Bon Voyage

    As we sat at the bus stop waiting for our ride, passersby kept glancing our way and lowering their voices as they shuffled through. One young girl, a mouselass with yellow bows pinning the fur behind her ears, actually stopped dead in her tiny little tracks and stared at Codsfellow as if he were juggling live fireworks or something. When he noticed her, he smiled and wiggled his fingers. She almost waved back, but her mother nervously yanked on her paw to make her hurry up.

    I can see why people were compelled to look at him. Not only were Clowns a rare sight for the people who lived in the city, but Codsfellow also looked nothing like what most people assumed Clowns to look like. He didn't...you know...he didn't wear, like, giant toddler pajamas or hold up his pants with a hula-hoop. He dressed kind of nice, actually. All of his clothes were fitted to his tall, slim figure, and his pants were always pressed and his shirts were always spotless. Such nice clothes made him stand out even more in the impoverished neighborhood that he lived in. Sure, his colors never matched—as if he modeled himself according to a page from a blind child's coloring book—but the overall affect of his appearance was almost regal...which is exactly what made him so strange to see, because anyone who knows anything about Clowns also knows that regal is a word no one would ever associate with Clownish folk.

    As we waited for our bus, Codsfellow rested his ankle on his knee and bobbed his giant, yellow rubber shoe to a beat only he could hear. Meanwhile, I was trying my best to ignore him. He must have sensed this, because he turned to me and asked: "So how was school today?"

    I almost laughed. What kind of a question was that? Might as well have asked me how's the weather in hell. 'Cause let me tell you something: middle school ain't no joke. I know high school gets all the recognition when it comes to drama and bullying and injustice and all that, but now that I've experienced them both, I can say that middle school is by far the worst of the two, and might possibly be the worst time in anyone's life, period.

    Think about it. That age, those years between eleven and fourteen, are when we are just old enough to be aware of all the darkest parts of adulthood, of brutality and drugs and sex, but we're not yet old enough to understand them, you know? At that age, we think of...I don't know...darkness as the core difference between adults and young children. Childhood is all color and sunshine and chirping bluebirds, and adulthood is all shade and lasers and gunmetal and smoke and rain. At some point, it becomes clear to us if we ever want to grow up, we must become nasty and dark like the grownups around us. Gotta give up those teddy bears and smiling clouds at some point. And that point is middle school.

    Like, when a kid wants to be more mature—which is what we all want when we're young, to put some distance between our old, baby selves as quickly as possible—a kid'll imitate those who are older than her. She'll first watch R-rated movies (when she knows she shouldn't) and use the 4-letter words that the actors are using (also when knows she shouldn't). And when she actually can see those movies and use those words without getting into trouble, she'll once again copy those who are older than her, and she'll do what they're doing and start to smoke, and when she can smoke, she'll start to have sex, and when she can have sex, she'll start to drink, and we she can drink, she'll either start to do drugs or start a career or start a family or all of the above. All for the sake of maturity.

    But there's also a point much later, usually, when an adult realizes that maturity has nothing to do with any of those things—those dark, colorless, lifeless things—that it really has everything to do with all those simple, childish ideas we were all taught at the very beginning, usually by adults who didn't want us to make the same mistakes as them: to be kind to others, to believe in ourselves, to avoid drugs and alcohol, to be responsible. And yet children avoid these principles because they associate them with the past, with elementary school and storytime and Puppets, and that's not the direction children want to go, not at all. They want to go forward, not back; older, not younger; bunk beds, not cribs.

    But how many children do you know who censor themselves? Who bite their tongues when they feel a bad word coming? Who admit when they're wrong or when they don't know something that comes naturally to everyone else? How many children do you know who admit they have a problem? Who admit when they're wrong? How many children do you know who volunteer? Who pay bills and wash dishes and take out the trash? Not many, I bet. And if you actually could find a kid who did all these things, what would you call them? Mature, of course. And what about an adult who did none of those things? A fifty-year-old who cursed around children and drank and got high and was violent and liked guns and katanas and high school girls and never did the dishes or made their bed? You would call them childish. But it's hard to get this through kids's heads—that the sign of a true adult is staying within the limits, not beyond them.

    God, I sound like such a prude right now. Man, if the twelve-year-old me could hear me now...I don't know what he'd do. Probably commit suicide just to get rid of me. Because, well...I was one of those kids who was all adult and no maturity.

    "I don't want to talk about it," I told Codsfellow as I lit my cigarette and put away my lighter. I took a much-needed drag from my smoke and then I took a much-needed sip from the coffee I shoplifted from a convenience store on the way to the bus stop. Codsfellow crinkled his brow and frowned—an expression I was already tired of.

    "Please," he said to me as I practically blew smoke into his face. "I wish you wouldn't do that. You know how bad caffeine is for your growth. Keep drinking that coffee and you'll remain vertically deficient for the rest of your life."

    "Suck off."

    Yeah...I was a disrespectful thumb at that age, I won't deny it. I'm ashamed now of how I acted then, especially towards Cods. I wasn't the easiest kid to take care of. I know we all think that in retrospect, but with me there's a good chance I was the most despicable child on the planet.

    When Codsfellow took me in, I was twelve, like I said, and I had already been sent to juvie multiple times. Even though I was small and scrawny, I had three tattoos—one on my chest that an inmate carved during my stay in Crumshack, one on my forearm that some powderhead Mosquito gave me while I was high on Pixiedust, and one on my butt cheek that I'm still not sure how it got there. I cursed like a Sailor, I drank coffee like my life depended on it, and I smoked like my life didn't matter anyway. My liquor of choice was Altunkul's, because it was cheap, came in a jug instead of a wimpy bottle, and reminded me of the stuff they'd cook up in the Shack, that nasty spit made out of fermented strawberries and gnats. I was, in a word, trash.

    "How much longer do we have to wait here?" I asked. My sunglasses weren't doing much to alleviate my hangover, and I was starting to get grumpy. "It's been, like, an hour."

    "I'm sure it'll be here any moment," Codsfellow told me. "The bus may have gotten stuck behind a bus. You know how these things go, Elmer."

    I shook my head and sucked on my cigarette. He still couldn't get my name right, and I wondered if he was just making up names on purpose. The Clown wasn't right in the head, I learned quickly. His memory was highly selective, and the parts he did choose to remember were almost always incorrect anyway. He lived in a thick bubble where only the happiest, brightest objects were allowed in—so it was a wonder that he even saw me at all. And most of the time I would have preferred it that way.

   "I swear to Doug, if you call me 'Elmer' one more time, I'll make that nose of yours look even more like a giant face hemorrhoid."

    Sitting to my right, on the opposite side of me as Codsfellow, was a Farmer. He was staring at us, perplexed, his shoot of buckwheat dangling off his bottom lip. I looked him in the eye, rolled up some phlegm, and spat it on the sidewalk by his boot. He tipped up his straw hat and looked over to Codsfellow, who was blissfully watching traffic, as if the honking cars and clouds of exhaust were as serene as a babbling creek.

    "You know," the Farmer slowly spoke to us, scratching underneath his chin whiskers, "I don't aim to be nosy, and I don't want to act like I'm privy to your business, but...this bus don't go to Clowntown no more."

    Cods blinked out of his haze. "I beg your pardon?"

    "Yup. They took it off the line some..." The Farmer tugged on the straps of his overalls and squinted towards the sun. "...nineteen, twenty months back, I'd reckon. T'werent enough traffic out that way, s'pose. Coming or going. Yessir."

    "Oh...I see..."

    As Codsfellow mulled it over, a bus pulled up and swung open its doors. The Farmer stood up and grabbed the handle by the entrance, but before stepping on, he turned to us and said: "No offense, fellas, but...ain't everyone got what it takes to be city folk." And then he and the bus rolled away, leaving us behind in a puff smog.

    I was hoping that the news meant we didn't have to make the trip. I had no interest in meeting this weird man's weird family, but Codsfellow was determined.

    "Welp," he said, lifting himself up by pushing off his knees. "There's nothing for it but to walk. Come! Let's take a moment to stretch and then we'll be off."

    "Walk? Isn't this place, like, thirty miles away?"

   "Twenty-nine-point-seven. If we leave now, we should arrive just in the nick of time for Saturday's beanbag—"

    "You're out of your dougdam mind if you think I'm walking thirty miles with a backpack full of books."

    "This is why I recommended you get one of those satchels with the wheels on the bottom. You know, what? We still have time. How about we head down to Flosniders and—"

    "If we're walking, I'm not going, and that's that. I don't care if they send me back to the Shack. I ain't walking." The only reason I was with Codsfellow in the first place was because of this community-service type of probation that my last juvie put me on. All I had to do was behave and be his assistant for a few months, and I was home free. Anything was better than being in juvie...but walking thirty miles was beyond the terms of the deal.  "If you really want me to come with you to this Moronfest, you either need to call a Taximan, or carry me, because I am not taking one more step in that direction."

    He looked down at me, concerned, and I could see the gnarly gears in his head cranking painfully, and I could see that he was considering the logistics of walking thirty miles with me on his back. And then his eyes lit up, and he snapped his fingers.

    "By Jove, of course! Why didn't I think of this sooner? Come. I know just the person to take us there."

    I groaned, finished my cigarette, and threw it into the gutter. Codsfellow picked up his suitcase and pulled out his compass. The thing was broken, because it always pointed North no matter what direction it faced, but the man trusted it blindly.

    He seemed to find something in the device, then he clicked it shut, returned it to his pocket, and confidently headed towards the northern part of the city. I begrudgingly followed, and twenty minutes later, I would be meeting one of the most influential thinkers in the world of humor theory.