Unfortunately, those who came with money to burn were usually the ones who could least afford it. One night a Mexican family came up to my joint-a man, a woman and a cute little girl, about 5, wearing a bright yellow dress. He was wearing a green workshirt and pants and was determined to win a stuffed dog for the little girl. But the woman, in a paisley print dress and obviously his wife, grew more and more anxious as she watched him pull out the dollar bills. My boss was watching closely, too, and I knew I would be in serious trouble if I let him off easily.
”Try something else,” I said to him in a low whisper after his wife`s deep brown eyes looked frantically at another dollar bill he was pulling out and then pleaded with mine.
He ignored me, however, and motioned for another ball. ”Dame la pelota” (”Give me the ball”).
His wife then tugged at his sleeve, and they began arguing in Spanish. The little girl, disinterested in the whole scene, stood with her back to the joint, staring at the Trabant`s whirling lights.
”Dame la pelota!” he said again as he got loose from his wife and pointed to the ball.
I handed him the ball, and my boss strolled away, satisfied that I was pulling in money.
”It`s on me,” I said, waving his dollar away.
He threw, knocked two bottles down and pointed once more to the ball.
”Dame!”
He had already spent about six dollars, and now his wife was frantic.
I took the dog down from the shelf and tapped the little girl on the shoulder to get her to turn around.
”Look,” I said to him, ”you can buy one for that much.”
But he reached over the girl`s head and grabbed the toy dog before his daughter, her arms outstretched, could take it. He then handed the dog back to me, puffed up his chest, gathered up his family and left. I stood there holding the dog as I watched them make their way down the midway.
After hours, the midway was strictly our turf, and we would gather there in the early morning hours for conversation and company. Once, about 4 a.m., we had drifted back from downtown, mooching cigarettes from those with packs, everyone drunk or stoned or a little of both. We were all tired and cold, and yet no one wanted to crash just yet. There was a reason for that clinging together. The night before, a couple of ride jocks had been hauled into jail for disturbing the peace.
Carnies like to tell two types of tales-those about their good hustles and good luck with the carnival, and those about their bad luck in life. That night I heard about their bad luck as pictures began coming out of wallets for my inspection.
”There`s my kids, and I can`t see `em, and it hurts,” said a heavy-set ride jock as he handed me a print with six faces. ”Here`s the letter their mother sent me. That hurts, too. And I ain`t ashamed to say it. I can`t read, but I always carry it with me.”
”That the one I read you?” another ride jock asked.
”Yeah.”
I was sitting on a car hood holding the photo and moist letter with curved Bic-blue words that had been penned by a woman but were now smeared and had run down the pages. I was staring at him. I had never met an American who admitted not being able to read, and he must have mistaken my look of disbelief over his illiteracy for a doubt of his inner pain.
”I can`t see `em, and it hurts,” he said again. ”When I was in the pen, I worked hard and saved my money and bought them clothes. I sent them to her, but she,” he pointed to the letter, ”she sent `em back. That hurt.”
And so I also learned firsthand about the hurts and the price of being on the road. Every so often a feeling-again, like a ocean wave-would sweep over me, only this time it was a feeling of such intense loneliness and longing that I would be left feeling about as insignificant as a single grain of sand in a vast desert of eternity.
That feeling came over me one night as I was standing in my joint realizing that whatever my intentions or pretentions were, at that moment I was just a wanderer in Texas, wondering if I would make enough money to cover my draw, not sure if I would find a place to crash for the night, and feeling hungry.
It all came to me when I looked up and saw her. She was standing about 10 yards away, a black girl, about 8, in a red dress and sandals. She was eating popcorn and staring at me. Every so often she would reach into the red cardboard popcorn box, scoop up a handful and crush it in her mouth, her dark eyes bulging from the effort. Some of the popcorn would escape her fingers and fall off her chin. She stood there, staring and scooping, and I realized that all I had eaten that day was a McDonald`s cheeseburger at noon. That had cleaned out my money, and it was now about 10 p.m.
I grabbed a cigarette just to put something in my mouth, which was already dry from too much talking and yet beginning to feel more uncomfortable at the thought of warm salted and buttered popcorn. We stared at each other as she ate and I smoked. I wanted to yell at her to go take her popcorn and leave me alone when her brother, about 12, ran up and pulled at her pigtails, all six of them.
The two began to tussle, and the popcorn box fell, spilling kernels out on the concrete. The children ran off. The popcorn box lay on the ground. I wondered if the two would come back as I glanced up at the people now walking by my joint. Two young couples making their way down the midway. The men in jeans, cowboy belts, print shirts; one with a cowboy hat. The women in light summer dresses, heels; their hair and makeup in place.
I looked down at my baggy shirt, dirty jeans and hiking boots and then back up at the women. I hated them. They probably had just come from a big dinner, and now they were laughing and strutting, gliding along on their dates` arms. One of the women glided right into the popcorn box. It spun in little circles and came to rest about 5 feet from my joint. The kernels left a spiraling trail. She never looked back or broke stride.
It was too much. I put one leg out of the joint, looked around, grabbed the box and was back inside in one quick motion. There was only about a handful of salt and hard kernels left in the box, and I crammed it all in my mouth. I ate fast, fearful the little girl in the red dress or the big girl in heels would return. Then I slipped out the back of the joint and vomited.
I remember thinking it wasn`t the food or the cops or the road that drove the carnies to their paranoias. It was the slow grind down to invisibility. It was catching the salt off someone else`s glide who didn`t even break stride.
It was time to go home.
On the night of ”slough,” or pulldown of the carnival, the midway became a mass of ropes, metal, lumber, lights, yelling, pounding, bodies and trucks. Ride jocks dangled on half-dismantled rides hundreds of feet high, while joints were felled with ropes and crowbars below. Orders were barked and whistles shrieked as bodies strained to meet the dawn deadline.
Trucks lightly brushed human shoulders as they were wheeled into passages with only inches to spare. There they were loaded with pieces of rides and joints that had been pried apart and folded up to sit ready for setup on the next spot. It was hard, heavy work, banging on boards, jerking on ropes, lugging lumber.
I had splinters in my hands and a soreness in my shoulders as I circled the lot to say goodbye to the midway. Our joints were down, and I had already told my carny friends I was returning to Champaign. We had said our goodbyes. The next day I would travel north with them to Huntsville and get on a bus.
I didn`t want to leave, but I knew that if I got in any deeper in this carnival thing, there would be no going back. The carnival was going all the way up to Canada. Canada. I had never been to Canada and its cool, crisp forests with fragrant pine-needle carpets and wide-eyed deer, but, no, I couldn`t start this road thing again. I was going home.
I stopped at the Sky Rocket. Rocky was down below shouting orders and waving his arms over his head. They were folding in the Sky Rocket`s ellipse, its crisscrossed curves still shone neon-white-light bright. A spotlight in the background created eerie, elongated shadows of human figures and pieces of ride on the 3 o`clock concrete. I was watching an unrehearsed production of absurd theater.
An old-timer stood next to me, and we watched in silence as he puffed on a cigar. Staring straight ahead at the ride, he said out the side of his mouth: ”Is it in your blood? Watch it. It just might be. And then you`ll be back. Maybe not this year or next. But sometime. You`ll be back.” Then, without even a sideways glance, he walked off, puffing smoke rings over his cap.
I turned back to the Sky Rocket as it was being folded into quarters. The circle was breaking up for the jump.
It was time to make my escape.
– – –
Three years later I was watching a televised documentary about kids living on the streets. A social worker said something like: ”If we can get to them right away, we have a good chance of saving them. In the first couple of months we have a 50-50 chance, and after six months to a year on the street, well, they`re gone. They`ll never be able to live a straight life again.”
I had been with the carnival just a couple of weeks.
Eight years later, again by accident, I happened upon the exact same carnival, for the first time since my carny days. I was in Phoenix, visiting my grandparents and sulking with a broken heart. I was managing to suffer quite grandly-until I walked on that carnival lot, and it was as if an electric charge went through my body.
Never mind that the faces had changed or that I was hard-pressed to find even one carny who remembered my friends. This was the very same carnival with the same name that had continued on season after season, linked to that same place and time that I had been a part of.
It took a lot of hunting, but I finally found one carny who remembered some of my old friends, even though he wasn`t with the carnival at the same time I was.
His name was Tiny, and he had a massive black body that spilled out over his stool into the ticket booth of his ride.
Over the honking and buzzing of his ride, he told me that my old boss and his wife were now selling insurance in Omaha. The old man who ran the whole show had died of a heart attack right on the spot after he had accepted some big carnival ”Showman of the Year” award. The carnival had changed its route, giving up the Canadian part, and now its winter barn was in Arizona.
He asked, ”Jim who?” And I didn`t know.
But he had heard of a few of the others.
Bedsprings and Fat Jack were somewhere in Texas, he thought. And Maine and Snake? Well, who knew?
I was older and, I hoped, wiser, than that rather naive young woman barely out of her teens who had first walked onto that carnival lot, and yet, when I made my way around the midway eight years later, soaking up the smell of popcorn and hot dogs, I felt that tug, that pull into those flashing lights and spinning wheels full of money, music, hands and talk.
And if I closed my eyes for just a moment, I could feel what it was like to live on that real, raw edge of survival where everything got down to real, raw basics and where things such as office politics and getting in the right publications or staying on top of the right trends or in the right crowd or finding Mr. Right-well, all of that seemed like part of a very different, very absurd world.
