Of course, it was strange when Harvey the Clown walked into the Roasted Coffee Shop in the middle of the afternoon. His shoes squeaked, and the bowling pins he held banged on the ground. Harvey the Clown couldn’t even smile at Tiffany as he ordered a black coffee. He was an unsettling sight for Tiffany, who usually liked clowns but couldn’t imagine what had happened to Harvey. She graciously upped the size of his coffee order.
Harvey slinked over to a chair, sat down and started to cry. If you were trying to work at the Roasted Coffee Shop at this time, you were out of luck. His red nose squeaked as he cried, and the way his body heaved, it was like watching a marionette on strings.
Two men involved in a deep political discussion about the town council looked suspiciously at Harvey for a minute, gathered their things, and left. A man walked into the shop whistling, stopped at the door when he heard the crying, looked at the clown and fled. It looked like Harvey might be the only one left.
Someone should comfort the clown, right? But who?
Kyle, who was also working behind the counter, didn’t have the patience to deal with this situation. So he yelled at the clown. “Hey buddy, what happened?”
If Tiffany hadn’t immediately nudged Kyle, he surely would have started going off on clown tropes. You couldn’t fit in the clown car? The circus left you behind? Did you lose an election?
The clown looked up and saw that everyone was staring at him.
Harvey sobbed through his retelling. “I was booked for a kid’s birthday party: balloons and all. Strangely, it was in an office building, but I figured it was a dad who didn’t have enough time for his kids. But when I got there, it turned out that a bunch of men in suits had hired me just to laugh at me. It was horrible. They popped all of my balloon animals. They heckled my routine.”
His red nose was practically falling off at this point.
Without irony, he continued, “I am a serious business person, too, not an object to be laughed at.”
He pulled a handkerchief out of his sleeve, attached to 20 more handkerchiefs and blew his nose.
At that moment, the door opened, and a mom walked in with her three kids. Her five-year-old boy yelled, “Wow, a clown!” and immediately ran to Harvey.
“Hey, do you have any balloons?”
Harvey stopped crying, “Yeah, I should have balloons for a long time after what I was just paid!”