The Death of Otto

Clowns are not supposed to die. They get walloped with mallets and blown up with large red sticks of dynamite, but they’re supposed to just run around after the fatal blow and then wave merrily at the crowd.

It’s not right when a clown dies. Or when love dies. Or a child dies.

When the Ringling Blue Unit played Madison Square Garden that spring of 1972 Otto Griebling played pinochle between shows with Chico; he supplied us with light bulbs for our roomettes on the train by stealthily appropriating them from obscure corners of the Garden; he drank a beer between shows each day; he doused himself with Lilac Vegetal so the crowds would know he was playing a hobo, not actually being one.

His voice lost to throat cancer, he was the Shakespeare of mime; his dumpy face encompassed the vasty deep and played to those secret ligaments that reach past the heart into the void of human expectations. As we settled into the Garden, finding baby rats hatched in our clown trunks and paying protection money to the Teamsters to keep our clown props from disappearing, Otto’s silent scenarios grew funnier and more poignant. His frail attempts to balance a spinning plate on a stick grew to symbolize mankind's giddy efforts to find stability where none existed. Out in the audience he sluggishly polished a railing until he ran up against a pretty girl. His dramatic and instantaneous crush on her was ludicrously pathetic. As he bent over for a kiss he represented every lovesick novice in the world, and when the girl inevitably broke into hysterical peals of laughter at his approach his visible disappointment, and then wrath, were wondrous to behold. Straightening up while pulling the lapels of his ragged coat down, he summarily swatted the girl with his rag and wearily stumped away, to begin polishing and searching all over again. As the days went by at the Garden, Otto stayed out in the audience longer and longer playing out these serio-comic scenes.  

Then one morning he was gone. His trunk was closed and locked. Even the sample piece of shag rug he kept in front of it to rest his bunioned feet between shows had been put away.

Where did he go? We asked LeVoi Hipps. He didn’t know. We asked Prince Paul and Swede Johnson. They couldn’t tell, either. When Charlie Baumann came in to give the ten minute warning prior to come in, he stopped briefly by the doorway to say that Otto was at the Lenox Hill Hospital for a checkup and would be back in a few days.

But in a few days he was dead, not coming back to clown alley. His was the first death in my young life that tore at my immature heart. I didn’t want him to go away; I needed him to further study the subtleties of slapstick. For there is such a thing, not just Three Stooges hooliganism and violence. I wanted so very much to learn how he rigged his derby hat so when he threw it out into the crowded arena it would come sailing back to him like a boomerang. You can see Harold Lloyd do the same trick in his movie ‘The Milky Way’. But I never learned how it was done, and nobody in the alley knew the secret, so it went away with Otto.

Then the years began to take away my other clown friends. Prince Paul was sent to a nursing home in Sarasota, where all he did was run around the dining hall counterclockwise, like he did during Spec. Mark Anthony came down with tuberculosis, moved to California, and died living in a friend’s garage. Tim Holst, after ascending to the top of what D’Israeli called the “Greasy Pole” as Vice President of Talent for Ringling, died suddenly and peacefully while watching a basketball game in a hotel room in Brazil. The list grew longer every year, until I wanted to cry out like Job’s servant: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”  

And then one day my little clowny boy, who was named after my great benefactor Irvin Feld, and my great friend Tim Holst, and who loved to dress up like a clown for Halloween to please his dad -- just before his eighth birthday, he, too, left me, and left my wife, after falling into a diabetic coma. We didn’t even know he had diabetes until it was too late. I put away the striped clown pants my mother had made for him for next Halloween. She would never make anything for our other kids, but for funny face Irvin she worked on her Singer despite her arthritis. Now there would never be another trick or treat for little Irvin Holst Torkildson. He sleeps away the time in a tiny plot in Pleasant Grove here in Utah, until the Trumpet blows or the Clown Car comes for him.  

The questions of Jesus:

Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

Hardwired and conservative, I’ve let tradition rule

My life until I’ve grown as stubborn as a hinny mule.

I do not question all the ruts I’ve dug in years gone by.

My passion for minutiae is now cold and hard and dry.

But then the Great Disruptor tells me all my mint and rue

Are tithed in vain if I do not my habits all review.

How hard it is to change my course upon this broad new sea;

Oh Lord please make me unafraid to face thy novelty!