Page 45 - Unlikely Stories 4

The Magic Clown

He stopped, whether for introspection or memory retrieval she
could not discern. “And then,” she prompted.
“And then one day I wandered into an old junk store downtown.
Maybe I was looking for a job. I certainly wasn’t looking for bargains.
This was before any of that stuff became collectible—I mean all the
household knickknacks and ephemera from the Fifties and Sixties that
people cleared out of their garages and donated to charities or sold for
a song to a dealer when they had to clear out the house of a deceased
relative. But there I was, looking around at old plastic cups and
saucers, paintings on velvet and boxes of LP records not worth
listening to even if they weren’t all scratched up. Well, up on a shelf I
spotted a lava lamp. You know, those optical gimmicks with two kinds
of material inside a columnar glass table lamp, one a waxy substance
heavier than the other—a colored liquid—so it slowly rises up in
blobs from the bottom when you turn on the bulb mounted
underneath and it warms up. Then the blobs cool as they get away
from the heat and slowly go back down and merge with whatever is
still stirring at the base. It makes a fascinating light show, right in your
living room. That was during the psychedelic period in popular
culture, and kids would get stoned and stare at those things for
hours.”
Ann nodded. She hadn’t been born when the Age of Aquarius
reached an early sunset, but had some definite received wisdom about
its excesses and absurdities. Nevertheless, Tony Riga needed no
further encouragement: if he had been effectively suppressing his
history for decades, the dam had burst and words came tumbling out
like rabbits from a hat.
“I had never owned one. The price tag was faded. Out of curiosity
more than anything else I asked the proprietor how much. It was only
two dollars, so I bought it. The cord was frayed and the plug was
missing, but I had an old extension cord I could cannibalize and get it
working—if it worked at all. There was no way to determine that
without buying it. Things were sold as is—and no returns. I found
myself walking out of the shop with the lamp in a greasy brown paper
bag, having spent a good chunk of my reserve capital. It was self-
indulgent, like wasting calories on junk food. That’s how I was.”

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