Velociworld

A HORRIBLE ADMISSION

A little known, well-guarded secret about Velociman: I used to be a Clown.

Not a buffoon, which I still am, but a bona fide, squirting flower Clown.

A little background: The Senator was a Shriner, and he and his buddies formed a Clown Unit within the temple in the fifties. They had a dragon float for the St. Patrick's Day Parade, a fascinating machine that was always parked at the fire station at 63rd and Paulsen. I remember it from my earliest days. Rumour had it that during the '50's and early '60's, while on Parade duty, they would snatch a small black child from the sidewalk, and terrorize them for a few blocks, before discarding them. I can't speak to that, other than to say it sounds like hyperbole. I only remember them throwing bubble gum.

Of course, I wasn't a small black child, either.

I can recall attending parties at sleazy motels at Savannah Beach as a 5 or 6 year old, however, and walking into the wrong room, only to see a burly man in full clown face, no shirt on, back as hairy as Willie B, who would hijack me, and make me watch him guzzle booze while he attempted to remove his clown make up.

I am always amazed when people think they are laying an epiphany on me when they say they are scared of clowns. Of course you are! We ALL are! Clowns are meant to amuse adults, and terrorize children. It is their fucking job!

Enough background. So, in the early '90's, my brothers and I were getting rheumy-eyed one night, and decided it would be a stroke of brilliance if we became clowns. And so we went through Masons, and Shriners, and joined the Clown Unit, which was mostly populated by The Senator's old cohorts. Bliss!

A good clown can make a child wet their shorts from a block away. And that was my goal. Terror, and fear. Shock, and awe. And some penny candy, so mummy didn't beat my ass.

There's something liberating about a mask, a disguise. A clown can say things to a shapely young lady that would get another man arrested. I'll leave it at that.

I cannot divulge secrets of the Brotherhood. But I will reveal this: the dragon float had a fully stocked bar for St. Patrick's Day, and a funnel one could urinate into, and the discharge would run out of a hose into the street, where it would roll to the curb, soiling many a pair of mary janes. Rawk, man.

I got tranferred to Memphis shortly after our initiation into the tribe, and the whole gambit imploded.

But for one beautiful, brilliant season, I made the children cry, the women blush, the husbands apoplectic. I was, for want of a better term, a frigging Clown.