“Of course it would be they who first bespittled and besotted my virgin green,” snarled Bub. His shoes imperceptibly drooped another few inches. “Here I sit, enjoying my morning snifter and corn-cob pipe full of guano, just to have the mood broken by those guys. Can’t they allow a clown a frown away from town?”
Mrs. Doggone and her spouse were not new to the Cinderbag Club. Indeed, they had been members long before Bub had even donned his first three-sizes-too-large, red-and-white-polka-dotted diapers. In some less sanitary circles it was whispered that the Doggones first introduced the foul-smelling sheep to the office.
“Now pay close attention, girls,” Mr. Doggone declaimed with the air of the self-appointed expert he knew himself to be. “The first and most important matter is addressing the ball. You have to face it full-frontally, fraught with fun, not fright.”
“Ugh, daddy...” began Laverne, tentatively. As the youngest (by seventeen seconds) of the far-famed Saperstein triplets, Laverne was always ready to challenge authority, accustomed to squinting into the ears of the other club members.
“What is it, oh wobbling wombat of my quivering ventricle?” inquired Mr. Doggone solicitously, his single — left — bushy eyebrow shrinking his forehead in quizzical surprise. “Is this a question related to this here sweet sweat-soaked bucolic pastime in which we is currently engaged, or do you plan to digress in your usual shameless manner?”
Laverne clammed up. This was clearly the time and place to concentrate on matters golfular, not puzzle out the fatter conundra of existence.
“Oh, nothing,” stammered Laverne. “That is, it can wait. Never mind.”
“Very well then,” said Mr. Doggone. “As I was saying, my avid pupils, addressing the ball is the most important element in this game of altered agents. If you will please to be noticing how my voluminous butt thrusts outwards, thusly—” Here he pointing his hindquarters more forcefully toward the caddie shack, where Bub sat nursing his second snifter, his jolly grin and bulbous red nose bewreathed in a thickening fog of guano smoke.
“That’s a snazzy cap, sirrah!” yelled Bub. He wondered whether Mr. Doggone would know he was being sarcastic. Probably not. In the first place, that dork Doggone was subtlety-impaired. And in the second place, nobody ever expected a clown to be sarcastic — especially Bub. In addition to the fact that clown-joshing was usually of the straightforward “pie-in-the-kisser” variety, and not much given to irony or double-entendre, there was also Bub’s voice; somewhere between a child's piping squeak and a eunuch’s shriek: growling was something it didn’t carry well. Instead, Bub sounded like Mickey Mouse with laryngitis.
Mr. Doggone turned slowly, narrowing his eyes to focus in the early-morning sun, nonplused as he tried to establish the source of that “snazzy cap” yelp. He sighted Bub. “Why, thank you graciously, baggy-ass,” Mr. Doggone hollered, ostentatiously doffing his bloopy plaid disco-lid. “I’d like to respond in kind, but you’re a clown.”
“Great,” Bub muttered to himself, while simultaneously offering an ‘aw-shucks’ wave and big goofy grin.
“Clown-hating bastard...whyn’t you just poke your big butt at me some more.”
Mr. Doggone, who never missed an opportunity to spotlight his coccyx, did so obligingly. In spades.
With a screech and a slice, Papa Doggone blasted the ball heavenward. It bulleted toward the goggling gaggle of girls, caromed off Murdstone, and lodged itself in the jutting fascia just leeward of Bub’s uptilted cranium. Bub windmilled his arms spastically and toppled over in his chair; his halter-top sliding off his right shoulder fetchingly. The Saperstein Triplets, their until now chastity never chastened, stared slack-jawed at Bub’s alluring shoulder. To be exact, it was not Bub’s shoulder that locked their orbs, it was the salty-topped jester’s tattoo. It was tri-colored, oblong. Its shocking image seemed to besmear the hapless gals with lurid promises of guess-your-weight chicanery and quarter-mile-gas-guzzlers. The Saps moaned and quavered. Nothing at St. Buttwitcher’s had prepared them for such an unsettling spectacle. Not even Father Tween’s post-prandial benediction: the belching had caused their trifle to remain untasted.
“Buh...daah...urmp...wulp,” said Cornpone (the eldest — by 47 seconds).
“Duhrb...geevim-geevim...hurmph,” said Murdstone, the middle Saperstein.
“Oh, Lordy...somebody’s havin’ biscuits tonight,” murmured Laverne, the only Saperstein triplet whose speech hadn’t degenerated into nonsensical vocalizations.
“Girls! Eyes front! Now!” barked Daddy Doggone, bopping each one smartly on the noggin with his nine-iron for emphasis. “You’ve all seen a clown tattoo before, I’m sure. Show’s over.” The Saperstein triplets stared holes in their saddle-shoes, Cornpone fingering the frayed hem of the left leg of her shorts intently.
Murdstone’s newly flushed face glowed in the morning sun, tiny droplets of sweat having sprung delicately into bloom on her upper lip. She licked the sweat off, pursing her cupid’s-bow cake-hole primly. Laverne, however, took off for the caddie-shack at a trot, muttering, “Lordy...biscuits aplenty...betcher boots, baby-cakes...”
“Laverne!” Daddy Doggone yelped, half in disapproval and half in peevish disappointment. Laverne, as though waking from a short dream, stopped in her tracks, disoriented, then reluctantly changed direction and shuffled back toward the third green, dragging her scuffed saddle-shoes.
“Replace all divots,” Popsy Doggone admonished.
“Jeez, Puppy Pop, the Divots play here every week,” Laverne reminded him. “They’re not even missing. And as you well know, they’re practically irreplaceable — think of dashing Danny Divot, or dreamy Dexter Divot. Replace them? Why I’d sooner hammer a nail through my skull with a block of cheddar cheese. Dogstar, that clown’s ‘markings’ have you more shaken up than any of us. Why don’t you just head for the 19th hole for a relaxing beaker of hot fuzz with Lavender Scarface?”
“What, and leave you brazen hussies gaping at that harlequin’s pen-and-ink prurience? In a hog’s peeper, you little minx.”
Just at that moment, all three Sapersteins burst out laughing. Old Daddy Doggone looked so stern and imposing, his muumuu ballooning comically in the breeze. Even Mr. Doggone had to admit he was getting a little exercised about the whole thing, and it was only a clown’s tattoo. Yet beneath the bluff bluster and baggy buffoonery, there were troubling new stirrings of teen-town trouble.
Bub’s tattoo had been a window through which each Saperstein triplet had glimpsed her inevitable loss of innocence, the wider world of warped weirdness that lay beyond the sweater-clad confines of chocolate-malted falcons and the Cinderbag Club’s annual Debutante Demolition Derby — good clean fun, which everyone knew enough to bring to a halt before somebody lost an eye.
Bub hitched up his halter-top gloomily, stooped to right his rickety wooden chair and brushed the bracken from his baggy pants. He, too, felt all rubbery, wooden and electric as a result of the curious tattoo-to-eyeball connection he’d made with the Sapersteins. What was weirder was that Cinderbag social protocols would not allow any of the parties involved to acknowledge what they’d seen...and felt — even to each other. For the Sapersteins having seen his tattoo had also cranked open a window for Bub. Through it, he had gimpsed blond wooden crank-cases and chunky vases with sprays of delicate meat-pies, had whiffed the scent of scorched hamster and seen the shadowy figure of an elegant and gracious charioteer tending all with a smirk. It was a world Bub served daily, but into which he would never be admitted, unless of course the children needed entertaining or there was a sudden infestation of chimps that needed a burly clown to dispatch them.
But what could he say to snap the high-tension twine which bound them in a world of palpitating uncertainty?
“Scree, wuhhmph, wooga-wooga, eeee, eeee, eeeee!” A distressed chimp swung over the porch railing, and Bub’s gaze was wrenched away from the stunned Sapersteins and the blustering righteousness of Mr. Doggone.
“Bub, you’d better come quick,” bleated the chimp. He was tugging at the lower pants-leg of Bub’s baggy trousers, trying to get him to move faster. “The Divots just found out about the valet parking. And boy, was the mayor mad!” The chimp’s features furrowed into grave concern, and an anxious fear-grin spread across the lower half of his face. “Now! He’s loaded for clown, man, and unless I’m mistaken, your baggy butt is the main attraction for the Theater of Cruelty’s lunchtime show, and... Hey — cool tattoo.”
Bub started glumly at the chimp. The chimp, wondering what the reason was for this sudden clown catatonia, stamped his foot “Well, you, you...clown,” he stammered.
posted by Bub at
8:30 a.m.
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