The End of the World Circus
“Did you know that those are the souls of the Dead?” Miles asked, carbon-based and high, as he peered down at a puddle on 12th Street as tiny spirals of gasoline and motor oil glistened in eddies and swirls.
“Yes, I suppose I never thought of it that way.”
“When I was growing up in Alaska, I had a friend who tried to kill himself when he was 7 years old. He tried to hang himself from the monkey bars and for some reason, none of us tried to stop him. The string wasn’t strong enough, and it broke and he fell to the ground. He’d just gotten a bad burn around his neck and the teacher took him away. He’d left school, but we’d heard rumors that he’d been to all kinds of doctors and therapists – only he didn’t even seem depressed or sad – more curious and daring than anything else. Anyway, he moved down to Louisiana with his family not long after that and none of us had ever seen or heard from him again. But a few weeks ago, I got a letter from my mom and she mentioned that he’d hung himself from the same monkey bars – 17 years later – only this time the rope was strong enough. It made all of the papers there. Apparently he’d been missing for a few weeks. The paper said he had a tattoo of a hangman – you know, like the game – on his shoulder.”
“Shit, Miles, that’s a fucked up story.”
Miles had told a lot of fucked up stories, but I had thought about the story of the hangman the most. I had always planned on writing a story about it from inside the mind of the character.
He’d grown up in Alaska, moved to San Francisco two years earlier and by the summer of 1999, he’d gotten himself caught up with a peculiar and offensive assembly of misfits that ran around the country calling themselves “The End of the World Circus” (not to be confused with the small sideshow of the same name that came of fame in Bisbee that same year). Lost in the frenzy of the Y2K scare, they’d tattooed clown makeup to their faces and traveled around the country – amassing wild amounts of credit card debt that they either believed or pretended they would never need to repay. The impending apocalypse funded their season of insanity. Drug fueled and ugly, they pinballed around the south, curled up the east coast and locked their sites on New York City – poised for front row seats when the shit hit the fan. Only the shit didn’t hit the fan that night. Not in Times Square and probably not anywhere else on any kind of scale that would have satisfied what they anticipated – and after that level of commitment, even hoped for.
Luckily, Miles had not joined the Circus in any certain terms, he’d only traveled around with them for 6 months eating acid, drinking beer, and listening to the doomsday philosophies of thirty or forty permanently disfigured vagabonds. Long after the anticlimactic floor dropped out from under these unfortunates, you could tell that the affair had taken its toll on Miles. He cut ties with the Circus, but he was consumed now – although sometimes in a lighthearted way – with Death.
. . .
My great grandfather shot himself through the mouth with a double-barreled shotgun in a barn on his farm in Pennsylvania. There was no note and no warning – at least none that was discussed or passed down. When they found my great grandmother dead on her bed and took her away, they found a letter tucked between her mattress and her box spring – one letter – from a Spanish soldier that was in a Spanish jail for desertion. The letter was signed “J. Basunta” and was addressed to my great grandfather and told of $200,000 in gold Spanish coins that had been hidden on my great grandfather’s farm. Basunta had been captured and taken back to Spain and in the letter, he asked my great grandfather to get the money to his daughter who had been living, for one reason or another, in South America. That there could be a connection to Basunta, the money, his daughter, my great grandfather’s Death and the importance my great grandmother placed in that letter can only be imagined.
My father once thought about trying to piece the mystery together and writing a novel about this. But he lacked either the desire or motivation it would take to write that story. But he had thought of writing many stories.
He had thought of writing the story of his friend who had blown himself and two other friends up in a bunker in Vietnam because he received a letter from his girlfriend in the States who had written to tell him that she did not love him and of how it would not be fair of her to allow him to go on thinking that she would be there waiting for him. He did not think it was fair either as the six or eight of them sat drinking and he pulled the pin on the grenade and threatened to blow himself up. He was holding the lever on the grenade shut with one hand and smoking cigarettes and drinking with the other. His friends and fellow soldiers had been consoling him and trying to cheer him up and were also drinking heavily to ease the tension and they seemed to be succeeding. They had him smiling after a while, but he was drunk and had forgotten that he was holding a live grenade and had never put the pin back in. Not all of them had noticed, as he hadn’t, that he had released the grip on the grenade and Died that day in a small bunker in south east Asia. That he didn’t really want to Die after all made little difference to the grenade.
He had thought also of writing of the Vietnamese woodcutters who were walking up a hill with their axes resting on their shoulders. There was a bunker on top of the hill that they were protecting and the woodcutters had looked like soldiers carrying rifles rested on their shoulders.
He did not not write those stories because he had lacked motivation or the discipline to write them. And they are most vivid in his memory when he drinks enough to remember them.
“Did you know that those are the souls of the Dead?” Miles asked, carbon-based and high, as he peered down at a puddle on 12th Street as tiny spirals of gasoline and motor oil glistened in eddies and swirls.
“Yes, I suppose I never thought of it that way.”
“When I was growing up in Alaska, I had a friend who tried to kill himself when he was 7 years old. He tried to hang himself from the monkey bars and for some reason, none of us tried to stop him. The string wasn’t strong enough, and it broke and he fell to the ground. He’d just gotten a bad burn around his neck and the teacher took him away. He’d left school, but we’d heard rumors that he’d been to all kinds of doctors and therapists – only he didn’t even seem depressed or sad – more curious and daring than anything else. Anyway, he moved down to Louisiana with his family not long after that and none of us had ever seen or heard from him again. But a few weeks ago, I got a letter from my mom and she mentioned that he’d hung himself from the same monkey bars – 17 years later – only this time the rope was strong enough. It made all of the papers there. Apparently he’d been missing for a few weeks. The paper said he had a tattoo of a hangman – you know, like the game – on his shoulder.”
“Shit, Miles, that’s a fucked up story.”
Miles had told a lot of fucked up stories, but I had thought about the story of the hangman the most. I had always planned on writing a story about it from inside the mind of the character.
He’d grown up in Alaska, moved to San Francisco two years earlier and by the summer of 1999, he’d gotten himself caught up with a peculiar and offensive assembly of misfits that ran around the country calling themselves “The End of the World Circus” (not to be confused with the small sideshow of the same name that came of fame in Bisbee that same year). Lost in the frenzy of the Y2K scare, they’d tattooed clown makeup to their faces and traveled around the country – amassing wild amounts of credit card debt that they either believed or pretended they would never need to repay. The impending apocalypse funded their season of insanity. Drug fueled and ugly, they pinballed around the south, curled up the east coast and locked their sites on New York City – poised for front row seats when the shit hit the fan. Only the shit didn’t hit the fan that night. Not in Times Square and probably not anywhere else on any kind of scale that would have satisfied what they anticipated – and after that level of commitment, even hoped for.
Luckily, Miles had not joined the Circus in any certain terms, he’d only traveled around with them for 6 months eating acid, drinking beer, and listening to the doomsday philosophies of thirty or forty permanently disfigured vagabonds. Long after the anticlimactic floor dropped out from under these unfortunates, you could tell that the affair had taken its toll on Miles. He cut ties with the Circus, but he was consumed now – although sometimes in a lighthearted way – with Death.
. . .
My great grandfather shot himself through the mouth with a double-barreled shotgun in a barn on his farm in Pennsylvania. There was no note and no warning – at least none that was discussed or passed down. When they found my great grandmother dead on her bed and took her away, they found a letter tucked between her mattress and her box spring – one letter – from a Spanish soldier that was in a Spanish jail for desertion. The letter was signed “J. Basunta” and was addressed to my great grandfather and told of $200,000 in gold Spanish coins that had been hidden on my great grandfather’s farm. Basunta had been captured and taken back to Spain and in the letter, he asked my great grandfather to get the money to his daughter who had been living, for one reason or another, in South America. That there could be a connection to Basunta, the money, his daughter, my great grandfather’s Death and the importance my great grandmother placed in that letter can only be imagined.
My father once thought about trying to piece the mystery together and writing a novel about this. But he lacked either the desire or motivation it would take to write that story. But he had thought of writing many stories.
He had thought of writing the story of his friend who had blown himself and two other friends up in a bunker in Vietnam because he received a letter from his girlfriend in the States who had written to tell him that she did not love him and of how it would not be fair of her to allow him to go on thinking that she would be there waiting for him. He did not think it was fair either as the six or eight of them sat drinking and he pulled the pin on the grenade and threatened to blow himself up. He was holding the lever on the grenade shut with one hand and smoking cigarettes and drinking with the other. His friends and fellow soldiers had been consoling him and trying to cheer him up and were also drinking heavily to ease the tension and they seemed to be succeeding. They had him smiling after a while, but he was drunk and had forgotten that he was holding a live grenade and had never put the pin back in. Not all of them had noticed, as he hadn’t, that he had released the grip on the grenade and Died that day in a small bunker in south east Asia. That he didn’t really want to Die after all made little difference to the grenade.
He had thought also of writing of the Vietnamese woodcutters who were walking up a hill with their axes resting on their shoulders. There was a bunker on top of the hill that they were protecting and the woodcutters had looked like soldiers carrying rifles rested on their shoulders.
He did not not write those stories because he had lacked motivation or the discipline to write them. And they are most vivid in his memory when he drinks enough to remember them.
posted by T. Holland. Still known, in some circles, as the Buffalo | 9:34 AM
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