THE CLOWN COUPLE

This treatise on how to turn 50-years-old without having a nervous breakdown takes root on a muggy Tuesday afternoon in April, in a state of irony in the ironic state of Michigan. The story-line focuses on interactions that occur between two aging Americans, a husband and a wife. I am the husband.

My wife, Bonny, and I may be comically oriented but I need to be absolutely clear with you right from the start -- we are not comedians, per say. Nor do we aspire to that uniquely cruel vocation.

Sure, my friends in high school voted me class clown. But, I think they were just kidding. In college, I toned down my comic nature and, in graduate school, I surrendered it all together when a large dump truck load of late-1960s angst/crap came down on my generation.

You know what I mean. War in southeast Asia. Corrupt presidents. Dazed on the road. Europe. Mexico. Canada. No no-lead gas. Too much LSD. Nixon, Agnew & Lyndon.

The world changed. So did I. Those were serious times and because I was there, I began to resemble a serious person.

Thirty years later, what you see is what you get. To make a living now, I create articles that appear in training publications. How's that for grim? I conduct my work in behalf of a large and deserving automobile manufacturing company that is located, not surprisingly, in an industrial part of the United States of America commonly referred to as the Detroit area.

To fulfill my job requirements, I strive to create enlightened instructional materials for automotive service professionals. To be exact, I deal in an abstract science that consists of two parts blarney for every one factoid.

I must confess, though, to have long harbored a desire to write about something more universal. Something like, possibly, mysteries surrounding the Loch Ness Monster. You know, "Nessie." My interests also extend into other venues, i.e., my basement.

In addition, I'm highly intrigued with the incredible linguistic revolution that is taking place around us, a new megatrend, for sure, that is represented most dramatically by the resurgence of phrases like "far out," "get out of here" and, certainly, the multi-purpose inquiry, "what up?" Until a few weeks ago, I had contained those yearnings and concentrated my efforts strictly on my job and family. That changed on the night when Bonny and I careened into a suburban saloon and beheld an amazing spectacle. There, ladies and gentlemen, seated in our midst, were either the actual founding fathers of America or, at least, a whole bunch of high achieving people who made us think of them.

This bar, this restaurant, this whatever it was, was filled with dozens of nearly intoxicated Americans who had obviously started something. It was clear they had money ... dignity ... and extraordinary thirst.

All they didn't have, it seemed, was a willingness to buy us a drink. That didn't matter. We were independent and oblivious to it all. My mind, in fact, was on absolutely nothing. The truth is, I have no memory whatsoever of the events that led up to the encounter we were about to experience. All I know is, Bonny and I were seated on tall stools, at a bar in a tavern in a town beyond suburbia but not quite all the way to Belle Ruse, amid a small cast of craven, belligerent individuals.

Confusion reigned. Anxiety ran a close second.

Although Bonny and I were dressed in bright red matching Clarabell clown outfits, we could not get the barmaid to notice us.

"Try to get her ATTENTION," Bonny urged, pinching my arm and stepping on my good foot. "Do something weird. Jumping jacks. Deep knee bends. Shout 'Double ditto, Rush.' Light your hair on fire. Yodel. Whatever it takes. I need an imported beer, probably a Heineken."

She needed a Heineken. I needed some new credit cards. The ones I had were hyper-extended, absolutely flirting with their respective credit limits. A beleaguered barmaid finally approached the clown couple.

"Did you get the parts?," the barmaid asked.

"Ya," I said. "We're off to Sarasota tomorrow. Side-stepping elephant shit, that's us."

"OK, what'll it be," she asked, feigning sincerity as only people from the midwest can. On her apron was a button that asked, 'How's my driving?' We weren't sure. We just wanted to spend VISA's money before the world as we knew it came to an end.

"Get my wife a bottle of, ah, Heineken, please, and I'll have a, ah ... Heineken, too."

"I'll have to see your i.d.," the keeper of the bar said to Bonny, staring at her, through her, around her and possibly into her soul.

Like most older women who are subject to age related anxieties, Bonny was thrilled to know the barmaid suspected she might possibly be younger than 21. I watched the transaction with interest, knowing an i.d. check would never happen to me again. Not in this lifetime.

"You can't be 37," the barmaid said to Bonny after squinting at her drivers license. "You don't look a day over 15."

Bonny went through all the predictable carrying on. "No, really, I am 37," she said in her best grown-up voice. "You just can't see my wrinkles because of the poor lighting in here. If we were outside, you'd think I was nearing retirement. Maybe even dead."

Assured of the documents' authenticity, the barmaid was ready to conduct business. "You said you wanted a Heineken, right?, she interrogated.

"Right," answered the woman/child I fell in love with and eventually married. "You, too, right?," the barmaid asked me.

"What about my i.d.?," I shot back. "You're going to check me too, right?" Ladies and gentlemen, what happened next was tantamount to the highest level of what we in America commonly refer to as, "white collar crime." In an instant, before either Bonny or I could regain our composure, the barmaid let out a piercing shriek, like a mamma hippo in the mud on the African Continent protecting her newborn from a pack of wolves. The floor moved beneath me. I saw cryptic images of Dante's dreaded inferno forming from the patterns of the saloon's shoddily constructed mock-cedar shingle interior design.

"Sure, I'll check your i.d.," this minion of alcoholic jurisprudence said. Her eyes fixed on me, as if I was a celebrity whose name she could not quite remember, or perhaps, an escaped convict with a reputation for roughing up his victims.

"Remember, you have to be at least 21 to buy a drink in Connecticut." "I thought this was Massachusetts," I said as I reached for not only my driver's license but also my library card and an old newspaper article concerning an alleged incident in which an alleged singer by the name of Jackson Browne got caught allegedly speeding in, allegedly, Malibu. "In any event, you'll see from the information here that I am duly qualified to not only drink your beer but also to relieve myself of your beer at a later date, if I so choose." I added the emphasis on the last few words so as to impress upon her the full extent of my virtual maturity. Based on her lack of reaction, she found my remark to be neither funny or justifiable. Nothing, in fact, amused her, now that I think about it. I don't know why she was even working there. Her disposition seemed better suited to a career in possibly, the dog food industry or, something slightly criminal, perhaps a part-time job in local government.

Making things considerably worse, my wallet was an embarrassment, not only to Bonny and I -- and the barmaid -- but also to everyone in our zipcode. The first thing you noticed when you looked into my excuse for a wallet was a total absence of currency. Imagine encountering a completely barren area where the twenty dollar bills are supposed to be. Picture a wallet with no pictures. Conjure in your mind a ragged collection of old receipts, none of them significant, all of them bunched ina mound where real money should have been.

This, you have to know, was the pathetic essence of "my wallet" on this fated occasion. I wasn't proud of it. Nor was I ashamed. No, my only thought was, "Make momma happy." That's actually my full-time mantra. "Herrrrre we go," I continued. "You'll see my birth date down here next to my height and weight and the instructions to give my bladder to the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame if, for some reason, I die. Of course, I'm not that tall anymore but I still have the same date of birth, give or take a few millennia."

I handed the license over to the barmaid who, by now, was so far from humored you'd have thought she'd just learned her dog had been struck in the skull by a concrete Frisbee.

The barmaid, whose ancestors surely came to America from one of the Scandinavian countries, took the license, held it up to the little bit of light that remained in our favorite saloon on this historically relevant day and began to perform an elemental mathematical calculation that would ultimately determine whether I was "age appropriate" for the act of commerce we had in mind.

What happened next was enough to seriously threaten the survival of the human species on ours and potentially every planet in the system of stars, planets, moons and suns we share with General Manual Noriega and other high-profile aliens in our midst.

The barmaid handed my driver's license back to me. She paused for what seemed like an eternity but was actually only about 12 million years. "Ain't no way," she said. "This says you're 50. This says you were born at the end of World War II. That's impossible. No one was born then, not in this country, at least. There weren't any men here then. They were all in Guam. And you don't look 50. You don't act 50, either."

"How old do you think I am? Forty, maybe? Forty-five? Forty-nine?"

Bonny stepped on my other foot and ground her finger nails through the fabric on the pants she made me wear that night, deep into the surface skin on my fat but sensitive thigh.

"If you're 50, I'm Betty Grable," the barmaid said. "There's no way you're 50. You look about 18 and you act like you're no more than 12 or so. I can't serve you."

We were, of course, incredulous. "Can you just volley me then?", I asked. "We don't have to play an actual game. Let's just hit the ball around. I'm easy and, look, I'm not wearing street shoes."

My bride and I were ready to lease the farm by now. The barmaid wasn't. She just wanted to meet Mr. Wright and I was clearly Mr. Wong. A few moments later, having looked at my wife's i.d., having verified her antiquity and having mumbled something we couldn't understand in what sounded like either Spanish or Canadian, the barmaid appeared to experience a sudden but conclusive change of heart.

Like a self-loading revolver that is nearly out of warranty, she looked at me again with a stare that would scare a mean linebacker. By now, I was convinced she was going to acquiesce and serve me a beer. This sense of what would soon occur was based almost entirely on what I perceived then as movement in her inner consciousness, but what I now realize was actually no more than a slight tick in her physical mannerisms, accentuated by a low, uncontrollable murmur.

"If you're 50, I'm ... I'm ... Betsy Ross," the barmaid sputtered. "You already said that," I countered, sensing a quick response would change her mind.

"That is my driver's license and it hasn't been altered," I added. "Plus, I can prove I'm 50. Ask me any question you want from the time period surrounding my alleged date of birth. I know everything about ancient history. I've been here more or less since the Truman Administration." "Harry or Capote?", she asked.

"President Truman," I bellowed, juxtaposing partial annoyance with permanent sleep disorder. "You know, he dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima." "Oh, THAT Truman," she said with fierce sarcasm. "Sure. And you're probably going to tell me next you were there in 1945 when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series."

Yaaaaa! I knew I was getting somewhere when she mentioned the Detroit Tigers. Somehow she must have sensed I was from some little dink-shit city in Michigan. It was then I knew we were making progress.

"You're right!," I exclaimed. "I WAS there. Not at the stadium, that's for sure. But I was alive ... in the hospital. The nurses were snake-dancing in the maternity ward. An orderly wearing a baseball mitt almost threw up on my sister."

The barmaid's mouth dropped several feet. Her complexion went from beet red to onion yellow. She asked the manager to disconnect the juke box. That pissed me off because I had just put my last dollar in there and played three Garth Brooks' songs, only one of which we got to hear. It was the tune about a pig that thought it was a sheep.

An eerie silence enveloped the entire establishment, interrupted only by faint, obnoxious ticking from an Oriental gentleman's hearing aid. My mouth was so dry I was tempted to rent it out as an incubator for bad ideas.

The barmaid said, "You're not kidding are you?" I thought the woman was going to have a heart attack, even though I wouldn't know a stroke from a hernia. She did seem faint and her bow tie had suddenly and curiously become attached to her white collar by only one of its two original hook devices.

I stared at her for a nano-second before whispering in Latin, "Would I kid you?" "I thought you would but ... but ... now I'm not sure," she said. "If you weren't 50 you wouldn't know about the Tigers. That's what gets me. You appear to be less than 15 but you have the wisdom of a hundred defrock potentates.

"Sure. I'll sell you an over-priced beer. You better not be deceiving me, though. If that's fake i.d., I'll throw your ass out of here faster than you can ask 'Why isn't Colin Powell president?'"

"I told you that was my driver's license," I said calmly. "I may have a disgusting pot belly but I'm not a liar. I'm a Libra."

"That's worse," she joked as she sashayed over to the Heineken cooler. Everyone in the bar laughed at that one, in fact, including my wife, who, by now, wished she was somewhere in Madagascar, toiling over the alfalfa crop, rather than being at my side on one of the most memorable nights of this or any year.

Before we left, everyone in the bar who had been a stranger when we first walked in had become a friend. None of them believed I was actually 50 but they all seemed relieved that the barmaid and I had averted a fist-fight over the issue.

One sociologically deprived gentleman said to me that, even if I was an impostor, I was being a pretty good sport about it. Then he gave me the keys to his Jaguar which I promptly flushed down the toilet in the men's room. That may seem crazy to you but, trust me: You haven't seen anything yet.