Hairdresser on Fire. Daniel LeVesque

      I

      Despite what has been written on countless salon applications, I cannot say with any stitch of truth that my childhood dream was to express myself through hairstyling. It’s all a lie. There was never any burning desire to do hair — not to touch it, arrange it, or place adjectives in front of it, e.g., overprocessed or silky hair.

      If you ask, you’ll often hear the story told in a mystical way. Ramón will tell you, “I was doing hair in all of my lifetimes,” spinning his hand above his head, a halo of tracers orbiting his hairdo, opal black eyes turned skyward (trust I am not poking fun at the Ramóns of the world. I adore the Ramóns; without the Ramóns, I am nothing). But, unlike The Ramóns, hair was not my calling in grade school, and falling into it was nothing more than random cosmic career assignment. I could just as well be repairing people’s air conditioners today, or drawing their blood. Massaging their thighs. A Trade. The sun eats itself.

      At eleven years old, my Grand Purpose, my calling, was to be a circus clown and a stuntman, merging the two into one glamorous pratfalling career. Dick Van Dyke tried it but not on the scale that I’d envisioned.

      My father loved The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the opening, Dick would walk in and trip over this hassock, and every time my dad would crack up like he never saw it coming. He’d laugh so hard that no noise came out, lying on his belly in front of the teevee with me sprawled over his back like a little monkey. When he’d laugh so hard he was like a ride at the fair, his back heaving silent screams of laughter, me flopping back and forth until I cracked up too. I always found comfort in the laughter of my father. For me, it wasn’t about the hassock at all.

      After a few seasons of the show, the opening changed. Dick Van Dyke would come in, act like he was going to trip over the hassock, and then do a near miss, jump-over-the-hassock gag. Upon landing, there was this little steppy tap dance number he did, mincing and grinning real proud. The clever side of the Fool. My father didn’t laugh at the beginning anymore so he would get up, tossing me into the deep shag, and change the channel. He liked that hassock bit a lot. He sure did miss it. This would not be the summer that my father got sober. Thanks a bunch, Dick.

      Other than wanting to slam Dick Van Dyke’s long face into the cement wall of our cellar, I wanted clown props, and would have traded all the giant honking horns in the world for a set of clown make-up. Becoming a clown without proper make-up is difficult at best, a possible reason for so much sadness and alcoholism present in the clown community: Repressed Childhood Make-Up Memories. No mother wants their son to love clowns, let alone be one.

      As Clown Children we are marked, and for this we are forced to dig, to find a way to make it happen. Unlike the way Theater People start out — jazzy adolescents in Drama Club, scrawling loopy “See ya on Broadways!!!” in senior yearbooks — Child Clowns have no such reception. We must learn early to make our childhoods work or to break them ourselves. Nobody reaches out to help a kid who wears suspenders so we chew holes in the box.

      In lieu of owning a tube of Clown White, I used a lotion/talcum powder recipe. Oh, coveted Clown White, with your perfect consistency and shocking opacity. I could eat you, the way I eat my sister’s cherry-flavored Bonne Bell lip gloss. I need you. I never get you.

      My mother’s top dresser drawer only collected things I couldn’t use for painting my face. Ketchup packets from Burger Chef, single use salts and peppers, old samples of beauty products that she would never consider putting on her face or throwing away, empty matchbooks — these are the items she hung on to.

      Medium-brown Maybelline stick was the only make-up option among the riffraff that filled my mother’s dresser. I used it for lips, eyes, and teardrops. The lack of rouge pushed me dangerously close to mime territory so I did what I could with what I had. How To:

      1) Begin by applying a light layer of Mary Kay lotion over the entire face.

      2) Wait until it almost stops stinging.

      3) Pat mounds of talcum over the sticky lotion.

      4) Drag the scratchy Maybelline medium-brown pencil around eyes and lips until skin tears and bleeds, creating a total look.

      Results were most often clumpy but after a few applications a sufficient washed-out pallor would take over my face, flaking like oats within an hour as I jumped off the garage in the summertime for stuntman practice. A ruby red lipstick was my only saving grace and I used it sparingly, saving it for serious clown shows or when pictures would be taken. It was a full tube but I knew better than to waste it. If I had to name the color, it would be “Mercy.” The tube came from the house next door where I could sometimes get lucky, hoping my neighbor would toss me a lipstick she didn’t like during spring cleaning.

      “Take this one, hon. It’s Mary Kay SHIT,” Betsy would say. She was allergic to Mary Kay, as was my mother. But my mother didn’t have any lipsticks hanging around, just the ketchups. Betsy had so many lipsticks she didn’t use anymore, all reds. I would have run away to next-door for the simple promise of a discarded lipstick once in a while, maybe some proper concealer. I always wanted to live with our neighbors, the Pagans, right next door and a thousand miles away. Bobby, Betsy, Marty, and Jennifer. The Pagans.

      Bobby Pagan watched a lot of teevee and stuff — it was always on for some sports show — but their house had a different feeling, a different smell: the smell of burning electricity from the all the teevees running in empty rooms, the smell of ovens preheating and cold cardboard under frozen pizza. The Pagans didn’t hide their empty wine bottles or wash the red rings of cheap Port from the bottoms of their glasses before going to bed. The Pagans fought and didn’t make up, they went to bed mad. The Pagans said fuck.

      I tried to be there as much as I could, as Betsy Pagan had all the best clown shades in her make-up box but, God, if she caught me in her room without permission she would throw a bottle at my head. Betsy collected bottles, always having a head-smasher within arm’s reach. She would grab for the heaviest bottle, the one with all the quarters in it, to whip at my head. It must have had a hundred bucks in it. Don’t think I wasn’t eyeballing that one, either. Its coins could have bought my bus ticket to clown school and back. It was one of those wine bottles from Italy, wrapped in its own wicker basket by children with nubby fingers. You could hang it up.

      There were bottles with wax dripped down them in colorful layers, years of flaming candles formed into mounds, the wax so thick on some of them that there was only a hint of the original bottle’s shape