It was a Saturday afternoon and Eddie was driving down Franklin. Traffic was a little heavy--it was always a little heavy since they turned Hollywood into a mall--and ahead of him in a beat-up primered Toyota was a clown in full makeup. The clown was in a rush--everyone except for Eddie always seemed in a rush--maybe the clown was late for a birthday party or something--and he was experiencing a bad case of road rage, leaning out the window, screaming obscenities at the cars ahead of him, red with rage under the white pancake. It was insane.

The clown tried to swerve around a truck but his worn out Toyota didn't have the power to pull off those kinds of maneuvers. Eddie could tell this clown was not a very patient guy; he was probably one of those drivers who didn't have time to use the clutch and had torn up his transmission. The clown was getting angrier. He was pissed off at the other drivers, pissed off at his Toyota, pissed off at the birthday party kids and their parents who didn't pay him enough to afford a better car, pissed off at his girlfriend, pissed off at everything in general as a matter of principal, and all this indiscriminate anger had rolled up into a big ball of clown rage. He probably wished he had a stiff drink right now, and maybe that was pissing him off too. "Aww man, this is too good!" thought Eddie, full of childlike glee at the thought of witnessing truth reveal itself.

Eddie had nowhere in particular to go and no set time to be there, so he decided to follow the clown for a while to see what happened. He was hoping maybe he'd see a fight. But a mile or so down the road traffic finally broke and the clown just settled brooding into his seat and puttered miserably down Sunset.

Eddie had a thing about clowns; a different kinda thing than he had about midgets. As a kid he didn't think of clowns as people in makeup. Clowns were just clowns, and their makeup was just make-up--the same kind of makeup he remembered his mom wearing, or his Aunt Rita--stuff they put on when they were going out in public. His mom in makeup was still his mom; his Aunt Rita in makeup was still his Aunt Rita, and Eddie-the-kid reckoned a clown in makeup was no different.

This was not the case with the guy in the monster outfit or the guy in the gorilla suit. As a kid he'd never seen a real monster except on TV, but he'd seen a real gorilla at the zoo, and could easily tell the difference. The Shrine Circus stilt walker wasn't really 8 feet tall. 8-year-old Eddie knew that. Clowns and midgets, however, were clowns and midgets, period, and it didn't matter how you dressed 'em up.

Back then Eddie thought midgets were a separate race of people, just like blacks or Chinese or Indians. He'd noticed that all the separate races tended to live in their own parts of town, like Chinatown, for example, and so he reckoned that there had to be a midget ghetto somewhere.

"Mom, Mom, take me to Midget Town! I wanna go to Midget Town!"

And his mom would give the automatic response that was Universal to all Moms: "Not now honey. Maybe tomorrow, after you've finished your homework." The automatic Dad response was "Ask your mother"--at least, this is what Eddie had heard other kids' dads say. Eddie never asked his dad anything because his dad was always drunk and you didn't want to mess with the man when he had a load on, but he'd seen it in action at his friends' places. Their dads would say "I don't know. Go ask your mother" and their moms would say "Not now honey. Maybe tomorrow, after you've finished your homework."

Eventually Eddie realized that his mom was never gonna take him to Midget Town, and if he wanted to see it he was on his own. For the next year he spent pretty much all his allowance money on bus fare. He'd hop on the bus after school, armed with all his bus schedules and a tattered map of the city he'd stolen from his Dad's glove compartment, take the bus downtown to the main hub and then transfer and explore the city's fringes. He had a clear picture of Midget Town in his head--all little Victorians, slightly rundown, in a hilly part of town, most likely on the East Side.

He never found Midget Town. He would've never even looked for Clown Town, and in the back of his mind, stuffed alongside all his other myriad fears, was a serious dread that he might accidentally wind up there. With his bad luck, the bus would probably break down on a muddy stretch of dirt road--Clown Town had dirt roads he reckoned, ramshackle wooden houses with ripped screen doors half off their hinges, damp laundry getting soaked in the drizzle on clothes lines, broken down cars stripped and abandoned on grassless yards, dirty clown kids running around screaming--and he'd be stranded, sucked into Clown Town, forced to work in a circus, probably never see his friends and family again.

Eddie hated those moments when the clowns hit the ring at the Shrine Circus. They scared him. Their behavior was aggressive, and worse than that it was erratic. The Big Men clowns would chase the terrified midget clowns, and then the Women clowns would chase the Big Men clowns, and then the midget clowns would suddenly turn on their tormentors and the whole thing would run in reverse. There was no rhyme or reason to it, no clear cut hierarchy of victim and aggressor, and a terrorized victim could turn into a violent psychopath for no other reason than they just decided to. It made even less sense than regular violence--it was like drunken violence, and just like drunken violence, the worst was yet to come. In the clown act, this happened when suddenly, inevitably, one of the clowns would pull out a gun--Eddie hated guns, and more than that he was terrified of loud noises--and the rest of the clowns would cower. The gun would go off with a deafening bang, and then a bunch of plucked chickens would fall to the sawdust with a thud and everyone would laugh. Everyone but Eddie, who could not for the life of him figure out what the hell was funny about that nightmarish display.

Eddie hated the plucked chickens. They seemed so pathetic, naked, and dead, and you can't hardly get any more vulnerable than that. He didn't have strong feelings one way or another about live chickens, but the plucked ones saddened him, and he was afraid, too, that that's how he was gonna wind up--pathetic, naked, vulnerable, and most likely dead.

Eddie was nuts about the midgets. They were about the same size as him, and while they were adults and he was only 8 years old, he was nevertheless generally left to fend for himself as though he were an adult. Midgets carried themselves with a sad dignity despite being constantly terrorized by big people, either at the Circus or on Stampede Wrestling, which was the only other place Eddie'd ever seen them. Yeah, okay, midgets ran around like crazy, and Eddie preferred to sit as still as possible, but hey, running around like crazy made perfect sense when you've got big people with bad intentions chasing you around everywhere. Eddie imagined that midgets probably yearned to sit still and enjoy a little peace and quiet. That's why he wanted to find Midget Town. He wanted some peace and quiet away from the threat of big people.

Clowns were pretty much big people. Clowns were his parents, more or less, when his parents had had enough to drink, which was basically all the time. The Shrine Circus Clown act seemed to encompass all of Eddie's most terrifying nightmares, and the worst thing about it was that it happened in plain view. If this was how clowns acted under public scrutiny, Eddie did not even wanna think about how they acted in private. Eddie knew all about the difference between a public face and private reality; the things that people did where no one could see. In private, his parents and their friends were a bunch of sloppy drunks who did stupid and mean things, who behaved erratically, and whose erratic behavior always seemed to be to the detriment of children. His father was generally a sullen drunk, sometimes a mean and violent one, humiliating everyone around him, and, on the rare occasions that he managed a happy drunk, humiliating to himself. He'd lost all his front teeth long ago in a drunken brawl. He'd take out the false ones that replaced them, get this menacing idiot grin on his face--the only time Eddie ever saw the man smile was when he had his teeth out--and then he'd sing "Where is Sylvia", a ridiculous song specifically chosen because it had the most s's of any song he knew; the slur of the drunk and the toothless lisp of the s's, the drunken idiot toothless grin, all combined into a menacing travesty, spittle flying across the room, and everyone would laugh like it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. Eddie's mother when drunk would get loud, and then louder, and then louder still, and just like in real life nobody would pay any attention to her, so eventually she'd start to cry, and his father's happy drunk would turn sour and then angry; he'd put his false teeth back in and all the rest of the drunks would leave before things got ugly.

This was the more benign secret stuff that happened just outside of the public eye; still kinda public, even if it was a bunch of fellow drunks. The real secrets happened when no one else was around.

Truth was a weird thing. It seemed like it was wrapped up with shame, and so it never revealed itself. Everything that happened under public scrutiny was likely an outright lie, and if not, it had been sanitized and stripped of reality to such an extent that they might as well've been lying. The world beyond the front door was no more real than Disneyland or the zoo or comic books and television, especially those parts of the world that didn't involve people. If only everyone could be like the people on TV the world would be a much better place. And if shit got scary on TV or in a comic book that was okay, because it was contained, you had control over it, if you couldn't take it any more you could just turn off the TV or put the comic away. In real life, all you could do was close your eyes and wait it out.

Eddie wasn't too nuts about people, not even other kids, because even in most kids he saw the same sort of malice he saw in his parents after a few drinks. He was a loner because he preferred to be alone, not because he was a weirdo, and the fact that the other kids called him that was exactly why he didn't enjoy their company. Because he wasn't a weirdo, he reckoned his family weren't weirdoes either, which meant that they were basically the same as any other family, even though his limited experience indicated otherwise.

If other families were just like his family, then he reckoned other families probably had all sorts of secrets too, maybe just not ones involving so much drunkenness and malice. As far as Eddie could figure, everyone had secrets. He was only 8 years old and he already had a bunch of 'em, many of which involved sex. He'd pretty much been taught that sex was a secret, and thus surmised that secrets were sexual.

When he grew older he started to fetishize secrets, and developed a fetish about the public personas that mask them. Masked women excited him, as did women in disguise, or with obvious personas or fronts. It wasn't the mask itself that caused arousal but what it signified. It had nothing to do with the antiquated idea that women would engage in all sorts of reckless shenanigans whilst masked, their true identities hidden. It was the opposite of the Victorian masquerade ball because the mask was the public face, and it was their true identities behind the mask that engaged in the taboo behavior. The secret stuff, the kinky stuff, maybe even the dangerously deviant stuff, happened behind closed doors, when the mask was stripped off. The woman with the obvious public mask seemed to be almost parodying the persona, baldly announcing her disguise, a brazen declaration of deviancy behind it. Or maybe it hinted at an over-abundance of sexual secrets, so many that she didn't dare show her face in public ever, because we'd read the truth all over her. It was no longer about knowing her secrets but about sharing them, about becoming part of them, because as the years went by and he became old enough to hold his own, Eddie started to desire being part of the secret things that had always swirled around him.

Dangerous, erratic, violent, often drunk and just as often surly--the things he'd always associated with clowns became part of what he sought in women, or at least what he found in the women he sought. But not clowns. The clowns remained forever clowns. They were just as frightening as they'd always been, and while they were no longer necessarily undesirable, they were still best kept at arm's length. Look but don't touch was Eddie's unofficial clown policy, and even then it remained imaginary, one of those secret fetishes he knew better than to ever explore. As for truth--well, maybe the truth didn't lie in the shadowy recesses he'd always believed it did, but that's where he'd continued looking, digging deeper and deeper and never really finding anything but more shadows to dig through. Truth remained as elusive as Midget Town.

 

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