Hairdresser on Fire. Daniel LeVesque

He would put me on his bus and take me away to Clown College.

      “Yes, sir, the circus! They’re expecting me at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College but my mom won’t drive me. I have ten dollars from the clown shows I do. Is that enough to get me to there?” I was walking towards his bus as I talked, pointing at the map on the catalog, knowing he would tell me to hop on.

      “What’s your name, son?” said Wilford. I knew this line of questioning, where “What’s yer name?” comes before “What’s your phone number?” Soon he would want to call my mother and send me back. He was no friend to a dreaming clown. He was a traitor who wanted nothing more than to see me end up in some factory. Or the priesthood.

      “What’s yer phone number, son?” The bristles of his moustache lifted to reveal filthy teeth. The next question in this series is always “Where do yer folks live?” so I took off before he could say another word, hoping he wouldn’t call the pigs. My sister once told me, as she puffed out the end of a joint, that all cops are pigs and I knew she was right. Wilford Brimley was a pig, too, I decided, as are all bus drivers.

      In the rearview mirror of an abandoned station wagon, I painted on full clown face with the lotion and powder kit in my pouch, then headed downtown hoping to find my benefactor. Juggling three perfectly weighted rocks, I entertained the checkbook-balancing audience filtering in and out of the bank. If onlookers took notice of my evident gift, I would tell them “I can juggle four, you know,” baiting them to ask me to show them, and getting me the big payoff. Most of them just smiled and continued on with the tedium of their lunch breaks; some of them put spare change on the ground by my pouch, mistaking me for a common street clown. Not one person asked me to do four. They were all pigs, I would later tell my sister, every last one of them. I put one foot in front of the other, in exaggerated clown steps, and marched up the street.

      Dinner was cold when I got home. Boiled beef and carrots. I got a can of sardines out of the cabinet and fed them to the cat. We sat outside and waited for the sun to go down, me and the cat and a can full of fish. Nine months later, my pouch stank of soured Miracle Whip and cigarette butts. It sat in the corner of my closet, the stick-and-bandana looking authentic at last, with food stains and holes big enough for dreams to fall from.

      They could at least have sent a letter.

      I was born early, as in premature, one of those miracle babies so cherished in Roman Catholic families. Oh, he’s a miracle baby. Wasn’t supposed to make it, ya know. I was born jaundiced and cold to the touch, with an old-timey condition called The Rh Factor, which sounds like a teevee show but it’s a real thing. There was a war going on inside my blood, I was rejecting it, allergic. I was immediately rushed to a larger hospital for a transfusion. Nervous hands passed me away and out of the hospital, away from my mother.

      One hour old, needles were already penetrating my tiny veins, screaming. Bad blood out; good blood in. Some vibrating machine behind my head with its electronic brrt brrt brrt, pumping someone else’s blood into my right arm as my own poison blood was sucked away. I wonder what they do with it, the poison blood.

      This girl, April, who lived two houses down from the Pagans was born with it too, the poison blood. She was older than me and the science wasn’t up to snuff when she was born so she didn’t get the transfusion in time, and as a result she was retarded. That’s what we said then. Mental retardation. April was retarded in a very profound way. She lived with her parents, a five-year-old brain trapped in a 22-year-old body. That could have been me, I thought. What would I be like? Would I stand around watching my posters for hours like I was looking out a window? Never go to school, drive, or live what everyone thought was a normal life?

      My sister reminded me of my connection to April as often as possible. “Shut up, you were almost retarded,” she’d say. “Retard.”

      “I am not retarded!”

      “You are, too! Just not all the way like April. Ask Mom. You’re a little bit retarded.”

      Maybe I was a little bit retarded and that’s why I felt this way all the time, prickly and anxious. Sometimes I envied April and wished the transfusion hadn’t come in time. We sat behind her one time in church as my parents were schmoozing their way to the front, row by row. Nobody wants to be seen in the back of the church. Or nobody can be seen, rather.

      My parents sidled up, sixth row, sliding in behind April’s family, my mother trying to get a good view, peeking around April’s big hat. She had on her big hat and a fur coat, she was always so fancy. Even in summer she liked to wear her church coat, she said. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. My mother wanted to rip her hat off so she could see Father Moe.

      After communion — where the people line up, eat the host and take their sip of wine — we knelt at our seats, back in the sixth row. After it was decided we could sit and not kneel, a time frame I have never figured out, we sat. Small throat-clearing noises started from under April’s giant muffin hat. It sounded like a bubble in her throat, some sort of trapped burp.

      Wishing she would be okay, I looked up as she started coughing, a real gagging sound gurgling in her throat. I became transfixed, gripping the rail of the pew with my summer arms. The wetness pushing up from her throat brought the final hack, a plop of the chewed-up host, the Body of Christ, regurgitated onto the shoulder fluff of her rabbit fur coat. It just sat there, white cracker chewed and glistening, while my fingers pressed into each other, waves of empathy ripping through my tightened skin. I closed my eyes, hoping it would disappear from her jacket, the hunk of Flesh gelled in morning spittle, shimmying soft on the needles of a rabbit’s fur.

      In the early 1970s, my parents looked to take their faith in radical new directions. The search didn’t lead in any fun directions, like Transcendental Meditation or Satanism, but was more of an inside-the-box approach, like How Can We Get A Fire Under This Kettle O’Christ?

      My family began its escape from the stoic practices of the Church by befriending the Bilders, whom my sister and I had always watched in wonder. My mother had been sizing them up for a few weeks by now, edging closer each time, pew by pew, until contact was made after communion during the Peace Be With You / And Also With You. The elite church people love this part of the mass. The who-knows-who part.

      My mother reached around a second-pew person to shove her hand into that of Alice Bilder. “Peace be with you!”

      “And al-so with you!” shouted Alice. Wilton was shaking my dad’s hand right off the wrist, deliberate over-firm handshakes all around. The Bilders were the people that sat in the Front Row. Every church has them.

      Wilton and Alice were the power couple at our church, boasting six beautiful children — three boys, three girls — all factually perfect. Wilton, with his lumberjack’s build and silver hair, the same silver hair that coated his forearms and chest, stood like a tribute to virility, holding his huge arms high in the air as he prayed. He was the JFK Jr. of our Church, everyone wanted to be near him. His voice boomed the Apostles’ Creed like nobody’s business, loud and in charge, enunciating “We believe in One God, The Father, The Allll-mighty, maker of Heaven and Earth,” on and on. It’s a long prayer.

      Every week, more eyes were on Wilton than were on the priest, who sat glowering from behind the wooden pulpit. Wilton made the pulpit for the church out of rosewood, sawing away shirtless in his driveway. Wilton was a real dick.

      Alice Bilder, Wilton’s wife, worked a puritanical blue twin set with black flats, a crinkly blouse choking her at the neck with a tight crucifix crushing the collar. Her ginger curls were a bit too tight, never brushed out enough, forming a round puff of dirty-penny crunch around her skull. I wanted to grab the hairbrush that my sister kept in her back pocket and go to town on Alice’s head. Everybody wanted to.

      My family started hanging out at the Bilders a lot. They lived in a two story/one-family country house on the corner. White, with white shutters, it was huge with a backyard barn and double garage. A compound, cut off from the street by a seven-foot white picket fence. A cartoon of a fence, it looked so tall to me as a kid. The slats were too close together so it seemed like a solid fence when you played inside