“Damn everything but the circus.”

-Corita Kent

Bedlam

№1

“Ladies and gentlemen, Calcutta has left the building.”

We’re all staring at Calcutta the Clown’s limp body—not that he’s dead or anything—and letting Puck boss us around.

“Show’s gotta go on. Will it be Dodd or Palmetto?”

I wish he was dead, actually. But no, he’s not. I’m quite sure.

“Don’t look at me,” Dodd artfully backtracks, “I just finished up the Harlequin routine with Gaston.”

I know for a fact that the Harlequin routine was canceled for today, due to the complete lack of an audience. Stupid Dodd. Always slivering out of work.

“So, Palmetto, what do you say?” Puck’s giving me the eye, ensuring I won’t refuse. I swear, one day I’ll go telltale heart on his ass.

“It’s just the Magician Spoof?” I find myself asking, even if a bit reluctant.

Puck’s left eye bulges something fierce. It frightens little children. “Sure is. I’ll go talk to the emcee.” He promises, slipping off behind the canvas curtain. He’s ring master, in charge of all, don’t you know.

Elfie, the Costume Coordinator and Makeup-Artist Extraordinaire, she throws the colorful parachute pants with purple moons and stars sewed all over at me and shoves me in the dressing corner. That’s the one thing you give up in the circus—your modesty.

Calcutta’s huge ass pants don’t exactly fit me like a glove, so I put them on over my jeans and wait for Elfie to peel the vest off everyone’s favorite heroin-addicted clown. I see a pair of rainbow suspenders hanging from the cupboard and wonder if I should use them.

Calcutta’s such a wimp; it might not be a nighttime show, or the most coveted of all time slots, but it’s a performance nonetheless. For all I know, he might be the greatest entertainer in this entire goddamn freak show, but he’s really not cut out for circus life.

I dress in what Elfie hands me, carefully holding my breath so as not to smell the clown-sweat soaked armpit holes. I slip up by laughing when I notice she can’t look me in the chest. It’s my deformity—my goddamn chest. And Puck makes me walk around without a shirt when I’m on duty just to scare any audience wanderers off.

Eww. The vest is warm and sticky and grossly sticking to my skin. I shudder and Dodd can’t stop laughing.

Stupid clown.

“Come here and let me do your makeup, Pal.” Elfie grabs my hand and sits me on the crate next to all her makeup, so she can flower up the white paint I already have on. The makeup causes lots of skin problems, so sometimes it’s just more tolerable to leave it on. It keeps the horrified screaming to a bare minimum.

Stupid acne.

She paints my mouth red with lipstick, then sketches out my clown face with a ballpoint pin. I have long lips for a clown, not round at all, but pointed. The red lips go all the way to my earlobes, I’m smiling so hard. Of course, I’m not really smiling. That’s the great thing about being a clown. You don’t have to smile to look happy.

The ballpoint pen hurts my eyeballs when she draws huge asterisks over my lids. I close them and let her work her black-paint magic.

“My fine audience,” the emcee booms from on stage. “Boys and girls alike!”

“Shit, shit, shit,” Elfie paints faster as Corn, the microphone commander, announces me. Or, well, announces Magician Wolfgang.

“Men, women, and children, one and all!”

“Merde!” Dodd and Elfie hiss at the same time in each of my ears. It means good luck, sort of. In clown language…

There’s the warm thrush of stale air as the magician’s cape is thrown around my clown shoulders. A boulder cap is placed upon my head, followed by a top hat.

“It is with great delight and awe I introduce Bedlam’s finest magician, retrieved all the way from the Black Forest of Germany…”

“Go,” Elfie whispers in my ear, and I feel Dodd pick me up from the elbows.

“With the charm of only a true gentlemen, and the mystique of a true practitioner of the Dark Arts…”

Corn’s totally stalling for time.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…”

I’m pushed through the cheap wooden door, painted black, to the curtain box, center stage.

“The Great Magician—,”

I turn my back to where the audience will be in just a moment and take a deep breathe before the plunge.

The curtains rustle open like threadbare moth wings.

“Palmetto?” Corn fakes astonishment at my fake sabotage, as I turn with the wackiest face of them all, staring into the deep careen of bright lights and blindness. You can never see the audience from the stage. The spotlight gets in your eyes.

I hear a little cheering, a little roaring, and I step into the light with the dignity of a clown.

I am the Palmetto the Great, the Lost Prince of the Circus...

The slapstick music begins right on cue and I jump off the black-box stand, dancing straight into the center of the three-ring stage. I jump into the hearts of my audience and I dance like the clowniest clown you’ve ever seen.

But not really. My name is Ethan and I am not funny.

With the pitch of my hand, I throw off the top hat, revealing my comical boulder hat, and bounce straight into the routine.

I am twenty and young, or so they say...

I start sabotaging the Magician’s set, just like what Calcutta does every “Sabo-Show” at three in the afternoon on Fridays. The audience seems appeased with my foolishness. I hear voracious laughing as I release the trained doves by accident.

In the circus, you don’t age much. If your younger than twenty-one, you’re still a kid.

But it’s not really an accident. I’ve seen Calcutta pull off this banter of an act each Friday for the past two years of my life.

Once you hit twenty-one, by circus standards, you’re practically middle aged.

I hear snarls of chuckles—not really real laughter, but the kind of sound you shout out when you think something’s pathetic—along with generic, carnivorous laughter as I set a predetermined fire on the card table. It’s all controlled, but the fire’s the tricky part.

All of them over twenty-one, they all look like their ninety. I’ve seen them without their stage make-up.

It’s when I’m the most scared I’ll fuck up.

Of course, I’m exaggerating. My brother’s twenty-four and he still looks seventeen to me.

I hardly ever get to perform by myself, so this is pretty ground-breaking for me. Usually I’m the Auguste to the Whiteface, the dunce to the intellectual, the inferior to the superior. It’s all part of the business. The war of the clowns…

But then again, he’s got that thyroid problem, and he’s looked that way since puberty.

I’m just getting to the part where I do my little jig during the wacky song their playing…

And I turn twenty-one in a month…

Then all the lights go out. I halt my jig. You can hear the generators lose power as the people groan, sort of. Everything sounds hushed in the dark.

I plan to celebrate with a bang.

I’m freaking out, hoisting up old Calcutta’s pants just as they begin to fall past my crotch. I’m really glad I kept on my jeans.

The bang of a revolver.

I knew I should have put on those stupid rainbow suspenders…

And all during an act. I’m going to blow my brains out during an act, right in front of everyone.

Emcee starts booming to stay calm, they’ll have the lights on in a jiff, but I can hear people getting out of their stadium seating. I see the glow of cell-phones being flipped open so people can navigate out. Wow, there were fewer people than I had thought.

It’s not like my plan’s original though…

Puck, or at least I think it’s Puck, grabs me from the stage and pulls me behind the curtain. The air is hot and sticky in my lungs as someone unbuttons me from the vest.

The Bedlam Circus owner pulled the same stunt himself, twenty-one years before I was born.

“You really sucked, Macintosh,” Dodd whispers lovingly in my ear. And by lovingly, I mean stupidly. “Be glad they hit the switch. You would have gotten booed off.”

Stupid idiot.

I hear fumbling and feel someone forcibly removing me from the clown pants. I realize the reason why the circuit-breaker failed. Corn had the music playing, the lights burning, and the audio record of laughter and applause going at the same time.

Stupid Corn.

Seems poetic enough for me.

No one had been clapping or roaring or cheering. It was fake. I heard Calcutta muttering something and knew he was slipping into the costume.

More realization hit home—there was no faulty circuit-breaker. They had pulled the plug on me because I sucked, and because Calcutta woke up.

Poetic indeed…

Oh god, I just want it to be my birthday so I can off myself.

I hear the recovering power of the generators, I see the flicker of lights, I hear the music starting over…

“Ladies and gentlemen, Calcutta the Clown! Lost Prince of the Circus!”

There was applause this time, real applause.

Who wants to watch a kid named Palmetto perform anyway?

There’s a bit of mirth, real mirth, bouncing up and down in the audience aisles as Calcutta does something worthy of laughter. I can hear it all from behind the canvas curtain. My painted face is still hot with the spotlight. My sweat is dripping like an angry faucet…

But I digress—my name’s Ethan Macintosh.

Maybe it’s the shoes. He has huge clown shoes…I have sneakers.

And I’m not funny.