JIMBO’S PILE
FREAKISH CHAPTER - MARTIN HIGGINS
There’s more about the Fair and Roland, but I had a hell of a time this morning trying to get Jimbo to pack up all his props and whatnot. The Park Association was fed up with his space looking like a junkyard and I can’t blame them. Three-hundred-pound, pot-metal, pyramid weights with lifting rings on top, a length of ocean-liner anchor chain, painted logs, and old, foundry dumbbells as big and black as bowling balls. Right out front, where everyone could see them, plain as day, was a forged steel drive wheel from a 1929 Buffalo Springfield Steam Roller. Close as I could figure, what with the steel spokes and solid steel rim, it must have weighed upward 700, 800 pounds.
Jimbo trucked it in and rolled it up there like there was nothing to it. Now, years later, it was sunk a couple inches into what passed for a lawn out front of his mobile. Weeds and rust now, mostly.
They were all props from his show, and he’d sooner fight than give any of them up.
In all fairness to the Park Association, Jimbo had pissed them off from the get. After his double-wide was hauled in, he decided to put his throne in the living room. But it wouldn’t ever fit through the front door and, weighing a quarter ton, he knew the floor would never hold it.
The throne was maybe six-hundred, seven-hundred pounds of chromed steel, made by a junkyard welder; shiny pieces of chrome bumpers from cars, old Buicks, and Oldsmobiles that had all sorts of curves and pointy bumper guards like horns on them. The damned thing looked like a big cat’s mouth, wide-open with shiny fangs, and around the back were outstretched steel claws. It had a leather seat and back cushions made from rhinoceros hide and the whole thing looked like the open maw of a steel lion with a leather tongue. It was built for a ten-in-one stage, but even when it was there, it had to have railroad ties trussed up under the planks just to support it. A throne for the stongman.
Well, beefing up the mobile with timbers wasn’t going to work in The Park; mobiles have flimsy little sheet-metal floor joists and nothing but plywood sheathing on top, sagging under the carpet. Hell, just walking around on that kind of floor you can feel the bounce and, eventually, you have to develop sea-legs to keep from taking a spill when you’re tipsy. So, the throne sat out behind his place wrapped in canvas, slowly rusting and sinking into Florida – kind of settling into the scenery. Like we all are.
There weren’t any local laws to keep Park people from having elephants or big cats or show trailers on their property, but where showpeople live, they have their own sense of what’s a go and what's a no-go.
Jimbo came up with this cockamamie idea; he’d cut a big hole in his living room floor, have a crane come in and hoist up the whole mobile, set the throne on top of a pile of concrete blocks in the center of his space and have the operating engineer lower his double back down over it. That’s when the well-known, brown substance hit the electrical convenience; the whole park was up in arms. The crane, the noise, the mess, and the throne – a bit rusty and lopsided gave everybody a case of the ass.
Jimbo didn’t give two shits. He had his throne in his living room and there was nothing they could do about it. Even though his neighbors still lived like road folk, they demanded to have things looking relatively normal in the park just to keep the townies and Lookie-Lou’s off their lawn.
I will admit, Jimbo was a sight to behold when sitting on that throne, six-foot-four and two-hundred eighty-five pounds of sinew, muscle, and a bit of smorgasbord flab– leopard breechcloth and a silver, necklace chain – links big as donuts - around his neck. Now, in his eighties, he had added a tiger-stripe cape and a crown made out of big-cat claws. He’d twist horseshoes into pretzels. He could hold a twenty-pound sledgehammer, his arm and its handle straight out in front of him, flex his wrist and bring the head of that hammer up, straight up above him, then down slowly toward his head to just kiss the end of his nose, before sending it back up and out, just a smooth as could be.
He once pushed a railroad boxcar up a three percent grade while carrying a full-grown man on his back. After a hundred steps, the damn car was three feet higher than where it started. His picture was in all the papers, and he was like a little kid with all the attention.
That was forty-odd years ago. He’s still tough as nails, but his stunt days are past.
Nobody had ever seen anything like him. It’s said he was six feet tall and two-hundred pounds at 16, played high school football for one year and sent many a player to the hospital. Not that he was mean, you see, he just couldn’t feel pain. Something was different about his nerves and brain. He could dislocate a finger and barely notice it. That’s part of what made him appear so strong. You try bending a two-bit piece in half and see how far you get. Before you put the first dent in the coin your fingers will hurt like Hell.
Jim was a roughneck before he got with the show, wrangling midway trouble, enforcing lot rules, tallying joint takes, odd jobs and such. What people now call middle management… like me here, riding herd on the Parkies. Wasn’t long before he beefed up enough to learn some stunts; having a mark sledge concrete into rubble on his chest, lifting hefty men and women over his head, tearing decks of cards and phone books– all the tricks that people expected from a strongman. He did the bully strongman in the ten-in-one for a spell, then started doing big publicity and getting known.
But then he changed.
There are always women hanging around the show, but Jimbo didn’t go in for that. He wanted love from above; a queen to join him on his throne. He was determined to find the perfect woman. That’s where he started getting more and more popular. There’s nothing more attractive to a woman than a man who doesn’t notice her. So Jimbo ignored them all, figuring sooner or later the right one would come knocking. And he wasn’t just dragging the midway looking for a fish, he started showing up at social events in a tuxedo with a satchel full of props to impress the townies. Twist a horseshoe, and every eye in the place was on him, tear a license plate in half and he’d draw a crowd, blow up a hot water bottle and, by the time it exploded, there’d be several calling cards in his kit, women who wanted a private show or something more personal. Jimbo never used them, never met with any of them, but kept a thick stack of calling cards in his kit with a gum-rubber band around them.
When he met Rowena Jimson, he stopped collecting the cards and gave her the stack.
“Here are all cards of women who wanted to meet a strongman.” he said, then handed her his calling card,
“And here’s the card of a man who wants to meet a strong woman.”
That’s all it took. She closed her eyes, smiled, and took a deep breath. Jimbo had said all she needed to hear.
Rowena grew up in Winthrop, Washington, the daughter of a granary owner who founded the Kings Table bread company. She lived a wealthy life, not old money family wealth, but enough to afford a mansion, summer home, college education, trips to Europe, and servants. Rowena had been sheltered throughout her childhood so the passion that burned in her breast was to be surrounded by the hurly-burly of life; the wild, unpredictable world of wild, unpredictable people. When she met her muscleman, she looked beyond his physique and simple pleasures and imagined life on the road and all the excitement that would offer.
Jimbo was a means to an end.
So, they had a Carny marriage – they took a turn on the carousel and the Ferris Wheel and threw a wingding of a beer blast. All the show people got together at the cook shack and Jimbo waltzed in with Rowena on one shoulder and a 40-gallon barrel of suds on the other. By the time that barrel was empty, the kootchies were dancing naked, little people were riding around piggy-back, and the strongman danced, spinning around with his love held high over his head.
I might add, the dancing girls were naked. When they did the same thing in a show, it was called, “dancing nude” for legal reasons. Damn lawyers, clever leeches.
During the Carny honeymoon, which was a couple of good years, Jimbo came into his own. He was in the newsreels and papers, met with Hollywood stars and athletes, and pulled off stunts that made him a legend of sorts. He carried steel girders up ladders to waiting iron workers on Manhattan skyscrapers, he lifted a horse and carried it across Wacker Drive with a cop still sitting in its saddle, towed a ferry boat across San Francisco Bay with a rowboat, and lifted an Indianapolis racecar in the pit while the crew changed its tires.
He loved the camera and the camera loved him.
As they grew closer, their love deepened, but Rowena’s craving for adventure and excitement began to wear on Jimbo. At first, he took it as a sign that she was becoming more comfortable with him, just being one of the girls and letting her hair down. Occasionally a drunken fight would have them sleeping in separate beds, but they’d always get back together.
Hate and love are a potent combination, and they had plenty of both.
It didn’t help matters that Rowena’s mother would send her a few hundred dollars now and again. Usually addressed to her at general delivery in whatever little Podunk town they were headed to. It got so that when the checks came she’d hit the drink pretty hard and treated Jimbo like a dog; her pet muscle dog. Oh, he’d laugh it off with everybody who noticed but deep inside he was hurt.
That was the crazy thing about the whole shitaree. Strong as he was, tough as he was – able to ignore pain that would drive another man to scream – Jambo’s heart was as tender as a baby’s. He hid his agonies deep inside and never let on that it was slowly pushing him and his love apart. He never spoke of it, per se, but if he did, I’m sure he would’ve denied that what she was doing to him was a slow death, a murder. So, he did with that rejection what he did with everything in his life that had failed him; he put his anger into the iron.
I once watched him practicing a 400-pound lift above his head and was amazed that his forehead was dry, but his cheeks were dripping wet. It was then I realized he did is crying where no one could see his pain in the gym. When I asked him how things were between him and Rowena he’d just shrug and say something like, “Oh, you know how it is.” I’m sure he meant me to understand that as, “You know how women are” but it was clear what was going on. I had seen other people come into carny life and go off the deep end.
Take someone who never had a whole lot of freedom then give them the opportunity to let loose… all too often it’s a train wreck. Booze, drugs, alcohol, sex, greed, hate… sad endings, and far too few happy endings when you’re riding the tiger.
I knocked on Jimbo’s door this morning and told him to clean up that crap in the yard or there’d be Hell to pay.
“What crap?” He was blank. Had no idea what I was talking about.
I pointed to the weights and the dumbbells and the wheel.
“That’s my stuff!” he said indignantly.
“It won’t be when the junkman comes and hauls it away.”
“Ah…PHOOEY!” and he slammed the door.
I opened it and walked in. Jimbo was already sitting on this throne - fist under his chin… deep in thought.
“I remember…” he started but I cut him off with a wave of my hand.
“Stow it. I already know it. You bailed me out when I clocked that Chester in Lancaster. Right. I paid you back. You lent me your car for my honeymoon. I put new tires on it. Whitewalls. You named your Boxer after my brother-in-law. I don’t know what the Hell to do with that. I guess you were sending me a message. And now you want me to fight off the Parkies who have a legitimate gripe to kick your ass out of here?”
Maybe I overplayed my hand. He looked at me wide-eyed and said, “Yep.”
“Why don’t you straighten up and fly right? Why does everything have to go down the toilet with you? You can be King of the Jungle to the rest of the world, but you have to LIVE here!”
He slumped back in his iron and leather maw. I waited for an answer and… nothing.
When I turned to leave, I looked at the living room wall where he had all his show paper. Thirty years of being the main attraction spread out across the wallboard. And there, thumbtacked in the middle of it all, a yellowed Kodak snapshot, cracked glaze, and fold lines where it had once been fitted into a wallet. The image was faded, but the letters were readable, “Rowena Jimson, b.1923 d.1958 R.I.P.” on a flat piece of marble in the ground. I had never seen it before.
I thought, so, she never even changed her name.
I turned back to my friend.
“Jimbo. The weights and wheels and such? They’re not you. They’re what you used . You are bigger than all that. You are past that now. Got to let go of the baggage, it’s holding you down.”
From across the room, I could see that the big man’s cheeks were wet.
_____
(c) 2024 MJH
all rights reserved
Jimbo trucked it in and rolled it up there like there was nothing to it. Now, years later, it was sunk a couple inches into what passed for a lawn out front of his mobile. Weeds and rust now, mostly.
They were all props from his show, and he’d sooner fight than give any of them up.
In all fairness to the Park Association, Jimbo had pissed them off from the get. After his double-wide was hauled in, he decided to put his throne in the living room. But it wouldn’t ever fit through the front door and, weighing a quarter ton, he knew the floor would never hold it.
The throne was maybe six-hundred, seven-hundred pounds of chromed steel, made by a junkyard welder; shiny pieces of chrome bumpers from cars, old Buicks, and Oldsmobiles that had all sorts of curves and pointy bumper guards like horns on them. The damned thing looked like a big cat’s mouth, wide-open with shiny fangs, and around the back were outstretched steel claws. It had a leather seat and back cushions made from rhinoceros hide and the whole thing looked like the open maw of a steel lion with a leather tongue. It was built for a ten-in-one stage, but even when it was there, it had to have railroad ties trussed up under the planks just to support it. A throne for the stongman.
Well, beefing up the mobile with timbers wasn’t going to work in The Park; mobiles have flimsy little sheet-metal floor joists and nothing but plywood sheathing on top, sagging under the carpet. Hell, just walking around on that kind of floor you can feel the bounce and, eventually, you have to develop sea-legs to keep from taking a spill when you’re tipsy. So, the throne sat out behind his place wrapped in canvas, slowly rusting and sinking into Florida – kind of settling into the scenery. Like we all are.
There weren’t any local laws to keep Park people from having elephants or big cats or show trailers on their property, but where showpeople live, they have their own sense of what’s a go and what's a no-go.
Jimbo came up with this cockamamie idea; he’d cut a big hole in his living room floor, have a crane come in and hoist up the whole mobile, set the throne on top of a pile of concrete blocks in the center of his space and have the operating engineer lower his double back down over it. That’s when the well-known, brown substance hit the electrical convenience; the whole park was up in arms. The crane, the noise, the mess, and the throne – a bit rusty and lopsided gave everybody a case of the ass.
Jimbo didn’t give two shits. He had his throne in his living room and there was nothing they could do about it. Even though his neighbors still lived like road folk, they demanded to have things looking relatively normal in the park just to keep the townies and Lookie-Lou’s off their lawn.
I will admit, Jimbo was a sight to behold when sitting on that throne, six-foot-four and two-hundred eighty-five pounds of sinew, muscle, and a bit of smorgasbord flab– leopard breechcloth and a silver, necklace chain – links big as donuts - around his neck. Now, in his eighties, he had added a tiger-stripe cape and a crown made out of big-cat claws. He’d twist horseshoes into pretzels. He could hold a twenty-pound sledgehammer, his arm and its handle straight out in front of him, flex his wrist and bring the head of that hammer up, straight up above him, then down slowly toward his head to just kiss the end of his nose, before sending it back up and out, just a smooth as could be.
He once pushed a railroad boxcar up a three percent grade while carrying a full-grown man on his back. After a hundred steps, the damn car was three feet higher than where it started. His picture was in all the papers, and he was like a little kid with all the attention.
That was forty-odd years ago. He’s still tough as nails, but his stunt days are past.
Nobody had ever seen anything like him. It’s said he was six feet tall and two-hundred pounds at 16, played high school football for one year and sent many a player to the hospital. Not that he was mean, you see, he just couldn’t feel pain. Something was different about his nerves and brain. He could dislocate a finger and barely notice it. That’s part of what made him appear so strong. You try bending a two-bit piece in half and see how far you get. Before you put the first dent in the coin your fingers will hurt like Hell.
Jim was a roughneck before he got with the show, wrangling midway trouble, enforcing lot rules, tallying joint takes, odd jobs and such. What people now call middle management… like me here, riding herd on the Parkies. Wasn’t long before he beefed up enough to learn some stunts; having a mark sledge concrete into rubble on his chest, lifting hefty men and women over his head, tearing decks of cards and phone books– all the tricks that people expected from a strongman. He did the bully strongman in the ten-in-one for a spell, then started doing big publicity and getting known.
But then he changed.
There are always women hanging around the show, but Jimbo didn’t go in for that. He wanted love from above; a queen to join him on his throne. He was determined to find the perfect woman. That’s where he started getting more and more popular. There’s nothing more attractive to a woman than a man who doesn’t notice her. So Jimbo ignored them all, figuring sooner or later the right one would come knocking. And he wasn’t just dragging the midway looking for a fish, he started showing up at social events in a tuxedo with a satchel full of props to impress the townies. Twist a horseshoe, and every eye in the place was on him, tear a license plate in half and he’d draw a crowd, blow up a hot water bottle and, by the time it exploded, there’d be several calling cards in his kit, women who wanted a private show or something more personal. Jimbo never used them, never met with any of them, but kept a thick stack of calling cards in his kit with a gum-rubber band around them.
When he met Rowena Jimson, he stopped collecting the cards and gave her the stack.
“Here are all cards of women who wanted to meet a strongman.” he said, then handed her his calling card,
“And here’s the card of a man who wants to meet a strong woman.”
That’s all it took. She closed her eyes, smiled, and took a deep breath. Jimbo had said all she needed to hear.
Rowena grew up in Winthrop, Washington, the daughter of a granary owner who founded the Kings Table bread company. She lived a wealthy life, not old money family wealth, but enough to afford a mansion, summer home, college education, trips to Europe, and servants. Rowena had been sheltered throughout her childhood so the passion that burned in her breast was to be surrounded by the hurly-burly of life; the wild, unpredictable world of wild, unpredictable people. When she met her muscleman, she looked beyond his physique and simple pleasures and imagined life on the road and all the excitement that would offer.
Jimbo was a means to an end.
So, they had a Carny marriage – they took a turn on the carousel and the Ferris Wheel and threw a wingding of a beer blast. All the show people got together at the cook shack and Jimbo waltzed in with Rowena on one shoulder and a 40-gallon barrel of suds on the other. By the time that barrel was empty, the kootchies were dancing naked, little people were riding around piggy-back, and the strongman danced, spinning around with his love held high over his head.
I might add, the dancing girls were naked. When they did the same thing in a show, it was called, “dancing nude” for legal reasons. Damn lawyers, clever leeches.
During the Carny honeymoon, which was a couple of good years, Jimbo came into his own. He was in the newsreels and papers, met with Hollywood stars and athletes, and pulled off stunts that made him a legend of sorts. He carried steel girders up ladders to waiting iron workers on Manhattan skyscrapers, he lifted a horse and carried it across Wacker Drive with a cop still sitting in its saddle, towed a ferry boat across San Francisco Bay with a rowboat, and lifted an Indianapolis racecar in the pit while the crew changed its tires.
He loved the camera and the camera loved him.
As they grew closer, their love deepened, but Rowena’s craving for adventure and excitement began to wear on Jimbo. At first, he took it as a sign that she was becoming more comfortable with him, just being one of the girls and letting her hair down. Occasionally a drunken fight would have them sleeping in separate beds, but they’d always get back together.
Hate and love are a potent combination, and they had plenty of both.
It didn’t help matters that Rowena’s mother would send her a few hundred dollars now and again. Usually addressed to her at general delivery in whatever little Podunk town they were headed to. It got so that when the checks came she’d hit the drink pretty hard and treated Jimbo like a dog; her pet muscle dog. Oh, he’d laugh it off with everybody who noticed but deep inside he was hurt.
That was the crazy thing about the whole shitaree. Strong as he was, tough as he was – able to ignore pain that would drive another man to scream – Jambo’s heart was as tender as a baby’s. He hid his agonies deep inside and never let on that it was slowly pushing him and his love apart. He never spoke of it, per se, but if he did, I’m sure he would’ve denied that what she was doing to him was a slow death, a murder. So, he did with that rejection what he did with everything in his life that had failed him; he put his anger into the iron.
I once watched him practicing a 400-pound lift above his head and was amazed that his forehead was dry, but his cheeks were dripping wet. It was then I realized he did is crying where no one could see his pain in the gym. When I asked him how things were between him and Rowena he’d just shrug and say something like, “Oh, you know how it is.” I’m sure he meant me to understand that as, “You know how women are” but it was clear what was going on. I had seen other people come into carny life and go off the deep end.
Take someone who never had a whole lot of freedom then give them the opportunity to let loose… all too often it’s a train wreck. Booze, drugs, alcohol, sex, greed, hate… sad endings, and far too few happy endings when you’re riding the tiger.
I knocked on Jimbo’s door this morning and told him to clean up that crap in the yard or there’d be Hell to pay.
“What crap?” He was blank. Had no idea what I was talking about.
I pointed to the weights and the dumbbells and the wheel.
“That’s my stuff!” he said indignantly.
“It won’t be when the junkman comes and hauls it away.”
“Ah…PHOOEY!” and he slammed the door.
I opened it and walked in. Jimbo was already sitting on this throne - fist under his chin… deep in thought.
“I remember…” he started but I cut him off with a wave of my hand.
“Stow it. I already know it. You bailed me out when I clocked that Chester in Lancaster. Right. I paid you back. You lent me your car for my honeymoon. I put new tires on it. Whitewalls. You named your Boxer after my brother-in-law. I don’t know what the Hell to do with that. I guess you were sending me a message. And now you want me to fight off the Parkies who have a legitimate gripe to kick your ass out of here?”
Maybe I overplayed my hand. He looked at me wide-eyed and said, “Yep.”
“Why don’t you straighten up and fly right? Why does everything have to go down the toilet with you? You can be King of the Jungle to the rest of the world, but you have to LIVE here!”
He slumped back in his iron and leather maw. I waited for an answer and… nothing.
When I turned to leave, I looked at the living room wall where he had all his show paper. Thirty years of being the main attraction spread out across the wallboard. And there, thumbtacked in the middle of it all, a yellowed Kodak snapshot, cracked glaze, and fold lines where it had once been fitted into a wallet. The image was faded, but the letters were readable, “Rowena Jimson, b.1923 d.1958 R.I.P.” on a flat piece of marble in the ground. I had never seen it before.
I thought, so, she never even changed her name.
I turned back to my friend.
“Jimbo. The weights and wheels and such? They’re not you. They’re what you used . You are bigger than all that. You are past that now. Got to let go of the baggage, it’s holding you down.”
From across the room, I could see that the big man’s cheeks were wet.
_____
(c) 2024 MJH
all rights reserved