As a young clown with Ringling I was full of myself. Greatest Show on Earth -- Largest Clown Alley -- Youngest Performer from Minnesota. I had all of that, and more. What a peachy-keen guy was I!
But no one in my family ever came to see me perform. Not my mom; not my dad; not my sisters; not my brothers; no uncles or aunts.
Only cousin Doris.
Every family has them; distant, or not so distant, cousins that seem to spring up occasionally like mildew under the carpet.
Our family had Cousin Doris. She intruded on my childhood like a case of recurring measles.
She lived over in Northeast Minneapolis, or, as the denizens of the area itself called it, 'Nordeast'. She had an apartment on Central Avenue directly above a Latvian delicatessen. She worked at the Polovny Cabinet Works -- makers of fine coffins since 1898. Her job, as I understood it, was to steam clean the red velvet interiors of the expensive coffins about once a month, and to distribute moth balls where they might be needed.
She was dumpy and her drab dresses always reeked of rancid garlic. She was the only member of the Torkildson clan to ever have a snub nose -- everyone else sported beaks of varying lengths and sharpness. Her moon face was permanently wreathed in a buck-toothed smile reminiscent of Mortimer Snerd.
The reason we disliked her so much was because she always insisted on being HELPFUL.
My mother had her over for Sunday dinner once every two months, and Cousin Doris was so grateful for this bit of kindness that she always looked for ways and means to help our family out -- with resulting calamities that shook our belief in a just God.
One particular summer Sunday when she graced our table she decided that we should have a batch of good, old-fashioned root beer -- the kind her mother used to make back in South Dakota.
She claimed the ingredients were cheap and handy, and the process was easy enough so that a blind simpleton could put up a dozen bottles in under an hour.
My mother tried to explain that at the moment we were plumb out of blind simpletons -- there were none to be had at any price -- but Cousin Doris was not to be put off.
The very next day she brought over all the equipment and ingredients and set to work, while my mother retired to the back yard with a brown bottle of something she told me was 'stress medicine', but which smelled awfully like my dad's breath when he came home late on a Saturday night.
Amazingly enough, Cousin Doris was true to her word, and the bottles were filled and capped within an hour. She then washed up and cleaned the kitchen to a spotless glare.
The bottles were lined up along the basement steps to 'work' for a week or two.
"Don't mind if they gurgle a bit at night" she told us cheerfully as she left. "That's just the yeast workin'."
The yeast turned out to have nuclear properties.
A few nights later the whole Torkildson household was rudely thrown out of their beds by a series of gushing explosions that emanated from the basement steps.
You guessed it; every single bottle of Cousin Doris' root beer had detonated like a sugary land mine.
And yours truly was deputized to clean up the bubbling mess toot suite by parents who obviously relished crushing a young boy's dreams of undisturbed repose.
Two months later, like clockwork, my mother had Cousin Doris over for Sunday dinner. As we sat down to pot roast, potato rolls, three-bean salad, and corn harvested straight from a Green Giant can, she asked brightly how we liked the home-made root beer.
"You'll never find anything like it in a store!" she exclaimed as we collectively scowled at her.
"It was explosive" my dad said shortly, as he jabbed the pot roast viciously with his fork.
"It does have a tang, don't it?" Doris replied. "Myself, I think there's a bit of alcohol formed."
That would explain the quasi-hangover I had the next morning, after inhaling the fumes while cleaning up the basement steps.
Nothing more was said about the volatile root beer as the dinner proceeded in sullen silence.
Afterwards, as Cousin Doris helped my mother with the dishes in the kitchen I could hear her telling my mother that pickling fish was a cinch, if the fish were fresh-caught. And since little Timmy liked going fishing all the time, she would be happy to help my mother put up a big crock of pickled crappie or sunfish . . .
At this point I sped out the front door as if my keister were ablaze.
Mostly because I didn't like to hear my mother swear.
As you can imagine, I was not exactly thrilled to see her years later when she showed up, ticket in hand, at the building in Des Moines, to greet me with a moist embrace.
“My, how you growed!” she marveled, as she began a long convoluted explanation of why she had relocated to Iowa. Apparently they took their coffins more seriously in Des Moines, and she was now involved with the actual sale of them instead of just mundane maintenance.
“I can get you a good deal on one anytime you want” she told me, as I unwillingly escorted her to her seat prior to come in. She thrust some colored brochures into my hand as I excused myself to go perform my buffoonery. I was hoping to avoid her for the rest of our stay in Des Moines. When I got back to the alley I tossed them on top of my clown trunk.
In clown alley any open talk of death is verboten. It’s bad manners and bad luck to recount the demise of any circus personnel while at your clown trunk. But talk of coffins is a hearse of a different color. Veteran clowns like Prince Paul and Swede Johnson were in a sort of Coffin Race. They were constantly bickering about the pros and cons of a cedarwood coffin as compared to one made of stainless steel. Was a satin lining better than a silk lining? So when Sweded discovered Doris’ brochures on top of my trunk he immediately wanted to know where they came from. I told him they were from my cousin Doris.
“Hey Prince, lookit this price for the Mahogany Bed of Eternal Rest!” he yelled across the alley to Prince Paul.
Several of the older clowns were soon engrossed in perusing price lists and warranties around my trunk, and I was bidden to produce cousin Doris after the show for further queries.
I did so, and she got more attention from Swede and Prince and Mark Anthony than I ever did. For the rest of our stay in Des Moines cousin Doris was an honored guest in clown alley. I believe she sold Sparky an Economy Model that featured a nitrogen filled plastic pillow, and gave Mark Anthony, our producing clown, some valuable pointers on moisture proofing plywood -- since Mark was intent on building his own casket as economically as possible. I have to admit I was a bit jealous of the fact that she was the only Torkildson clown alley seemed to care about.
At the end of the Des Moines run cousin Doris gave me another moist hug, saying “I’ll see you next year!”
“Over my dead body!” I THOUGHT that -- but didn’t say it. Since I didn’t have my own sarcophagus bought and paid for yet.
