A Memory of Otto Griebling . . .

(Twenty-five years ago I fancied myself as a writer of novels and biographies. I wrote several long works, which I desktop published to immediate, yawning obscurity. They have long been out of print and unavailable, and until a few days ago I was sure even I myself didn’t possess a copy of any of my own prosy drek anymore. But recently, having moved into a Senior Apartment, I discovered in a moldy old suitcase some manuscript pages of the biography I had written long ago about the clown nonpareil, Otto Griebling. My biography was based on a conversation notebook I had kept in 1971, which allowed Otto to write down his part of the conversation he was having with me – since he had lost his voice to cancer a few years earlier. Here, then, is one particular story from his youth that he shared with me, and which I now happily share with you, from my original manuscript.)

Out of makeup, Otto Griebling looked like a dyspeptic janitor. In makeup, he became the glowering foil of an unsympathetic fate. Accoutered in hobo rags, his pudgy face lacked that treacly sentimental visage that both Charlie Chaplin and Emmett Kelly had parlayed into world-wide fame. Instead, his bindlestiff makeup displayed consistent crankiness, avarice, and suspicion.  

Otto was the only buffoon allowed complete freedom to carpet clown during the entire show. This meant he could go into the audience and interact with the crowd no matter what was going on in center ring.

He would amble slowly and sullenly through rows of circus patrons, checking a greasy clipboard from time to time, making sure everyone was in their proper seat. Somewhere along the line he would discover a miscreant who was not on his list. Subtle shades of horror, disgust, and finally grim determination would flit across his face, indicating to the haplessly seated malefactor that his or her doom would be hard. But then, looking slyly about to make sure the coast was clear, Otto would give a conniving leer and hold out his hand for a bribe. His victim would offer him popcorn, a Coke, even a hotdog, with mounting merriment – since Otto would accept whatever goodies he was offered and then daintily tie a snow white napkin around his blackened neck before partaking. When the bribes ran out, the outraged Otto would mime the immediate expulsion of his victim, only to be met with more gales of laughter, to which his only reply was a furious glare and then a fatalistic shrug of his tattered shoulders as he moved on.

Or else he would industriously be wiping down the rails and backs of seats when he chanced upon a woman whom he immediately fell in love with. His body language perfectly mimicked the swooning swain as he lowered his ludicrous face closer and closer to his beloved, who would be convulsed with embarrassed laughter. Finally puckering his lips for the expected kiss, he was nonplussed at the guffaws that burst out all around him. Sadly realizing his mistake in giving his heart away to such a hussy, he would straighten up with vast dignity, squint at his former flame, and give her a light belt across the shoulders with his cleaning rag. Then stump away in high dudgeon.

Did Otto always have this mad and daring sense of humor? I used to wonder about it as we made up next to each other in clown alley. One day between shows he told me something of his youth in Wilhelmine Germany after I had asked him if he always wanted to be a clown.

Otto grew up in Koblenz, on the Rhine River, in west central Germany. In his early teens he was apprenticed to the keeper of a medieval clock tower in the courtyard of the Elector’s Palace. The elderly timepiece needed little attention, so Otto spent a great deal of time wandering among the gears and flywheels inside the tower. The day came when his master showed him how to control the strokes for the bronze bell that tolled the hours – and Otto became inspired with an impish plan.

Like many another town in the Rhineland-Palatinate prior to the First World War, the citizens of Koblenz had not traveled very far from their superstitious peasant roots. The forests still held sprites and goblins and the mountains were home to witches and other fell folk it was best to ignore or try to placate.

Thus it was on Hexennacht, May 1^st, each year, the people of Koblenz mostly stayed indoors after dark, saying their prayers and sprinkling the lintels with holy water.  (Hexennacht means Witch’s Night.)

After midnight, it was believed, the witches were diminished in their malignant powers and it was safe to go outside again. People would wait up until the twelve strokes of their clock towers had come and gone, and then go peacefully to their beds at last.  

But that particular year when Hexennacht came around, Otto secreted himself in the clock tower during the evening and reset the bell mechanism so that when midnight came there would be 13 strikes to the bell – not twelve.

The ensuing panic and bedlam, Otto wrote in his conversation book to me, were well worth the whipping his father gave him the next day.

And when his father scolded him, calling him “eine dumme Betruger” (a foolish clown), Otto suddenly knew what his career was going to be . . .

Memories of the Circus: The Clown Casanova

A shot exploded late one night inside Ringling Train Car #19, where most of the new clowns, including myself, were domiciled. The narrow metal hallway that ran through the entire length of the Iron Lung (as we affectionately called it) magnified the echoing report until it sounded like a howitzer blast.

I was lying in my Murphy bed, reading a dog-eared Kurt Vonnegut paperback, and immediately stuck my head out the door of my roomette to find out what the ruckus might be. Dinko came flying down the hallway, yelling as he passed me, "Head for the hills -- it's another one of Bobby's castaways on the warpath!"   

I pulled my head in like an alarmed box tortoise, flipped the latch, and waited nervously for this latest of Bobby's romantic victims to cool off and exit the train before we started to move on to the next town.

Lemme see, I said to myself sourly, that makes about Lady Number Five since the season began that has tried to exterminate Bobby Dorman (not his real name).

Dorman, you see, was the clown alley Casanova. The cliche had it that sailors have a girl in every port, and Bobby had one in every town the circus played -- but he had never mastered the art of "Love 'em and Leave 'em" to any extent, so the heart-broken gals, baldly told that the grand passion was kaput, always turned on him with a fury matched only by Mount Vesuvius and the last days of Pompeii. How Bobby managed to avoid being punctured so many times is something that still keeps me awake on hot summer nights.

There were several bullet holes in the hallway to prove how inept he was at making parting a sweet sorrow.

Ringling Brothers had always had clown alley groupies; lonely, desperate, and terrifically homely women who deluded themselves into thinking that life with a professional circus clown would be nothing but raucous hilarity. We called them 'town hounds', and they made themselves pathetically available in almost every town; hanging around clown alley, offering to do our laundry or bring us a sandwich. By humane consensus, we never gave them a tumble (at least I never saw any of my colleagues have anything to do with them).  Those clowns who were not married could always pick up one of the show dancers for the season by the simple expedient of buying them dinner and drinks after the show each night.

Me, I had a girl I'd left behind in Minnesota -- we had vowed eternal faithfulness to each other when I had been accepted into the Ringling Clown College in Venice, Florida. I wrote her almost every day, and sent her painted platters, ceramic bells, silver-plated spoons, and other gewgaws from each city we played in. That she steadily two-timed me from the moment I left does not need to enter into this narrative, except to explain why I did not take up with any of the big top chorines.

But Bobby was different. He scorned the show dancers; instead, he prowled the late night cocktail lounges and smoky coffee houses that still existed back in the early 70's for older women. Lonely women. Gullible and plaint women. Women who had steady, well-paying jobs and didn't mind blowing a wad on Bobby to keep him well-dressed at the swankiest haberdasher and well-fed on surf and turf at the local chop house. He rarely slept in his roomette on the train, and was usually incommunicado to his fellow clowns except during actual show times.

It was not hard to understand his success with his victims, for he had been blessed with those large soggy eyes made famous by Margaret Keane. One look from those fatal baby blues, and even the witch from Hansel and Gretel would give him her broom and willingly hop into her own cauldron to provide him with a good meal.

For, you see, he also had one of those torsos that appear to be in famine mode, no matter how much fodder he gobbled up.

In fine, women wanted to mother him -- and he was only too happy to oblige them, with a soupcon of carnality on the side.

At first most of the new clowns, young bucks who were out to prove to the world just how much hell they could raise, were extremely proud of his conquests, as a sort of reflection on their own devil-may-care mindset, even if it meant dodging an occasional stray pistol shot. We'd see him with his current inamorata strolling about down by the circus train or holed up in the priciest steak house in town, and growl to each other what a lucky so-and-so he was.

But eventually the repeated melodrama of Jilted Lover Seeks Revenge grew rather tedious. Believe it or not, circus clowns work very hard at their craft, and cherish the restorative power of a good night's sleep -- on move out nights we grew to resent the hullabaloo that resulted from Dorman's callous farewells.

A delegation of younger clowns, including myself, finally caught him in his roomette one night, miraculously alone for once, and delivered an ultimatum, or, as Dinko called it, an 'ultimato'. If he was going to continue his wanton ways with townie females he had better say his good-byes far away from the train, so we could all get some assured shut-eye instead of dodging bullets. Otherwise, we muttered in the sinister tones we'd learned from watching Boris Karloff movies, he might find himself red-lighted -- thrown off the train while it was moving past some dismally uninhabited swamp.

Bobby merely pooh-poohed our remonstrances and continued with his staccato romances, until the show reached New York City in May.

We played Madison Square Garden for nearly a month, and so Dorman was stuck with his temporary mistress for much longer than usual. We could see he began to tire of her puppy-like devotion to him, and cringed when he started to treat her rudely and abruptly right in front of us.

The denouement was sudden, tawdry, and mysterious.

  On move out night, with the circus train ready to head over to Philadelphia for a two week run, there was no shouting, shrieking, or shooting in or around the Iron Lung. Bobby's 'girlfriend', who I recall as rather tall with a predatory horse face, mooned about the tracks, taking long pulls from a bottle in a brown paper bag.

"That little %&##* is in for it now -- soon as my brothers get here" she kept repeating viciously to herself.  I gave her a wide berth as I pulled myself up onto the Iron Lung.

Too tired to care about any further affaires de coeur, I left her to her crapulous fulminations and went to bed. I never even heard the train lurch into motion, and I was still dead to the world when we pulled into the Philadelphia trainyard the next afternoon.

When I finally got up and got down to clown alley, it was to discover that Bobby Dorman had never made it back onto the train the night before in New York. He was AWOL, missing in action -- gone and done a bunk.

He never showed up in Philadelphia, and when the boss clown made inquiries with Dorman's family about his possible whereabouts the only reply he got, he told us, was frosty silence.

Many years later Dinko told me he'd bumped into Bobby Dorman in New York, where he was a set designer on Broadway, and married to that same horse-faced harridan. Dinko told me that Dorman seemed reasonably happy and satisfied with the way things had turned out.

But then, Dinko always did like to make things up . . .

The Lofty Looks of Man

2 Nephi 12:  "And it shall come to pass that the lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day."

The lofty looks of man, as he gazes into space,
do not begin to comfort the wearied human race.
For we scrutinize the stars in their cold and distant way,
looking far beyond the mark of salvation ev'ry day.

Exaltation will not come through technology, but grief -- 
if our science is not yoked to a Christ-centered belief.
Our haughtiness of mind and of heart, a cul-de-sac,
leads our wits to idols dumb and our faith to actions black. 

There is wisdom in the dust, in humility sincere,
that the mighty and the great will soon justly come to fear. 
For the heavens stoop to me and I need not fly to them
when I stay upon my knees and gaze only at God's hem. 

From the Dislocated Grit

2 Nephi 11:7 -- "For if there be no Christ there be no God; and if there be no God we are not, for there could have been no creation. But there is a God, and he is Christ, and he cometh in the fulness of his own time."

From the dislocated grit a rare world was made for man
by the Son of God to advance the Father's master plan.
The mechanics and the time frame of this overwhelming feat
are less important than the liberation oh so sweet!
For we are made the heirs of a completeness so outright
that we'll outshine the sun, the moon, the stars aflame at night.
And all because a Father's love commanded God's own Son
to do what in His other worlds has already now been done!

My Heathen Sundays as a Child.

While taking the Sacrament this morning I was brought up short by the realization that until I was 16 years of age I never gave the person or mission of Jesus Christ a single serious thought.

As a child I had a cheap plastic crucifix hanging over my bed but I only ever thought of it as a sort of good luck charm; I took it off the wall and with me into the basement whenever the tornado siren went off in our Southeast Minneapolis neighborhood.

My mother was Catholic and my father an accommodating agnostic; he drove us to Mass at St Lawrence over by Dinkytown on Sunday mornings, staying out in the car reading a Mickey Spillane paperback until we were done genuflecting.

Sundays in the Midwest back then were supposed to be peaceful and restful; the big department stores and other large retail concerns were closed -- I still remember an ad for a furniture store on WCCO Radio in which the announcer piously ended his spiel by intoning "Closed on Sundays -- we prefer to see you in church."

But the movie theaters and public beaches were wide open on the Sabbath.

We went to the movies on Sunday for only two personalities.  John Wayne and Jerry Lewis.
My dad was besotted with Wayne, and never missed any of his films -- dragging me along with effective bribes of greasy buttered popcorn, kegs of Coke, and all the Nonpareils and Jordan Almonds I could hold (which was a lot). This despite my mother's admonitions to him that I would develop tremendous stomach aches and all my teeth would rot overnight and fall out.
There was very little I wouldn't do to catch the latest Jerry Lewis flick, short of murder. My dad loathed Jerry Lewis, and my mom absolutely refused to go to any of his movies -- she preferred to stay home and do up the dinner dishes by herself. But I wheedled and begged and bargained with such determination that my dad would give in at last rather than listen to any more of my mosquito-like whining. He would fortify himself prior to the ordeal with several quick snorts of Old Grand-Dad, and then nap sullenly through Lewis's cinema shenanigans while I laughed myself sick.

Lake Johanna was ten minutes away by car, and when the molten days of midsummer left us all breathless in our sweltering, un-airconditioned house after Mass on Sunday, mom would pack up some baloney sandwiches, Old Dutch potato chips, and a large ungainly thermos of cherry Kool-Aid, and we would dash off to the lake. The beach was rather stingy, when it came to sand; but the water was full of aggressive little perch and sunnies that liked to inquisitively nip at your skin -- a true ghoul, I always imagined I was being ripped to pieces by sharks somewhere in the vastness of the South Pacific. We would not return home until the sun began to set and my skin was so puckered I could use it for a washboard.

But most Sundays, after Mass, we simply stayed at home. After a huge dinner and the consequent shouting match between my mother and my sisters on who was going to wash the dishes, we all migrated to the living room -- Mom would read Good Housekeeping; Dad would park in front of the TV to watch an unending parade of grainy black and white movies that featured either Fred MacMurry or Randolph Scott; my sisters messed around with their Barbie dolls; and I mooned over the rich and vibrant hues of the Sunday funnies, as provided by the Pioneer Press. My parents took both the Minneapolis Tribune and the Minneapolis Star during the week, but their comics section was somewhat lacking on Sundays; so we got the cartoon-profligate Pioneer Press on Sunday. The continuing adventures of Prince Valiant, Dick Tracy, Snuffy Smith, Li'l Abner, and Alley Oop, among others, offered me a fascinating and violent smorgasbord of fantasy characters and plot lines that inspired me to draw reams of stick figures flying advanced jet machines or fighting horrible purple blob monsters with as many claws, fangs, and horns crammed onto their bodies as I could manage.

Looking back, it now occurs to me that even during the stifling and inhibited Fifties, when I was a boy, there was a strain of manic insanity available to Americans in the form of Jerry Lewis and the Sunday funnies, not to mention Mad Magazine and television reruns of the Three Stooges. I instinctively gravitated towards anything rude and slightly schizophrenic. Thank goodness most of that kind of stuff was considered too trivial to analyze and then prohibit, so I didn't have to sneak around to enjoy it as if it were pornography or underage drinking.

Nothing of a religious nature was ever discussed or even hinted at during those Sundays long ago. We didn't even have a Bible in the house.

My mother had some ingrained sense that untrammeled playtime with the neighborhood kids should be discouraged on Sundays, so I always had to ask if I could scamper outside to mess around with my friends Randy and Wayne. During the winter, which I suspect my mother hated, she would brusquely tell me to stay home and stop bothering other people, when I asked her.
But in the summer, during those long humid days when it seemed like the sun would never set and she would never be able to confine her beloved children to their beds, she became more liberal and allowed me to be unyoked.
"Go play outside, run through the sprinklers -- just stay out of Mrs. Henderson's rhododendrons!" she'd say wearily, sinking onto the couch with the latest copy of Reader's Digest.

She didn't have to tell me twice -- I was out the door before you could say Dagmar.

Randy, Wayne, and I had a carefully guarded hoard of small balloons -- just the right kind to make water bombs. We kept these weapons of mass sogginess stashed in Wayne's garage, on a shelf behind the WD-40 and Miracle-Gro. Our object all sublime was to prepare a dozen of 'em at a time to lob at my sisters, or any other loathsome girls unwise enough to wander within our sites. Then go hide among Mrs. Henderson's rhododendrons until our victims stopped looking for us. Those bushes sure were full of ants . . .
By the time I returned home I'd be crawling with little brown Formicidae, which required an immediate tongue lashing from my mother -- and then a quick dunk in the bathtub.

Sunday night leftovers were never warmed up; if you couldn't eat it cold that was just too darn bad. The kitchen was closed to the general public at 5 p.m.

Until I turned eight I slept with my sisters in the same bedroom, and Sunday night, as with any other night, mom would have us all kneel down together to say our prayers -- but it hardly gave me any spiritual insight to repeat them night after night:

"Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

Even to a kid as dumb as a rock, and I was igneous from the get-go, there seemed something sinister, maybe even downright menacing, about these four lines.
Never mind this soul business:  What's all this about dying? Who said anything about kicking the bucket? I feel great -- don't even want to get into bed . . . full of vim and vigor! Farthest thing from my mind, croaking is.
 But mom insisted we chant this by our bedside every night. And no explanation about what it meant. Just do it.

I never heard about the possibility of a resurrection until I was 16 -- but I sure heard about dying every night, until I stopped saying that grim little ditty at age 9.

And so that's how my heathen childhood Sunday would come to a close -- on a note of uncertainty and anxiety.

We are born with God before us

2 Nephi. Chapter 10:3 --  ". . . and there is none other nation on earth that would crucify their God."                                                                                                                                                                                                                   We are born with God before us; we are made from light and love,
and our lives are never lacking tender favors from above.
But when Christ our one Creator beckons us to follow truth
we often fight his promptings like a wild thing, nails and tooth.

And yet he won't destroy us for our crucifying ways,
and always seeks to bless us during all our mortal days.
The wounds we give to others are the wounds we give Him, too;
impaling Him again as did the ancient stubborn Jew.

From priestcraft and iniquity, from stiff neck, rigid pride,
O God of all creation be my constant steady Guide
away from hate and folly to find what I'm meant to be --
even if I must myself be nailed upon a tree!


(To learn more about Tim's poetry please check out his write up in the New York Times here.)

My Children's Hands

2 Nephi 9:3 -- Behold, my beloved brethren, I speak unto you these things that ye may rejoice, and lift up your heads forever, because of the blessings which the Lord God shall bestow upon your children.

King David, after many wars, a Temple to his Lord
asked to build so censers could replace the bloody sword.
But God told David he was not quite fit to do that thing;
it would have to wait until son Solomon was king.

I, too, feel that my follies and career leave some constraint
upon my future labors as a feeble, struggling Saint.
How wonderful my children may surpass their own begetter
and build the Kingdom with stout hands that are so much better!

To Kindle Sparks

2 Nephi 7: 11 -- "Behold all ye that kindle fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks, walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks which ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand—ye shall lie down in sorrow."
The weary waste before me lies in darkness I can't pierce;
full of midnight prowlers and of creatures cruel and fierce.
To kindle sparks by my own hand in such a lightless land
is to leave my bones to molder on the rotten sand.

Great inner light is needed; I must have it from the Lord,
if obscure plains I am to cross and sullen rivers ford.
The darkness beckons only fools who think to hide their sin;
 their embers of regret will build no saving blaze within. 

Making Swords of Laban

2 Nephi. Chapter 5:14 -- "And I, Nephi, did take the sword of Laban, and after the manner of it did make many swords, lest by any means the people who were now called Lamanites should come upon us and destroy us; for I knew their hatred towards me and my children and those who were called my people."

Preaching peace and making swords is what the Saints have done

when shedding blood in battle was how security was won.

Today the only swords we forge are in our minds and heart;

of massacres and looting we do not want any part.

 Yet many Saints must have a gun or two at their address

as a way of dealing with their feelings of distress.

I do not say tis good or bad, but I begin to doubt

that with the Lord an arsenal will carry any clout. 

Waxing Old

2 Nephi. Chapter 4:12 -- " . . . he waxed old . . . "

I'm changing my estate again, or rather it's changed me --
from the clamor of the world to ripe serenity.
Ambition and agenda are becoming strangers like
they were so long, so long ago when I was just a tyke.

I yet may slip into the fog of senile sterile blank,
but hope to hug the world in joy before that final prank.
The way becomes much clearer as I take it slower now,
as God and I become old friends . . . or cease bickering, anyhow!