Clowns, contrary to popular belief, don’t have a universal scent. Some smell musky and dull while others smell flowery. Others still smell like old rubber, cigarettes, and glue. For me, any one component of this last concoction brought with it images of tangled synthetic red hair and a cacophony of reds, blues, greens, and whites running together and distorting the face canvas that they blanketed. Oversized shoes held together with patches of painted duct tape. Clothes held together with safety pins, staples, tape, and glue. Pants torn and re-sewn a dozen times at the same seams.
These are professionals, I told myself growing up as I stepped over a pile of make up and vomit that had been that night’s entertainment. Professional men at work and then at work still after hours. But not all clowns are those whose images kept me in school year after year until I became not only the most educated person in my family but the most educated person that anyone I knew outside of my school had ever personally known. There were clowns who seemed respectable, responsible, clean even! Those whom I could count on from time to time; whose children read books and aspired to one day enroll in clown school. In some ways I got lucky by not being born into those families. I may not have made it this far from home in search of something better.
