It was in the rainy and depressing winter of 2005 in New Zealand that I first met the Kiwi men who pretended to be legitimate clowns. It was with them that I paraded through children’s carnivals dressed in full clown gear in the intense grip of a BZP High, laughing my ass off as I posed for pictures with the unknowing little ones who had never met such energetic entertainers. Jimmy Debrowski, an accountant, my mentor and trouble-making clown guide, ran over from a group he was juggling in front of and threw a huge bottle of mustard onto my stomach for no apparent reason. That is a sensation I’ll never forget as it was the spicy kind. His eyes were on fire and he laughed diabolically. “Take that, America.” That was my simple nickname and they seemed intent on keeping me in my place as a foreigner. The unknowing children seemed to care less that the fools in front of them were far removed from sobriety or appropriate boundaries of any kind. They hollered and we fed off their approval. Jimmy took out a soft baseball bat and slugged me in the back with it. I keeled over in pain but was still laughing my ass off as I lunged at his legs. We wrestled to the ground with our floppy shoes as the children shrieked in delight before the manager of the Auckland carnival ran over to kick us out. Pete and Timmy had managed to get into the main tent and Timmy was standing on top of a mount and breathing fire into a hoop. He then decided that he wanted to pet the tiger which was running through hoops so he did a full dive into that area to the crowd’s terror. The tiger didn’t find Timmy amusing and he swiped at him. It was lucky for Timmy that he’d been de-clawed or the joke would have been quite over. He was vomiting all over himself and he pissed himself, much to the shock of the mothers, as they drug him out in front of frightened children – a sweaty, trippi ng, frightened little clown trying to soak up the last bit of attention he could.
The Kiwi clown imposters laughed at Buddhist Monks who strove for peace with their quiet footsteps. For it was the untameable and wild part of those men and myself that redeeemed us in the madness to come. “The monks are pretending” they said. “No one can be that nice, not a man, anyway.” I wondered what a Buddhist monk would do, or, how he would perform, disguised as a clown and dosed with a large quantity of BZP at a fully functioning circus? Would he sit there and not try to be funny? Would he rise to the occasion and let the moment be what it is, a brief sample of life at its most pure, chaotic, hilarious, uncontrollable form? Or were we kidding ourselves and bending morality too far, patting ourselves on the back for being so daring and clever, taunting boundaries of right and wrong and rationalizing it by the sound of laughing children?
We were staying in a batch in a town called Mangawhai. The costumes were perfect, right down to the red nose and huge shoes and face paint and little squeezable honkers with those little blowers that shoot out which kids go crazy for. We would drink KilKenny beer and consume large quantities of narcotics and “party pills” while preparing – passing the bottle around and laughing as the BZP flowed through us – the legal X of the day. We considered it a bit careless in the grand scheme of the mighty universe, but reckoned that none of us could perform such shenanigans while sober. We scanned the papers and internet trying to locate the nearest circus and it was in Whangarei, about forty miles north. “The North Island Traveling Carnival.” This was nothing to compare to Barnum and Bailey, only an atmosphere of little Maori children with their fierce looking, tattooed fathers hoping to find a break from the gloom of five straight rainy days. New Zealand could use lots of clowns at times and we saw ourselves as “givers of happiness.”
If you know New Zealand at all you may recall the Tsunami of 2005. Who knew that on this day, with this carnival so close to the ocean, that our laugh would finally come to an end. The wave was nothing like the 2004 Asian mammoth, but our shouting and antics were brought to an abrupt halt when the four tripping clowns became the only hope for six little children washed out to sea. We did not know that we would be the only ones to help them not drown and had we known mother nature’s wrath, well, you never know these things. Timmy and Jimmy were great swimmers, like most Kiwis and I saved the life of Peter Mexted as he clung to my large shoes when all others lights went out. Our pictures were taken as heroes and it came out that we were not actual clowns and that we were drug abusers with twisted senses of humor and a fettish for needing attention . These two facts were forgiven by a grateful community and mothers in tears to see their kids again. But the party stopped for us and we never crashed a carnival again. I am sober now and those days are long gone, the red nose and floppy shoes just a memory. But I loved both the men I performed with and I will never forget the laughter of all those cute little Kiwi children. I try to be more like those Buddhist monks, living a peaceful life. But I slip from time to time. I hop a train without knowing where it goes. I hitchhiked across Canada and saw Banff in the freezing rain. I still long to feel alive again. And then I smile and remember that in the midst of insanity or boredom or darkness, something wonderful can still happen.
