The following is only based on true events. Based on. That means that any percentage of it may be true, and any percentage of it may be false. You decide. I just felt like it'd be fun to write it down.
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Well, fuck.
I do that. I curse for no reason. I consider it my right as an American citizen to use whatever language I choose. I have my limits, rest assured, but they are a little further out than the limits that other people have. Other people are a little more limiting, I find. I am also always careful of the company I'm in and the context of my language, as well as my surroundings at any given time. I'm aware of other people's limits, and respect that when necessary. Nevertheless, I have my limits, too, and sometimes I can snap.
I'm also a children's performer. Now, you may be wondering why I preface that comment with a paragraph promoting expletive language. Well, I just needed to make a point about how kid's performers (clowns, magicians, etc) are human. They are human beings with lives outside of what you see when they're "on". If only I could share half of my real life with the people who hire me to perform.
I'm a children's performer, but I don't work for myself. I work for a franchised company that performs educational based entertainment for schools, clubs, and birthday parties. Within my branch, I tend to levitate as often as possible away from birthday parties, and toward the larger shows. The big houses. School assemblies, and large gatherings of that sort are more my "thing" when it comes down to the performance aspect of the job.
I took the job a few years ago, and the performance aspect was essentially my reason for taking it. I figured it still counted as performance (even if it wasn't "acting" per se), and I figured that money was a really useful thing to have when hungry. I really love to eat, and I've always been kind of a natural at it.
I also need to admit that I frustrate easily in general and, more importantly, that I frustrate really easily with children. Ah, yes, children. The small, snotting, whining, noisy, stupid couriers of our future. Well, until the future gets here, fact is I'm bigger than them, I can drive a car, I can eat cookies for breakfast, and I can go out on school nights.
About two years ago, I was driving to a gig. I use the term "gig", because it sounds much cooler than the words "heading to a church to be a party clown". Oh, but for the record, I'm not a clown. I do birthdays, but I'm not a clown (and the kids are usually way more excited when they see a clown). I do however, use the term “party clown” in a self deprecating manner to get cheap laughs, and because it’s the easiest way of describing to people what I do.
“What do you do for a living, Brendan?”
“Eh. I’m a party clown.”
That kind of thing.
I'm heading to the gig, and there's a guy driving behind me. He's tailgating me, and flashing his lights on and off real fast. He does this every minute or so. He doesn't beep more than a few times, but he keeps flashing his lights. This bugs me to no end. I mean, it really pisses me off. I'm on winding roads, in an area I'm unfamiliar with, looking for a place I've never been before, and I am obeying the speed limit as best as possible since I don't know where there may be cops hidden.
We're in a single lane for a while. The road seems to go on and on and on, with no hope of ever splitting into two lanes, it seems. The guy behind me continues to tailgate, and flash his lights. I ignore him for a while, but then it really begins to piss me off. Then, it moves up from 'pissing me off', to 'getting on my nerves'. Then it goes from 'getting on my nerves', to 'really getting on my last fucking nerve'. It continues to escalate from there.
The road, finally, does split into two lanes. The busy bee behind me zooms out, and enters the left lane. As he does this, I beep my horn and I give him the finger and shout an expletive or two. It's nothing too over the top. He sees me. I see him. He drives on. He cuts me off, gets back into my lane and takes off, engine roaring. He does this as if to teach me a lesson. If the lesson was supposed to be "I'm an impatient, rich asshole, and I have a faster car than you", he accomplished it.
He takes off, and I resume my hunt for the church. I finally arrive, I find where I'm supposed to go, and I begin unpacking my stuff. The people there were very cool. They were gracious and had everything set up for me. They offered to help load in my stuff, which doesn't happen all the time, so they also earned some points for that. I'm not there to do a show that day. Instead, I'm just there to run a kind of "booth" for a few hours. It's an indoor-carnival atmosphere, and people are just going to walk up and try a few things, and then go about their day. There are other booths with carnival games, snacks, etc. It's more of an opportunity to promote the business than anything else.
I'm doing my thing for a while. Children are coming up and checking out the booth. Parents are walking away with flyers and party info. All is going well, until I notice a guy in the background, helping prep food or something. He looks oddly familiar.
Actually, I'm bullshitting you with the "oddly familiar" line. I recognize him right away. It's the guy from the car.
He's there, working with the church, talking directly to my customer (the lady who booked us for the booth). I'm looking right at him, and he's glancing at me every now and then. I don't know if he recognized me. Don't know if he told my customer about how the kid's performer shouted at him and flipped him the bird. Either way, the fact is that I don't think we've been back to that particular function since.
Flash forward a year or two, to last night. I'm driving to another gig; this time, a library in Morris County.
My car is packed to the brim with equipment, and I'm having some claustrophobia issues. It's been a long day, and I have one show to do at 7pm, then I can go home. I've been stuck in the office since 10am, getting as much done as possible, and it's been a really long week, so I'm a little burnt out.
I'm on the road, almost at my destination, when I come to a stoplight. Now, let me reiterate my disposition. I'm tired. I'm busy. I can barely see out my windows. I'm very, very grumpy.
I'm at the stoplight. There are three lanes, and I'm on the far right. The road is at kind of a fork, allowing for the right lane to turn onto the next road. The problem is, there are two big SUV's blocking my line of sight, so I can't see whether there are cars coming or not. Therefore, and this is important, the fact that I can turn right on a red light is of no use, because I can't see oncoming traffic.
A car pulls up behind me. Beeps. I'm trying to check if there's any traffic coming. Every now and then a car zooms by, proving my need to know that there is no oncoming traffic before I turn. The car behind me beeps again. Now I'm getting angry. I can see the driver in my rear view mirror. I see the silhouette of a suited man, waving his arms and wondering why I'm not turning. He's yelling at me to turn, and gesturing. I get angrier. I can feel my face turning red, and my eyes are starting to sort of "tighten".
The light turns green, and I start to move, but in one last effort to get nominated for the "Ultimate Prick" awards, the guy behind me beeps again.
I slammed on the brakes a minute, holding him up. Then I move forward. He pulls out from behind me and heads toward the next light. The light is red, and I see that he's going to get stuck behind a couple of cars, whereas in my lane, I have clear passage straight to the light. I stop right next to where he's going to land, with my window rolled down. When he pulls up along side me, his window is down too. He's already looking at me. We're both ready for words.
Without a seconds’ hesitation, I began pointing and barking.
"It was a red light, I couldn't see what was comin', and I have every right to wait! Keep fucking with me, asshole, and see what happens!"
He jumped in somewhere around there, yelling some nonsense about making a right on red. He was obviously not heeding my very reasonably debated argument points. He was an older guy. Not too old, but "older".
When he started yelling back at me, something went off. Some fuse inside my head broke, and I might as well have blacked out for the amount of control I displayed next. A seizure victim has better control than I did.
"KEEP TALKIN', ASSHOLE!" I threw my car into park, opened my door, and began to step out, still cursing. I don't know exactly what my plan was. I don't think I had one. I think I was pretty much just making things up as I went along at this point. I do know that as I unbuckled my belt, I glanced around my car for a quick second, seeking any kind of hard, blunt object. There were none.
No sooner than I stood up, still between my opened door and my car, the light turned green, and he sped away. I felt bad for the cars behind me that I was holding up. I think they were a little perplexed by whatever was developing in front of them. Nobody beeped. I got back into my car, and pulled into the next parking lot I found, fuming. I was so angry (in fact, my head aches now even as I type).
A few minutes went by and I pulled back onto the road and went to my destination (the town's library). Once there, I needed to vent. I called up my girlfriend and recounted the situation. She was less than pleased.
"Are you crazy? You never do that! Oh my God, Brendan, what were you thinking?" Things like that.
She's right. I lost it. Had he not sped off, that could have resulted in a really bad day for one of us. What's worse, is that it could have resulted in a really bad day for me.
She's right, and I know that I'll hear the same from others. People get killed that way, etc. I know, I know. Bad, Brendan, bad.
I finish up on the phone with Laura. I head into the library to set up. They have a little table. They have a section of floor for kids to sit on, and seats in the back for adults. The librarian tells me about how they put up a few hundred flyers around town, and that they're hoping for a good turn out.
People don't realize the power that one wields when you get a group of about a hundred kids on your side. When I do a good show, these kids hang on my every word. They are clamoring to come up and volunteer for tricks. I become the coolest person on the planet, and they become my snotty, dirty, screaming minions. It's a really interesting thing. It's just a matter of knowing how to get them going, how to get them riled and excited. Eventually, I hope to graduate this ability to adults.
I do my show. All is going well. Parents are laughing. Kids are laughing. I'm shouting in a library, which is fun in and of itself. I'm about to wrap up the show. I'm giving my closing speech, thanking people for coming out and having a good time. That's when someone walks in the door.
It’s my traffic friend from down the road.
He walks in, and he sees me. How could he not? The commotion is huge, and it's not a big place. He stares for a second in disbelief. I fall silent as he stares. The roar of the children slowly falls into a deep silence, too. Then they turn and look at him.
The silence is deafening. I keep mentioning it, because it seemed like an eternity of silence.
One of the librarians sees him there. "Oh, Mr. So and So" she's says.
Oh, Christ. He's with the town. He's with the library. I never learned my lesson. How is it that these people are always with my customer?
I can't let them know that though. No, it's too good of a possibility for further business. Before the librarian can walk over to speak with him, I let out the biggest shout I can.
"GO!" I shout. Just one word. "Go." Then I point at the suited man.
The children's eyes blaze red. They all start screaming, and then as one they rise and charge. In an instant I can no longer see the suited man. The mass of screaming children envelopes him. Parents shield their eyes. They know better than to interrupt nature. The children are wild with the transferred rage of my car incident, and when they clear there is nothing left. No blood. No body. Only a suit; empty, and on the floor.
I walk over to the empty suit, and I stare down at it.
"Keep fuckin' with me, asshole. I’m a mother fuckin' party clown."
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