Work in progress: Based On a True Story

Based on a True Story

By

Constantine von Hoffman

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

It may be shared and adapted with attribution but cannot be re-used for commercial purposes.

1

In Niagara Falls the old Daredevil Museum goes out of business and JoJo, the stuffed chimp kept by the cash register to scare children, moves on. Now he spends days doing soft shoe for spare change with the hurdy-gurdy lady on Goat Island, where tourists who don’t know the good view is on the Canadian side go to see the Falls. Nights he works dealing poker at a boarded up Indian casino he owns. 

His most reliable customers two one-eyed ghosts who blew in from Fort Stanwix during the Revolution without knowing how or why. Twin brothers, one missing the right eye and the other the left, the only way JoJo can tell them apart. Neither will say how they died except it involved moving a boulder and is the other one’s fault. Been trying to leave ever since they arrived but whatever shoved them here isn’t letting them go. They try to cheat all the time, but JoJo doesn’t care because they’re terrible at it and only try it on each other. During winter they stay in an abandoned power plant where leftover electricity still murmurs in the lines. It keeps them warm. 

You haven’t seen bad until you’ve seen a ghost freeze to death, they like to tell him, one starting the sentence and the other completing it.

They’ve said it so often JoJo screeches at them if he even thinks they’re going to say it again. 

Players come from all over, some stick but most are sightseers or tourists, even if they don’t know it yet. Tonight, a lady clown, who climbed off a faded circus ad painted on the side of a brick dry goods store in Tuscaloosa and headed north until she didn’t, is trying to figure out how much farther she can go on a pair of 10s. Next to her a cigar store Indian living in fear of the Senecas turning him into kindling but won’t put himself on the antiques market because he hates whites and is more afraid of living with them than Seneca hatchets. He just folded, which he does frequently so he’s smarter than he looks. The Stanwix brothers on his right trying to make each other look bad like usual then, filling out the table, a coyote and a bear. JoJo’s been seeing more of both of those lately. No surprise. The forest gets crowded, rents go up and the non-migratory get desperate. 

No one’s hiring, says the bear.

At least there were jobs for you, the coyote spits in disgust. Who the hell wants a coyote?

Not me, JoJo mutters to himself.

Fifty years of running the game and not one, not a single one, has ever left a tip. Even vultures tip. JoJo’s never told the coyotes how he feels, though.

Evolution’s not my business.

Hasn’t seen a vulture in a while but there was a time there’d be four or five a night. He figured it was because they were shut out of everywhere else. Back then all JoJo knew about them was what he’d read on a sign in the break room of the first place he’d ever dealt cards: “There are two types of casinos, ones that ban vultures and ones that are out of business.” 

Vultures have a binary way of understanding the world: Everything is alive or dead. For some reason that makes them preternaturally good at black jack and roulette. After a couple of weeks of vultures crowding his joint JoJo learned a second thing about them. They suck at Texas Hold ‘em.

Birds are generally talkative, except predators and carrion eaters. Only word he’d ever heard any of the vultures say was “fold” and not nearly as often as they should have. Then one night after closing and with no one else in the place, a Lesser Yellow-Headed named Earl started talking like they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

It’s you and the living taxidermy, Earl said, that’s why we’re here. You’re not living. You’re not dead. You’re Schrodinger’s monkey.

Chimp, said JoJo, mopping the floor.

Chimp, right, said Earl. Sorry.

Everybody gets to make that mistake … once.

Gotcha, said Earl. 

An appropriately awkward silence ensued then Earl started talking again. The bird’s voice was scratchy, like fingernails clawing at the inside of a coffin. 

Word got around. There’s a third kind of thing in the world. Now everyone wants to see you. Coming from all over.

All over?

Yeah. Just tonight you had a Cinereous from Iraq and a Rüppell's from Mali. Getting a Rüppell's is big. They’re vulture royalty.

JoJo was about to say something about how odd the idea of royal vultures was but then realized maybe a stuffed chimp shouldn’t be throwing that particular stone. 

Where you from? he asked.

Suriname.

JoJo considered that. 

Sorry I don’t live somewhere nicer.

Not to worry. We’re vultures, we like dying things.

Earl must have found this funny because he beat the bar with a wing and made a hacking sound like there was a mouse skeleton stuck in his throat.

Just kidding. Just kidding, he said once the hacking stopped. Pulled a flask from under a wing and offered it. The smell was death’s breath and meat rotted so long even the maggots had left. 

No thanks. 

You introduced vultures to the philosophical conundrum, Earl said.

A pause while JoJo pretended to think about that.

That’s something, the chimp said because it felt like a response was called for. Well, I gotta close.

Earl nodded and flapped away out of a hole in the ceiling.

JoJo decided he liked vultures more when they weren’t talking. 

2

Like the Stanwix boys, JoJo is an unexpected immigrant to Niagara Falls. 

Started out in Tanzania. First memory is sucking at his mother’s teat as she got shot in the head by a minor White Russian noble named Vsevolod who was in the process of walking from Cairo to Cape Town. 

He was the fifth son of a baron whose estate consisted of a few small islands in the Baltic off the coast of Latvia. Three hundred years ago, when the tsar gave the islands to that first noble of nowhere, they were smack in the middle of one of the Baltic’s great herring fishing grounds. For a while, the family had done well enough to live at Court, far from the stink of their riches, but herring are capricious and one year they and the family’s fortune ran off to an elsewhere far away. 

By 1890, when Vsevolod was born, the family had been reduced to selling and mostly eating sprats for generations. 

Herrings are everything in the Baltic, Vsevolod told a butler once. Sprats are for servants. No one can get rich on them.

However, they are also incredibly nutritious. Thus, the family’s health was in direct inverse to its wealth. 

Not a tall man, Vsevolod had the physique of someone who could wrestle a full-grown bear and win, which he had. That he was the kind of person to do that said all about his personality and made it even more surprising he lived through so many wars.

His first was the Russo-Japanese. At the siege of Port Arthur in 1905 he, a junior sub-lieutenant, was summoned by the commanding general.

“Praporshchik Belosselsky-Belozersky reporting,” he said, snapping off his best salute.

“Ah, Belsky-Belzky,” Major-General Stessel said. “Good to see you. I served with your uncle in the Crimean War.”

Vsevolod nodded at this. He was the first Belosselsky-Belozersky male since the family’s ennoblement not to serve in the navy. It was his way of rebelling against his parents. Also, the major general was five years old when the Russian army turned the charging British Light Brigade into cannon and poetry fodder. 

The Most Junior Officer rank was created by the Undying Gods of Military Bureaucracy 7,549 years ago and its primary responsibility is the same now as then: Keeping a straight face as senior officers say absurd things. It is a good winnowing tool. If a person cannot stand up and awake in the face of waves and waves of bosh, then clearly, they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a battlefield. The mark of a great Most Junior Officer, of which there have been many, is the response he or she gives if called upon to do so.

“Always spoke very fondly of you, sir.”

That simple sentence made Vsevolod one of the greatest The Most Junior Officers, a fact history makes no note of whatsoever.

“Died?”

“Several years ago. Killed by a wild boar rescuing a peasant toddler.”

“Damn peasants.”

A respectful pause in honor of the major general’s non-existent comrade. 

“Mission for you, Belsky-Belzky. Could make a man’s career, it could. More likely you’ll die, of course. Strictly volunteer.”
“I volunteer.”

“Good man. Your uncle would have done the same.”

The first part of the mission was escaping the city, a relatively easy feat as the Japanese were all in favor of enemy soldiers departing. They were not nearly as helpful with the second part of the mission: Returning to the city with a case of Major-General Stessel’s favorite cognac and his second favorite mistress. For this Vsevolod received a promotion to captain, the Order of St. George, first class, and a seat on the general’s private train car after the Russian surrender. He must have enjoyed something about the whole experience as he went on to fight with Pancho Villa, the Russian army during World War I and the Whites during the Russian Revolution. He had an unerring instinct for the losing side.

The fateful African walk began a few years after the Revolution. Vsevolod wasn’t alone on the walk. Of names were two of note, rich British gentlemen who had hired him to lead the safari. The nameless were 40 or so porters carrying necessities – tents, beds, baths, rugs, champagne, tobacco – as well as animals killed but not eaten. By the end of the trek, they had accumulated enough of the former to stock a large and particularly macabre zoo. 

The sight of the baby chimp next to its dead mother triggered in Vsevolod the gross sentimentality that is every Russian’s birthright. His chin twitched a moment, pulling the lips above it down into a special shape that opened up his tear ducts. He was, he decided, honor bound to raise and so he named it JoJo after one of the idiot British gentlemen and brought it back to his home, a fourth-floor brownstone walkup in Manhattan, Greenwich Village to be precise. His wife, an American dentist who had only married Vsevolod because the sex was incredible, and son quickly loathed JoJo. 

JoJo got his own room – larger than the boy’s – and was always dressed in clothes newer than the boy’s, because while wearing pants, a shirt and sometimes a jacket do not come naturally to chimpanzees, ripping them does. Vsevolod indulged JoJo wildly with an enthusiasm unknown to the rest of the family. The chimp ate his meals at the family table, developing a passion for coffee and rugelach. The coffee must have cream and ten sugar cubes, or he screamed and dumped its contents to the floor. JoJo went everywhere with the family. On walks through the neighborhood, he held Vsevolod’s hand while the boy stood behind his mother and held her hand. They always found reason to trail chimp and man by at least half a block. Greenwich Village being Greenwich Village none of this drew comment from the locals, although it did appear as an “About Town” item in the second issue of The New Yorker. JoJo once went with the family to a circus where he went – and unfortunately, there is no other way to say it – ape, running up the trunk of a dancing elephant, ripping faux jewels off its forehead, wrapping them around his waist then jumping atop the howdah and dancing in time to a polka being played by the band. Everyone in the audience, save two, thought it the greatest act ever seen.

JoJo died from diabetes at what is, for a chimpanzee, a young age. For a while Vsevolod was as inconsolable as his wife and child were relieved. The chimp’s body was expertly mounted then given a place of honor in a room with other strange and remarkable things Vsevolod had accumulated in his adventures. Despite being dead the chimp continued to cause problems as the son couldn’t sleep for three nights until his mother put an outsized padlock on the door. Not long after and to the surprise of no one who knew them, the couple divorced. In the settlement, his wife got JoJo and the son, the latter simply for the joy of putting it out with the trash, which she promptly did.

Before the garbage men could cart the body away, though, a drunken West Point cadet found it curbside, bundled his coat around it, and brought it back to the Academy, where he stuffed it half in and half out of the barrel of a large artillery piece. It was his idea of a prank. Fortunately, for the sake of any men he might have led in combat, his military career was cut short when, two years later, ignoring a sergeant’s advice, he shook a mortar with a shell stuck in it while looking down its barrel. 

However, at the Academy the next morning no one was surprised by a potential chimp cannonade because during the night JoJo had found himself alive. The odd, inexplicable, and mundane revealed this to him when, following a yawn, he rubbed his eyes and discovered they were now glass. Tapping them made a sharp sound and the desire for his eyes to water, which they didn’t. At first there was a disconcerting pause between the time he asked his limbs to move and when they actually did. During this period, they made a slight, small noise, as clay cracked and realized its time in the kiln wasn’t the defining episode of its existence it had believed.

JoJo might have remained in the cannon’s barrel until morning, but for the intervention of a stereotypical magical African American janitor.

You’re alive, now get out of here, he yelled at JoJo, before shuffling away, pushing a mop and bucket in front of him. I hate this fucking job. Why do I even have a mop and bucket? I’m outdoors! His rant trailed off as a he slowly disappeared on his way to his next appointment, this time in a white Hollywood screenwriter’s dream.

JoJo has no idea who or what caused this second life and industriously avoids looking into it in case it was an accident and worries remedial actions might be taken. Dead JoJo is what live JoJo wasn’t: Polite, inquiring, quiet. Still a streak of obnoxious though. Used to chalk it up to the imp of the perverse, until he met one. 

His re-animation happened during a brief initial pause before the Depression dove all the way down to Great. Not that its status mattered to JoJo. Unlike bears and coyotes, there’s always jobs for a chimp. Worked with all kinds of performers – magicians, musicians, clowns. Learned to play hammered dulcimer, crumhorn, and theorbo; do a blind shuffle, false transfer a small dog, misdirect like a master; and, as far as clown skills, he’s a chimp and that’s all needs saying. Stayed with each act for a while but left as soon as they started to draw much attention, which they always did thanks to him. He wanted something to be near the spotlight, not in it, and was pulled toward carnivals like a hammer swinging at a thumb. It wasn’t the tired, wandering little shows themselves as much as the people who made them breathe. They’d lived with weird for so long a sort-of-not-dead chimp wasn’t even an anything. JoJo was mostly behind the scenes, dab hand at repairs it turned out but, if things got tight, you did what needed doing, the carny credo. Amid lights and freak shows and seductive patter whispered and screamed from the Add ‘Em Ups and Razzle Dazzles, what chance a townie notices the short, hairy man in coveralls and hat running a ride or selling tickets? He did do one out front show as a chimp but only that one and only when he was feeling restless and blue. For The Globe of Death is a show where a motorcycle whizzes around a giant metal sphere. JoJo would put on a leather jacket and goggles, get in the rusty sphere, fire the engine, speed up and then up more and more until he’s going in circles, loop the loop and completely upside down at peak! Even better when there was another bike and rider in there with him. 

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! STEP THIS WAY! SEE MAN AND BEAST RISK THEIR LIVES IN THE GLOBE OF DEATH! TONIGHT, FOR ONE TIME ONLY LUCKY LOU – THE CHIMPANZEE THAT DRIVES A MOTORCYCLE – AND LAURA MAURA – THE DAZZLING DARE DEVIL – RACE AT UNIMAGINABLE SPEEDS AND FULLY UPSIDE DOWN IN DEFIANCE OF THE LAWS OF GRAVITY INSIDE A SPHERE OF DOOM! THE SLIGHTEST MISTAKE MEANS INSTANT FIERY DEATH! STEP RIGHT UP!”

 Twice the fear, twice the chance he wrecks and whatever is inside him gets outside and onto the faces of the crowd. 

The motorcycles whip around the sphere like electrons out on a Saturday night bender, hoping the bastard neutrons will finally notice them, and JoJo screams his scream, matching the engine’s roar note for note. It was his nearest to being alive.

One dead, high summer day, so hot you had to drive from sun rising to setting so the car’s tires wouldn’t melt, they land in Keokuk for a week-long run, which didn’t make sense to JoJo because he could see there was already a circus there but no one else minded so he didn’t say a thing. 

That first night the other circus is either closed or empty because the crowds coming to the carnival are something out of a crazy conman’s dreams. Lines and lines of locals for every game, ride, and attraction and more pushing pushing pushing to join in. Too many people for this town and every little town for miles around to have, more than all of Iowa past to future put together. Like someone picked up the corners of the Great Plains and shook, sending every ancient farmer, bitter wife, broken Bible salesman, honky tonk waitress, and all their sullen progeny, rolling right to this spot. A spot that’s nothing but what’s left of a wheat field after the top soil blew east, bringing false nights to Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, before diving into the ocean for the water it dreamed of.

JoJo is running the carousel, the jittery calliope playing louder and wilder than a thunderstorm trapped in a funhouse. Still, over that and the crowd growling and snapping, the circus’ music is all he hears: tuba puffs, accordion trills, and brushes on the snare run around inside his ears, clearer than if he was conducting the band. 

Lovely Rita comes to let him take a break and he can’t do all but walk toward the sound. Through the town, totally empty and covered in a thick, undisturbed dust like no one lived there for years. The town going on far farther than it did. Comes to a hill where JoJo knows there shouldn’t be one. Knows the nearest to something bigger than a dirt mound is hundreds of miles west, a bump in the ground left over from when the continents were roughhousing. A large bump of land never to be named or looked at, only looked past, because who remembers a hill next to the damned Rockies?

JoJo goes up this hill in Keokuk and finds it flattens out at the top. In the center is a caldera, with lava bubbling like Satan’s own jacuzzi. Walks the rim around and then down to a different town that looks to been made by a German expressionist set designer. Immense warehouses, grain mills, truck stops, and all pulled and stretched so far out over the streets the roofs lean against each other. Heads down Main Street until there’s a train crossing with tracks so tall he can barely climb over. Past that, he sees the circus. Raggedy, old, odd thing. No gonfalons, no barkers, no people at all, but a colander’s worth of holes in the top of the tent, where light lances out, up, and too far into the sky, too bright to be made by anything such a taped-together outfit might afford. 

JoJo looks back, and all behind him is gone – the town, the volcano, and Keokuk itself. Nothing but a road running straight back to his carnival shimmering and rippling in the heat and moonlight like a belly dancing mirage. Now looking at the circus, he sees it’s woven out of stories worn thin from the telling and patched with sin. Reaches out to touch one of the main tent’s ropes, not knowing if his hand will pass through. Doesn’t, so he tugs hard to be sure it’s also strong, then runs up it and laughs like only a chimp can, jumps to the next rope and next and next all the way ‘round. The tent’s sides painted to show William the Conqueror invading Britain and killing the Angles but, in each scene, an murder of crows fly above, singing It’s A Small World over and over, just like happens in Hell. 

The ringmaster comes out, an old Yoruban spirit with onyx for skin. 

The show goes on every night, rain, shine, or anything else, he says.

Always here?

Oh, no. We have played for crowned heads of Europe and beyond. Last week we played for King Ngô Quyền the night before he chased the Chinese from Vietnam.

Fancy.

Next month we’ve been engaged by the Hanseatic lords of Oldenzaal to perform for the Ottoman emperor. A gift for his oldest daughter who has been ordered into a disappointing marriage.

Gift has to be big if to get an Ottoman’s attention.

The Ring Master laughed in agreement.

Have you ever seen an elephant roasted whole? That’s the 37th course. It will be followed by jellied hummingbird tongues served with a sauce of starved satire. The last might not be true or real. The feast is set to go on for a week or more with none of the guests permitted to leave their seats.

JoJo raises an eyebrow, as if to ask a question, but the Ring Master knows.

Servants will bring huge pillows stuffed with down and triangular bricks of sharpened steel so no one can sleep. Their only relief will be when the mother-of-pearl bedpans are brought around, and they are allowed to step into gold silk tents to use them. Invitees are people the sultan particularly despises, daughter included.

A grand time will be had by none.

Precisely, the Ring Master says. But, to answer your question entirely, many nights we are in Keokuk and like places. Many more we are in places that will make you think fondly of Keokuk’s wild sophisticates.

He pauses while the centuries of all the events he mentioned arrive and introduce themselves to JoJo. They look like a fog made of neon and when they speak it’s a sound like muffled trumpets. They whirls around him, bow and exeunt – no other word for it. 

Maybe you should come with us.

What would I do? JoJo asks.

What would you do? the Ring Master replies.

What …? JoJo says, waving one arm toward the circus, the night sky, beyond.

We’re the frame creatures need so endless space seems to end. The world’s depth, what matters, what passes, what wolves howl to in the fullness of winter, what causes stars to fall and wishes to be made against them, a tune beyond us yet ourselves.

Inside JoJo meets the circus that couldn’t be and always was. Three Mongolian queens, Genghis’ daughters and the only ones who know where he’s buried, do sword fights with scimitars while jumping and tumbling on great horse made out of British chalk. One of the true people from Australia bends sound into shapes to give Euclid nightmares then tears them apart, stuffing the pieces into carousel horses to give them souls. His big finale: Pulling an Englishman out of the ground, come straight through all the earth only slightly singed. The house band, Larry Barely and the Rhythm Torpedoes, is tuning up while their singer, Emily Dickinson in jeans, a Ramones T-shirt, and the jacket Hank Williams wore the day he died, throws knives into strange things with feathers nailed to a board. The strong man, a Neanderthal who goes by the name Enkidu – because that’s what Gilgamesh called him, juggles fallen empires and says he speaks fluent Olmec. In all the circus’s travels, no one has ever been found to prove or refute this. 

JoJo and Enkidu become fast friends, frequently holding long conversations in languages neither quite understand. Mostly what they do though is anything to get the other to laugh. Once, during a tour of Yggdrasil’s nine realms, Enkidu sets up JoJo on a blind date with Jormungand, the Midgard serpent. A lovely enough creature but one that has, literally, the worst breath in the universe.

JoJo travels long and far with the circus without moving, spends days and nights and not a second passes, learns strange and diverse things, like Stonehenge can be used as a bottle opener, if you ever find a large enough bottle.

 Then once – because that’s all there is – on the way to Bad Credit, New Mexico, he sees that old casino and is finished being everywhere and nowhere for all of time. Jumps out of the circus tent, a million miles high in a blue sky because outer space isn’t invented yet, landing on the head of St. Peter the trickster god who says the gambling house is his even though he’s never been there before. After a bargaining session longer than the Amazon River, JoJo gets the deed, St. Pete gets a waiver says he can live in the spare room as long as he wants, and both get to feeling they’ve fleeced the other. Best part of the deal.

3

After closing, when the last hand of cards shuffles off back into the deck, JoJo goes uptown to his three-bedroom suite on the top-floor of the best hotel in town which, this being the U.S. side of the Falls, isn’t particularly best. 

People say all sorts of stuff in front of chimps, especially ostensibly dead ones, and that’s how JoJo affords all the things that don’t matter as well as the few that do. He’s gotten in on the ground floor of every stock bubble in the last half of forever. Knowing when to get out is easy, just listen to the pigeons. Idiots. If they’re buying the doom train is starting to roll. 

Only does the dancing and the dealing because he’s terrible at doing nothing. Tried it once and inside a week his girlfriend said she’d leave him or else. She’s a nine-tailed fox from inside a mountain in north Japan. Tough and smart and a laugh sweeter than angels dying. Her name’s Zenko but he calls her Z. Used to run a detox for river spirits. Ask her why she looks at you with a thousand-year stare and slowly shakes her head.

No one needs it more than they do, she says. No. One.

Every few months she writes out a check to the detox with so many zeroes after the first number it has to be shipped by freight delivery service. A lawyer now is why she can do that. Doing mergers and acquisitions for pocket universes looking to expand. Doesn’t like a single one of her clients but DAMN they pay well. 

Each year he asks her to marry him, and she always says, I’ll think about it.

He knows what she means. Living together for so long, getting married would be redundant. Still, he asks, and he hopes. It means something to him, the ring, and the ceremony.

Always asks her the night before her New Year’s party. Throws it when New Year’s is, not when the calendar says. Calendars, which do nothing but convert time into chaos, are why no one can figure out when Jesus was born. Sheep in the fields in winter? Nah. Year He was born New Year’s was the ides of September. Jesus shows up at the party now and then. Nice guy but everyone feels awkward around Him, and Jesus feels bad about that, so He just says hi to a few people and then leaves. Something about crowds, because one-on-one you want the conversation to never stop.

The party itself? Bacchus always leaves early because he can’t take it is what you need to know. One year Quetzalcoatl peed a whiskey made of a barley grown in an El Greco painting while a troika of Neanderthals’ goddesses cooked a feast of animals that will never be discovered. Desert was ice cream made of the first mayfly’s last words.

Neanderthals always get a bad rap,  JoJo says to No One. 

Yeah? No One asks.

Actually, they were the smartest ever, he says. Only species to figure out the universal prime number. Before them it only ever existed once, written on the walls of nothing holding the Big Bang. That number didn’t just make the Bang possible, made it necessary. 

No One nods.

Could have stuck around long past homo sapiens but didn’t want to. Got a look at what was going to happen 100,000 years or so down the road and didn’t want any part. Let the weak, little roundheads take the blame, the Neanderthals thought because when they chose to, they thought collectively, which explains being so damn smart. How come they’re the only species ever to go extinct voluntarily.

Ends the story and No One asks if his drink wants refilling. JoJo nods and No One goes off to the bar. 

The chimp thinks about everything all at once, because he can, but mostly about Enkidu. Makes him sad in a good way. Finishes his coffee, tips with a gold coin under the cup, gets off the diner stool and into a 1965 Pontiac Parisienne Sport Convertible, pulls out onto Hollywood Boulevard, which is in town for a Shriner’s convention, and heads north, every light turning green.