Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Right. Well.
Allow me to introduce myself:
Scaramouche Jones
Esquire.
Clown.
Performer.
Now as
a million clocks strike midnight, I shall lay down
my long
and weary life.
I was born
at midnight
on this very night
Happy Birthday to me...
Happy Birthday..
..to..
me..
Happy.....well that's enough..
it's time...to die...
Charlie Chaplin once said: "Life is a tragedy
when seen close-up, but a comedy in long shot."
When it's no secret that the world is an ugly place,
it's hard to believe some brightest smiles, can be found
in the darkest places.
Scaramouche Jones by Justin Butcher
But before I go
I must
prevail upon you and obscene and enchanting spectacle
That will thrill you
and revolt you with fear...
and delight.
my mother was a dark skinned gypsy,
a swarthy Ethiop.
My little oyster
she called me
so white and pale....you were born for something
special
my little oyster
Nights passed and from behind the gauze netting..
i watched my mother
earn our keep.
I wondered which of this legion of
*** beasts
might I be permitted to call "papa"
She never told me!
but once,
just once.
Perhaps it was the rum talking
I felt
her heart quicken in her chest as I clung to her and she whispered
huskily
and slowly
"Your father, little Scaramouche, was a performer!" Well that
was the last time I ever saw my mother.
The very next morning I was dragged from my bed by the fish monger
who turned a blind eye
to my mother's nocturnal trade.
He was in a state of panic.
As he hustled me away, I remember noticing in a flash,
a dirty old pile of nets in the corner of the shop
with something
protruding from under
one of the cork floats.....
A woman's foot.
Now
perhaps my mother had laughed too loud in the face of her last customer
snapping his trottering dignity and having her head stoved in
with her own rum bottle...
who can say.
I was sold
to a hawk-nosed, Arab
slave trader from Mombasa,
we lived and traveled together for nearly 25 years
as I
grew into manhood.......
...or something like it...
Years later
when Poland fell, I escaped slavery, but not the fury of the Blitzkrieg
The Nazis kept me alive as a sort of
curiousity, and gave me a job as a gravedigger at the concentration camp...
However the corpses arrived, whether by gas, bullet, or malnutrition...
my task
was to shovel white lime over their contorted limbs and twisted faces..
like the painting of so many clowns...
so
many clowns. Millions of clowns.
Jewish clowns...
gypsy clowns
homosexual clowns and children clowns.
Now, I discovered
a certain
facility
for making children laugh. :)
I would wink at them
pull faces
act out a silent pantomime of the execution that was about to take place
pretending to be the victim
gunned down
falling down into the pit
having my face painted white
and then rising
fluttering on angel's wings up to heaven.
Well, I got caught fooling around in this way
plenty of times and the punishments were far from pleasant
but it seemed to me
a price worth paying
to see those haunted little faces, fixed on mine as they waited for the end...and sometimes....
...just sometimes...
one of them would almost break into a smile
before the bullets ripped through them from behind
and they toppled down..
beyond the reach of pain and fear
Now, I've been locked up
not surprisingly, for
complicity
with war crimes
here in Sandau prison
induring the worst torments of
bordom, imaginable.
So, now you know, years to make the clown...
...years...to PLAY the clown.
Scaramouche Jones....esquire...
clown......performer.