Free Clown Girl by Monica Drake; Chuck Palahniuk

big bucks, Sweets, the real deal. I’ll set you up with a hat and a cane.”
    I said yes to all of it.
    I’d been out of the hospital three days, was still on the dizzy side, head buzzing, but could move without feeling faint, could walk at almost normal speed. The orange plastic jug sat empty in my mudroom waiting for a day I could devote to collecting urine. Twenty-four hours of contiguous urine is a tougher trick than it seems. One pee away from the orange jug on ice, and the whole day’s urine file is shot.
     
    ON THE WAY TO THE GIG, I STOPPED AND COPIED MISSING Rubber Chicken posters. The poster had a drawing of Plucky, my name, Herman’s address, and a dancing money sign as promise of a reward. I stapled flyers to phone poles, one eye out for cops, always ready to silly-walk away fast in my oversized wing tips. Posting flyers on phone poles is illegal, but how else to tell the neighborhood?
    To keep my chin up, I recited the Clown’s Prayer: “As I stumble through this life…May every pratfall pay the bills. May every tumble lighten strife, all the aches be cured with pills.”
     
    I MET UP WITH CRACK AND MATEY IN A HOTEL LOBBY.
    The lobby was wide and lush, with a thicket of plants in the middle. Prom night. Girls dressed like faded flowers lingered with acne-faced dates outside the hotel restaurant. Skinny kids danced through the lobby like they were on vacation, rustling and laughing, calling out names.
    Matey, all in black and white, was perched on the back of a couch, feet on the cushions and her cane across her knees. She leaned forward, elbows on the cane. Her shoulder blades stuck up under her white T-shirt like wings over her thin back and took the place of her trademark fake parrot for the night. Crack paced back and forth in front of the couch. She had on a dark wig, a tidy men’s hairpiece, black and shiny as shoe polish.
    Matey saw me first, and nodded. “Here she is, Boss.”
    Crack looked up. She said, “Christ, could you be any later? When I said 6:30, I meant sharp, like on the dot, like the point on your head, see?” She moved fast and bumped into a short girl dressed like an after-dinner mint, all white with red piping. Crack didn’t look at the girl even after she ran into her.
    “What is this?” She pulled the flyers from my hand. “Missing Chicken. Plucky. Aw, real sweet. Now forget about it.” She threw the flyers on the couch and slapped a party-store bowler hat and a bamboo cane against my chest. The hat was made of plastic covered in a thin spray of fuzz like faux felted wool. “Got your suit, sister?”
    I had on the big wool pants, and my thighs were sweaty from walking in the summer evening. The air-conditioned hotel was cold as a walk-in fridge. I shivered in my own cooling sweat. I already had on a pair of men’s wing tips, one black, one brown, both size massive. The suit coat was compressed, tight in my shoulder bag. I pulled the coat out of the bag and shook it.
    “Right,” Crack said. “Put it on.”
    I rested the cane against my leg, pulled on the coat. The shoulders pinched and the sleeves ended half a foot before my arms did.
    “Perfect,” Crack said.
    The coat had the Goodwill seal of hobo authenticity in mingled cigar smoke and rancid sweat. I could barely move my arms as I collected my flyers, shoved them in the pink bag. If I moved too fast, the coat would rip in two. I said, “All this for a prom gig? That’s a little small-time for what you said. The big bucks.” Prom was teenagers, once a year at best.
    “If prom was our gig, I’d shoot myself,” Crack said. “Then again, why shoot myself when I’ve got you two?” She turned on her heel and waved a hand, speaking clown sign language, directing Matey and me to follow.
    In the ladies’ room there was a counter of sinks a mile long lined with a mirror on one side and prom girls on the other. Every prom girl was cloned across that counter, all of them in pastels, with big hair and bigger plans.