Send in the Clown

About once a month my son and I turn the corner in front of my mom’s beach house at the Jersey Shore to find a car parked out front with a bright red, plastic ball affixed to the front grill. The car tells us that Bernie is inside—short for Bernice—and that the house is being cleaned. You see, Bernie is my mother’s cleaning lady. She is also a clown.

For about seven or eight years now, Bernie has been under my mother’s employ and in that time I’ve learned a few things about clowning. For instance, I’ve learned that “clown” is a verb, as in, “I clowned on Saturday and some kid threw up on my shoes,” Bernie might say, “Thankfully they were longer than my feet and made of plastic so I didn’t get covered. I just wiped them off.” Or, “The air-conditioning was broken where I clowned on Sunday, so my make-up started to run and I looked a little like the scary Joker from that Batman movie.”

Bernie is a large woman in most ways with a very friendly face; a face that one could immediately imagine tracing with the large, happy red lips of a clown’s over-the-top smile. Her eyes are bright and her bosoms are huge which, I imagine, would serve to enhance the overall round-y clowness of any working clown in the biz. She speaks not quiet slowly but with the same steady rhythmic inflection on each syllable of every word, as if there were an invisible piano teacher sitting on her shoulder reminding her of the calm, predictable pace of a metronome nearby.

Thankfully, I don’t have to imagine her smile because there is a business card of Bernie in “full clown” tacked up our kitchen bulletin board. “Laffles” it says in a loopy italicized font and she’s available for pretty much any event you can conceive of. Bernie’s longtime husband is also a clown. Sometimes they work together but mostly they work apart. Whenever they’re hired to work at children’s hospitals or for veterans, they never, ever charge them. If she gets hired for a gig and can’t do it, she passes the job onto other clown friends. Apparently there’s a ring of local clowns and they all look out for each other. Sometimes Bernie forgets to collect her fee, and sometimes she collects it then misplaces it. But you won’t hear those stories recounted with bitterness or frustration. There is too much to be thankful for in Bernie’s life to get upset about something like money.

Bernie can’t clean and tell me stories at the same time, and so we stop to talk and catch up with what turns out to be great length. Occasionally she forgets where she left off and misses something she was supposed to clean. It’s no big deal and in fact, gives Mom and me a chance to sharpen our skill at clown puns. Once I came back to my bedroom to discover that the waste paper basket hadn’t been emptied. On my way down to the kitchen garbage to empty it myself, Mom stopped me and asked what I was doing. I explained and she said, “Oh, that Bernie; probably clowning around.”

Sometimes when my son and I round the corner there is a black pick-up truck out front with a hood ornament of a boxer dog welded to the car. That car belongs to Mom’s handyman, Stanley, who is the other person who rounds out my mother’s staff. Stan is a dead ringer for Hulk Hogan in every way except much, much friendlier. He’s got thick, blonde hair that he wears helmeted under a bandana and a blonde handlebar mustache that dips down around the corners of his mouth to meet up with his beard. He wears brightly colored T-shirts and parachute pants with neon yellow and pink triangles—not unlike something you might have seen in a Whitney Huston video back in her heyday—and a single, solid gold chain around his neck the size and thickness of your pointer finger.

His blue eyes twinkle as much as Bernie’s and he’s got that steady cadence speech pattern thing like she does, too. The only difference is that Stan speaks much louder than Bernie because he’s got tinnitus. That’s also the reason why he brings in a boom box to play 1970s biker hard rock at deafening levels when he’s repairing anything in the house. He tells me he listens to music just as loud to fall asleep to as well, but his wife’s used to it. He’s got a Dalmatian dog named, Trixie, and three daughters to whom he each gave a motorcycle when they turned sixteen.

I take great comfort in knowing that my mother is being looked after and taken care of by a clown and a biker with big smiles and twinkly eyes. It’s a little like living on the Island of Misfit Toys but my mom wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometime I’ll tell you about her plumber, Steve. He’s in a rock band with his brothers and sings top 40 tunes from the sixties while he works. Life’s a circus if you choose to see it that way. Sometimes more literally than figuratively.