En Streng av Perler: Clown Alley Gets Religion!

My mother was Catholic. My father venerated Micky Spillane. He would drive mom and us kids to Saint Lawrence Catholic Church for Mass on Sunday mornings, and then stay in the car smoking and reading Micky Spillane paperbacks until we came out. He didn't care one way or the other about his wife's religion, as long as he could follow the adventures of Mike Hammer making out with some blonde bimbo while plugging away at the bad guys.

After my First Communion I dropped the Catholic faith; I was leaning towards my dad's disinterest while hiding a deep yearning for mystical experiences. When I joined Ringling Brothers at age 18 as a clown the only dogma I followed was "Anything for a laugh."  My first week on the show I ran a rope six inches above the ground across the track just as all the showgirls came traipsing by -- they fell over it like bowling pins. I got my laugh from the audience. I also got the eternal hatred of most of the showgirls that season, and my first of many stern warnings from Performance Director Charlie Baumann:

"Dun't do dat kind uf schtuff again, funnyman" he growled at me in his thick Teutonic accent. He was also the tiger trainer, and always carried his whip with him while working -- after delivering his grim warning he flourished it above my head in a figure 8 pattern. I looked properly chastened, but when he turned his tuxedoed back on me I gave him a silent raspberry.

As I got to know the thirty-odd clowns in the alley that first season I noticed that only one ever bothered to go to church on Sunday. That was Tim Holst, nicknamed Bear for his roly-poly contours, who was a Mormon.

Everybody knew Mormons were wet blankets and closet satyrs. But one day he said "Hi Tork" to me and offered to split his smoked turkey leg from Winn-Dixie with me. A few days later the Elders showed up at the train car to tell me about something called The Plan of Happiness. I liked it, and asked Bear to baptize me on New Year's Day, 1972.

My conversion went unnoticed in clown alley. "Live and let live" was standard operating procedure for a group of thirty men tasked with creating chaos in the ring while trying to maintain some kind of sanity outside of it. There were Jews like Prince Paul and Murray Horowitz; Catholics like Lazlo Donnert and Kockmanski; Protestants like Don Washburn and Swede Johnson; Baptists like Boss Clown Levoi Hipps; and now there were two Mormon First of Mays added to the mix. So what? Everyone kept busy combing out their fright wigs and reinforcing their galluses with Velcro, and minded their own business.

Until, that is, Tinny got religion in a big way and tried to shove it down the throat of Spike and the rest of clown alley.

Tinny and Spike had been boon companions, roistering until the pearly dawn and pursuing carnal adventures best left to the pages of Hustler magazine. Their language was peppered with profane obscenities that would curdle the pointed ears of Lucifer himself. They were abandoned sinners, and proud of it.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Tinny stumbled into a tented revival meeting during a lull in his nightly debauch, sans Spike, who was hot in pursuit of a solitary trollop. Something in what the itinerant preacher said broke through Tinny's hardened heart and touched him deeply. He knelt before the pine board altar that night and committed himself to a new and clean way of living.

Spike was disgusted with his friend's decision, refusing to listen to him and his 'pablum'. But Tinny was now concerned not just for his own immortal soul but for Spike's, and for everyone's in clown alley.

Tinny became a pest.

He read out loud from the Bible while we put on our makeup for come in. He kept asking each of us if we had been saved. To which Dougie Ashton replied "No, but I been recycled." Tinny passed out pamphlets and knelt next to his wardrobe trunk in deep but not quiet prayer for our misguided souls.

Finally Spike had enough; one afternoon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as Tinny began to preach about the laying on of hands, Spike shot up from his folding chair with a pious shriek to announce he had just been "saved". He then went from clown to clown to lay his hands on the top of each head, bellowing the whole time "You are HEALED, sinner!" Prince Paul called him a schmuck and threw his mirror at him. Tinny did not take the satire kindly; he launched himself at Spike, and in a trice clown alley was transformed into a scuffling and cursing scene not far from Dante's Inferno.

Bear and I and Swede managed to bail out just as Baumann came roaring down upon the brawling clowns like an avalanche. He knocked heads together, flicked his whip none too carefully, and finally restored a semblance of peace and order. Everyone was fined ten dollars for fighting. Tinny and Spike were rusticated back to Winter Quarters in Venice, Florida, for a week, to meditate upon their folly. This was a not uncommon practice when personal issues between clowns threatened the quiet and dignity of clown alley. They had to pay their own way and got no salary for a week; it usually persuaded the feuding parties to kiss and make up.

A week later Spike showed up in clown alley, fresh as a daisy and completely unrepentant. When asked what had become of Tinny he replied with relish that the pious fraud had gotten drunk down at the Myakka Bar (a notorious dive in Venice that catered exclusively to cutthroats and white slavers). Tinny had tried to burn down the bar when they cut him off, and was now cooling his heels for sixty days in the county clink in Sarasota.

Tinny eventually rejoined clown alley, hollow-eyed and silent. He no longer tried to spread the good word, but neither did he rejoin Spike in his wicked ways. We didn't exactly welcome him back with open arms, but neither did anyone razz him about his previous religious mania. Not even Spike. Live and let live. The prop boxes needed repainting and a dozen new foam rubber animals needed to be carved for use in the clown car gag. Salvation could wait until the off season.