The Devil in the Washing Machine

Tarzan Zerbini in his prime

We were six in clown alley on the Tarzan Zerbini Shrine Circus back in 1988.

Half way through the season we were down to two clowns; the rest had succumbed to the rigors of two shows a day in primitive rodeo grounds where the dust was thick and the audiences were thin. Our juggling and magician clowns were gone; so was the producing clown, who had supplied all the clown props for our gags. There was just me and Victor – who doubled as the Human Cannon Ball. Even Lee Marx, a veteran of the show for the past thirty years, had to throw in the makeup towel after the first few weeks -- he had never fully recovered from a car crash several years earlier that had killed his wife. He walked with a limp, and the cold, damp, Canadian towns we hit at the beginning of the season provoked his thigh muscles to seize up like a car engine with a dropped piston. So he left the show in Lloydminster, Alberta -- several weeks later I got a postcard from him from his hometown in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he had met and married a mere sprig of a girl, half his age, and was going out on the road with her with one of our rivals; Circus Vargas. 

The boss still expected a grand clown gag with plenty of boffos from the two of us, so we put our bewigged heads together and came up with a weird pastiche that used every remaining piece of equipment we had between us. It went like this . . .

We come out lugging a large wicker laundry basket, full of dirty clothes. In the center of the ring is a huge washing machine (hammered hastily together out of plywood scraps and painted an unconvincing white). We begin tossing the laundry into the machine and set the dials. Working several concealed foot pedals at the base of the machine, I am doused with water and suds from the sides of the washing machine. In a passion I start beating on the washer, and Victor helpfully boosts me up so I can peer inside the rebellious contraption. And then Victor casually pushes me inside the washer. Inside we had placed a propane canister rigged up to some pipes along the top of the washer. I turn on the gas, light it, and WHOOSH, the washer is suddenly aflame! About here all logic and sanity disappears, cheerfully subsumed by the clown mandate that the bigger the disaster the bigger the laugh. While the flames roar I put on horns, a red cape and a long red tail. Then I turn off the gas and unlatch the sides of the washer, which collapse outward. The whole thing ends with me, now inexplicably changed into a leering devil, chasing Victor out of the ring with a plastic pitchfork.

 The gag went over big with small town circus crowds. What a sophisticated, urban audience would have made of it I shudder to think. Even the boss, a hard-bitten veteran of the tanbark and not given to praising his joeys, came right out and said he thought it was a pretty good gag.

When the show reached eastern Wyoming my wife brought our (then) six kids to see daddy at his job. I never traveled with my family, preferring to send my paycheck home each week. Clowns always got free room and board, such as it was. I slept in the back of the bleacher wagon and got stale donuts and tap water for breakfast. 

After the matinee I was eager to find out what my children thought of their old man’s comic ability. But when I approached them, still in my clown regalia, their eyes started out of their heads in terror as they ran squealing to their mother, pleading with her to save them from the “daddy devil!”

It was only after I removed my horns and makeup that they would consent to edge nervously close enough for me to give them a hug. We spent a joyful weekend together before Amy had to get them back to school in North Dakota. The kids loved hanging around the circus lot, where they could visit the petting zoo to feed the tame buffalo weed bouquets they had picked themselves. But they evinced a puzzling reluctance to enter the tent once the show had started -- they did not care to see their kindly father transformed into a red-faced capering fiend any more. 

At the end of the season, when I came home for the winter, the kids had mostly gotten over their heebie jeebies from the devil in the washing machine gag. But for several years after that season they played suspiciously obedient whenever I offered to do the laundry for Amy. They didn't want to take any chances . . .