Circus Cigs

My teeth are discolored from smoking. It’s Fecal the Brown Clown’s fault. He was the brown clown because he always wore brown. And calling him Fecal was just funny. He didn’t smell or anything, but he did smoke..and it’s his fault that I smoked. We were on tour with Cirkus Redickuless. It was my second summer touring with the circus and I brought Fecal and my other good friend Ritch Bitch along for this ride. We were the circus band: Fecal on bass, Ritch on drums, myself (Hopeless the Clown) on keys, and circus boss Chicken on guitar. At home in L.A. (sans Chicken) we were a strange noise rock art punk band called the Boy Scouts of Annihilation, but in the circus we became the Organ Grinders from Hell.

The previous summer I left with $40 in my pocket and did fine except that I was starving the whole time. This time around was gonna be different. I needed a way to make money since we definitely weren’t getting paid by Chicken. Besides panhandling and tarot card reading, I had been test marketing a couple different products to sell on the road. I made caffeinated chocolate and sold packs of cigarettes. I tried out the chocolate at some local los angeles club shows. I tried out the cigarettes standing at the foot of the stairs of General Hospital.

The chocolate did not sell as my presentation was off-putting. My recipe was to melt chocolate bars in a pan and add crushed No-Doz. I would pour the mixture in a lump onto butcher paper then wrap the chocolates in foil. Unfortunately nobody trusted these foil-wrapped lumps. The cigarettes on the other hand did just fine. I bought a carton of cigs before tour and marked the packs up 100% at the merch table. I am reminded that this looked a little strange to the New York circus we joined up with on tour, as they had towed along an anarchist bookmobile and their merch was a bunch of progressive literature. The L.A. clowns brought cigarettes, seven-inch records from Black and Blue records, and some shitty t-shirts.

Somewhere in Louisiana, Fecal the Brown Clown ran out of both money and cigarettes and begged me to give him a cigarette. I told him “No, I can’t break a pack.” He would not relent, pleading “You don’t know what it’s like (to need a cigarette)” I didn’t know what it was like because I didn’t smoke. But after I conceded and opened the pack for him, I ended up with a bunch of loose cigarettes and would smoke them too. So we can blame Fecal. Of course I went days without brushing as well. So that in combination with the smoking turned my pearly whites into dingy yellows.