COLUMN: Don’t send in the clowns
Humor is tragedy plus time and distance. While the following may be funny to some right now, it is going to take some time before it’s funny to me.
On the evening of Sept. 4, I got bike jacked by a clown in western Nevada. That’s a National Inquirer headline by itself, right?
The synopsis is that I now have a broken left elbow with two surgical screws in it, a big black eye, no bike and an eerie subliminal nausea for all things related to the Ringling Brothers and Ronald McDonald.
Serial readers of this column will connect the dots and realize that I was not at the Republican National Convention, where you might expect this sort of behavior, but rather I was at the relatively idyllic Burning Man Festival. Unfortunately Burning Man is not immune from the laws of probability. The are 1 to 5 percent whackos amongst us. Some of them wear smiles and suits and some of them wear clown make up in the desert. Of course that is the problem with statistics; when the random Damocles swings low on your sweet chariot you aren’t 1 to 5 percent hurt, you are 110 percent jacked up.
So I’m riding along in the dark looking quite sartorial myself in a velour shirt, Thai hat, a thrift shop suit coat and some kind of garish pants I can’t describe. (Not everything you have heard about Burning Man is true; most people really do wear pants there) Mainly I was just trying to put a little distance between myself and the rest of the 35,000 throng who showed up this year when some belligerent bozo on foot rams me like he is trying to make a goal line stand on the last play of the Super Bowl. I grab my throbbing elbow, dust myself off and yell a few deleteable expletives at the middle linebacker clown who must have some deep-seated issues with my bike. Bozo boy comes over to clarify my confusion by giving me a big round house to my left eye and kicks me a few times for no extra charge. I fall down in punctuation. He rides off with my bike. I contemplate the new stellar constellations in my head, roll my tongue around my mouth to feel for missing teeth and scream for help. About a dozen people, obviously thinking that this some sort of bad performance art, walk by without stopping.
Finally someone who is not an art critic stops and calls for help on his radio. A John Deer ATV picks me up; which is what passes for an ambulance on the playa. I end up in what I imagine is what the emergency room looks like at Mardi Gras. Some paramedic in a pirate costume takes my blood pressure. I hear someone else tell the police “the guy in the funny looking pants and the bloody face needs to file a report.”
My dad is a retired cop so I know the drill, but in this context it is all too surreal. The cops are the only ones not in costume unless this was a gay bar which it definitely is not.
“So, Mr. Hinkamp, have you been drinking?,” they ask.
“Well, yeah this is sort of a big party who isn’t? I was just riding my bike,” I think I said.
“Describe the attacker,” they continue.
“Well, he was a clown about 6-foot, 180,” say.
“What kind of clown was it?” they continue
“A really bad one?” I think to myself but resist the urge to be a smart ass and try to explain the color of the make-up so they can file the report and I can get out of this M*A*S*H tent.
I drive with one arm back to sweet home Logan, Utah, and seek normalcy.
The coda to this mock opera is that I have received hundreds of emails of support from the Burning Man community. They loosed the mad dog hackers, determined devotees and sympathetic friends I never knew I had on this case. They have doggedly tracked down this evil clown and we are close to a resolution.
As weird as it sounds, the clown caper could not have happened in a better place. It was an isolated incident of violence in a most isolated place. It is one of those things that you always say, “could have happened to anybody” unless it is your body it happened to.
I will be sleeping Percocet dreams for a few more days but I feel certain with time I will learn to forgive. And with time and physical therapy I hope to soon raise my left arm and middle finger in the general direction of the nearest circus.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears in the Utah Statesman every other Friday. Comments can be sent to dennish@cc.usu.edu.