The Last Lovers on Earth: Stories from Dark Times Read online

  When they dated sober, she looked more like Mamie Eisenhower than Annie Fratellini, but in those days, in many Midwestern towns, Mamie was what passed for hot. After numerous dates, they decided that their feelings for each other were just as strong when they weren’t drunk as when they were, so they decided to marry. And this happened despite warnings from her family about men who took a woman on too many dates at the circus.

  The mother tried to be supportive of her husband-to-be’s obsession with clowns and the Big Top. She thought that it was better to have a man who has jolliness in him than not. They were married inside a huge tent and the bridesmaids were a little chagrined to have to wear bowlers and taffeta with polka dots. The event struck many of the guests as being more like a big children’s birthday party than a wedding.

  Their married life revolved around the father’s successful accounting career. And his dream. He wanted a large family to increase his chances that one of his daughters would grow up to take the circus by storm. This is where the first hitch occurred, because, try as she did, the mother could not give birth to a girl. In rapid biological succession, they had five healthy sons and then the couple stopped trying because they were worried about how they would be able to send the ones they already had to clown school. The paucity of daughters came as an existential shock to the father, but the mother kept insisting that men make fine clowns too.

  Privately, she thought that she was unable to give birth to a girl because she had been painfully jealous ever since he told her about Annie Fratellini. What women’s magazine tells us how to compete physically or emotionally with a clown in a husband's past? When they made love, she could never be sure whether he was really making love to her or to his French icon. There were nights when she felt like there was a goosey Parisian clown lying there in bed between the two of them. But to get through this life, every woman makes her choices and her trade-offs.

  The father struggled to give his sons the kind of childhood that any professional circus performer would envy. The house was painted all the bright primary colors used by Ringling Brothers, and they filled their children’s playrooms with oversized balls and whoopie cushions. They even bought an expensive battery-operated car into which, on cue, all five sons would cram themselves dressed in their little clown costumes. Whenever their neighbors were having a backyard barbecue, the family was always invited. All seven of them arrived at the parties in full formal clown costumes, which amused everyone to no end. Their reputation as the weirdest family on their block was unchallenged.

  The parents thought they had given their progeny an entertainment-packed childhood complete with the solid building blocks of audience participation, charm, and aggressive buffoonery that would lead to a successful adult life of a clown. They were not at all prepared for their oldest son’s announcement in his senior year of high school that he was hanging up his carnation with the hidden water jet in order to enter college and law school.

  And the bad news did not stop there. The second son wanted to become a politician. And the darkness continued to fall upon the family when the third son told them he planned to enter medical school. The father was beginning to understand that life has a propensity to break your heart. He looked a tad crazed when his fourth son took his parents aside and told them that his career path would not take him into the realm of the greatest performers, but rather into the three rings of the great thinkers; he would become a philosopher.

  The fourth son’s announcement was qualitatively different from the others. There was an edge to it, a very negative one. The father sensed an anger beneath his son’s career decision, as though it was meant as a complex punishment for his parents. But as with the other sons, they put up a good front, and the mother rushed out to Carvel’s to purchase a big ice cream clown cake to celebrate the announcement. It turned out to be one of the most ambivalent evenings the family ever spent together.

  The father was on the money about the fourth son, for he truly dove into philosophy with a vengeance—against his family. And as is the case with any angry academic, someone gets hurt in the process. This time it was Hannah Arendt. The fourth son put the banality of evil in his crosshairs and decided to spend the rest of his life proving the clownishness of evil. Evil was hardly banal—not in the least. It was as clownish as the day was long. And clownishness was the root of evil, its very essence.

  He quickly made a name for himself in the narrow and controversial field of philosophy called Evil Theory. Only the biggest universities have endowed chairs devoted to the exploration of the nature of evil, and at a very young age he was given one at an Ivy League school. He published dozens of groundbreaking papers on the clownishness of the Inquisition, the clownishness of witch-burning, the clownishness of slavery, the clownishness of the Holocaust, and even the clownishness of capital punishment. Perhaps his most talked-about work was a paper trying to show the connection between clowns and the crucifixion of Christ. More than one fellow philosopher quipped that he probably had Hannah Arendt perpetually spinning in her grave.

  The fourth son always made a point of sending his articles, which were invariably published in prestigious philosophy journals, home to his parents, who sadly read each word out loud, even the hard to understand ones on "the reification of the clownishness of evil." They didn’t fully understand the papers, but the father usually caught the drift and he would sigh deeply and say to the mother, "He hates us, he really hates us."

  Predictably, the fifth son provided the coup de grâce with a twist. After making sure that his parents were sitting down, he informed them that his plan for the future was to become "a gay."

  "A gay?" his father shouted.

  The mother immediately dreaded the years ahead. But in all fairness, the parents made every attempt to be cool about the orientation announcement. And there was at least one fringe benefit: Becoming "a gay" did not entail the expense of going to college. All that was required was moving to New York City.

  The father was crestfallen, and given his advancing years, the mother desperately tried to convince him that there was not that much difference between being gay and being a clown.

  "Stop humoring me," the father said. "They’re worlds apart. They’re apples and oranges. There’s not even a remote connection. Gays are boring. You’re libeling clowns."

  "Listen to me. I raised that boy. There are things he just can’t hide from his mother. I’ve watched him like a hawk. One day he is going to make you proud. Deep down inside, that boy is a clown."

  Their fifth son moved out of the house and made his way to Manhattan where he became a bartender, a waiter, and then wrote a novel about coming out in the Midwest. Meanwhile, from the moment he left home, his parents kept reviewing the details of his youth trying to figure out what they could have done better.

  Early in childhood, when he wasn’t wearing his clown costume, their fifth son often donned women’s clothes, and it hadn’t escaped their attention that he looked good in them. Remembering how Annie Fratellini had rapidly crossed back and forth over the gender lines in the blink of an eye, the father had high hopes that his son was developing a repertoire that would come in handy years later in some prominent North American circus. It was not easy explaining to their neighbors that the tiny drag queen was preparing for a major career in show business. They even let the son bowl publicly at the local alley in the mother’s high heels. He also had free reign at his mother’s make-up table. Unfortunately, with his keen eye and sure hand, when he was done he often looked more like a ten-year-old Joan Crawford than a budding Annie Fratellini. It galled the father that after being so supportive of the son’s adventures in flamboyance, it had only resulted in him becoming a gay.

  A number of years went by during which the parents received letters from the fifth son about boyfriends, bars, and brunches, but little that would pass for confirmation of the mother’s so-called intuition. The father started to think that she made the whole thing up so that he would not lose interest in lif
e. When they received the son’s coming out novel, he was certain that there was no hope, for the book was so tedious that neither of them could read more than half of it.

  But then a miracle happened.

  It was after the ten o’clock news one evening several years later when they were flipping around on the television set and they saw a familiar face bobbing up and down like a marionette on one of the talk shows. By God, it was their fifth son, the gay.

  He was shouting at the talk show host, "IT’S A PLAGUE! YOU’RE ALL MURDERERS! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

  Just when the talk show host got him quieted down, he started screaming again, "THE GOVERNMENT’S NEGLIGENCE IS KILLING US! THE GOVERNMENT’S NEGLIGENCE IS KILLING US!"

  The performance astounded his parents as much as the people on the talk show. Their son’s face turned every angry shade of red and his eyes were popping in and out of their sockets, as if they were fake eyes. And his hair, which was now receding, had become a vigorous orange fringe that gave him a very contemporary Clarabelle look.

  The effect of the son’s uncontrollable shouting and wild over-the-top body movements struck his parents as utterly hilarious. They both fell on the floor, howling.

  "I can’t believe it. Maybe he hasn’t let us down. I hope the camera shows us his feet. I bet he’s wearing big floppies."

  Then the son began to attack his own people, the gays. "YOU’RE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS EPIDEMIC! YOU’RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

  To further dramatize his point, he stood up for a second and then sat down with such force that his chair collapsed backwards.

  Well, it’s a good thing that the mother was wearing Depends, because both parents lost it.

  "He’s doing the Crazed Napoleon routine!" the mother shrieked.

  "I know, I know, and bless him, he’s doing it perfectly!" gasped the father.

  As the talk show ended, the son screamed into the camera, "IT’S AN EMERGENCY! IT’S A CRISIS! NO MORE BUSINESS AS USUAL! THE PRESIDENT MUST DECLARE A NATIONAL EMERGENCY!"

  The father traveled back in time and saw his little Emmett Kelly sitting on his lap begging him to tell him again about Annie Fratellini’s Crazed Napoleon routine. It was his father’s favorite. When all three rings of the French circus were filled with the action of nearly every performer in the circus, Annie Fratellini would suddenly appear in the midst of them all dressed as Napoleon, complete with her hand tucked inside her little jacket, which was covered with all kinds of impressive looking clown insignias and epaulets.

  In her oversized Napoleon hat, she began screaming out orders at every one in the circus. They weren’t even really words. They were just screeching, vaguely hysterical sounds. Even though the noise made no sense it seemed to overpower every single performer in the circus, including all of the animals. A dark, sinister, almost erotic trance of human execration and abjection seemed to seize every soul in the audience, including the father. The audience roared with the loudest, most other worldly laughter that the father had ever heard. One by one, everyone in the circus tent seemed to fall into servile obeisance. Everything had gone completely out of their control. At Annie Fratellini’s feet were the trapeze artists, the dog trainers, the dogs, the dancing bear trainers, the dancing bears, the lions, the lion tamers, the zebras, the French poodles, the human cannonball, the other clowns, and even the ringmaster himself. Then for a second, the entire audience paused in absolute silence so all that could be heard was the piercing sound of Napoleon Fratellini’s comic will to power. The audience seemed to levitate in total delirium. Before them stood not a clown but a superhuman genius. The fifth son loved the story, and sometimes his father would catch him trying to act it out. When he was alone in his room he would often shout all kinds of orders at his toys and then have a frustrated tantrum when they did not obey his orders.

  Life had taken a strange turn for his son. The plague had given him a stage on which to fully realize his talents.

  Unfortunately, the son’s appearance on the talk show was also taking the mother back in time and the faultline beneath herself and the father was turning into a virtual earthquake.

  "See," she said, "why did you doubt me? Can you forget her now? Who cares about her? I feel cursed by her. Look at our son. He makes her look like Soupy Sales. Don’t you see? I haven’t failed you. I’ve given birth to the biggest clown of the twentieth century. Damn Annie Fratellini. Damn her! Damn her! Damn her!"

  The father was so excited about the son finding himself that he didn’t pay much attention to the mother’s outburst.

  In the weeks, months, and years ahead the fifth son was a constant presence on network news hours and talk shows. Whenever their son was on television, they made a real occasion of it. They blew up balloons and threw confetti at each other. They ate Jujubes and popped corn. They would even have calliope music playing in the background while, on one prime time show after another, their son was screaming, "END THE PLAGUE OR REVOLUTION! END THE PLAGUE OR REVOLUTION!"

  Although the father was elated at the son’s fame, he began to withdraw into himself and wonder exactly what the legacy of Annie Fratellini had done to his son. As he watched his fifth son become the leading clown of the plague by constantly doing the Crazed Napoleon routine, the father remembered him dressing up in drag as a child, and he grimly suspected that his son was literally trying to become Annie Fratellini to please his parents. His son was trying to transcend time and gender to become her. He had never told his son that he wanted him to become her, but the father was convinced that his son had tried to become the fulfillment of his father’s obsession. It gave the father chills.

  The son’s performances became more and more elaborate. He turned screaming at talk show hosts into an art form. Like Annie, their son seemed to be attempting to control every element of the plague with sheer loud will. Activists, doctors, nurses, even elected officials were like his elephants and French poodles. They all bowed to his ear-shattering, overpowering looniness. If he told them to go left, they went left. If he told them to go right, they went right. There was no rhyme or reason to what he told them to do. It was pure unpredictable, irrational entertainment. And no one was immune. Even the President of the United States seemed to be listening to their gay son screaming out all kinds of final solutions for AIDS and doing whatever he said to do about the plague.

  One night on a Nightline telecast while he was urging Americans (in an explosive menacing voice) to bring the government to its knees in order to end the plague, the parents watched as their son crossed and uncrossed his eyes while touching his nose with his tongue. They had never seen anything like it. They hadn’t laughed so hard in years. It added extra years to their lives.

  The country was so taken by their son’s performances that at times the government’s policies concerning the plague began to resemble the Crazed Napoleon act. Their youngest son, the gay, had the entire United States in the palm of his hand and totally at his command. Government officials who were handling the plague got so rattled by his veiled and not-so-veiled threats that they felt they had no choice but to supply all the sick people in the land with any and all of the medicine that the son demanded in his routines on television. An endless round of experimental drugs was given to the sick at the shrill behest of their son.

  The son was clearly impressed by his own angry performances, because he himself eventually took every single one of the medications that he had demanded the government offer, and inevitably they took their toll on him and destroyed his immune system. Soon the ghost of Annie Fratellini could no longer be seen doing the Crazed Napoleon routine on television and one day the inevitable phone call came to the father and mother.

  "Father, I am dying. May I come home?"

  "Of course, son. You’ve made us proud. We love you. Come home."

  When the fifth son arrived home, he was a pale shadow of the ballistic man they used to see on talk shows. When he walked into his childhood home, the reunion was overwhelmingly emotional. The parents put him
in his old bedroom which now had walls covered with pictures of the family visiting circuses all over the world in happier days.

  The other four sons were called and told that the youngest did not have much time. They dutifully journeyed home from all over the United States. They all spent the last day of the fifth son’s life surrounding his bed, trying to express their love and unity with him by all wearing their red clown noses. Across America, the plague was bringing families together exactly like this. Some people argued that reunions like this one were what made the plague a good thing, that it was a kind of morning in America. For a brief moment, the parents were happy to be with all of their sons again in one place, even if the occasion was a sad goodbye. They were now all grown men, but for a second the father felt as though all his sons were cramming once again into that little car for one big comic effect just to make their old man happy. It was heartbreaking to see the mother, the father, the lawyer, the doctor, the politician, and the philosopher, all in clown noses, gathered around the bed watching the gay brother die.

  There was one very unpleasant moment near the end when the philosopher son and the father seemed to be exchanging hostile glances over their red noses. (The philosopher son hadn’t wanted to wear the nose, but given the gravity of the situation, he acceded.) The philosopher son seemed to be saying to the father that the plague itself had been caused by clownishness, and in response the father’s eyes seemed to say the opposite, that the plague would be ended by clowns.

  The youngest son was buried, after a surprisingly somber and quiet funeral, in a clown costume. When the four sons returned to their homes and families, they felt a relief that lasted the rest of their days.

  The Coma