Dear Elaine,

I'll remember this forever: When I was a little boy, maybe two or three, my mother, who was a very clever woman, made this remark to me. "Son, when you grow up, if you want things to be nice, listen to me now, and follow this advice." Then she started coughing so hard she almost dropped her cigarette. That wasn't the advice. That was what I like to call a "health problem." Mama was in jail for grand theft auto. I saw her once a week.

"Be a clown," she said when the coughing subsided. "Be a clown. All the world loves a clown." She tapped the cigarette on the slate-gray desk that separated us. An ash fell onto her orange jumpsuit. "Act the fool, play the calf, and you'll always have the last laugh. Wear the cap and bells and you'll rate with all the great swells" Her fingers worried a scar on her forearm. " If you become a doctor, folks'll face you with dread. If you become a dentist, they'll be glad when you're dead. You'll get a bigger hand if you can stand on your head. Be a clown, be a clown." The guard came to take her away. Her final words were lost to the scrape of her chair on the floor and the clanking shut of the gate at the end of the hall. I'm pretty sure that she said "be a clown" a third time.

So I listened to her counsel. I became a clown so that I could be a clown. I acted like a crazy buffoon, and the demoiselles all swooned. I dressed in huge, baggy pants, and I rode the road to romance. I had friends who went to butcher or baker school; ladies never embraced them. I had a cousin who was a barber and he dated a girl for about six months, but when it came time for her to introduce him to her family, she begged off and said that he was a social disgrace. Meanwhile, I was falling on my face, and that was when you came to call. We met. We fell in love. We were married -- by another clown. You remember.

What a honeymoon. My noise was extra red, if you know what I mean. I was still showing 'em tricks and telling 'em jokes, and that generally meant that I associated only with the top folks. I was a crack jackanapes, and most of the guys I knew imitated me like apes. Every once in a while, the thought would flit across my mind that I should have done something else, but what? I could have been a great composer but then my rent would have been in arrears. I could have been a major poet but I would have owed it for years. People were paying to come see me wiggle my ears.

Then, last summer, I developed a little prescription-drug problem as a result of the repeated facefalls that I had done before we met. I started to cancel performance, and to show up, and before I knew it, our accounts were overdrawn, and the first-class accomodations I had come to expect were in short supply. That only made the addiction worse -- I was trying to kill the pain on the inside as well as the pain on the outside. I hid my state from you because I love you. Then, last night, I hit bottom. I was given one phone call, of course, but a man of my status is more comfortable writing a letter. I wish I knew what will happen. I do not. I only know that I am scared.

Quack, quack, quack, quack,
Rickey