Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist

brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from

area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do

this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

Fuzzy Mules, Pink Slippers Volume One: Came a Clown

Author: McAllister

Ransom

Publisher: Kohinoor

Books, Baltimore

Date: 1990

Discovered at:

American Veterans Thrift Store, Allston, MA

The Cover Promises:

A clown named "Puzzles." That doesn't bode well. Also: "NAKED

SHE STOOD. NAKED AGAINST THE WORLD. THEY KIDNAPPED HER BABY."

Representative

"Mr.

T., great and gallant man, was about as afraid of flying as a patriot

of truth." (page 111)

"John

Eddy Ryan III; a grade A, first class, prime rib, numero uno creep .

. . His name was all that he had. His name his claim to fame. Would a

pile of poop called another name smell sweeter? Were it perfumed with

perfume of prose or poetry, 'twould sweeter smell? Would you want to

eat it?" (127)

"She

just wanted to be happy and help others be happy, be their friend, to

be a friend of man, to serve man. To serve man using the claw hammer

of laughter removing the nails of woe from the coffin of care . . .

April just wanted to be the clown in the party of life. Life! Party!

Sure!" (145)

If

Finnegan's Wake is, as

Martin Amis said,

a 600-page crossword clue, then

Came a Clown, the

first volume of McAllister Ransom's self-published, un-proofread,

anti-consumerist clown epic, is an 872-page Jumbo Word Find ... one

where you search the bursts of random letters for any kind of sense

at all.

With his wild rants, off-putting scatology and reams of

half-wit wordplay, Ransom aspires to beatnik glory, but the result is

scattered and shouty and suffering a chemical imbalance. Consider

this outburst from a page-long denunciation of April's husband's

name:

"All

Ryan had, whimper, whimper, whimper, was his God damned stinking

name. Ryan and his name! His honor! His dinky fist and his name. We

fornicate in the cream of his name! We shit on his name! Ryan! Hey!

Over here's your name! Here! Here!"

The book reads not

as if it were typed but as if it were hollered. From an alley. By

that twitching bearded guy who haunts the campus quad and everyone

says was once a grad student who snapped.

"Strange

freedom indeed. Freedom that enslaves a country's majority. The word

of the rich punks and fairies that own and run the county through

their fat-butted nazified bully boys, trustworthy and loyal, their

word stone, solid as a whore's wink. True blue and firm as the

endearments of a whore."

Ransom

purports to tell the story of April, a naïve young woman hated,

for her simple decency, by all the fat, cruel capitalists making up

America. April escapes their tyranny by clowning as Faffo, but even

then she gets beaten up and spat upon. Also, someone steals her baby,

I guess -- I've never made it past page 150, and there's no kidnapping

in that chunk.

Still, I won't let the book's impenetrability prevent

me from reviewing it. In the decade or so that it's given me

migraines, I've accepted that Ransom's epic is not meant to be read

straight though. Instead, Came a Clown is

a brick-thick party trick. Get some friends, some drinks and declaim

aloud from any random page:

"And

now for the cootie grass. A few precise flicks with the eyebrow

pencil. Some precision swits not swipes of the omnipresent cotton

slob, swab, never to be inserted into the ear canal. With her fingers

Faffo unconsciously twirled the swab with the confidence of your

white-booted high-steppin' bosomy majorette wristing a baton! Over

here! Yo!"

Since only lengthy

quotes could begin to suggest the spirit of Ransom's efforts, here's

the climax of that same scene:

"It

was, Was, WAs, WAS, PRESTO! FAFFO

THE CLOWN! Yeaaa! Voila!

Voila Voodoo! Walla! Yea! Walla Walla! Voila Walla! Voila Faffo! Vive

la Faffo! Wall of Voodoo, bro. Yea yea yeaa! Wall of Voodoo! Walla

Voodoo! Who do? You do. Hindoo him do what him do!"

I don't want to be

indelicate, here, but I must say this: No other book has ever

inspired me to search so often through the DSM. 

It Gets Ugly:

While

Ransom demonstrates little interest in dramatic niceties like

narrative or storytelling, Came a

Clown does generate some true dramatic interest. The compelling questions: Will

Ransom's belief in the decency of individuals like April best his

hatred for mankind? Will this confounding hippie lark collapse into

hate-filled madness?

In the early going, as he takes 75 pages to describe three scenes of

April stranded at gas-stations and fast food restaurants, Ransom seems nice enough. He'll gas on harmlessly about "pig" cops, how every boss

has "asslickers" with their "noses jammed far up the very Bung

of Authority," how free markets crush everything gentle or human

about us, how good people like April are ground through "the

American meat grinder."

It's what Rush Limbaugh imagines liberals

think like.

Ransom also

passionately defends the humble April and anyone else who stands up

for humanistic morality. He loves his protagonist so much he often just calls

her "Love."

But as the pages pass, the cutesy stuff curdles:

"April

called him Eddy a lot. Like he deserved affection or something. It

sounded more cuddly or something. Cuttly's more like it if you ask

us. We've got Ryan's cuttly here in our pants. He snapped at Love a

lot. She thought sometimes.

The

little punk snapped all the time, a two-legged Doberman pinscher. Had

a face like one too. Little faggoty rat-face mustache."

At his worst, Ransom fights hate with hate and vulgarity with

vulgarity. As the book goes on, and April suffers greater and greater

brutality, Ransom hates harder. He denounces "fairy" America and

"penis-sucking" parents. He imagines April's husband

masturbating: "POW! POW! POW! Eddy shot. He shot his little pistol.

Shooting down the Commie pinko peaceniks of his mind."

By the end, Ransom's hatred for mankind defeats his love of Love.

Disgustingly, he gives "a black pig cop" dialogue like this:

"Ah's offica Moe-ra an Ah doan wona shotts ennybody but if Ah has

ta Ah sho nuff will. Ah's de trained killa. Ah'm de boss here-ra."

In the next paragraphs, Ransom loses it altogether. As the black cop

beats April with a nightstick resembling a "cock," Ransom calls

him "subhuman" and tosses out the vilest racial slurs. He somehow

then goes further still:

"It

held up its club."

This

is the most disgusting word in the book, if not the language: It

instead

of his.

Shocking Detail:

This was volume one. Here's an announcement of the follow-ups, which

as far as I can tell have never been published:

More, More, More:

The only way to capture the Came a Clown Experience is to quote extensively. So, for the masochists out

there, here's more. Your Crap Archivist's advice for any sensible people who have made it this far:

please, bail out now.

Page 33: "After five-hours and four-minutes Lord Master of the

Grease Monkeys he sent forth both of his loyal serfs, both who would

have been so much happier chained to an organ . . . That was no job

for a Lord God, He, the prosperous, paunchy and well-respected

manager of a great, top-of-the-line, upbeat, fast, foreskin in the

forefront, capitalist automobile emporium! No!

57: "People,

being the assholes they are, verily wondered why? Why would April not

go out? Why? Not so strange. One of them could get hit full in the

face with a shit pie, full in the mug with a shit pile, then, when

you protest what happened to them ask: 'Why did you say that people

should not throw shit pies?' Hit in the face a pile of shit! We bet

you can see them licking it off, can you not! Chocolate!"

Pages 101 to 111

describe how John Madden and Mr. T both suffer from a fear of flying.

"You take your Mr. T., The A Team, God bless their brave souls,

always had to knock him out to get him on a plane ... They had to

knock him out! Konk 'im oan de aid widda big bode, two-by-fo'.

Perhaps a crowbar, or perhaps a tire iron or a soft anvil (by

comparison) to before they could get Mr. T from one wild exciting

adventure to the next. Chap was stark raving mad with fear of flying.

So it cost a forest od 2 X 4's? So what? This is a small cost to pay

for the protection of the A Team."

From 121 to 123,

Ransom lists names starting with A.

260: "Let's face

it. Patriotism knows no bounds and there are two types of them. Not

patriots, faggots. There's only one kind of patriot. All patriots are

faggots but not all faggots are patriots."

352: "Realize

that this quote is much too literate for the average beetle-browed,

knuckle-dragging dim-witted and stripe-backed American. They know of

starving children but the fat-assed do not care. Waste it anyway.

Throw it away. The fat rich, the rich-assed, Ameri-assed tough

looking down into the faces of starving children, down-looking

starving babies, spit in their faces grinding food under foot!

Grinding vittles under hoof! Hash 'neath hoof."

680: "Saucy Slut

advanced upon April slowly; step by step, step by step, step by step.

The mob thickened behind her like dropping a dried sponge into a pail

of water and the mob grew rocketing behind the Saucy Slut like a

mushroom of hate."

766: "All in all

though, the two had their eyes on the guys, the guys had eyes on

them. Doubtless here in the free modern America many people will not

understand this statement. Allow us to elucidate. To make it clear in

these morally muddy bayou times. The muddy moralled Days of Kali

Yuga. Witness! Boys go for girls, girls go for boys! Simple. They fit

together like a dovetail joint. Hey! Snug like a bug in a rug. Yo!

Like-a deece, like a-deece. Voila!"