When I let it, the Ringling Clown College defines who I am. That’s why I write so often about it and its aftermath. I’m trying to exorcise a demon. The sudden juxtaposition of complete freedom from parental authority and the narcotic effect of the Gulf Coast, compared to my first 17 years growing up strictly in Minnesota, gave a shock to my system that remains hard to overcome.
I shared a rented apartment at the Venice Villas with three young men, not boys like me. How they tolerated my gawky ignorance and puerile anxieties I’ll never understand. My own parents came close to murdering me, if I’m any judge of their facial expressions at times, and my roommates should have finished the job for them. But instead they tolerated me the way a family tolerates a slobbery puppy who chews on everything and gets underfoot.
While our Clown College curriculum was hard, it still left plenty of time for me to observe the natives of Venice, Florida. Like any good anthropologist, I noted their language, dress, customs, and beliefs. Among the men knobby knees and Panama hats prevailed, while the women folk favored culottes and a blue tint to their silvering hair. Several Italian restaurants, which I was too poor to ever enter, catered to the villager’s taste for the exotic amidst the humdrum sea grapes and sand fleas. The village was for the most part elderly, conservative, built of coral, and combatively religious.
Every morning except Sunday the milkman drove up to our motel at 7:30. He parked his boxy truck down by the Villa’s private beach and waited for sleepy Clown College students to come to him for their eggs, milk, and butter. The reason he did not deliver items to our doorsteps was because he hated us.
He hated us because we were young, flippant, and unconcerned about the afterlife. He was middle-aged, stuck in a dead-end job, and deadly serious about the status of his reservations at the Pearly Gates. Milkmen all wore pure white outfits fifty years ago, and they were starched (the uniforms, that is, not the milkmen.) Our milkman looked ready to either baptise the whole lot of us in one fell swoop, or damn us all to perdition with a single evangelical blast. The frowning creases in his sunburned face hinted that he would prefer to do the latter rather than the former.
Some mornings he would hold a sort of street meeting while passing out the milk and cream.
“Didja know” he would start, while handing over a pound of unsalted butter, “that that there Peace Sign you all is a-wearin’ is actually a say-tonic symbol? It shows a broken upside down cross. Bin used fer devil worship fer hunnerds of years.”
“Lemme have a dozen eggs, pops.”
“Here you go; thas 55 cents please. Thank you kindly. There ain’t no peace in the devil’s kingdom, only tort-shure. And why ain’t you hippies doin’ yer dooty over in Vietnam ‘stead of here fixin’ to be clowns?”
“They should draft beer, not us!”
“My draft number was very high” I added helpfully. Sometimes listening to the milkman gave me uneasy thoughts when I walked over to the public fishing pier to puzzle over the sunset.
“Friend” he said, pointing directly at me, “you need to get yer draft number directly from the Lord! He’ll march you in the right die-rection.”
“I asked for unsalted butter; this is salted.”
“My apologies, missy. Here you go.”
Suddenly the wind through the saw palmetto fronds sounded like tongues clucking in disapproval at me. I went back to my apartment, uneasy and distracted. Did that crazy old Baptist have something?
As our graduation drew nearer we all started going into the rehearsal barn before the sun was up to work on props and rehearse clown routines. I was included, and then excluded, from several different routines. In one I was supposed to throw a plate of spaghetti (the pasta was made of red yarn but the plate was real) into the face of another clown -- somehow I managed to send it frisbee fashion into his forehead, opening an alarming gash which required stitches. After that I was considered a jinx and did only one gag in the graduation show.
The milkman left our orders at the Venice Villas front office, where Ruby the proprietor could put them in her refrigerator until we came back in the evening. Some days, if she’d been taking too much of her nerve tonic, which had a Russian label on it, she forgot to do so and left it all out on the veranda, so we came back to pools of butter and curdled milk. The eggs were half-cooked as well.
And eventually the seashore became more compelling to me than anything the milkman of Venice had said. One reason was because I was walking along it with one of the girl Clown College students who was almost as young as me. I remember that after half a dozen saltwater strolls I opened up to her while I held her hand, saying that I thought neither Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett were very good comedians and that only men could be any good at slapstick comedy.
After that I found myself walking on the beach by myself, wondering what it all meant -- life, love, milk, eggs, baggy pants, and Campbell’s tomato soup (which was about all I could afford that last week of school.) I did not yet know if there was a God, a real loving Heavenly Father, but I did know there was such a thing as infinity -- and that it was the ocean.
And by the way, that girl did not get a contract with the circus.
I, on the other hand, did get a contract with the Blue Unit for the 1972 season. It was a simple two-page document that I signed, stipulating, among other things, that I was responsible for my own makeup, costumes, and clown props. A roomette on the train was guaranteed, for ten dollars a week, which included a change of bedding once a week. I was obligated to join AGVA (American Guild of Variety Artists) and pay annual dues of 125 dollars, which gave me health insurance coverage. My salary was set at 135 dollars, minus taxes, each week. I assumed my residence would automatically be changed to Florida (which has no personal income tax) from Minnesota (which has a hellacious personal income tax.) Thus it was that several years later I was hit with a tax bill that delayed my LDS proselyting mission to Thailand for over a year, until I could get it paid off.
Long years later I heard that the milkman of Venice died of a sudden stroke while doing inventory in the back of his refrigerated truck. His icy blue corpse was not discovered for two days. Today no one delivers milk, or salvation, to the residents of Venice; they have to go to the Tom Thumb or Winn Dixie to get milk and eggs themselves. I have no idea where they go for salvation. At least that’s what I’ve been told when I asked someone from Sarasota who had no love for Venice, telling me it’s still a pretentious backwater town on the Gulf Coast.
The Gulf Coast tantalized and disturbed me with its vast white clouds sailing above an endless blue turmoil. Since those youthful days in Venice I have sought the seashore, in California, Mexico, and Thailand, and then fled from it. It becomes too vivid, too sensual, too magnificent for my Minnesota-bred sensibilities -- so I either must cheapen it to make it bearable or embrace it by shedding my old perceptions like a snake sloughs off its old skin. Today I live in Utah, in the desert, and dream of the ocean slowly and peacefully engulfing me one last time -- forever.
Jack Spratt said news was flat.
His wife said it was lean.
And so fake news they swallowed whole
Upon their laptop screen.
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