I hated that my father was a clown; hated that we would go to parties for other people’s kids. My father hardly spent time with us, preferring the comforts of his bedroom, yet he felt the need to dress up and cheer up other families. Why couldn’t he put a happy face on for us? Why was it only reserved for others?
Our humble wooden house resided in the middle of rural Texas. Surrounded by mesquites and cotton fields, it always seemed on the verge of being demolished by any passing wind. The wind would rattle the windows, especially during hurricane season. The grass would swell into lakes with the heavy rains with any passing storm.
Grimswald the Clown was the name my father chose for his clown persona. The day he revealed his name, there was a strange stillness to the house. Instead of the usual sounds of Lucha Libre coming from his bedroom, men grunting and a riotous applause, his voice hummed a circus tune. My father had tasked me with loading a sound system he had built in the backyard one weekend.
I was about to knock on my father’s bedroom door to tell him I had finished loading the van when a strange chuckling emerged. At first, I assumed he had changed the TV channel to a circus documentary for inspiration. Or that it was a part of some sitcom, some cheesy laugh reel. A silence ensued. I leaned closer to the door to listen better.
“You’re nothing without me. You need me.” It was a tittering voice.
“I don’t need you,” my father’s voice responded.
“The kids find you boring. You are your sad self. Look at you.”
“Shut up. You’re just me.”
“You’re Grimswald now. That’s all you’ll ever be.”
My ear was pressed against the door. My father must have made a clown friend in town to mentor him. This friend must have come over to bless his debut. I nearly fell forward when the door whipped open. My father towered over me in his red and blue clown parachute costume. He had put on white base makeup but had yet to put on his rainbow wig.
“You’re supposed to be outside,” he said coldly.
I smiled awkwardly and glanced inside his bedroom scanning for the other person. It was just his empty bedroom. My older brother had mentioned that my father was depressed, that he should have been on pills. Maybe this was him battling that.
“Um, when do we need to leave?”
“In an hour. Now, go get ready.”
He slammed his door shut and I kept wondering who that other person in the room was. The voice had sounded distinct, completely removed from my father. It reminded me of a ventriloquist, except one where you are puppeteering yourself.

I fidgeted uncomfortably in my seat on our way to the birthday party. The south Texas desolation surrounded us, abandoned houses and fallow fields. In those parts, if someone ever disappeared, they were certainly not found. I tried to focus on school with the hope of escaping my surroundings. Otherwise that landscape would swallow me alive. I knew that. My older brother had done it, somehow…
My father was silent. His gloved hands gripped the steering wheel, and one eye twitched a little. The van was stuffed with this tense energy. His forehead was perspiring even though a cool autumn air was wafting in through the windows.
The back of the van was crammed with the sound system, his dark blue valise where he kept his clown makeup, and a trash bag full of balloons. Each time we came to a stoplight, a few balloons would poke their heads out of the trash bag, mocking my efforts at trying to keep them contained. I wanted to ask my father if he was okay but was afraid he’d snap at me.

We arrived in front of a brick house in the countryside. Men were standing around a barbecue pit, and a table was covered with present bags. My father grinned and opened the van door. The children squealed as my father waddled toward them and chuckled at the birthday party. He was wearing his extra big clown shoes and opened his arms wide. He was now using that other voice, the one I had heard in the bedroom, only it was jovial and silly, not demanding and insulting.
He came back to the van to check if I had finished unpacking all his equipment. I made the mistake of saying, “Not yet, Dad.”
He gripped the back of my neck with one of his hands and squeezed.
“Don’t call me that,” he said in his other voice, “Call me by my real name: Grimswald”
I nodded. He was no longer Raul, my father. He only answered to Grimswald while at the party.
I brought out the sound system and started setting up near a patch of dirt in the backyard, where my father would play games with the children. I stood away from the party, an outsider while my father played tricks on the children, zapping their hands and trembling with false electricity himself. They all laughed at his antics and didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest at his voice. I had heard it battling my father, and thus couldn’t rid myself of the notion that it was sinister and conniving. It’s just that no one else knew how it had wanted to suffocate my father in his bedroom.
During the birthday party, I kept scanning the crowd for any sign of anyone I knew. There was a more pressing concern I had. I was mortified that my father had turned to clowning. It only meant one thing for me as a nerdy high schooler- the potential for being bullied. The last thing you wanted in a yearbook was a picture of you and the heading: best clown family.
If my friends or anyone found out about my clown family, I knew I would be toast. I could only begin to imagine the teasing. Once I had tested the sound system, I went back to the van to bring out the balloons. My father’s makeup case was open. The white base makeup was still open and the mirror on the back of the lid reflected me. I quickly closed the case and carried the bag of balloons to my father.

I found myself biting my nails, growing more and more nervous at each game my father played with the children. Next up was apple bobbing. My father filled an orange bucket with water and carried it to a chair where the children had lined up. He motioned to a scrawny little boy, who eyed the bucket nervously as he approached it.
After hesitating and then looking at the other children, the little boy dipped his head into the bucket. It was taking him a long time to bite into an apple and fetch it out. Too long. The other children kept watching his headless body struggling. For the briefest of moments, a grin flashed on my father’s face. He was pleased with himself for setting these children’s traps. Yes, Grimswald wanted to hurt them.
Then, the grin disappeared, receding, controlled, and he quickly helped the child out of the water. The child coughed and grew teary-eyed. My father fixed it by presenting him with a balloon poodle. The child sniffled and smiled.
Once the children had had their fill of cake and games, a tired energy overtook them. Their eyelids seemed to want to close on their own and their chatter had taken on a more subdued tempo. It was almost time to go home, thank god. I was tasked with putting away the sound system and cleaning up after my father’s antics. I didn’t even get a bite of the cake. I was wheeling the sound system back into the van when loud music approached down the dirt road where the family lived. A car was driving at high speed down the road, kicking up a cloud of dust behind it.
I pushed the heavy sound system up the ramp into the back of the van. When I hopped down, I froze. Allison, a cheerleader from my high school, was exiting the sports car that had just pulled up to the house. One of the senior football players waved at her before speeding away. She walked toward her house. She slowed when she noticed me standing like an idiot behind the van. She didn’t acknowledge me; simply raised an eyebrow and went inside.
I wanted to burrow into a hole, like a wild hare. If Allison connected me to Grimswald, my high school vaneer, however little I had, was over. Shame warmed my cheeks. I want to disappear for a long time.

On the way home, my father was silent. If my father had received relief from his depression, he certainly didn’t show it. He shut himself in his room and left us like he usually did. If anything, things were far worse than when we had left because Allison knew who my family really was.

My high school was a square main building with attached blocks of classrooms. I felt people’s gazes and heard snickers the week after my father’s debut. I was marked, surely. It could have just been my mind playing tricks on me, but I swore it was about me, every sneering look. And it’s not like I could just go to Allison and beg her not to say anything. It was too late for that. Once rumors spread in a small town, it was hard to ever dispel them.
“You didn’t tell me your dad’s a clown,” Gustavo told me at lunchtime.
We were sitting across from one another in the large auditorium that doubled as a cafeteria.
“He’s not.” I stiffened, readying myself for repeated denial. Denial, denial, denial. That was my strategy.
“That’s not what people are saying.”
I sighed.
“I think it’s pretty cool.”
Mind you, Gustavo was a nerd just like I was- plastic framed glasses, esoteric knowledge of role-playing games, and a sarcastic sense of humor. I wanted to crawl into a locker and close the door. I told him so.
“Dude, just chill. No one even cares. I think it’s pretty cool that you get to hang at people’s houses and get paid for it.”
His reassurances did very little to put me at ease.
“What does your dad charge?” He continued, “You could make a lot of money with him.”
He was always trying to hustle for the latest board game.
“I’m not going to become a clown. That stuff creeps me out.”
“You just gotta embrace who you are.”
“It’s not who I am. It’s just something my dad does for fun cause he’s bored of his life.”
He threw up his hands to exculpate himself. “I’m not accusing you of being a clown.”
I changed the subject to the book report we had due for English. The topic was quickly forgotten as we finished our slices of greasy pizza. Except that it wasn’t forgotten. I kept thinking about it even as we spoke about other things.

The bell rang to signal the end of the last period. Our day was done, and there was that excited chatter in the halls. The relief was palpable. I needed to pick up my math book and headed to my locker near the auditorium’s perimeter. I opened my locker only to find a blurry object barrelling toward me. I thought it was an animal. I fell back to the floor and screamed, throwing whatever it was off my chest. The jack in the box simply smiled at me from the floor. I rushed out of the high school without looking back at whoever was laughing at me.

At home, my father grew more and more reclusive, spending all his time in our bedroom. At school, the pranks kept coming. It seemed there was an endless supply of clown related jokes: balloons descending from the air, whoopee cushions on my seats. I grew to resent my father and that clown of his. It was all so stupid. If the clown was supposed to help my father with his depression, why did he seem more distant to me than ever? If anything, the appearance of the clown had corrupted our lives.
After being held down in the restroom and painted with lipstick and called a clown, I decided to destroy Grimswald. It was the only way to get my life back. A bitter animosity had blackened my heart. Grimswald had destroyed the anonymity I had enjoyed. I stayed up late one night, harboring the bitterness inside me. My father’s snores signaled it was safe to infiltrate his bedroom. At that point, our mother was sleeping in a separate bedroom. She had largely taken a passive observer role, even when I had pleaded with her to do something about Grimswald. The house had become more and more tense as they had drifted more apart.
I tiptoed into his bedroom. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, so that I could see the outlines of shapes. My muscles were tense. I froze when my father grumbled and moved from his back to his side. The bed creaked under him. After standing still for a few moments and making certain I hadn’t roused him, I continued.
I pushed my hands into his closet and sifted through it to see where he kept his makeup valise. There was a shelf in the back of the closet. One of my hands slid along its smooth surface. Something pinched it and I nearly yelped. A splinter had pierced my skin. The bed creaked and I turned toward my father.
A wind blew open the curtain, letting the pale glow of moonlight into the room. My father was sleeping with clown makeup on his face. It could have just been the pallor of the moonlight, but no, it was too white for it to be just the glow of the light being let in. It was Grimswald at rest, only waiting to be roused. I wasn’t in the room with my father but that other thing that had possessed him. My father slept in his clown makeup.
I shuddered. My father was gone. There was nothing left of him. If I was caught, there was no telling what would happen. My legs grew weak. Enduring the pain from my hand, I sped up my search and touched the makeup case’s cold steel handle.
I quickly slipped out of the room and went outside. I turned on my dad’s shed light and found the lighter fluid. The trees rustled. It felt like the night conspired against me. I squirted lighter fluid on the case, and it sheened in the moonlight. I lit a match and threw it at the valise without hesitating.
The case puffed up in a cloud of flame, the heat flushing my face. Relief flooded me, and my shoulders relaxed. The more the valise burned, the more I was getting my life back. I kept staring into the fire and finally noticed something strange. The flames were only touching the valise’s surface, not warping or charring it.
The back screen door banged open.
Grimswald’s voice was behind me, “He’ll have to join us. I warned you about him.”
I remember trying to run only to get lifted by arms that chuckled wickedly. My chest was squeezed out of breath until darkness descended, a starless one.

When I woke I was in my dad’s van. My dad was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He wasn’t dressed as Grimswald. Maybe my father had been cured. Maybe the makeup case had been destroyed.
“Everything okay?” I asked cautiously.
He nodded. “I’m glad you did what you did.”
We arrived at another rural house in the middle of nowhere. I did my normal routine and started setting up the sound system. My head was foggy. I feared I had had a concussion.
As I knelt plugging in wires, a little girl in overalls approached me timidly. “Mister clown, what’s your name?”
“Malo,” I heard myself saying.
“That’s a funny name for a clown.”
I chuckled. A deep horror wrenched inside me. I ran to the van and checked the side mirror. A clown in the likeness of Grimswald smiled at me. I shook my head. No… I was supposed to be at home. My life was supposed to be normal.
My father patted me on the back and said, “It’s your big debut. I’m glad you’re checking to make sure you like it.”
He grinned and there was still that glint of madness in his eyes. I simply chuckled even though I wanted to scream.