The Crawling Abattoir Read online

  His Union, the International Brotherhood of Clowns, Funnymen, Warm-Up Comedians, Gag Writers and National Public Radio Humorists, Local 8 7/8, had to cough up a five-figure settlement to hush the whole matter up. Slappo hadn’t been expelled from the Union, but he’d had to endure a Letter of Censure in the Well of Clown College, and then he got stuck in mime-jail for six months. White-faced, painted-on frown, big teardrops painted under his eyes. He wasn’t allowed to speak the whole time, just stand there, gripping pretend bars in his empty fists.

  Once out of air-jail, he vowed to get his life in order. For a while he did, working as a carny clown, until his relationship with fellow-carny Leslie the Hermaphrodite ended in bitterness and recriminations when Leslie rejected Slappo in favor of dating herself.

  Thus, in a fit of sexual confusion, Slappo became Homo the Clown, but that too went badly, and this phase of his career ended in failure too when he lost a lawsuit which accused him of repeatedly and maliciously claiming to be the sixth Village Person.

  The depth of his despair may be gauged by his next career choice. In 1984, he became Male Prostituto the Clown, but he failed too even in this desperate cry for help, and he was eventually found face-down and unconscious in a puddle of his own lemon-meringue, wearing only a pair of split-crotch baggy pants which were not his own, and, in a recklessly inappropriate orifice, a small tin trumpet. From here, Slappo disappeared into the red-polka-dot underbelly of clown ghetto’s meanie streets.

  Six months later, he was reduced to pedaling an itsy-bitsy, eensy-weensy tricycle in circles in the middle of the street as Crackheado the Clown, while cars swerved madly to avoid him, all for spare change and the smiles on the faces of the neighborhood children, who kicked him unmercifully in his kidneys whenever he tried to escape onto the sidewalk.

  To the children, he was known simply as the Bum, or sometimes That Stinking Crackhead Bum, but they always said the names with laughter, and with those special humiliating jeers that little boys and girls save for someone who can’t fight back.

  He was Smacko the Clown from ‘85 to ‘87, hooked on heroin and using the last of his long, skinny balloons not to enchant children with marvelous balloon animals, but to be a mule for Colombian cocaine-smugglers, carrying white powder across the Mexican border inside his stomach.

  He reached the nadir of his self-destructive, downward death-spiral at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he was wrestled to the ground by the Secret Service while trying to throw a whipped cream pie mixed with rusty nails and broken glass into Dan Quayle’s face, and nobody, not even the Democrats, thought that it was funny. Yes, Slappo was as jolly as a malignant tumor.

  And the party at 3012 Waterloo really was his last chance. His very last, really-the-utterly-at-the-end-of-his-rope, absolutely final chance. He scowled again, the blue exclamation points above his eyes crinkling in wrinkles.

  He didn’t notice the construction site in his path. He was oblivious, concentrating to the point of constipation on BEING FUNNY, GOTTA BE FUNNY, ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE FUNNY, I MIGHT AS WELL HANG MYSELF IF I’M NOT FUNNY.

  That’s when he tripped over a heavy-duty electrical cord and fell chest-first on top of the Black and Decker Model 6000 pneumatic nail-gun. The thunk-thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk-thunk sound, and Slappo’s body spasming as the nails entered his flesh, these things should have been a horrible, horrific, hideous sight to the passersby on the sidewalk.

  Mothers should have shielded their children’s eyes from the terrors of amateur nail-gun surgery. Total strangers should have interposed their own bodies between the awful sight and the little tykes’ eyes. Except that the spasming body was a clown, and a clown with a very funny red rubber nose at that, and so it was funny, and people laughed.

  Slappo struggled to his hands and knees and pushed himself to his feet with a blood-curdling scream. A row of shiny nailheads studded his torso like clown buttons, blood soaking his billowy clown-shirt. He clutched his leaking stomach with both hands, in too much agony to even shriek again.

  And the mothers and toddlers, the businessmen and cabbies, the street-vendors and shoppers, all looked and laughed, because it was impromptu and impeccably well-mimed comedic street-theater. It was a welcome chuckle in the middle of their otherwise humdrum days, and, my, wasn’t it amazing what clowns can do these days with makeup and fake blood? It was very funny.

  Slappo staggered along the sidewalk, scraping his big clown-shoes on the pavement until he couldn’t take another tortured step. He stumbled to a halt, gurgling for help, making a very, very funny noise like “Ehp! Ehp!”

  He stopped right in the middle of a shadow on the sidewalk. A piano-shaped shadow. He didn’t notice that he was standing directly underneath the piano which was casting the piano-shaped shadow, but everyone else did.

  They saw the shadow, looked up, and saw the beautiful, black Steinway grand piano hanging from a cable and a crane on top of the twelve-story Henry Steel Cast Iron Anvil Manufacturing Building, and wasn’t that a really funny name for a building to have right at that moment and under those circumstances?

  The piano swung to the right, and everybody leaned to the right as they watched it. Then the piano swung to the left, and everybody leaned to the left. The piano spun in a sudden gust of wind, twisting on its cable, and the anticipation was really very funny.

  Slappo collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath, Ehp! Ehp!, bloody foam bubbling on his lips from the internal bleeding, but very funny internal bleeding.

  Then the cable holding the piano snapped from the violent twisting, just like everybody knew it would sooner or later, otherwise why would Slappo be kneeling right smack-dab, Johnny-on-the-spot underneath it? Everybody laughed as the piano-shaped shadow got bigger and BIGGER, until finally even Slappo looked down and saw the growing horror.

  He looked up, said something like, “Urrkh,” and lurched out of the piano’s way at the very last moment, leaving nothing but a pool of his own blood behind.

  Slappo rolled off the sidewalk as the piano exploded into a million lethal slivers of wood and ivory. He rolled right into the middle of oncoming traffic. That’s when everybody saw that the piano hadn’t really missed him. They saw when he tried to stand, to run, the adrenaline pumping like crazy out of all the holes in his body. They saw when his piano-mangled leg collapsed under him, the broken, exposed thigh-bone sticking out of his flesh.

  The bone looked so real! My, what couldn’t clowns do with special effects these days?

  A taxi-cab’s bumper caught Slappo at thirty-three miles an hour, which was a very funny speed to be going, its horn braying, its tires squealing, Farsi curses erupting from the driver. The cab threw Slappo into the air, and how he flew! Like he was on a trampoline, and he flew, doing cartwheels through the air, one of his clown-shoes flying off as he spun, and he flew, blood pinwheeling off his body, and everybody laughed, even the Iranian immigrant cab-driver who had only been in the country for a few months and didn’t fully understand American humor. Everybody guffawed, really, as they watched Slappo arc high over the street, and, goodness, wasn’t it spectacular what acrobatic stunts clowns could do these days? A clown couldn’t have done this stunt on the Ed Sullivan Show, no sir, not on your life.

  Everyone turned their heads slowly to follow Slappo’s ascent, until he reached the tip-top of his flight, and then he rolled over and started to fall. He fell and fell, and just before he hit the street, he slammed headlong into the front grill of a speeding Mattress Warehouse delivery truck, and don’t think that everybody didn’t get an extra giggle out of the irony of Slappo slamming headlong with a gigantic nauseating bone-cracking THUD into the grill of a speeding Mattress Warehouse delivery truck, because they did.

  Slappo ricocheted off the grill and up into the air again, and everybody went Ooooooooooh! Slappo rose higher and higher, up, up, until at the very top of his highest-ever arc, he reached out in mock desperation and clung to an eleventh-floor flagpole sticking out from the Henry Steel
Cast Iron Anvil Manufacturing Building.

  At this point, everyone caught their breath, stopped laughing for just a second and looked around for the TV cameras, because something this funny just had to be on TV, on America’s Funniest Clowns, or The World’s Craziest Clown Chases, or Clown Autopsy.

  Only a few people who were leaning out of windows in the Cast Iron Anvil Building heard Slappo, who now had more bones broken than whole, as he prayed for a quick death while he dangled from the bowing flagpole. They all thought Slappo’s prayer was a fine joke, and they laughed, but the people on the street only started chuckling again when the flagpole started to crack, loudly, slowly, Slappo dipping lower and lower as the wood splintered, and don’t think that everybody hadn’t expected exactly this to happen, because they had, but it was still hilarious.

  “Ohgodohgodohgod, please let me die fast, please stop the pain, ohgodohgodohpleaseohplease,” whispered Slappo as a pigeon landed on the cracking pole and began to peck at his clinging fingers, blood smearing across its beak.

  Slappo knew he was dying. His left shoulder was broken, and his right arm too. His left leg was mangled and dangling by nothing but sinews. The nails burned like six acetylene flames with every breath he took. He had a concussion, maybe two, maybe even a broken skull. There wasn’t any way to count all the places he was bleeding. He knew he was going into shock, and if he lapsed into unconsciousness, he would quite simply just die. But he was dying so funny.

  The flagpole snapped, and the pigeon flew away carrying one of Slappo’s fingertips with it as a meal, and Slappo plummeted, screaming like a Doppler shift as he neared the street. He landed on top of a Jeep Wrangler that was carrying two bicycles in a rack on its roof. Slappo hit the bicycles with his right clown-shoe on the left-hand pedal of one bike, and his left foot, minus the clown-shoe, on the right-hand pedal of the other bike. The bikes broke loose from their bindings, then Slappo and the bikes shot down over the Jeep’s hood and onto the street, Slappo’s legs, mutilations and all, pumping like a heavily caffeinated millipede to keep the wobbly bikes upright and ahead of the speeding Wrangler.

  He turned desperately to the left, directly between two more delivery trucks which were going side-by-side in the opposite direction in a completely illegal maneuver on a crowded city street, and Slappo got whacked in the head by each of the over-sized sideview mirrors, and this sound was more of a thwack-thwack than a thud-thud, a bloodier, squishier, pus-ier sound than when he had hit the first delivery truck.

  He was wavering between the trucks, when a motorcycle, which had been trying to pass between the two trucks in another completely illegal traffic maneuver, shot between Slappo’s bicycles and clobbered Slappo right in his unprotected and so far uninjured groin with its windshield. This sound was a deep, reverberating THUMP.

  All the men watching went ooooooooh, and aaaaaaaaah, but they smiled because it wasn’t them. All the women covered little giggling grins with their hands, because at one point or another in their lives, they had all wished to see exactly that happen to someone close to them. Slappo gave everybody something to enjoy.

  Slappo was flipped into the air again, spinning, twirling, twisting, and the two bicycles rolled sadly down the street like two empty skis around a tree.

  That’s when Slappo’s heart started to flutter, and he grabbed his chest, and everybody laughed because the timing was so perfect, and how did he get his lips to turn blue like that, and at the same time that his whole face went deathly pale?

  Slappo soared like a chip shot over to the sidewalk, where he landed in the business-end of a brush-chipper, which a city tree-trimming crew had parked alongside the curb. Slappo went into the hopper feet-first, and the chipper gunned its engine as he hit, trying to grind him up. The rotating blades sucked him in an inch, spraying out a little blood and shredded flesh, and sucked him in another inch, and sprayed, and sucked and sprayed, Slappo screaming and shrieking all the while, until the blades finally clogged, because, as everyone knows, too much of even a funny clown can be hard to swallow. The chipper belched and burped and hiccuped Slappo, minus a good portion of his feet, back into the construction site where he had started his act.

  He landed face-up on an exposed shank of rebar, and the steel spitted him, piercing one of his lungs, just missing his heart. He lay on his back, the spike sticking up through his bleeding chest, and he listened to laughter and applause ripple down the street. He couldn’t move. The pain stood on top of him like a five-hundred-pound butler and a three-hundred-pound au pair, both wearing spiked golf shoes.

  Mister E.S. Trainjer knelt next to Slappo. He smiled, hovering over Slappo’s face. He brought his hands into Slappo’s limited field of vision and clapped.

  “Ehp,” whispered Slappo. “Dying.”

  “Of course you’re not dying, Slappo,” said Mister E.S. Trainjer, laughing. “They loved you. You’re a big hit, boffo, smasho, SRO-material, real headliner stuff. As a matter of fact, this was probably the only time in your life that you didn’t die.”

  “You bathdard,” said Slappo. “Quit laughing. Thith ithn’t thome cheap Katthkills thtick here. I’m really dying.”

  Mister E.S. Trainjer started laughing again, tried to stop, couldn’t, and covered his mouth with his hands, chuckles still squeezing out around his fingers.

  “Up yourth,” said Slappo, “you bleeping, bleeping, goddam bleeping motherbleeper.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mister E.S. Trainjer. “I guess I just have a funny sense of humor.” He couldn’t hold in his mirth any longer, and he broke up laughing. Literally broke up. Cracks formed in his face and body as if he were made of dried-out clay. Pieces of him began falling off, spasms of laughter shaking loose bits and shards of his body like avalanches of chalk dust until he had entirely collapsed into a heap of dirt next to Slappo.

  Slappo’s eyes rolled up into his head. He stopped breathing. His kidneys and bowels emptied. In short, he died, but he died in a very funny way. You’d never see that on The Cosby Show.

  Slappo’s last words were carved on his tombstone in Clown Cemetery, and “Up yours, you bleeping bleeping goddam bleeping motherbleeper” became a hilarious, all-purpose tagline, suitable in almost any situation, a great icebreaker at parties, for years and years.

  And every year, on the anniversary of Slappo’s death, his fans dug his corpse out of his grave and propped him against his world-famous tombstone, and they beeped his red rubber nose, and they remembered the good times, and they laughed until they cried. Because, after all, a dead clown is just really funny.

  The Reincarnation of the Dolly Llama

  o, really,” said Tenzin the 24th, brother-monk of the Temple of the Only Right and True Way To Do Things. “The Great and Serene Leader of our Temple, Tenzin the First, recently died, and he has been reincarnated as something, somewhere in your home. Would you mind if we came inside and just sort of took a quick look around for him? We won’t be long. He’s usually pretty easy to spot.”

  Tenzin the 24th grinned harmlessly and held his breath. So did the other five brother-monks standing behind him on the porch.

  “I don’t know,” said George Henderson, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “What do you think, Marge?”

  “I suppose it would be OK,” said Marge, slowly, warily, staring at the swaying, six-inch tall, blood-red mohawk haircuts and blood-red silk robes the brother-monks wore.

  “Say,” said George. “About this great leader of yours…”

  “Tenzin the First,” supplied Tenzin the 24th.

  “Yeah, him. He’s not planning on staying reincarnated here, is he? I mean, I don’t know about that. What do you think about that, Marge?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I want a reincarnated world religious leader living in my home, at least not permanently.”

  She folded her arms across her breasts.

  “I certainly hope he hasn’t reincarnated himself into the bedroom,” she said.

  “Or the bathroom,” said George, waving hi
s pipe vaguely towards the second floor. “If you know what I mean.”

  Marge winced.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Tenzin the 24th. “It’s just kind of creepy, that’s all. No offense.”

  “None taken,” chuckled Tenzin the 24th. “And don’t worry about him being in either the bedroom or the bathroom, folks. The Inner Eye sees all things spiritually, as we like to say at the Temple. I’m sure Tenzin the First only saw whatever it was he may have seen in the best possible light. So, could we take that quick look around?”

  “Well, no one ever accused me of being Pontius Pilate,” said George, and he stepped back into his living room, leaving the door open. Marge backed away with him.

  Tenzin the 24th walked into the living room and looked around.

  “Nice place,” he smiled and nodded. “Lots of space.”

  Marge smiled back. George straightened the throw pillows on the couch.

  The other five brother-monks shuffled as a group into the mud-room, as if they were leg-shackled together.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” said Tenzin the 24th, turning to his brother-monks.

  George waved understanding with his pipe.

  “OK, let’s do a standard alpha-search, brothers,” said Tenzin the 24th. “Bathrooms first. You know how his bowels get after a reincarnation.”

  Marge winced again, standing with her legs pressed tightly together.

  “Tenzin 28 and 33, you take the upstairs. Tenzin 40 and 42, the ground floor. Tenzin 49, you take the basement.”

  He clapped his hands twice, loud.

  “OK, let’s do it.”

  The brother-monks scattered in a red-silk swirl of robes, like a blood-clot breaking up.

  Tenzin the 24th turned back to Marge and George.

  “They won’t break anything,” he said. “They’ve done this before, but we’re fully insured, if that puts your minds at ease.”