevin bought clearly stated, Happy Birthday, Min.
My friend Ross came. He lived—and still lives—on the Upper West Side. In those days, Brooklyn wasn’t cool. For a Manhattanite, crossing the East River was like crossing the River Styx. But Ross was curious from an anthropological standpoint. He’d heard about the non-stop talking and the chicken costume blanket. Ross didn’t come for cake. He came to see The Clown.
Ross and I met up after work and arrived together. There was something new in the kitchen. A full McDonald’s booth table, though the plastic was split and sooty. Sam had found it under the BQE. He put his Chinese takeout pail next to his beer on the counter and we helped him center the table.
Sam started talking about the suicide hotline he irregularly ran out of his bedroom and about his improv classes, but suddenly The Clown came out of his room and took center stage. First he did his frenetic hand-pumping bit. Then he bragged to Ross that he was the third-best clown in New York without divulging his metrics. While we waited for Min, The Clown began to drink. The more he drank, the more balloon animals he made for Ross. He lowered his voice to imitate the Yankees’ ancient public address announcer Bob Sheppard and made balloon poodles and showed us a video of the sketch he did on late-night television and made balloon giraffes and said things like, “Applause, a standing ovation, all for me,” and “Now batting, Derek Jeter,” and “Once you go Clown, you never go down.”
I’d never seen Ross so quietly ecstatic, listening to The Clown’s absurd digressions and receiving balloon animal after balloon animal. But Kevin was distraught. He stood over the cake with a butterknife. “Min promised he’d come, but the party was supposed to start at seven.” It was almost nine.
The Clown took the butterknife. “Let’s erase his name,” he offered cheerfully.
“No.” Kevin snatched the butterknife and stood over the cake for a moment. The knife hovered. Then he smeared out Min.
Later, as Ross and I were corralling balloon animals into a Hefty bag, he said, “What’s up with The Clown’s room. There’s no doorknob. Just a padlock.”
I had accepted this eccentricity along with everything else. My Overton window had shifted during my tenure as the fourth roommate who “must like mangy cats & balloons.” Nothing seemed out of the ordinary anymore.
Kevin handed Ross a balloon cat (“Derek Cheetah”) and said, “Sorry it was such a bittersweet night.”
I couldn’t respond. I saw a few roaches squeeze into Sam’s takeout carton. Their Trojan Horse was Sam’s moo shu chicken. I had cracked the case.
The rent was too good to be true. The week before Thanksgiving, I came home to an eviction notice on our door. We had three days to leave the premises.
According to Kevin, the fire department had been tipped off that there were too many occupants in our neighbors’ apartment. While the officers were there, they noticed our windows were obstructed by newspapers, lumber, and a polyvinyl chloride Tweety head. They entered our place and informed Kevin that we had “no means of egress.”
After an initial we’re-about-to-be-kicked-out freak-out period, Kevin, Sam, and I had an idea: if we cut a swath through the storage room junk and tossed out as much as possible, maybe the eviction order could be reversed.
Two hours into the disposal process, The Clown came home. He seemed more agitated about our plan than the possibility of being displaced. He took a thick stack of newspapers out of Kevin’s arms and said, “We can’t get rid of papers I haven’t read.”
The Clown set the papers on the kitchen table and rushed to his room. In his panic, it took him multiple tries to unlock it. He returned with a plug-in tape recorder and began recording: “Daily News, April 9, 1995. New York Post, March, no May 20, 1997.”
I was trying to widen the path in the storage room. Sam was somewhere under the BQE with a stack of nail-studded boards. Kevin was dragging garbage bags through the kitchen but stopped. “We’re going to be e-vic-ted.”
“I’ll look these ones up later at the library on microfiche,” The Clown said, crouching over the built-in microphone. “New York Post, February 24, 1997.”
Kevin clenched his jaw. Then he said, “The fire department also cited us because of this.” He pointed to the padlock on The Clown’s door. “We’ve lived here eight years, and you still shut your room like a gym locker.”
The Clown stopped the tape recorder. He looked at Kevin and then down at the papers. Then he looked me in the eye. “When you grow up with a mother who steals from you.” He finished the sentence with a shrug.
Kevin stood for an appropriate amount of time before continuing to drag out the garbage. The Clown stammered his way through recording the dates of two or three more papers before he pressed stop. I thought he might put his head down and collapse on the remaining stack.
He gave a little laugh. “This is crazy, right?”
The Clown had said so many things during our time together, about the Yankees, about how he didn’t have a driver’s license, about his years at clown college, about his much older ex-girlfriend who sometimes paid him to catsit, but he had never before spoken about family or about insanity. And there was never silence like this. He had never waited so long for an answer from me.
The previous night he had rerecorded his answering machine message: “If you’re looking for a clown, a magician, a mime, a singing telegram, a costume character, or if you just want to laugh….” He said his whole life, all he wanted to do was make people laugh. And he was good at it. More than good. Third best.
I couldn’t imagine the uncertainty that came from having an untrustworthy mother, but in that moment I did not have any comforting words for him. Instead, I picked up the nearest stack and he picked up his stack. We squeezed out the door and down the hallway stairs, skipping the fifth step from the bottom.
When New York’s Bravest returned, they cleared out the apartment across the hall. Eighteen Polish immigrants scattered into the frigid November streets. We never found out what became of them. The fire inspectors looked at our cleaner place and permitted us to stay on a contingency basis, which was fortunate because none of us had a contingency plan.
“Now, whenever I see a firefighter on the street, I run away like I’m an innocent Black man who’s seen the cops,” The Clown said a few days later, back to his normal self. “I’m not racist. I’m making a joke. You’re not going to laugh? No applause? No standing O?”
By the time FDNY circled back several months later for a reinspection, I had taken stock of my life. My career was nonexistent. I lived with a clown. My bedroom was a meat locker. And I had Precambrian insects in my icebox. It was time to go.
Through a kind co-worker, I found a two-bedroom in a four-floor walkup. My rent was double, but because I had been able to save up from all those under-the-table jobs, doable.
Eighteen months later, in the spring of 2001, the New York Yankees were coming off three straight World Series titles and The Clown was riding high. I was happy, too. I was out of the life insurance biz. My two-bedroom had a mouse in the couch, but a roach-free fridge. More importantly, I had a new girlfriend, Sara. Though she didn’t like baseball or clowns, she agreed to come with me to see the Yankees and to meet my infamous former roommate.
There are two behaviors The Clown exhibited that I have not yet addressed. One is that he stood extremely close. The other is that he spoke loudly. A potent one-two punch of spit and volume. From the moment he made Sara’s acquaintance, she was backpedaling and wiping moisture from her face.
Short bursts of Clown within the apartment were one thing, but the long-form version that roamed loose was another. “It’s my dream to marry a Yankees fan,” he told Sara, and proceeded to chat up every woman on our way to the upper deck. “Are you married?” If “no,” he dropped to one knee. If “yes,” then, “Do you have a sister?”
During the game when people cheered Charge! he cheered back, “Visa! Master Card! American Express!” He put his fist in the air and stood up, but his pants did not come with him. “I lost my belt,” he told the crowd, hiking up his pants and reknotting the jump rope he was using to keep them around his waist. “I lost my belt,” he repeated to Sara and me. We winced.
During a pitching change, The Clown leaned over and made a joke to the couple in front of us about having a “mixed marriage.” The husband was Black and the wife was white. “No, no,” clarified The Clown, spit shouting at them and pointing at their caps. “Because you’re a Yankees fan and she’s a Mets fan.”
They laughed, nervously.
“You have good taste. I’m a Yankees fan, too,” the Clown told the man. “The Yankees are like my wife and the Mets are more like a woman I sleep with sometimes.”
“What’s that mean?” asked their kid. Sara looked at me, wide-eyed. The family found new seats.
Charge! people cheered. “Diner’s Club!” cheered back The Clown. Another look from Sara.
We were trapped for the full nine innings. I needed to protect her, to protect fans with mixed marriages, to protect The Clown from himself. I distracted him by talking baseball. I asked about Kevin (finally repaired the front bell), Sam (still no hotline calls), the fridge roaches (moved out), Min (moved back in), and Mangy Cat (dead). The words didn’t matter. The score didn’t matter. I just needed to get us to the last out.
We were trapped longer than nine innings because after the game The Clown joined us on the southbound 4 train. He’d be with us for six stops before he transferred to the L—twenty-five minutes—but I wasn’t sure my relationship with Sara would make it to Union Square. She was done for the night. I was spent as well. Tired of running interference. Of being embarrassed. We were going on hour four with The Clown.
The postgame crowd was large, so we had to stand on the subway. The Clown jerked his big thumb at us and announced to everyone, “They’d never been to Yankee Stadium before.” Then he propositioned a female Yankees fan.
In the nosebleeds, it had been obvious that Sara and I were part of The Clown’s posse. We were sitting right next to him. But in the subway car, I realized people probably assumed we were another poor random couple he had targeted. That is, as long as I didn’t reel him in. As long as I didn’t think about his mother who stole from him. If I made a conscious choice to let him go.
A woman glanced at him and he launched into a story about the time he snuck into the 1996 World Series. When the man beside her looked up, he finished the story to him. One stop later, he imitated the stadium announcer to a pair of women. By the next stop, he was asking rhetorical questions about Joe Torre’s place in the pantheon of team managers. He continued bouncing around, talking at one person after another.
“This is the last time I go to a baseball game,” Sara whispered to me.
“Why?” I asked.
She giggled. I was pretty sure our relationship would make it after all.
On that last stretch, between Grand Central and Union Square, The Clown only gained in strength. He had a captive audience. He was talking louder and faster and higher, and his spit propelled even farther and at greater capacity as he propositioned women in pinstripes or asked about their sisters. There was no other conversation happening. As the train slowed, The Clown picked up his pace, swept into a mania about a possible fourth Yankees World Series. He tried, unsuccessfully, to lead people in Visa and Master Card cheers.
New Yorkers witness public weirdness on a level that non-New Yorkers cannot fathom. They are famously unfazed. Yet Sara and I were not the only ones exchanging glances. The car was packed, but people had given him an extra berth. He had done the impossible. The Clown had made New York uncomfortable.
We pulled into the Union Square station and the doors opened. Sara put her arm around my waist, and I leaned into her.
The Clown suddenly remembered us and waved as he exited backwards, still in mid-sentence. Sara and I gave weak smiles. It was the last time I would ever see him. He was talking into his hand, pretending to announce Derek Jeter to the plate.
Before the doors closed, spontaneous clapping erupted from the train car. In a split second, it became rowdy applause and whistling. The Clown brightened at his favorite sound: applause, a standing ovation, all for me.
The doors closed and his smile wavered. The sound was off. Way off. Like biting into a favorite fruit and finding it bruised. I saw it register in his eyes as people stamped their feet and we rolled away, abandoning him on that platform. Applause. A standing ovation. All for him.
Aaron Rabinowitz writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He won PRISM International’s Creative Nonfiction Contest and Meridian’s Short Prose Prize. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Grain, The Masters Review, Chautauqua, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. He also will water your plants when you are out of town.
Photo by: charlesdeluvio