Tickles the Clown

for Walter Rae

Tickles finger-combed the kid’s sheep-dog hair and gathered it in his fist, pulling at the roots. Semi-engaged texters finally looked up from their phones. The banners announced the birthday boy was eight and that was old enough to know about respect. The kid had kicked his shins and stomped on his size 32 shoes because he hated clowns and had requested Iron Man. The frenzied assault triggered laughter so loud and long that Tickles considered playing along. But no, his abuse limiter had been tripped. Future Bully Boy whimpered and squirmed as the clown tightened his grip.

Tickles was certain no one in the basement of that British Properties home understood his craft, knew about his restrictive, uncomfortable gear, and the challenge of stairs in shoes the size of swim fins. It took an hour to make his face, a chore involving the closest shave, a grease base, and a sock full of baby powder to harden the layer. It was a crap day even before the kid started kicking. Security guards at the bank swarmed him like yellow-jacket wasps on barbeque sauce. As Tickles crossed the Lions Gate Bridge, some boys in a red Camaro needed to pull up to his window and call him a fag. They nearly rear-ended a mini-van during their getaway, so focused were they on delivering that important message.

Three delivery trucks and an animal handler meant that status-oriented parents were throwing a party that cost more than a Lexus. The father wanted to put him to work right away at the end of the driveway as a sign spinner. Tickles didn’t spin, but dad insisted.

—There’s an extra hundo if you stand by the road and spin the sign.

Bully Boy came from Bully Dad. They kicked the world in the shins until it gave them what they wanted. Bully Dad dressed like he needed you to know he was rich. The fabric of his shirt was thick, the stitching exquisite, the buttons carved from Madagascar unicorn tusk. His tan was not the red-brown burn of a Chilliwack ditch-digger but a perfect golden hue layered in at Davos, Martinique, and Monaco.

Tickles didn’t spin, yet there he was, spinning. He thought of spinning badly as part of an act, dropping the sign or hitting himself in the head, but it was hard to play to a drive-by audience, and he worried about his makeup in the heat. He spun without joy, trying to think of the bills he’d pay with the extra money.

In the hierarchy of entertainment, Tickles was the clown in the basement. Elsewhere on the estate, stilt walkers killed grass in the backyard, a string quartet played Brahms, while the fire juggler and a sexy magician/lingerie model competed for crowd near the pool. The clown had felt a surge of excitement when the birthday boy finally came downstairs.

Now Tickles let go of the kid’s hair and started twisting a balloon dog for an emptying room. The kid ran upstairs and sent his mother down. She led Tickles to a study filled wall-to-wall with signed hockey jerseys. Dad came later to discuss payment. There wouldn’t be any. The act was “low-energy” and Bully Dad expected something more dynamic. After the hair-pulling stunt, the clown should be happy that criminal charges weren’t being laid.

—You’re lucky we’re not suing you.

Tickles stood outside the house and unclenched his fists, but his fingers soon curled inward again, flesh bricks for bashing. He took his car key out and held it an inch off the fourteen layers of paint that covered Bully Dad’s Bentley, but couldn’t do it. The thing to do was re-enter his clown space and forget about this latest full-on boot to his junk.

He watched television late into the night but the shows did not amuse, just as the fury did not fade. At six in the morning, he drove to the British Properties and stood at his client’s doorway. He was thinking of what he might say when Bully Dad opened the door, squeaked like a child, and stepped back.

—You need to pay your clown.

Tickles had four inches on the guy, five with the terror stoop. Breaking the bully pumped good chems through his body as the millionaire struggled to tease apart the hundreds in his wallet. Bully Dad looked through a crack in the door as Tickles paused by the Bentley. He pulled out his key again, then thought it too weak. A large flat rock waited for him in the middle of a landscaped flowerbed, but he realized he was beyond scratching paint and breaking windshields. He was the victor, walking away with the cash while the rich man cowered behind a massive wooden door.

Everything that was owed was paid, plus a generous tip. Tickles looked in the rearview mirror of his totally paid-for 1990 Chevy Celebrity and understood why: his face paint was smudged into clown camo or pre-zombie corpse, his greasy hair couldn’t pick a direction, and the baggy-eyed scowl must have implied a mix of menace and desperation. Fellow commuters on his return trip to Whalley glanced over at stop lights and looked away fast.

The notice on the door of his apartment referred to a building-wide renovation beginning with the eviction of current tenants. As an act of generosity, everyone would be given the chance to purchase their suites at market prices. He imagined the writer of the notice smirking as he typed. Already a week late with rent, he decided that the renovicting greed heads wouldn’t get another dollar from him.

The clown fraternity was less supportive than Tickles expected, with only one member returning his call. Tickles dropped his bags just inside the doorway of Rainbow’s guest bedroom, but that room, the one with sunlit hardwood, the cheerful oak dresser, a view of the street lightly screened by a walnut tree outside the window, was reserved for the weeks Rainbow’s kid came over. Accommodation for homeless clowns was out the door and across the yard in a detached garage with no windows, three rat traps, and a space heater that would not be able to keep up with the crack under the door and complete lack of insulation. It wasn’t all pride, but Tickles was sure he could do better than sleeping in a place where someone stored stuff they didn’t care about.

The Wensleydale looked like the cleanest of the SROs lined up along Pender, but Tickles couldn’t find a parking spot. After many right turns he found a strip along Gore at Alexander and parked in front of the driveway of an abandoned car dealership. There was smashed glass by the curb—he hoped the car was close enough to the police station to deter thieves. He left the glove compartment open and pulled out the coin tray to show it was empty.

Tickles left five boxes of choice clowning gear with Rainbow. With most of his stuff shed, he felt lighter, free to turn in any direction. He woke at five and took the time to remember where he was. He thought the sheets he bought were making his skin itch, but when he turned on the light he saw a tight grouping of three bug bites close together: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He lifted one of the legs of the tubular bed frame and let it drop on the floor, lifting again to reveal a small pile of dislodged bed bugs.

Later in the morning he put his things in the bathtub and went to the hardware store to buy a propane torch. He shot the flame down the end of the tube and then ran it lengthwise, scorching and peeling the paint. The floorboards required a lighter touch: close enough for heat, far enough to avoid fire. He had a jug of water on standby.

Tickles rushed to catch the 8:00 PM meeting at First Baptist, but when he stepped inside, there was no one there to help beat down temptation and deliver another dull Monday night. He loved the dark, well-worn wood of the staircase rail, stained by the hands of a thousand sinners, but the basement itself was a sad, abandoned place. The grey-green carpet was a graphic record of all the coffee spilled there and only enough lights were left on to prevent mischief. He looked again at the scrap of paper in his pocket, checked the time and place. Yes, he had it right, but there was no one there because they were all out drinking. The universal power spoke as a basso profundo and he was not about to ignore it.

He made four trips to the liquor store and one to Sunrise Grocery to pick up a bag of carrots and a jug of milk. He sat on the edge of his bed, opened the first of many beers, and used his thirty-day chip as a coaster. There were no words for all the kinds of good he felt, the sharp crack of the pull tab, the fizz on his fingers, the taste, a long absent friend. He sang songs, juggled bowling pins, and ignored the banging on his door, and later his wall. He was fifty and clowning wasn’t what it used to be, but at least that night would be a good one.



Tickles heard the soft talk of two women above him. He heard the snap of rubber gloves and felt light squeezes as one worked up and down the length of his limbs. When he opened his eyes, morning light and pain flooded in as seizure-inducing strobes from the ambulance and cop car lit up the alley’s brick walls. He couldn’t lift his right arm because of the weight of the bowling pin that was cemented to his hand with sticky blood. The paramedic helped, cracking the tacky seal and setting the pin down next to the other one. A photographer with a giant flash rig came close to the pins, snapping rapid-fire shots from every angle. Tickles obeyed the paramedic, wiggling his toes and fingers as requested.

—I’m going to take this off, okay?

She gently pulled off his bloody clown nose and Tickles took in more of the garbage pile he fell in, and the caked blood that coated his hands, the cement of the lane, and the dumpster. There was blue plastic draping three bodies close by. A gentle gust had just enough power to lift a corner of the tarp, revealing the Nike of a dead guy.

Officer Danforth was the first person to use the word hero. The thick-limbed, broken-veined veteran came to the hospital for more information; every time Tickles answered, Danforth rephrased the question until Tickles got it right. It was important, for example, for Tickles to know a gun had been pulled, and that gun was silver with a brushed metal finish. Tickles had no memory of anything after he started drinking— then he thought he might have remembered a few things about that night, and actually, yes, the alley behind his hotel, men with hard faces, the silver gun, all kind of foggy but coming into focus. Danforth often paused and smiled, patting Tickles’ knee whenever Tickles remembered something new. They were making a story together and Tickles was the hero. The dead guys in the alley were low-level affiliates of the Big Circle Boys, Asian cocaine and heroin specialists who had locked down forty percent of the trade. Lives were lost last night, but lives were also saved.

Tickles didn’t have a concussion, and the nurse who was sponging him in the most sensual way couldn’t find any bruising or cuts.



Tickles woke later in the week and noticed another pair of bloody bowling pins sitting on the floor near his bed. They were standing straight up, proud, like cats that bring mice to the master. At first he thought they were the same pins from weeks ago—couldn’t be, those were lost to the chain of evidence. The pins sitting on the floor were new.

Tickles shaved twice on Friday night, preferring to take the town wearing full colours. There were few children in his new neighbourhood but he could still force smiles from big people. A young dealer on Main Street trailed behind him, repeating his offer just above the noise of traffic: Ativan, Ativan, Ativan. Tickles spun around to address this irritation and found no one, the punk instantly blended into the loose group of smudged hang-abouts who spent their days there. A crack-rotten hobbler pushed into Hastings against the light and no one even honked, perhaps fearful the slightest rebuke would bring the whole tribe down on their vehicle.

Tickles stepped on crinkly glass in the gutter as he bent forward to inspect his shattered driver-side window. The car jack and snow scraper from under the front seat were missing and he knew where he’d find them.

The Hastings street market was a dirtier version of a third world bazaar where shabby locals displayed their loot on blankets so you wouldn’t mistake it for the surrounding trash. One ski boot, a lampshade, CDs, a kid’s tricycle, everything you might want and none of it stolen. Really. It didn’t take long for Tickles to find his jack. He picked it up and held it in front of the jittery junkie with open sores.

—So you stole this, what, an hour ago?

There was guilt and panic, but that was quickly pushed out by rage, the hood off his head, the chest puffed out, making the most of his stick figure physique.

—Fuck you, clown! This is all my shit.

Tickles didn’t have to use Clown-Fu on stick man because a nearby friend stepped between the two and advised stick man not to mess with the clown. The friend towed stick man to a safe distance, looking over his shoulder at the clown as he whispered warnings into stick man’s ear. There was no one else who objected or even had the stones to look directly at Tickles, so he left with his jack and threw it in the nearest dumpster.

If the answer was the Downtown Eastside, the question was what do you get when you pour two billion dollars down a bottomless pit of addiction and mental illness? The city did its part, reducing the speed limit to thirty kph so fewer brain-fried, funky-chicken-strutting jaywalkers got smoked. It wasn’t simple carelessness, walking out into the middle of traffic. It was a claim of ownership, marking territory. Glass-walled condos were like high-class watch towers looking down on the yard, and all the microbrewers and hipster charcuterie joints were filled with skinny jeans and logger beards, but new money could not untie the ugly knot. You were never more than a hundred feet from someone shooting up.

The Pint was the kind of place Tickles could go to watch the game in peace. He only came on Thursday’s when he could be served by Tia, the waitress who had finally run out of clown jokes. She knew what he drank and didn’t stop bringing it until he was warm and fuzzy. He motioned for the bill by squeezing his nose but she shook her head and smiled. His money wasn’t any good there because the bar supported their local red nose.

Clowns never get drunk, only tipsy, and Tickles was certainly that, bumping into people he’d rather avoid, lurching comically as he stepped off the curb. Two doors down from the bar, someone had drawn a picture of him on the sidewalk. If it wasn’t one of the servers at the tapas bar, then the owner had hired someone with multi-coloured chalk to render a muscular clown flexing his biceps. “Hero” was written in broad, ornate script, beneath the drawing. A red nose was tied to the door handle.

Two young couples walked east on Alexander, toward the Alibi Room. One of the women saw Tickles and started rooting through her bag. Tickles stopped, relieved that this quiet dark block would be the end. Her clumsiness was ruining it, though. Drawing her tiny Dillinger or other suitably cute firearm was obviously something she had not practiced. Tickles was willing to wait for what he had coming, however incompetent the delivery system. She gave up on a slick draw and dumped her bag out on the sidewalk, spilling brightly coloured lady things at her feet. She found her clown nose and stuck it to her face, crying as her friends stood by. Tickles walked right up to her while she was still on her knees, but she couldn’t look at him. One of the men came just close enough to take a grim selfie with the clown and then they were off, pulling their traumatized friend from the ground, stuffing her things back into her bag.

Tickles walked up the Main Street overpass and paused at the top of the arch to look out over the harbour at the North Shore mountains. In the foreground was Tymac Launch, and beyond that, Centennial Terminal. To the west he could see the faux sails of Canada Place, downtown Vancouver, and the Lions Gate Bridge. During daytime, dog walkers in CRAB Park pushed the crazies out, but at night there was still plenty of wildlife. An unhinged screamer laid down the law for her companion for the night or for the minute. She was somewhere in the treed area on the north bank, the same place that hosted mid-day sex, hobo encampments, and injections. Nearby, a ten-foot concrete retaining wall that dropped to jagged rocks was the stepping off point for blind drunks, bad trips, and starter kit suicides. The path that ran along the beach was on every patrol car’s route.

At 4:00 AM there was a hint of light from the east and it was as cool as it was going to get. Tickles sat on a bench overlooking the beach and tried to remember the last time he laughed. There was a 0.005% chance the screamer was going to make it back to some kind of enjoyable, sustainable, productive life. He didn’t need to hear the words to know them: some great injustice, something stolen, someone who cheated, someone who owed her money. No doubt she had bounced off the criminal and medical systems, and whatever family she had, had long ago slammed the door in her face and tried to forget she existed.

Officer Danforth pulled up in his cruiser, gravel crunching beneath his tires. He stood in front of Tickles and called it in.

—I have our 10-32 in sight at the east end of CRAB Park. Caution Victor.

—What’s a 10-32, Officer Friendly?

—Clown with a gun. I’ve come as a courtesy. They’re staging over on Gore.

—You said I was a hero.

—You were a hero, but I don’t know what gave you the idea you could walk around with a handgun in plain sight.

—Tickles has been open carry for weeks. Take it if you want it. It’s a Sig Sauer with G2R 9 mil RIPs.

—The ME knows this. Everybody fucking knows, clown. It took him two hours to pick all the copper out of your last guy. Not smart, Tickles. That ammo’s like a calling card. Did you think you could just do whatever the fuck?

Tickles slid the gun along the bench toward Danforth who didn’t touch it. They watched a water taxi idle out into the harbour. The red light at the edge of the CenTerm pier warded off other traffic. A heron sat on an empty barge, quietly watching. Danforth looked at his watch and got off the bench, making old man sounds, as if skin was the only thing binding his broken body. He was halfway to his car when Tickles called out.

—I don’t see how it ends.

Danforth looked very tired as he paused. He said nothing, got back in his car, and parked it three hundred feet down the path. Tickles didn’t need to turn around because he could see the parade of flashing lights reflected off the boathouse. He heard gunned engines and just a little tire squeal as they all came around the sweeping loop and hopped the curb into the park. He looked down at the gun on the bench; he couldn’t make himself care about next moves. Whatever whatever, thought the clown.

“Tickles the Clown” was published in Grain, 43:3. © 2019 Oscar Martens