Diary of a Clown/ the Japanese Clown Connection
By Susan Zwirn aka Polkadots the Clown

This story isn’t really clown related, but I think (for comical and circumstantial purposes) it has to be told, since it eventually led to the clown in me coming out into the world.
The first year and a half that I was in New York City in the mid nineteen eighties, I probably had about eight short lived clerical jobs. I can’t even begin to tell you how many job agencies turned me down or gave me the run around since my typing speed was really low and my past jobs were short lived.

I can’t remember how I came upon this particular agency, but I remember walking into this dirty looking office waiting room that reeked of cigarette smoke, in Mid Town Manhattan somewhere. The waiting room contained a reception-less phone and about four typewriters. Another twenty something year old girl was in the waiting room as well and had gotten there first. After a few minutes of small talk, the phone rings. The door to the office finally opens and out pops the head of the sleaziest looking man I ever laid eyes on, with hair that was in dire need of being washed and combed, not to mention the wads of hair emerging from his ears and nose. He annoyingly yells out…”Hey! Can one of yous get that?! And answer wit Amazing Employment (or whatever the name was) Oh, and take there number on that piece of paper there and say I’ll be right back with them.” After doing so I waited around some until the girl before us walked out of the office and went over to one of the typewriters. Max, (the sleezebag) walks over and tells the girl to sit down and start typing (pointing to sample typing in a book) and turns on a timer and again yells out “Start typing!” In the same breath *which was bad) he turns to me and calls me into his office. After very briefly looking over my resume, he tosses it in the trash can and hands me a bogus resume and says “Here, look this over and memorize it in case someone asks you questions about your back round” “But that’s not my resume”, I replied. “It is now! Oh, and don’t forget to change the name!” “When your done, come out here and take a typing test”, he said as he walked back into the waiting room. Like the girl before me, he sets the timer and hands me a typing test. As he’s leading the next girl into his office, he turns back to me and says…”If the phone rings turn off the timer and take a message”. He came out of the office a few minutes later and says….”let’s see, what ya got there?” I hand him back my five minute typing test which (including some miss-spelled words) contained like twenty words on it. Typing skills was something I didn’t inherit from my late mom, a former secretary of thirty something years. This is before the computer kicked in and made typing easier on our fingers and spell-checking bad grammar. He took one look at my test, tossed it in the trash, and said…”Congratulations you now type sixty five words a minute” and adds it to a blank spot on my new resume, and then says…”Right now I have nothing for yas” “Come back tomorrow”.

After a couple of more days of sitting in this sleazy smelly office all day, answering phones, I was ready to call it quits, thinking that this was just this sleazebags way of getting a free receptionist, but as soon as the words started forming in my mouth, he jolted out of his office “Do yas have your resume memorized?” He responded to my uh hu with ….”Good, here’s where your going” and hands me an address.
Under the circumstances I expected my first job interview with this so called agency, to be as sleazy as the office, but to my surprise, it turned out to be on the thirty fifth floor of “The World Trade Center”. The company was called “Kanematzu Goshu” Don’t ask me what it means in Japanese! It was a Japanese import/ export company. I walked into a huge office filled with desks in groups of threes. Each area contained one or two Japanese men and a young American secretary, each one not typing much faster than me (I found out later, we were all sent from the same agency). The receptionist (The only Japanese woman in the office) told me to have a seat. Shortly afterward, she brought me to an area in the back, and introduced me to a nice middle-aged woman who reminded me of my mom. After we both took a couple of seats by her desk, she told me a little about the job which entailed varied clerical duties and booking plane and dinner reservations for my two bosses.
After a few minutes of questions, she (the secretary to the only American man at the company) brought out two Japanese men a little shorter than me (five feet four inches). There names were Kise Sun and Suonobu Sun, Sun being the Japanese equivalent of Mr. After the introduction, they shook my hand and bowed a couple of times, and then after looking very briefly at my application, they asked in very broken English if I would be willing to make and serve tea and coffee to there clients. I said yes, they excused themselves bowed , went over to the corner of the room, said a few words back and forth to each other in Japanese and came back over to me and shook my hand while one of them said, “We hile you”. When I was walking out, the woman who interviewed me earlier stopped me and said…”Oh, Susan, we need you to take another typing test for clerical reasons.” Uh Oh! I thought. After all, I was no where near the sixty five words per minute that the other typing test and application stated. After taking the test, she didn’t seem taken back by my sperratic typing. Judging by the sounds of the other secretaries typing, she probably was used to it. After studying my test, she looked up at me and said…”This job does require some typing, so promise me you’ll brush up on yours and it will be our little secret”. I agreed to do so with a relieved smile on my face.

After starting the job, “Some typing” was an understatement! Every morning starting at nine o clock, a five page voucher had to be typed out and was to be finished no later than ten thirty AM. I know that five pages doesn’t seem like that much, but each page contained a bunch of numbers and calculations to be made by me. Now here’s the catch…each page had four different colored carbon copies attached to it, which meant, that every time I made a mistake, each copy had to be whited, blued, green and yellowed out! In the mean time Kise Sun my high strung boss would yell out “Suzan! I have crient! Bring tea with bottled water and flesh milk only!”
My two bosses, Kis’e Sun and Suonobu Sun, were like night and day. Suonobu was very laid back to the point where when he stretched back in his chair, his back would almost hit the ground. If the phone rang during one of these stretches, he wouldn’t even bother to straighten up. In the middle of reclining, he would slowly reach for the phone, and with his eyes barely opened would say…”Suuu o no buu”. If the person on the other end were English speaking and calling for the first time, you would hear in an annoyed sleepy voice…”No, that is my nam…I spell…S….U…” He never usually made it past the U. When the person would interrupt, his eyes would widen while he said…”HU!?” Then he would slowly go into his sales pitch. Sometimes he would disappear three or four hours at a time, when no matter how busy I was, Kis’e Sun, who was extremely hyper would hand me a piece of paper with a phone number on it and say…”Suzan! Find Suonobu Sun!” I would quickly call the number which was received by a Japanese sounding woman with some other female voices in the back round. While I was on hold, I turned to Kis’e Sun and said…”Was that his wife?” “Suzan!! Don’t ask questions!” After being on hold for like fifteen minutes, he would finally come to the phone. As soon as Kis’e sun heard me say Suonobu’s name, he would grab the phone out of my hand and started screaming G-d knows what in Japanese. When Suonobu returned about an hour and a half later, he would look around to make sure the coast was clear of Kis’e Sun and hand me an entertainment voucher to record his latest pleasure in the books. No, I didn’t write “Geisha Girls”. It was always recorded as “Entertaining client”.

A couple of days before the fourth of July, I’m sitting at my desk, when all of a sudden, the sound of fire crackers started up. Kis’e Sun sprung up from his seat and dodged under his desk, yelling…”BOMB!!” I tried calming him down by saying that they were just fireworks. An hour after he came out from under his desk, and he started calming down (calm for him, anyway) a loud siren went off followed by a voice over the PA system in English and afterwards in Japanese announcing a bomb scare! Needless to say, Kis’e Sun was the first out of the door. A few seconds later, Suonobu Sun, slowly snuck past Kis’e Sun, neither returning the rest of the day, even though it was a short lived scare. This was over a decade before nine eleven. I’m guessing that Suonobu went back to his Geisha Girls, because the next day, he snuck me another entertainment voucher.

On the very few occasions when I wasn’t working like a dog, or Kis’e Sun wasn’t trying to make a play for me by pretending to read my palm, he would yell out…”Suzan! Plactice typing!”
Needless to say, that job was short lived. Suonobu Sun gave me my two week notice. Kis’e Sun avoided me most of that time. When I finally did hear from him, it was an order to bring in some coffee and tea for him and a blond he was interviewing for my job. “How dare he!!, I thought. As I’m preparing his tea, I started to pour water from the purifier, when the devil and clown in me took over! As luck had it, the tap water happened to be coming out brown that day, but brown water wasn’t enough, so I reached into the back of the refrigerator and reached for a carton of soured curdled milk. I didn’t do anything to the blonde’s coffee, since she hasn’t done anything to me. Just as I’m starting to hand Kis’e Sun his tea, my hand started shaking when I realized what I had done and that there was no turning back and I ended up spilling some of the hot tea and coffee on his lap. He did end up drinking some of his tea. Luckily, it was late in the day and he was flying out to Japan for my remaining few days and that was the last I saw of him.

Shortly before my two week time frame was to come to an end, I just couldn’t bring myself to doing the agency thing, especially after that last experience with the sleaze bag. Luckily, I came across an ad in “The Village Voice” advertising for a singing messenger... and so a clown was born!