Pinocchio in Clown Alley

I told whoppers as a child. I continued to invent them as an adolescent. And when I entered the fabled portals of Ringling clown alley over forty-five years ago I did not mend my ways, but spread disinformation and gasconades far and wide with a great deal of dedication and glee.

Why? Because of a lifelong sense of boredom and inadequacy -- the hallmarks of any true slapstick jongleur. On long and simmering summer days when my chums and I parked our keisters on the street curb in front of our homes I told them that it was getting so hot that the cars that came down the asphalt neighborhood street would sink into the road, never to be heard from again. To back up my tall tale I pinched a piece of bitumen patching goo right from the road itself and played with it like Silly Putty. This convinced the more gullible of my pals that they’d better tell mom to warn dad before he tried to pull into our quiet little street, only to become another dismal statistic of the Minneapolis Tar Pits. Their parents, of course, pooh-poohed the whole thing, but several of them nervously waited out on the front lawn at dinner time to make sure the family Ford did not do a Titanic. That experience of almost being believed egged me on to more fantastic stories.

In high school I boasted to anyone who would listen, teachers and students alike, that my dad had prudently invested in a moonshine well in Kentucky -- which was now gushing bourbon at the rate of ten gallons per hour. I also claimed that my Grandmother was the last Albanian princess from the royal House of Fonebone (Don Martin fans will recognize that moniker.) For proof I spouted a rumbling gibberish that I explained was the Albanian national anthem -- to the tune of Turkey in the Straw.

I lied through my teeth on the Ringling Clown College application. For ‘age’ I put “24 next St Swithin's Day.”  Under ‘acting experience’ I penned “I have assisted at every Shakespeare production at the Guthrie Theater for the past two summers.” Which was really true -- as an usher.

My first fabulous fib in clown alley occurred during our run at Madison Square Garden. I had been down with the runs for the past week and was feeling discontented and contentious -- I wanted to stir up some trouble, just because I felt mean-spirited and was getting bored with the routine inside the grimey building. So I casually mentioned to a few of the clowns that I had just heard on the radio that Fidel Castro was putting in nuclear warheads in Cuba again. This was just a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and people were still on edge about how close the whole world had come to an atomic holocaust.

“Great God in heaven!” said Swede Johnson when I told him. “And to think I never got to sleep with Greta Garbo! Dammit!” Nevertheless, he went and found his wife Mable and they started filling up plastic water jugs just in case.

There was a general exodus out of clown alley to find a radio or TV set to learn how close Armageddon was going to be this time. When nothing appeared on the news, I was surrounded by a hostile mob of joeys demanding to know what the hell I was up to, scaring the beezus out of them like that. They had called sweethearts and parents far away to say their last good-byes -- and long distance telephone rates back in those days were astronomical.

Only my sang-froid saved me from a lynching. I coolly shrugged my shoulders and said “I must have heard it wrong. Sorry, guys.” Like a true sociopath, I glibly denied any culpability.

“It’s all that Mormon stuff he reads” Chico said to Roofus T. Goofus. “It gives him hallucinations.”

I never told a lie in clown alley for personal gain or to get back at somebody. Let me make that clear. My fabrications were merely for my own amusement.

A few weeks later I sidled up to Murray Horowitz, the biggest loudmouth in the alley, and told him in strictest confidence that Charlie Chaplin, THE Charlie Chaplin, had just flown in from Switzerland and was going to be in the audience that evening. As I planned, he couldn’t bear to keep that juicy bit of information to himself. That evening clown alley got out their best outfits, polished their clown shoes until they could see their own grotesque reflection in them, and nearly fractured their necks craning them to look for the great cinema clown out in the swirling audience.

Only Tim Holst was not taken in by the rumor. Eyeing me placidly going about my business without so much as a shiver of excitement, he pointedly asked “How come you aren’t all over goose pimples about this?”

“Oh, I dunno” I replied, pretending to file my fingernails with a rubber chicken. “You can’t believe everything you hear around here, ya know.”

Holst just shook his head and went back to repairing his clown wig, which was basically a latex bathing cap with red yarn glued onto it in wild disarray. The asking price for a Bob Kelly or Zauder professional clown wig was several hundred dollars. A little too pricey for most of us First of Mays.   

When the show reached California in the late summer I began yipping in a piercing high-pitched voice every time I powdered down my greasepaint with talcum.

“What in the sam hill is a matter witch you?” Chico finally asked. “You sound like leaky pipes ina radiator!”

“Well, if you must know” I replied diffidently, “I’ve got Rimsky-Korsakov Syndrome. I just went to the doctor and he told me if I keep using talcum powder I’ll break out into wattles and never recover.”

“Oh jeez, Tork. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize . . . “ Chico began.

“Never mind” I told him bravely. “I’ll manage. I’m switching to potato starch.”

Chico spread the word that Tork was suffering from a very grave condition called, he thought it was, Rinky-Kordacop disease. There was suddenly a lot of gruff sympathy for me in the alley. The boss clown, LeVoi Hipps, excused me from holding a rope for one on the showgirls during the Spanish Web number.

“Yew git a little rest in, y’hear? I kin find some other booger tew do that there number” he told me as he patted me on my shoulder consolingly. Who was I to refuse his kind offer?

I am happy to say that I finally outgrew my need to tell outrageous whoppers, and I haven’t told a taradiddle of any kind since that first season with Ringling Brothers. Not a single one. By the way, have you heard the latest about those Russian hackers . . . ?