Clowning Around On TV

I can forever thank my parents for having an electric box raise me from birth. I really do thank them. They weren’t the crappy, tight-assed types who wouldn't let me watch certain things. And even if the v chip had been out when I was growing up, my mom would have been too cheap to buy it, and my dad would have been too drunk to notice it was invented.

Even luckier for me than having ambivalent parents was, around the age of nine, the daytime TV explosion of talk shows. Inexperienced journalists and old TV stars were suddenly psychiatrists, with their audience of retards behind them to push whoever was in the ring of the circus at the time further into TV craziness. Some of my favorites included images of dolled up drug clowns that called themselves "club kids" on Donahue, Geraldo getting a chair to the moustache for being a Gew, and one of my personal heroes, GG Allin, spitting and swearing and talking about rape with El Duce and Sally Jesse Raphael.

I wanted nothing more than to be a part of this extravaganza. When I watched fat women on the Richard Bey show rub themselves in mud, all I wanted was to be up there, on television, in front of the lights, being humiliated like everyone else. Since I was too small at the time, this became one of my dreams that followed me through my teenage years. In high school, I often skipped my last two classes so I could come home in time to see Springer.

All my dreaming and class skipping finally paid off, and my dream came true sometime around my junior year. I was going to be on TV. I was going to be on the Jerry Springer show!

It was such a fluke that I actually went on. It went beyond fluke. It went to the ridiculous. You know how at the end of every show they invite you to call with show ideas? Well, during this phase I had just gone through a huge mental breakdown and was living with my mother. The breakdown had something to do with three solid years of daily drug injections and a relationship with an immigrant rapist. That is, of course, a whole other story. But, needless to say, I knew some interesting people who could qualify for the show. As for me, at this point, I was sucking on the psychiatrist tit and slobbering around mom's house like a doped up bag of zombies, which was a mental state I was very familiar with, except now I was "sober" and the medication was prescribed, so it was legal.

Yes, I found myself with a large amount of time on my hands. My "previous lifestyle" had introduced me to all kinds of interesting and hideous trash in human form, and in my drug haze I decided to call the number at the end of the show and pitch them an idea. I was thinking of a particular couple I knew. If you could call them that. I could write a book about them alone, but I'll try to make it short. He called her his girlfriend, but she was a prostitute who would only sometimes let him hump her leg for money, or give her drugs to stick a q-tip in her vagina and let him hold onto it. Get the picture?

Anyway, I lived with them for awhile. I figured they were trashy enough to grace daytime TV, so I called the hotline. When the hotline called back I was so excited. Jerry Springer was interested in my story. Well… their story. I immediately called the couple with the great news, but in all of their debauchery and trashiness they actually had the nerve to get mad at me for thinking of them for a topic on Springer!! I thought they had no dignity, but apparently they did. To me they were fucking nuts for not wanting to be on television, but I guess their story was a little too real. I called back the show and told them it was a no go. Then they asked me if there was anything going on in my life, if I was a prostitute, or sleeping with a married man, or cheating on my amputee spouse, or if I liked to jump into tubs of urine, etc. Now at this point I had my share of stories. I had come into contact with those kinds of penises that come scented in special bacteria... Chlamydia. Herpes. Syphilis. I had seen coke bottles, razor blades, women fucking dogs, faggotry, psychiatrists and counselors, but I knew none of the other ends of the sex acts would appear with me on the show. For some reason, people have problems going on international television to talk about things that actually happened to them. Go figure.

I was trying to think of some weird fetish I could go on for and then make a story from it. Somehow, I came up with this one…

You see, I love clowns. I have tons of clown paintings and figurines. I have always thought that people's ugly faces look way better in bright clown makeup anyway, and I find them to be so sexy. I also knew I wasn’t alone. I knew other people had clown fetishes, because I had seen clown porn before. So I called Jerry Springer and revealed my clown fetish to them, and how I was cheating on my then-boyfriend with a man who would dress as a clown during sex. The producers loved this story and they even told me that they hadn't had a clown sex story for six years. I think that fact surprised me most. I had thought I would be the first one.

This time it wasn’t hard to find people to go on TV for something not so real, so I easily found two people who were very into playing the parts of my boyfriend and the clown.

Since the show was filmed in Chicago they limoed us to this really nice hotel where we were able to meet the other trash that was going to be on Springer the next day. They were from North Carolina, and their story was somewhat fabricated like ours. We instantly found all the other Springer guests staying at the hotel. They were all complete white trash and extremely excited to be out of their roach infested existences and put up for a night in the fanciest of fancy hotels.

After getting our story straight, we went to bed early that night because we had to be extremely early the next morning in order to be on the show. We waiting in the greenroom, where a gangly, transvestite makeup artist prepared us for the show.

The shit that went on in the back room was pretty unbelievable. Of course, some of the people who were on the show were there for real things. Others were more like us -- mental retards who wanted $100 and to be on TV. Not to mention that I was fulfilling one of my personal, childhood goals.

They fed me energy drinks nonstop until I felt like I was on methamphetamine… something I was rather used to. Those drinks, coupled with the psych meds I was on, made me into a shaky, tweaked-out mess. Oh, and it probably didn’t help that they kept feeding us cigarettes. (This was at the glorious time when you actually could smoke inside of some buildings. Random trivia: it Judge Mathis who forced the network to get rid of smoking in the building at the NBC tower in Chicago, and yes, I feel like an idiot for knowing that.)

After a couple hours I was slumped over on the couch and surrounded by 20 empty energy drink cans with cigarette buts stuffed in them, all the while shaking and tweaking like a malfunctioning robot. The scene must have been priceless. I’m sorry I can’t remember much of it.

The "Producer" of the show was this crazy woman named Gina. She was even more tweaked out than me, and I'm sure it had nothing to do with energy drinks. She wanted people to YELL. So she would YELL at you. The woman punched my friend – the fellow playing the clown – and called him a pussy just to get a rise out of him. It didn’t really work. But she wanted us to scream and yell. She even tried to make me really mad by telling me that my "boyfriend" had been making out with one of the interns in the hallway. I pretended to be really pissed. I really didn't know if they knew we were not for real or what. They made some half ass script of what was supposed to take place once we were out there, and Ms. Gina practiced it with me over and over, screaming in my face and pushing me until she actually got me pissed off and yelling.

After being in the green room for about six hours with one of the guys from North Carolina, watching him throw chairs and listening to him proposition me to have sex in the bathroom (he even asked the interns for condoms), he almost war me down. It was probably a combination of all the energy drinks, the fact that he looked semi-good, and his relentlessness. He was full of so much energy and so was I, but I thought sex might be too hard to have in the shower room, and even though I wondered about giving him a blowjob, I don’t think it would have been possible. Things were so chaotic with everything going on, and I think the girl he was with was really his girlfriend. I probably should have let him pull one off with me, but the gangly transvestite kept walking in and out and then she did my makeup, and once they had piled 20 pounds of pretty onto my face, I was barely allowed to talk so as not to smudge something, so I figured sex with a pock marked trash heap from North Carolina was out of the question. In retrospect, I still regret passing that one up. It was, after all, a sleazy, daytime talk show.

Finally the show started. Throughout the entire day I had been separated from my two companions who were god knows where and probably given the same treatment as I was, with the lines and the pushing and the yelling, so I didn't know what to expect when I saw them. We were to encounter each other on stage. I played the "villain" because I was the one cheating on my loyal boyfriend, so I was the one that the world was going to hate, the audience was going to antagonize. I was also the whore and the first one to go on for Jerry to interrogate.

As I waited, all the years of childhood and teenage anticipation of this dream flashed before me. This show had practically raised me and seemed so distant glowing on that little box, and here I was about to be a part of it. I was scared about fucking up, but watching the show recently, all of the shows look like fuckups. It was honestly beginning to lose its quality. Then Gina gave me this weird, half-tweaked out smile and pushed me out on stage. When Jerry said "Let's meet Meg, she has a bizarre sexual fetish that she has to tell her boyfriend about," it was about the most surreal moment of my life. And even when I watch the tape, I still cannot believe it. It’s the kind of stuff dreams are made of.

So I was on, and talked to Jerry, and during our little discussion they kept playing the "BOOIINGG!!" boner noise. I guess I can take that as a compliment. I mean they could have played the cow noise or something. They apparently didn't have a noise for a red bull fueled whore that worshiped clown dick. But then they brought my "boyfriend" out and I followed the script and told him what I was supposed to say. And then before I could blurt out another thought they brought Matt out, dressed head to toe like a clown. But not a clown that I would have liked. They made him a "sexy" clown. I later found out they did this because they didn't want any little kids watching to think that normal clowns have sex, which of course they do.

He had this gay rainbow wig on and just a vest, NO SHIRT!! (disgusting) and then combat boots and pants. He was gross but I made out with him anyway and I made sure to get as much of his clown makeup around his mouth (which was black not red like I wanted) on my face so I looked as disgusting as I wanted this character I was playing to be. ".

Then there was the audience. As a side note, this was right before all the crazy nudity and way before the "Jerry Beads" thing so there weren't many people demanding everyone show their shit. There were a couple of inquiries as to what my diet was that made me so skinny. Of course some people asked why I liked clowns. But they mostly just chanted "clown whore" and I just yelled back at them like I was supposed to. It was fun. All the people that were calling me skinny were all fat asses, how could I get mad? I just kept coming at them with anger and calling them fat.

There was only one audience member that actually scared me, and he was by far the most insane person out there. He had some kind of disorder where he had ticks. I don't know what was wrong with him but he reminded me of a robot with Tourettes in the process of being shut down. This thing was genuinely angry at me about being a clown lover.

He’d stand up and say, "I-I-I-I c-c-c-can't sssseee how you-u-u c-c -c-an [tick] d-d-d-do tttttthis t-tt-to him [referring to the boyfriend]." He kept saying stuff like that but ticking. I thought one of his limbs was going to explode or something. I angrily/jokingly egged him on and invited him up to the stage to resolve his obvious insane problem with me and my obsession with clown dick. He started coming down from the top row and threatening to k-k-k-k-ick my a-as-ss-ss. I welcomed him, because I knew the guards would stop him, except he was getting closer and closer, and angrier and angrier. I could not imagine how me sleeping with a clown could make this man so mad. But he was fuming and really close to the stage. I sort of stopped provoking him because the guards weren't stopping him, but finally right before this ticking robot man reached me, they got him. I think they wanted to see me squirm and they got what they wanted. I nearly shit my clown loving pants. The last thing I needed was some retard with an anger toward clowns ready to kill me. Sadly, that particular part with that man never aired. They edited it out. I have no idea why. If they wanted weird and obscene, it was definitely the most bizarre part of the show. Again though, I think things got a little too real, and the editors had to cut it.

After almost fighting with the audience, my stage-mates went at it. My "boyfriend ripped" off the clown's wig and punched him and they got in a big brawl which I was involved in. One of them even hit me, though it was probably on purpose for getting them into this ridiculous daytime trash TV mess. Then no sooner than it started it was over. My dream for years since I was a child was done. I had done it. I had appeared worldwide on Jerry Springer, the "trashiest show on TV

Since then they have aired and re aired the show and some days I'll be walking around, and I'll see someone and they'll be really excited to see me and they'll say "Girl, you was on Jerry Springer this morning. You was the clown lover. That’s craaazy shit. You really love clowns?" And then I get into some ridiculous conversation about it. I never want to ruin the illusion of the daytime talk shows, especially to people who love them as much as I do.

Surprisingly, when people find out I’ve been on the Jerry Springer show, the most impressed group of people are Russians. I was once in Russia, or former Russia, and somehow the subject of Jerry Springer came up and I told them the story of how I'd been on the show, and these Russians were so excited. It was almost like I was Pam Anderson or something. They treated me like a celebrity for a minute. They’d say shit like: "If only I am on Jerry Springer, everyone will know who I am." They seemed to be the only people that shared my excitement and joy for having been on the show. The show is really huge there. It's great to know that people can be watching you at any time. It's not exactly fame, but it was a major goal for me that I accomplished. The whole thing was like this weird whirlwind, but I'd definitely do it again. I even got one fan letter from it.

I had trouble watching Springer after appearing on it because it sort of lost its appeal. I felt like I had shattered a fantasy by actually doing it. But as long as there is the great medium of television, there will be more trash for me to worship. And I certainly plan to. In fact, I plan to devote my life to making sure this trash continues, and, better yet, help it get even worse.