The woes of an aging clown

At the end of a long walkway across a Mount Oliver lawn that needs to meet a lawn mower, I am invited into a cluttered front room by two of Mr. Smacky’s colleagues.

I’d heard this clown is looking for work. I figure it must be tough out there in the baggy-pants world, even for those not closing in on their 81st birthday.

“Smacky!’’ yells one — or was it both? — of his sometime sidekicks, and the man himself comes downstairs. We shake hands for a very long time.

“You’re not scared of me, are you?” he asks, looking me in the eye.

“No,” I say, my hand still pumping his.

“What are you shaking for?” Bah-da-bump.

I sit down at the table with him and two women (and sometime assistants) already seated. He slides away the cards from the solitaire game he’d been playing and I get right to the point: Some kids are scared of clowns.

Today’s kids didn’t grow up watching Clarabell on “The Howdy Doody Show.” As my 19-year-old daughter had reminded me when I mentioned I’d be meeting a man named Smacky, the most prominent clown these days is Pennywise from the movie “It.” He’s the sewer-dwelling embodiment of cosmic evil brought to us by horror master Stephen King, and “It: Chapter Two” is due out in September.

So how about “It”?

“It killed me,” he said. “It got to a point where ... a woman says to me, ‘How can I trust you?’ And I thought this was a dumb question to ask. And I says, ‘Why?,’ and she says, ‘Are you anything like this “It”?’ I says, ‘Ma’am, that was a movie.’ But I will tell you the truth: It hurt me.”

He pulls out a thick scrapbook. Written on the front cover is “1968 to 2016.” Inside is a trove of newspaper clippings, certificates, photos and thank-you notes. There’s a clipping of Smacky with the Pagans motorcycle club at a Strip District fundraiser for Children’s Hospital in 1995. There’s another from 1982 about an event with the Tri-River Clowns in front of a Mount Washington bank, and he tells me what happened that day.

“A woman comes over and says to me, ‘What are you doing, casing the place?’ And I had no idea what she was talking about.” But then she told him some clowns had just committed armed robbery.

(I later found a Pittsburgh Press photo from July 1982 showing an FBI agent, with roughly the same serious-asa-heart-attack look Tommy Lee Jones had throughout “The Fugitive,” holding the largest pair of clown pants I’ve ever seen. The caption said three armed clowns abducted two security guards in the robbery of an armored

van in Peters, and the costumes, wigs and shotgun were later found in a dumpster in Banksville.)

What I know of the dangers of clowning I learned more than 40 years ago in the “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Sadly, the title clown, dressed as Peter Peanut in a circus parade, was killed when a rogue elephant tried to shell him. ‘Twas a tragic end for a man whose only wish in life was “a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.”

And my only direct experience in clowning came circa 1985, when a sometime clown I knew persuaded a bunch of us to sit still for face paint and crash the Blacksburg (Va.) Christmas Parade. Oh, the places you’re allowed to go if you only remember to carry a rubber chicken.

Mr. Smacky (he put the “Mr.” in front of “Smacky” when he stopped wearing makeup a few years back) is not the clown he once was. His hands have become too stiff to make balloon animals, and his longtime assistant, Roberta “Ladiclown” Lukas, also at the table, told me she no longer has the knees to help him.

When he went upstairs to change into his work clothes, Patty Hess, who’d been sitting quietly at the table, talked of being Mr. Smacky’s assistant at a holiday party in an American Legion hall a couple of years back. “Miss Patty” told how Mr. Smacky fumbled the lyrics of the Christmas song he sang, and how that only made the kids love him more.

“He’d call Rudolph ‘Randolph’ and the kids yelled ‘His name’s Rudolph!’”

When I asked Miss Patty if it was “Patty’’ with a “y” or an “i,’’ he interrupted, “It’s Patty with a cake.”

His jokes are so corny you may look around on the floor for the cob, but he’s a charming guy so desperate to get back in the game, “my fee is free.” He says he’s gone by “Smacky” or “Mr. Smacky” so long that when people ask his real name, “I have to take my wallet out.” His ID says he’s Rick Busby.

“You can take the man out of the clown,” he likes to say, “but you can’t take the clown out of the man.” Yet if no one has reason to call a clown at 412-481-1390, Mr. Smacky will have no reason to tune his guitar.

I walked back across the unmowed lawn, feeling a little sad for both of us. I was wondering not just whether Mr. Smacky would ever work again. I was wondering if I would ever get “Randolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” out of my head.