DECEMBER SHORT STORIES

Ballooning Along

By

Chuck Taylor

It isn’t easy being a balloon clown, rather embarrassing, in fact, if you’ve got a PhD in European history but haven’t been able to find a teaching job. There’s always a tension. For example, say it’s almost closing time–a few minutes shy of five. The phone rings and this woman is calling from work in Houston. She desperately needs a bouquet of birthday balloons delivered to her boyfriend’s Rail Yard Apartments in downtown Austin by 6:00 PM. You were sure you were done for the day, but your boss says no, go put the whiteface back on and I’ll blow up the balloons and tie them off.

 Luckily you’ll be going south while most rush hour traffic on Lamar will be heading north. You get inside the clown suit and zip it up. You smear on the oily whiteface and put on the orange curly haired nylon wig. You load the slivery red helium balloons into the back of the van, where they crowd to the top, and then you start driving south.

 It’s 5:20, but you’re not too worried because you don’t need to consult a map. You know exactly where the complex is located, even if you may have trouble finding the exact apartment. The place looms huge and narrow along the train tracks, built back in the 1980’s when the goal was to get people living again in downtown Austin.

 The rents are high and there’s all the noise coming from the partygoers dancing to loud music in the clubs of Sixth Street, and then there’s the trains clanging through in the middle of the night. No way in the world you’d live in the Rail Yards, though you do live downtown, in the basement of a used bookstore you operate with two other guys in a kind of co-operative that so far barely pays the building rent.

 You take Lamar south until you reach Ninth, and then you cut through a green and leafy neighborhood full of rich lawyers’ offices in big antique homes past the lovely old Austin Library building to San Jacinto, where you hang right and head south again to the apartments.

 The drive has been slow because of the traffic, even with your shortcuts. It’s 5:50. You’ve got to find a place to park, hopefully near the apartment you’re seeking. Wouldn’t you know? You get lucky and find a spot at a meter that requires no change after five. The downtown workers have cleared out; the partiers on 6^th have yet to arrive.

Is this a singing balloon bouquet? You check the work order on the seat next to you. You have a lousy voice and hate singing.

You look into the rearview mirror and try to drain some tension from the body, to turn clown jolly. You stick on your red rubber nose and check your whiteface to see if your sweat has made the clown face run in any places. Luckily it’s a fairly cool evening in June.

The work order says the balloons are from “Jacqueline,” and that they are for “Jay”. The accompanying message reads, “Five years, babe, and still desperately in love.”

Not such a bad cliché.

You open the back of the white van, grab the balloon ties close to the top where the various lines are knotted together, and start across the street. You keep the balloons down and close to your body because in June breezes will pick up speed tunneling down between downtown buildings.

5:57 PM. Luckily the numbers on the side of the buildings are big and easy to read, and at 6:02 PM you are standing in front of apartment 347 on the second floor. You could pull out the tuning harmonica in the clown costume right pocket, but you don’t know what singing in tune means.

 You think happy thoughts like a method actor. You picture your very first kiss with Rosy in the sixth grade under an umbrella in the rain on the sidewalk leading up to her front door. Ah Rosy. She married the basketball player, the center, whose dad had the big insurance agency. You remember your first kiss with your ex-wife Katherine, back in high school during summer vacation, on her front porch, she and you sitting on a big wooden swing, like in a Victorian courtship.

You ring the doorbell, plaster a wide smile on your face, and wait.

“Yeah, who is it? Just a moment,” a voice says from behind the door.

You’re now thinking how this part-time, extra job pays lousy, but does have compensating moments. You are none other than the happy messenger of love. You are a modern day Cupid. There’s a kind of happy irony here, for your specialty in history was the European Romantic movement.

The door opens and a young man in underpants with disheveled blonde hair stands before you. You can see around him and you notice that the floor of his efficiency is littered with clothes and empty beer cans. You did not know that the Rail Yard’s had such small units.

You are about to burst into the happy birthday song. Few know that the tune is still under copyright with royalty payments due for every performance, but you’ve never heard of any balloon clown being busted.

 After singing you will hand the blonde man the helium bouquet of red and silver balloons and read with both humor and feeling Jacqueline’s words, “Five years, babe, and still in love desperately.”

But then your eye catches sight a woman in the man’s bed, a woman who is probably naked, given the way she has the sheet pulled up to her chin. She has a slightly irritated but quizzical look on her face.

You do a fast mental compute and decide the woman in bed cannot be Jacqueline. There’s no possible way to make the drive from Houston to Austin in one hour. You decide not to sing the birthday tune. You thrust the balloons at Jake and mumble in a low whisper, “These, for you.”

Then you turn on your heels and fast track it out and down the stairs, across the street, and back to your van. In about a minute you’re pulling away from the curb, long before Jake can slip on his jeans and rush to follow you out shouting, “Hey wait, dude! These can’t be mine! You’ve made a mistake!”

 No tip on this run, damn it! Ah, but another grand little tale of love gone wrong to share with your two partners in crime without regular jobs trying to make it at the used bookstore business.

Katherine, lovely Katherine, was helping you through school, working as an optician’s assistant, when you slipped up and slipped into the back bedroom at a party and had sex with a fellow plastered graduate student.

It happened only once, and Katherine wasn’t with you at the party. She had to work till nine that night, yet somehow the next morning she knew. You loved Katherine but you despised that one trait of hers, that she was so superbly intuitive.

As you drive back to the balloon clown office, you’re shaking your head and laughing out loud, but when you stop at a red light and check the rear view mirror, you notice, from the blurred whiteface around your eyes, that you are also crying.