When I was eight years old I engaged in a deadly battle with a clown.
Well, perhaps “engaged” is a bit misleading, unless you counted my crawling under the covers or entirely under the bed as an engagement. But the clown was real enough, and he possessed supernatural powers, although I was the only one in my family who was aware of it.
The clown took the guise of a painting—a garage sale gift from my mother. In the full brightness of the bedroom ceiling light, he looked harmless enough, even somewhat benign. His head was cocked curiously to one side while his bright red lips tugged gently, sadly down at the corners of his exaggerated mouth. Horizontal lines of melancholy carved his white painted brow in spite of the small, jaunty derby hat perched atop his bald head. A bright budding flower protruded from the band encircling the clown’s hat and arced listlessly down beside his ear. The flower’s bright blue color matched the large diamonds painted over the clown’s sad eyes. He looked as though he was frozen, perpetually on the verge of crying.
There is something unnaturally disturbing about a sad clown.
Although I was pleased to receive the gift and thought its bright colors would brighten my small bedroom, I soon discovered its supernatural secret. That first night, in the dim light of my small bedside lamp and in the gray-black sheath of night, the clown began to change. The horizontal lines stitched across his forehead faded slowly away, but were soon replaced by the deep, vertical lines of anger. The melancholy darkness of the clown’s eyes began to gently sparkle with a hint of malevolent madness. The sad, red lips gradually, almost imperceptibly, arced upwards into a malicious grin. The jaunty, derby hat only lent a more macabre essence to the ghoulish transformation.
In my mature, eight-year-old reasoning I attempted not to look at the cursed clown, but its grotesque shape shifting compelled my eyes to it. Knowing that its power was unnatural as well as unreasonable, I kept my eyes glued to the portrait, intently defying it to transform in front of such a stolid, rational witness. Then a sudden, ever-slight change occurred, causing me to blink, which only provided the clown with an added instant to shift even more.
However, before the clown achieved complete transformation and was able to perpetrate unspeakable acts of terror upon me, I raced headlong for the wall switch and dissolved him with 60 watts of GE power, back into the sad portrait from whence he came. Of course, I tried calling my father to me in order to share the eerie phenomena and obtain his reassurance on the occurrence, but surprisingly, he chose to remain in bed, unimpressed with the supernatural. My mother quickly came to me, but the clown craftily maintained its front of sadness so that she remained unconvinced. After the second night, she too refused to come to my aid. I was left with the sole option of sleeping with the ceiling light on which inevitably led to a morning of teasing from my siblings and a stern reminder from my father that he “didn’t bust his hump all week to support the electric company.”
The battle continued for four nights.
On the fourth day after receiving the clown portrait, I sat listlessly in my third grade class too deprived of sleep to even enjoy gazing at the curly-haired beauty of Patricia Wellinguard, a fellow classmate and unknowing receiver of my undying adoration. When we had finished the math portion of our day the teacher announced that we would be reading some poetry and then writing poems of our own. The assignment was an “open-write,” we could construct a poem on anything we wished—whatever came to mind.
Whatever came to mind? That criminally insane clown was the only thing dominating my mind since receiving the portrait. I lived in a continual state of the clown staring at me with angry glee from within my mind’s eye. I ate, drank, slept, breathed, and even went to the bathroom while the clown stared, plotting his vile acts.
What else could I write about?
I used the poem to attack the clown. I exposed him for what he was. I revealed his evil intentions and thwarted those intentions with scathing rhymes. I made a joke of the whole horrific situation and in so doing, made a joke out of him. The humor of my poem also illustrated my inherent bravery in dealing with the clown. The teacher loved it. She shared it with the class. The class loved it. I became the center of attention for the first time in my scholastic career. I stood apart.
And when I got home, the portrait still hung on my bedroom wall, but the evil clown had gone, vanquished without the courage to even say goodbye.
Such is the power of writing and such was my first realization of that power.
After I vanquished the clown I suddenly became the “go to” guy for writing. Other students asked for my help with their writing assignments. The teacher used my work as examples for the class. People sat in wonder at how quickly I could make up stories and rhymes. One of my class writings even won a place for me to attend a play with my teacher and one other student. There was an eminence and confidence that came with being “the writer” of the class that I had not known before. It was too good to last.
And it didn’t.
My family moved from that area of California, to John Day, Oregon, home of loggers, mill-workers and cattle ranchers. In John Day, imagination and writing were as valued as a steel saddle in a lightning storm (you see how quickly just the thought of the town brings on a bad, down-home simile). My newfound eminence and status abruptly vanished and with it my desire to write.
My re-engagement with “real writing” (as I called it) did not happen again until high school. By then my family had relocated once again and I was struggling with all the usual perils of adolescence. Writing allowed me a voice with which to release my teenage social fears, confusion, and angst. At that awkward age I rarely shared my writing with anyone; it simply existed as a comfort, a safety valve. The few times I shared my writing, it was viewed as a curiosity, a novelty or trick that not every one could do—like juggling. Others seemed to appreciate the finished product, but did not quite understand it or my inherent need to write. As high school blurred into adulthood, writing slowly became a private, isolated thing I did, then a private, isolated thing I occasionally did, and ultimately, a private, isolated thing I used to do. The reality of the world and how to survive in it gently pushed writing aside. Had I possessed a greater level of awareness, I would have realized that writing contributed greatly to my survival up to that time. But awareness is a slow dawning for many people and when the light hits them they often simply pull the shades.
I encountered the clown again when I was thirty-four.
This time he stood at the foot of a hospital bed. His features, at first fuzzy, came into sharper focus as I drifted out of my morphine-laced sleep. I had been crushed in an industrial accident. The accident left me with three broken ribs, broken blood vessels from my neck up, and a lung in danger of collapsing due to the burst air sacs within. The whites of my eyes shone blood red and I was sore to the point of feeling pain within a six-inch radius outside of my body. I remembered the doctor telling me of my “luck”: had the angle of impact been slightly different, my heart might have been crushed.
As my eyes regained focus, the malevolent clown at the foot of my bed slowly grinned.
“How ya doin’?” he said.
“Okay.” My mouth felt thick with cotton.
“When can you be back at work?”
I ignored the clown for the time being, but he remained inside my mind, grinning, wanting me back. When I got home four days later, I began to write. Although I had turned my back on it, writing had not forgotten me, and writing had not lost its power. It kept me sane as I spent six weeks semi-confined to a recliner that allowed a comfortable position in which to breathe. It kept my spirits up as the lung damage slowly healed, suddenly turned to pneumonia, and then healed again.
Since then I’ve walked away from my previous work and my ill-conceived idea of what life was suppose to be (hey, I may be slow to learn some lessons, but I do learn). I returned to school and re-embraced the written word. Although my “real writing” is still primarily for personal pleasure and fulfillment, I enjoy sharing what writing has done—and continues to do—for me in spite of the times I turned my back on it. Even though I didn’t know it, it was always there.
We all write even if we don’t realize it. We all stage scenes, add descriptions, write dialog in our minds—even though circumstance and our own sudden fancies prompt constant revisions.
Writing is here, within you and me, even now.
But the clown is gone and I know he won’t return again.
Well, perhaps “engaged” is a bit misleading, unless you counted my crawling under the covers or entirely under the bed as an engagement. But the clown was real enough, and he possessed supernatural powers, although I was the only one in my family who was aware of it.
The clown took the guise of a painting—a garage sale gift from my mother. In the full brightness of the bedroom ceiling light, he looked harmless enough, even somewhat benign. His head was cocked curiously to one side while his bright red lips tugged gently, sadly down at the corners of his exaggerated mouth. Horizontal lines of melancholy carved his white painted brow in spite of the small, jaunty derby hat perched atop his bald head. A bright budding flower protruded from the band encircling the clown’s hat and arced listlessly down beside his ear. The flower’s bright blue color matched the large diamonds painted over the clown’s sad eyes. He looked as though he was frozen, perpetually on the verge of crying.
There is something unnaturally disturbing about a sad clown.
Although I was pleased to receive the gift and thought its bright colors would brighten my small bedroom, I soon discovered its supernatural secret. That first night, in the dim light of my small bedside lamp and in the gray-black sheath of night, the clown began to change. The horizontal lines stitched across his forehead faded slowly away, but were soon replaced by the deep, vertical lines of anger. The melancholy darkness of the clown’s eyes began to gently sparkle with a hint of malevolent madness. The sad, red lips gradually, almost imperceptibly, arced upwards into a malicious grin. The jaunty, derby hat only lent a more macabre essence to the ghoulish transformation.
In my mature, eight-year-old reasoning I attempted not to look at the cursed clown, but its grotesque shape shifting compelled my eyes to it. Knowing that its power was unnatural as well as unreasonable, I kept my eyes glued to the portrait, intently defying it to transform in front of such a stolid, rational witness. Then a sudden, ever-slight change occurred, causing me to blink, which only provided the clown with an added instant to shift even more.
However, before the clown achieved complete transformation and was able to perpetrate unspeakable acts of terror upon me, I raced headlong for the wall switch and dissolved him with 60 watts of GE power, back into the sad portrait from whence he came. Of course, I tried calling my father to me in order to share the eerie phenomena and obtain his reassurance on the occurrence, but surprisingly, he chose to remain in bed, unimpressed with the supernatural. My mother quickly came to me, but the clown craftily maintained its front of sadness so that she remained unconvinced. After the second night, she too refused to come to my aid. I was left with the sole option of sleeping with the ceiling light on which inevitably led to a morning of teasing from my siblings and a stern reminder from my father that he “didn’t bust his hump all week to support the electric company.”
The battle continued for four nights.
On the fourth day after receiving the clown portrait, I sat listlessly in my third grade class too deprived of sleep to even enjoy gazing at the curly-haired beauty of Patricia Wellinguard, a fellow classmate and unknowing receiver of my undying adoration. When we had finished the math portion of our day the teacher announced that we would be reading some poetry and then writing poems of our own. The assignment was an “open-write,” we could construct a poem on anything we wished—whatever came to mind.
Whatever came to mind? That criminally insane clown was the only thing dominating my mind since receiving the portrait. I lived in a continual state of the clown staring at me with angry glee from within my mind’s eye. I ate, drank, slept, breathed, and even went to the bathroom while the clown stared, plotting his vile acts.
What else could I write about?
I used the poem to attack the clown. I exposed him for what he was. I revealed his evil intentions and thwarted those intentions with scathing rhymes. I made a joke of the whole horrific situation and in so doing, made a joke out of him. The humor of my poem also illustrated my inherent bravery in dealing with the clown. The teacher loved it. She shared it with the class. The class loved it. I became the center of attention for the first time in my scholastic career. I stood apart.
And when I got home, the portrait still hung on my bedroom wall, but the evil clown had gone, vanquished without the courage to even say goodbye.
Such is the power of writing and such was my first realization of that power.
After I vanquished the clown I suddenly became the “go to” guy for writing. Other students asked for my help with their writing assignments. The teacher used my work as examples for the class. People sat in wonder at how quickly I could make up stories and rhymes. One of my class writings even won a place for me to attend a play with my teacher and one other student. There was an eminence and confidence that came with being “the writer” of the class that I had not known before. It was too good to last.
And it didn’t.
My family moved from that area of California, to John Day, Oregon, home of loggers, mill-workers and cattle ranchers. In John Day, imagination and writing were as valued as a steel saddle in a lightning storm (you see how quickly just the thought of the town brings on a bad, down-home simile). My newfound eminence and status abruptly vanished and with it my desire to write.
My re-engagement with “real writing” (as I called it) did not happen again until high school. By then my family had relocated once again and I was struggling with all the usual perils of adolescence. Writing allowed me a voice with which to release my teenage social fears, confusion, and angst. At that awkward age I rarely shared my writing with anyone; it simply existed as a comfort, a safety valve. The few times I shared my writing, it was viewed as a curiosity, a novelty or trick that not every one could do—like juggling. Others seemed to appreciate the finished product, but did not quite understand it or my inherent need to write. As high school blurred into adulthood, writing slowly became a private, isolated thing I did, then a private, isolated thing I occasionally did, and ultimately, a private, isolated thing I used to do. The reality of the world and how to survive in it gently pushed writing aside. Had I possessed a greater level of awareness, I would have realized that writing contributed greatly to my survival up to that time. But awareness is a slow dawning for many people and when the light hits them they often simply pull the shades.
I encountered the clown again when I was thirty-four.
This time he stood at the foot of a hospital bed. His features, at first fuzzy, came into sharper focus as I drifted out of my morphine-laced sleep. I had been crushed in an industrial accident. The accident left me with three broken ribs, broken blood vessels from my neck up, and a lung in danger of collapsing due to the burst air sacs within. The whites of my eyes shone blood red and I was sore to the point of feeling pain within a six-inch radius outside of my body. I remembered the doctor telling me of my “luck”: had the angle of impact been slightly different, my heart might have been crushed.
As my eyes regained focus, the malevolent clown at the foot of my bed slowly grinned.
“How ya doin’?” he said.
“Okay.” My mouth felt thick with cotton.
“When can you be back at work?”
I ignored the clown for the time being, but he remained inside my mind, grinning, wanting me back. When I got home four days later, I began to write. Although I had turned my back on it, writing had not forgotten me, and writing had not lost its power. It kept me sane as I spent six weeks semi-confined to a recliner that allowed a comfortable position in which to breathe. It kept my spirits up as the lung damage slowly healed, suddenly turned to pneumonia, and then healed again.
Since then I’ve walked away from my previous work and my ill-conceived idea of what life was suppose to be (hey, I may be slow to learn some lessons, but I do learn). I returned to school and re-embraced the written word. Although my “real writing” is still primarily for personal pleasure and fulfillment, I enjoy sharing what writing has done—and continues to do—for me in spite of the times I turned my back on it. Even though I didn’t know it, it was always there.
We all write even if we don’t realize it. We all stage scenes, add descriptions, write dialog in our minds—even though circumstance and our own sudden fancies prompt constant revisions.
Writing is here, within you and me, even now.
But the clown is gone and I know he won’t return again.
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