Bowling Diarrhea

I’m at an exclusive county club watching the performance of a high-tech Eastern European clown. 

She’s dressed like a neon tulip and dancing in front of a strobing 20,000-dollar pile of Best Buy Credit Card debt. She’s making all kinds of bubbles: shapes and varieties not yet described by science. An audience of toddlers is held captive. 

With every cascade of bubbles, the crowd tries to jump and pop them. They’re getting dangerously close to thick puddles of solution on the ground. Like any normal human with a sense of humor, I’m waiting for someone to slip and fall. 

I want a full slapstick crash bang. A Looney Toon fatality. In my prayerful mind, I can see it:

A partygoer wearing a fedora plays an inflatable saxophone. On his feet are a pair of penny loafers he got for his first communion. The classic party song, Tequila comes on. That’s when he loses all control. 

His loafers are no match for the big skid of soap on the dancefloor. With zero traction he slides at incredible speed, smashing through the wall. Leaving a hole that perfectly matches the shape of his body (and the sax). 

This scenario isn’t totally out of the question. I once saw a hippy slip on a banana peel. It was at a music festival. The grass was wet with morning dew. He tried to stand on one foot to adjust his Birkenstock. His only support was planted squarely on a half-eaten banana. Faster than lightning, he was on the ground. The wind completely knocked out of him. 

This is a birthday party and I have to be cautious. I have to look after “me and mine.” Barely lifting my ass off my chair, I check on my son, David. 

Mouth open, he’s mindlessly staring at a flashing JBL speaker. Aqua’s smash hit, Barbie Girl is entering his soul. As far as I know, he doesn’t have epilepsy. We’ll see. 

I decide David is safe, but I’m plagued with a pervasive thought. Can something worse happen? Could somebody get their body stuck in a bubble and float away? I scoff at myself, but…it is a terrifying thought. 

Picture yourself ensnared by a clown bubble. You’re helplessly stuck in a translucent orb as you slowly rise above the city. You’re getting higher and you can see all the way down. Rainbow streaks of magenta and cyan dance across the thin film. The beauty of it all… mocks you during your ironic ascent. You know it’s gonna pop. But when? Will you be carried over a swimming pool where you can dive gracefully to safety? Or will you land on the pointy end of a rusty graveyard fence, asshole first. Who knows?  

When I was 11, my father and I were driving by Buffalo’s City Hall. I pointed out the flagpole in front of it. Like any normal father, he told me that in 1976 he saw a man impaled on that flagpole. I remember him saying “Right through his back…he probably had an inch of skin remaining on each side, holding him together.” 

A grim sight that I never saw, but pictured many times. It never occurred to me, that this poor soul may have been attending a birthday party. One with too many bubbles.