I finally got Becky Thingvold to come visit me in my basement apartment. She had been to Minot covering a political rally, and when she came back her face had hardened somehow and her breath began smelling of stale coffee. A policeman in Minot had shoved her and when she swore at him he arrested her; she spent the night in jail before the newspaper bailed her out. But they refused to print the story of her night in jail, as being too ‘negative.’ That’s when she said she’d come down to my place “just to relax and talk about you competing against the Ringling clown school.”
She brought a six pack of Coors, which embarrassed me -- since I didn’t drink and I didn’t know if she wanted to drink, or not. I just put it in the fridge and we sat on the couch. Her eyes were cold and hard, not the kind of eyes I had dreamed of finding in a girl someday. When I asked her about her time in jail she got so bitter I hardly recognized the same person that had been so enthused about my clown academy. Her innocence, I saw, had been bruised in Minot, and she was allowing it to fester and die. Now she wanted to be a grown-up, hard ass woman reporter. Another Murphy Brown. So she had come to my place to drink and have sex and then write some grungy piece about the has-been clown and his pitiful dreams -- which she’d get published in Rolling Stone or Mother Jones. I intuited all this just by looking at her face, which was now the face of a stranger. I didn’t like her anymore. I wanted her to leave. But there were juices and hormones and subconscious imps that also wanted her to stay.
But I was in no way ready for or wanting to initiate a physical relationship. My mind had been on marriage ever since returning from my LDS mission in Thailand. Back in those days the party line was that a returned LDS missionary should be married within six months of coming home, or else become a pariah. I hadn’t met the deadline, and did feel a bit ostracized by the LDS community in Williston for my marital tardiness -- but that didn’t mean I was going to take up with Becky. Physical relationships with women have always frightened me -- in and out of marriage. I blame my mother and her hairbrush so often used on my backside . . .
Terribly conflicted, I sat on the couch as far away from Becky as I could. And I began to tell her a story, a clown story -- which, I think, saved both our souls that evening. I just started randomly.
“I wanted to teach clowning when I was a missionary in Thailand, but that really wasn’t part of my calling to preach the gospel, you see. I did a lot of clown shows as benefits for the Thai Red Cross, which was under the auspices of the King and Queen of Thailand -- but that was to garner some positive PR for the Mormon Church, since Mormons were not liked at all. The Thais all thought we belonged to the CIA or something.”
“What kind of clown show did you do, then? Balloons and stuff?” she asked, settling in. Until that moment she had perched on the edge of the couch like a hawk.
“Well, I tried to do as much pantomime as I could. You remember I told you about the training I had in Mexico? Los Payasos Educados? I loved doing that stuff for the Thais -- they really got it most of the time, too. And then, of course, I played my musical saw. But I think the most favorite shows I did weren’t for the general Thai crowds, but for church members and missionaries. We used to have a Mission Conference every six months and I always put on a full hour’s worth of pantomime for them. They were held at resorts like Pattaya -- beautiful beaches, which the members could visit but we missionaries couldn’t. One of the rules.
I had several specialty pantomime numbers I did for those special meetings. Things I had created on the spur of the moment just for LDS audiences. One was about a missionary getting a Dear John Letter and how he tries to commit suicide after reading it. He can’t seem to kill himself until he remembers that his ex-girlfriend sent him a box of cookies -- he just forces himself to eat one of those and dies immediately with a smile on his face.”
The memories of those performances were flooding back, distancing me from my own carnal desires and dulling Becky’s pagan intentions.
“Another one was about the difficulty of getting money out of the bank each month. The pens didn’t work and the clerks kept shunting me from one window to another. It was a great bit of mime, because I actually interacted with several imaginary people, including bank robbers! I think I was inspired somehow when I did that one -- I don’t even think I could do it now!”
“But my best bit of mime was the sleepy man at church. I pretended to sit in Sacrament Meeting and tried to stay awake through it all. That one always got the biggest laughs. The very biggest.”
“You love getting laughs, don’t you Tim?” asked Becky, her hard edges suddenly dissolving.
“More than anything” I affirmed.
“Well, I gotta go. Gotta write up some stuff for the Sunday Arts page -- maybe I’ll use that story you just told me. Is that okay?”
“Sure, Beck. That’s fine.” I moved close to her. Suddenly I wanted to kiss her hard and drink all that beer and see what would happen. But she was no longer willing to take me down that road, so she took the Coors with her and left.
She never did write about my clowning in Thailand. Or about my clown academy again. We only ever met at city council meetings, nodding at each other. She married one of the other reporters that winter; they moved out to Boston so he could enter a graduate program in journalism. And that’s all I know about it.
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