Kochmanski Rides Again

During rehearsals of the Ringling Blue Unit show for 1972 I took to wearing my wrist watch around my ankle. The reason is not complicated nor eccentric. The faux leather watchband expanded in the torrid Florida humidity until it flopped around on my skinny wrist and kept falling off. So I put it around my ankle, where it stayed snug as a bug in a rug. When I wanted to know the time I simply lifted my knee and looked down at my exposed ankle.

Kochmanski, the Polish clown, took advantage of my unusual circumstance, waiting patiently by my side until somebody in the vicinity asked “What time is it?” He immediately pounced on my ankle and pulled it up to his face to gaze at my watch, upending me ass over teakettle.

“Is four O’clock” he said cheerfully, while I lay sprawled on the ground.

Thereafter I removed the watch band from my ankle, keeping it in my pocket. But I didn’t begrudge Kochmanski his violent little joke, because he was a hard guy to dislike. Diminutive and wiry, he did a Charlot (Chaplin) character in the show, faithfully accompanied by his wire hair fox terrier Kropka. When he whistled, Kropka was trained to sink his teeth into the rear of Kochmanski’s black and white checkered pants until they gave way to expose a bright red pair of jockey shorts. In clown alley Kochmanski was quiet and polite to everyone. He read comic books to improve his English.

“Kaboom!” he would repeat out loud, followed by a quizzical “Splat?”

“What is it, this boo-eng?” he asked me once, referring to an Archie comic where Jughead’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets at the sight of a giant hamburger, accompanied by a balloon sound effect reading “BOING!”   

“It means . . . “ I tried to explain, not very successfully, “Uh, it means when something is like shot out of something else and makes a popping sound but it’s not a popping sound, it’s like a spring or something that goes ‘boing’.”

“Tenk you, Tim” he said politely. He was the only person in clown alley who called me Tim. To everyone else I was Tork, or Pinhead, or Nut-Nut, or Pete the Pup (because of my one black eye), or Torkil-Twinkle, or Schmutz Finger. Like I say, he was hard to dislike.

And his wife, Slavka, was just as nice. Although, as it turned out, she was not really . . .

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here; so let’s back up.

Born and raised in Poland, Kochmanski had spent the tail end of World War Two in a concentration camp for helping to hide some Jewish neighbors. He told me that when he was liberated he found his village blasted and blown away and his family scattered beyond recall. So he joined up with a ragtag circus, as a roustabout, and then learned how to be a bareback rider. That skill took him all over the Soviet Bloc and then to America, where he was able to defect. A bad fall from a horse left him with a slight limp, and so he became a clown. A good one. His Charlot character paid tribute to the ineffable sadness that Chaplin could sometimes display. After his tragic experiences during World War Two, I imagine this was not too hard for Kochmanski to display. And he was up to anything when it came to clown gags; he could throw a pie, take a slap or a fall, and mug it up with the best of ‘em. He never put on any airs as an artiste, as Dougie Ashton, who came from a famous Australian circus family, sometimes did.

And his Slavka made a wonderful pickle soup. She was shorter than he was, with black hair, and loved to sit in the pie car, chain smoking Winstons and playing solitaire. She did not work in the show, preferring to stay at the train all day and cook hearty Polish soups for Kochmanski when he came back at night. Those first few weeks of the season I would give her a smile and a friendly nod when I saw her. She didn’t appear to have many friends on the show. I never saw her gossiping with the other Polish ladies, who worked mostly in Ladies Wardrobe. One day as I passed by her with a smiling nod she stopped me to ask in halting English if I would like to come over that evening for some ‘zup.’

“Is good zup” she said. “Make with pickles.”  

I said sure and that night I tasted a dish that has left me dissatisfied with other watery concoctions for the past forty years. She made it with hamburger, potatoes, and dill pickles; that much I know. But as to how she combined it and coaxed it to turn into ambrosia as it caressed my tonsils on its way down, I never found out. I meant to ask her, but by the time the show reached Madison Square Garden . . .

Slavka was gone; replaced by Brygida, who Kochmanski introduced as his wife. Who was a brunette that never smoked, although she too played solitaire in the pie car all day long. I was sure Kochmanski had introduced Slavka to me as his wife; could I have misunderstood his ambiguous English? When I asked him he smiled pleasantly at me and just said “Is Brygida my wife here, no?”

Well, she didn’t have me over for pickle soup -- but otherwise she seemed okay. So I didn’t think anything more about it.

Until the show reached Denver. Then Brygida was replaced by Magda, a stunning blonde who towered over Kochmanski. She too played solitaire all day long in the pie car, and never smiled. By now I was not only confused about Kochmanski’s apparently polygamous marital status, but extremely curious -- and a bit censorious. I figured if I asked him outright he’d give me some convoluted rigmarole, half English and half Polish, so I went to Prince Paul, who had worked with Kochmanski longer than any of the other clowns.

“What gives?” I asked Prince early one afternoon in clown alley, before there were too many people around. “How come Kochmanski has got a wife in every port, like a sailor?”

Prince put down his New York Times, removed his half moon glasses, and gave me a frown that had his lower lip sticking out like a balcony.

“None of ‘em are his legal wife, Schmutz Finger” he replied. “The Nazis killed his first wife a long time ago. He got married again, but he had to leave her behind in Poland when he came here back in ‘65. When he defected the Commie momsers back there locked her up, and he hasn’t heard from her since. So he grabs a couple of poor Polish grass widows along the route each year, let’s ‘em tag along for awhile, pays ‘em off good, and then hooks up with another one. And it’s really none of your damn business, is it?”

I told Prince I guess not, then went over to my trunk to get ready for come in. I remember that day the shows were hard to do, hard to have fun with. The world can sure be a mean place sometimes.