Clown Army

Bizarro is brought to you today by Clowns That Kill.

When I was in elementary school in Oklahoma, I played all the sports that were offered. My least favorite was basketball, because we played with an adult-sized ball on and adult-sized court. Most of us couldn't even throw a basketball high enough into the air to hit a backboard, much less accurately enough to get a basket. It would be as if average-sized adults were playing with a ball the size of an airplane tire and the hoop was hanging on the edge of a three-story building. The final scores ended up being more like hockey games than basketball.

A couple of times each year in basketball and other sports, we would play the kids from the local military school. These kids were scary. They were gaunt, tough, bruised, nearly bald, and had the look in their eye of a man on death row who has nothing left to lose. Their gymnasium was cold and dilapidated, and the entire campus was out on the edge of town and felt like you were visiting the set of a teen horror flick. I don't think we ever beat the military school kids at any sport. I remember not wanting to beat them, partly because I felt sorry for them and partly because I didn't want them to tear my head off and spit down my throat.

But the kids from the clown school were easy to beat. They were always tripping over their big, floppy shoes, for one thing, so we had a big advantage right off the bat. In many ways, however, they were even scarier.