I was indentured at the University of Florida when I saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Well, big to me. I was a breakfast waitress in a restaurant lined with aquariums that smelled like dead fish.
Even though I was in my senior year, close to the college finish line and anticipated an internship and subsequent job as a newspaper reporter, I had a dodgy relationship with patience and a dramatic familiarity with instant gratification. I was also on the exit ramp of a relationship with a taciturn older man who preferred the company of bees to people. So I peppered my cover letter with adjectives, inflated my resume and was called for an interview. I got the job. At the age of 22 I was hired as one of four marketing managers for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. Yes, I am that cliché: the one who runs away and joins the circus.
Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers was an old-fashioned circus that travelled by train, paraded its animals through the center of small towns and set up a three-ring venue in a parking lot, using elephants to hoist the red-and-white striped tents. While Ringling filled auditoriums with whiz-bang-glitz pyrotechnics, the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers circus hewed to a modest production saturated in nostalgic Americana with sideshows, airborne acrobatics and a fairway that featured a bearded lady!!! and the world’s tallest man!!!
My job was to arrive in town three weeks before the show. I set up ticket sales, hung posters, schmoozed locals, secured permits and did what I could to froth up the town. The job had sounded exciting in the ad; it was instead cripplingly lonely. I was in obscure, forlorn towns where I knew no one. During the day work filled my time, but in the evenings I returned to my cheap hotel room, ate dinner from a vending machine and medicated with wine and lethal amounts of network television. For the 10 months I had the job, my only companion was Elmo. Elmo the clown.
Elmo was a white-faced clown. He wore a massive, marigold-colored Afro wig and stuck a red Ping Pong ball on his nose. A fat, white crescent moon of an upturned smile outlined in black took up most of his face. A black X crossed the large white circles around his eyes, and his painted-on brows were way up near his hairline. Baggy overalls covered a blue-and-white-checkered shirt that looked like a tablecloth from a shopping mall Italian restaurant. He waddled on puffy, oversized shoes and carried a four-foot-tall, yellow foam hammer that he tapped on people’s heads as an exclamation point to his sight gags.
About a week before the circus pulled its pomp into town, Elmo arrived in a pickup truck pulling his little bubble of a trailer. Elmo was an advance clown, and his job was to work the town. My job included accompanying Elmo to everything.
The first time I met Elmo, he knocked on my hotel room door one evening in his full clown gear. “What’s your real name?” I asked. “Just call me Elmo,” he said. Then he hit me on the head with his foam hammer. He was smiling. He was always smiling, even when his lips pursed in concern. “Maybe we could go out to eat?” I asked. He nodded. I thought he would change out of his costume and makeup. He didn’t.
I can’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember I was gushingly grateful for human contact. Somewhere inside I must have been aware of how absurd it may have looked to the other diners. I didn’t care. I was thrilled to have company even if he was wearing clown shoes the size of doormats.
During dinner I began crying and talking way too fast about things way too personal. Elmo listened. Or I thought he did. After a few minutes of my waterworks, he hit me on the head with his hammer. “You are so silly,” he said in a Pee Wee Hermanish voice and then tucked into his pizza.
And so it went. Every two weeks Elmo appeared at my door in some new town. Always in makeup. Always in his clown clothes. Always with his yellow foam hammer. I sat with him in restaurant after restaurant, and we inevitably launched into what became our routine. I cried. Elmo listened. Or pretended to. Pretty soon out came the hammer. He called me silly in that goofy voice and hit me on the head. I stopped crying, and then we turned toward our meals and began eating in a silence that seemed to satisfy us both.
