Carnival Knowledge

The Midway that is life. I misspent my youth traveling that hard road chasing a dream I couldn't define. I bounced from from one town to the next, scratching out a meager existence. When one does that, one expects every bump in the road. Such is the existence of a carny.

It was right about the time the Viet Nam war wound down. I was a kid of 17 during that stormy spring in '72. I'd split from home right after my senior year in high school, not wanting to go on to college and not wanting to have the discussion about what I wanted to do. Fortunately, the folks were so busy with their own self-centered lives, they never even noticed I was gone. I was blown away when I wrote them a month after I left and they replied that they thought I'd gone to summer camp. What? Did they think I was twelve? But, rather than try to make them notice me, I got my independence and left it at that.

Outside of Kansas city, along the banks of the Missouri river, I was sleeping in the shadow of a grain silo when a travelling show...a carnival, pulled onto the property and began setting up. Hungry and needing some quick cash, I joined up. I figured I'd work a few days and be on my way. A few days stretched into a few months and longer. I picked up the trade fast. I was a smart kid...or so I thought. I think if it had been a few hundred years earlier, my fellow employees would've been pirates. That's all we were...land pirates...who paid taxes...sometimes.

Anyway, we were setting up on the outskirts of a small Missouri town. And the wind was kicking up so strong that we couldn't hardly keep the joints in one piece. Every time a roustabout'd get something nailed down, a big gust would come along and blow it all to smithereens.

Then, this "Reverend Michael" showed up. No one saw him arrive. He was just there. And with him came the eerie calm. And I mean it was eerie. No wind. No sign of any kind of weather. Just calm. It was like we were setting up in a big empty room. While he was on the grounds, we got nearly everything operating except for a couple of the big rides. And those could be set up in a hurricane. Which is lucky, because it got that way later.

The Rev went right to the manager's office and asked if he could arrange for a church charity bazaar with us. The boss agreed right off because a couple thousand extra customers was hard to turn away.

Also because the boss knew a mark when he saw one. He told the Rev he'd split the take 50-50. 'Course the boss never intended a 50-50. The Rev'd be lucky to get 10 percent. And I suspect that the boss meant to pocket the whole nut and light out.

Most of the crew were alright with that, being carnys. For them, real satisfaction came from wringing that last buck out of a mark who's trying to win a bear for his squeeze. But we didn't rip off each other. That just wasn't honorable. Also, if you stole from another carny, or the boss, you just might end up under the wheels of the last eighteen wheeler to leave the grounds. I guess carny morals were what you'd call...modifiable. I wasn't all that comfortable with the boss' plans, but I needed the money.

The Rev left and the winds came back full on strong, just as we were setting up the big rides. I was feeling uneasy about that. Word came down to "gaff" the games. They were going to be flat. No one would win. We were gonna burn the lot of them. The Larry's in this town could be bought off for a few bucks in patch money. It didn't take much juice to buy off a cop in the Midwest. But those winds. They made it real hard to do anything right...or wrong even.

The weekend came and the townspeople came with it. Simple, church-going folk. I didn't see the brewing storm. No one did. This little town was gonna be trouble. I just didn't know that it would come in the form of a girl named Lizzie.

I was running the Tilt-A-Whirl. I could usually collect about twenty bucks in loose change from the cars at the end of a night. I remember that my father had a big overstuffed couch like that. When I was a kid I could dig through it for nickles and the occasional dime. The Tilt-A-Whirl paid better.

I was bent over pulling out a quarter stuck behind the seat from its hiding place. It was a really uncomfortable position. With my arm extended that far back behind the seat, I was forced to turn my head towards the safety bar. My view of the world was sideways and horizontally bisected.

As I sweated and strained to reach the payoff, into that odd world view walked half a pair of the most beautiful gams history has ever recorded. I had to assume the other half was just as spectacular. When I finally pulled my arm out, I had not only the quarter, but a dime stuck to it with chewing gum. It was turning into a good night. When I stood up and gazed at the gorgeous face body attached to those legs, it turned into a great night.

"Hi," she said. "My name is Lizzie."

She said she was 19, and a bottler in the line at the local brewery. She said that she'd always wanted to ride a Tilt-A-Whirl. I stammered something about four tickets to ride and she lifted her skirt a few inches...I think four. That was good enough for me. I opened the gate and led her to the cleanest car on the ride. This kind of dame didn't sit in puddles of Dubble Bubble.

As the night wore on, she rode the ride at least a couple of dozen times. She kept smiling at me. And each time I saw her, I got the feeling that she was interested in something more than just the ride. Then she asked me to ride with her. No one else was in line, so I agreed. We got into the car and the self-timer started it up. As soon as the ride began to move, so did Lizzie. She was all over me, kissing me and putting her hands on places I wouldn't touch myself.

By the time the ride stopped, I was more exhausted than I thought possible. But this girl, she just stood up, smoothed out the wrinkles in her poodle skirt and hopped off the ride. She asked me if I'd win a bear for her. The winds had started up again big time, and people were taking shelter in their cars and most of them were leaving. I couldn't refuse...I didn't want to.

The midway was a ghost town, so we headed over to the ring toss. The game was nearly impossible, since the rings were only a 32nd of an inch larger than the bottles they had to land on. If they didn't land absolutely perpendicular, they bounced away. People won at the game maybe one time in ten thousand. I laid down my dollar and got three rings. I noticed that the winds were howling all around, but not at the booth where we stood. Lizzie kissed the rings for good luck and had me throw them all at once. All three landed square on a bottle. We won three giant bears. The rousty working the booth was dumbstruck. And Lizzie? She just wanted to go to the dart toss.

The calm that was with us at the ring toss seemed to follow us to the darts booth. The balloons attached to the cork board stopped blowing around and just hung there. Again, I laid my money down. I got three darts and again. Lizzie kissed them for luck. She told me to throw them all at once. Pow-Pow-Pow. They all found home and three balloons hung deflated and lifeless. This time we got three giant stuffed snakes. The boss came running from his trailer. He wasn't happy.

He stormed up to us and demanded to know Lizzie's game. She told him she was just feeling lucky and added that she was the Reverend Michael's daughter. I began to see a pattern but I didn't know the half of it. The boss blustered that the wind was forcing the show to close early and she'd have to leave. Then he turned to me and fired me on the spot.

Lizzie turned to me and keeping her voice low, told me to get as far away from the carnival as I could, then she turned on those gorgeous ankles and walked off in the other direction. As she did, the wind swirled up behind her, the calm she carried with her following her off the lot. I practically ran the other way, fighting for ground with my every step through the increasing winds.

When I finally passed the rent-a-fence that surrounded the carnival grounds, the winds suddenly and completely died out like they were never there. I turned around. And as I did, the winds inside the carnival rose to tornado force. In seconds, the entire carnival was swept up off the dirt field as though it was a train layout and vanished inside the twister, never to be seen again.

I was the only one who didn't go with it. It was like a scene from some tacky science fiction movie. I couldn't believe I was living it.

For the next few weeks, I bummed around the town, searching for Lizzie and the Reverend Michael. No one knew where they were or even who they were. No one in town ever heard of them. Eventually, I moved on, the bears and snakes my only proof that the carnival ever even existed.

As I hitched across the state, one day I happened on a travelling tent show. It was headlined by a preacher named Reverend Billy. He was a real fire and brimstoner. I sat through three of his meetings and finally got a personal audience with him. When I asked him about Reverend Michael, he told me he'd heard of Lizzie and her father. They'd been killed during a melee at a crooked carnival some twenty years before and rumor had it that their ghosts moved from show to show, saving the souls they could and sending the rest straight to wherever damned carnies go.

I suppose I learned a life lesson from it all. I settled down, went to school, got a law degree and became a prosecuting attorney. I've put away more than one sleazy carny in the last 35 years. But I've never forgotten Lizzie and that amazing night. In fact, when she left me, my wife said I was obsessed with that girl and I guess the shrine with the stuffed bears and snakes was a bit much.

I always wondered what became of Lizzie, because I never really believed the ghost stories. But I could never explain what happened that night. I always half expected that one day, my doorbell would ring and there would stand Lizzie, looking for the stuffed animals. I even bought the land on which the ill-fated carnival had set up and built my home there...Just in case.


Then, on one particularly familiar and stormy evening, came a knock at my door. When I opened it, looking not a day older than when we spun madly on the Tilt-A-Whirl, stood Lizzie. She hadn't aged a day. She still had the hottest legs I had ever seen. But the poodle skirt was now an ultra short mini and she wore tennis shoes with workout leggings around her ankles.

There was something else. While the trees in the neighborhood swayed broadly in the high winds and their leaves blew all over hell and gone, my property was as still as death. A sailing ship would've drifted aimlessly with the swells in the becalmed atmosphere around my house...if my house had indeed been floating in water. Lizzie greeted me warmly, kissing me like she had on that first night. I invited her in. We sat, reminisced...though to be sure, we had little to reminisce about, having spent only the one evening together so many years before. I knew what she wanted. I was only waiting for the question. The she asked it.

"I came for the stuffed animals. May I have them?"

I'd thought about this moment for years. Maybe there was something truly magical in her involvement with the games. I didn't really know. But I did know this. I'd laid my money down and I did the playing.

"Not a chance babe. I won that stuff fair and square."

With that, sweet Lizzie became a creature of howling wrath. She rose up into the air, shrieking at me.

"Someday you will pay with your soul!"

She and crashed her way out through the front window screaming more awful epithets at me as her anger grew.

I called out after her: "You've got nothing on my ex!"

Trembling violently in mid-air from her horrific rage, Lizzie's true spirit burst forth and she turned into a swirling mass of unearthly evil vapor, disappearing down to the depths of hell through holes in the sewer access in front of my house. (We use to call them man-holes, but in the "Politically Correct" 2000's, even a harpy can sue you.)

As I age, I now dread that "someday" when she and I will meet again at the entrance to her domain. But I am resigned to it. Such is the existence of a lawyer!