WASHINGTON — Few pleasures compare with being able to cancel brunch with your in-laws because you have an appointment with a rodeo clown from Wyoming who is rolling a barrel from the District of Columbia to New Jersey.
Starvin’ Marvin Nash was on New York Avenue when we first talked.
He keeps a phone in his overalls.
Nash must have some kind of internal cowboy-tracking device, because he found himself at the only place you could imagine a cowboy being comfortable along New York Avenue: a barbecue joint called Hogs on the Hill.
He had just tackled Capitol Hill, where he managed to get a royal-blue rodeo barrel past Senate security (he decided not to wear his rodeo-clown makeup so as not to trigger suspicion) and confronted his senators with the No. 1 thing on his mind: bullying.
Nash thinks that by pushing a barrel from the nation’s capital to the Cowtown Rodeo on Saturday in New Jersey, along trash-strewn highways and over the crunch of broken glass on inner-city streets, he will bring attention to an epidemic of bullying among America’s youths.
“Every day, 160,000 kids don’t go to school because they are afraid of being bullied,” said Nash, who markets the Bullying Hurts Program to school districts across the country through his website. “Think about it. That’s like a whole town of kids not going to school.”
It’s a serious cause to Nash, 55, who has been a bullfighter at rodeos for nearly 40 years, making kids laugh while dodging a 1,000-pound animal.
It’s about 93 degrees outside, his clown makeup — which he added after leaving the Capitol — is running, and there’s not much in sight except for a liquor store.
It’s a grueling and puzzling endeavor. The barrel weighs about 160 pounds. He walks about 12 miles a day, slightly hunched over, pushing it along. When the sidewalk narrows, he turns it and cartwheels it end over end. It needs an extra push over tree roots and broken pavement.
We pass a knot of construction workers. One points to him and tells his co-worker: “Loco en la cabeza.” People honk, yell, wave and ask him if he needs a ride. In Baltimore, a woman asked if he needed a date.
A police officer made him get into a truck with his wife, Darlene, for a few miles in Laurel, where there was no shoulder on a busy road.
I still don’t get how this is going to help his cause. But Nash is following in the footsteps of all sorts of oddball do- gooders. They come to the nation’s capital, especially in the summertime, walking for warts, somersaulting against sorrow, doing ridiculous stunts that often end up overshadowing the very cause they are trying to bring attention to.
“It’s not a stunt,” Nash protested. “I call it an exciting media marketing opportunity.”
He explained his thinking: “I can’t sing. And I’m not going to take my clothes off. Or give people the bird at a stadium. And I ain’t no Lady Gaga. So this is the best I could come up with to make people stop and listen to me.”
On Bladensburg Road, two teens on their way to their summer jobs started clowning with his barrel.
“Either of y’all ever been bullied?” Nash asked them.
“Nah,” they said.
He gave them his brochure, which explains his anti-bullying program.
“Pull yer britches up,” he yelled at them as they turned to leave. “I don’t wanna see yer butts.”
They do pull up their britches.
These exchanges are part of Nash’s shtick. He’ll talk about his personal experience with bullying.
One of his four children, Skeeter, was bullied. Another son, Rocky, became the class clown to deflect bullies. And when Nash was young, he worked on a truck loading hogs. One day at school, his boots smelled, and he was bullied for that. “You remember those things,” Nash said.
He isn’t wrong about the extent of the problem or its consequences.
We have kids who kill themselves after being cyberbullied and schools where drills for surviving a Columbine-style shooting have replaced the training for Cold War-era nuclear attacks. The Justice Department released a study last year estimating that in two-thirds of recent school shootings, “the attackers had previously been bullied.” Nash thinks his anti-bullying program is the answer.
“What if someone came to Washington with an invention that could end our dependence on oil? Wouldn’t everyone want that?” he asked me.
“Well, right here, I have an invention that can end bullying,” he said, pointing to his brochure. “Where is Washington now?” Well, it’s about 12 miles back, wondering who the heck let in the clown with the barrel.
Tina Griego is taking some time off. Her column will return soon.
