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| Joining a Circus with Dental Insurance was top of his wishlist |
Pennywise the clown. That fucker haunted my dreams for years. He lurked in the shadows of my bedroom, hid between the cracked alleyways that dotted my hometown. He was everywhere I feared and many places I didn’t. I should never have watched that fucking movie: Stephen King’s “It”. I begged my Mother to let me rent it. I promised her it wasn’t that scary. “It’s about a clown, Mom,” I urged, “how scary can it be?” “It’s about an evil clown.” She countered. “A rogue clown, Mom. A clown who’s been chewed up and spat out by society. A misunderstood clown who’s made some wrong turns in life, and is trying to find some semblance of normalcy in his baggy-panted, white-faced, red-nosed existence.” Twelve year-old me probably didn’t say that, but either way she bought it. In reality, it was about an evil clown – one who feasted on the dreams and also the flesh (an important detail) of children.
Being a child myself, and knowing first-hand that clowns
existed, and that any adult man, who painted his face and traveled around with
a circus under the guise of entertaining kids, was almost certainly pure evil,
I found this movie somewhat unsettling. Or put more succinctly: I didn’t sleep
for almost a year.
Let’s cut to the fucking chase: clowns are weird. Anyone who
aspires to be a clown is fucking weird, and anyone who has made enough poor
decisions in life that they find themselves employed as a clown, is fucking
weird. At face value, the concept of a clown is to entertain children. But
let’s look a little closer at this supposition: The modern clown began as
vaudevillian characters in French theater. You had the whiteface or ‘blanc’
clown, who would essentially abuse the lower class, or ‘auguste’ clowns. They
did this with their faces plastered in colored face-paint, because, y’know,
that’s hilarious and all. Later, common to North America, came the ‘hobo’
clowns, these are the guys who look like they’ve just murdered and raped some
kids, and smell of piss. They’re usually sullen and grumpy and derive much
pleasure from the physical (and one would imagine mental) abuse of their peers.
Obviously anyone who can’t see the hilarity in that is lacking in the very
basic tenets of a sense of humor.
Somewhere along the lines, people realized that these guys
weren’t so much funny, as freaky-looking fuckers, and that rather than tickle
the funny bone, they instead stomped all over their fear receptors. Horror
writers, such as the aforementioned Stephen King, began to write clowns as the
horrible, monstrous beings they are. Over the past twenty years there has been
a flurry of terrifying clown movies. Clowns, as a source of joy, entertainment
and gaiety, have virtually been wiped off the map (which is a good thing). Of
course, many of these clowns have freaky-ass evil faces, as you can see on thiswebsite. But this isn’t even necessary. If, like me, you have a true fear of
clowns, you’ll agree it’s the regular old middle-aged men with sad expressions
and painted on grimacing smiles that are the most sinister. Except for
Pennywise – the granddaddy of them all – who flips with consummate ease between creepy regular clown guy, and soul-petrifying monster, whenever those meddling
kids piss him off.
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| His owner not willing to take a chance, poor Gizmo starved to death. |
Of course, it wasn’t just clowns I was afraid of: Gremlins
scared every shade of shit out of me. And a question: WHEN THE FUCK DOES “AFTER
MIDNIGHT” END? 6am? 9am? Fucking when can I feed my pet, without him attempting
to murder me and everyone I love? And I accidentally saw “Aliens” when I was eleven. I vomited that night, and every day for about six months I went to bed
with anxiety that I had an Alien hitch-hiking in my chest. In fact, as a kid I
was afraid of fucking everything: vampires, aliens, banshees scared the living
bejeesus out of me (If you see one you die? How fucking unfair is that? Gimme
at least a chance of escape, for fuck sake). On top of all these grotesque creatures
of the night, I also possessed a vague fear of just your random, garden variety,
amorphous type of monster; the ones that you never did see, but you knew looked
all kind of monstery – a bit like the ones you see in “Monsters INC.” but less
cute and more terrifying.
And then it stopped. All of it. I realized that the really
frightening things in life were real. There were no Bogeymen hiding under my
bed. There were actual real-life terrors waiting to strike at any moment. When
my Dad was diagnosed with Cancer, just after my eighteenth birthday, I realized
that adult life was a hell of a lot fucking scarier, than my childhood
imaginings. Fears didn’t hide in the shadows; they jumped out and face-raped
you in broad daylight. By the time my dad died, and I dropped out of college,
got myself in debt, had my heart broken a couple of times, and been diagnosed
with depression, I was no longer frightened of things that go bump in the
night. I’d lie in bed at night willing them to come take me away.
Nowadays, things are much better for me: I have a beautiful
wife; two amazing kids; a good job; depression still rears its head sometimes,
but never for long; debt … debt still sucks, but I can handle it. I’m still
afraid, of what the future holds for my kids, of how they’ll navigate school
and the lure of sex and drugs in their teens, of their job prospects twenty years
from now. I sometimes worry about my wife’s health, about my health – was my Dad’s illness genetic, or just bad fucking luck?
But these fears don’t paralyze me; I still wake up in the morning and go to
work, or make my son breakfast and watch cartoons with him. And I’ll be there
for both of my kids when they get scared that there may or may not be an evil
child-murdering clown in their closet. I might even check it out for them.
Either that or run screaming for the door.
