"THE STREET OF CROCODILES was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. The misfortune of that area is that nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a cardboard imitation; a photo montage cut out from last year's mouldering newspapers."
-Bruno Schulz
I can only trace the events that led me here back about a month, and there's one in particular that sparked the chain; I was in San Antonio, wandering around on the river walk, when I saw a pigeon, sleeping. I guessed it must have been a female, because male pigeons are larger, and have rings of iridescent feathers that mark their necks, but it wasn't much more than a fledgling, so I might have been wrong. Anyways, she was sleeping, at the edge of the sidewalk, while all the tourists and businesspeople passed by on their way to bars and restaurants.
She seemed healthy enough, and her wings weren't broken as far as I could tell, but she obviously couldn't fly. I was glad, because I'd tried to take care of another bird that I'd found earlier this year in Denver who apparently had avian polio; wings were fine, no parasites, but she had paralyzed legs. I probably should've broken her neck when I saw her flopping around in the alley, but I couldn't do it. I carried her around in a shoebox for about a week before I left the box on the front porch of a speakeasy in five points, and a cat ate her. I felt terrible after that, and figured that I had something karmic to work out with this new one, who seemed to at least have a fighting chance. I nudged her with my hand; she ruffled her sparse, grimy feathers and looked up at me. I extended my arm and nudged her again. She stepped up onto my arm, so then I put her on my shoulder, and went on walking.
She refused to eat at first, but after a day or two, I could feed her from my palm; a paste of crushed potato chips and fries, sometimes bugs. She'd try to fly sometimes, but couldn't get very far, so she'd always come back to my shoulder. Everyone I passed on the street gave me really strange looks; lots of people made comments about the bird man of Alcatraz or some shit like that.
About three days after I found her, I turned a corner on the square across from the Alamo, in front of Ripley's Odditorium. A guy standing outside stopped me:
"Why do you have a pigeon on your shoulder?"
"I'm taking care of her"
He thought this was pretty curious. Surprising for anyone who spends much time around Ripley's, much less someone who (may or may not have) worked there. I told him that I'd been traveling, explained that I'd walked from Austin, that my guitar had been stolen (not the one in the gallery) that I was looking for some work, told him about my general experience, plans etc. He said he knew someone who owned a carnival ride, and was getting ready to set up for the state fair, that she would pay me $350 a week and take care of my living expenses for the month, including food.
You should know that, cynical as I am, I'm still willing to take someone at their word, mostly because I have nothing to lose if they're lying to me anymore; good faith, non-contractual (under the table if you wanna call a spade a spade) agreements have formed the basis of most of my lifetime earnings. If I have to use money at all, I like cash. It sounded like a great deal, but I really didn't understand what I was getting into. I acknowledged as much when I accepted the offer, but hey, it's the fuckin' fair. I had to check this out. Besides, now that I had no guitar, and no ink drawings, selling shitty poems that I'd never see again for a quarter apiece and sharing tips with the pigeon was only getting me so much to eat, and I was tired of sardines and chips and gas station food.
We drove up to Dallas about a week later. If you've never been to Dallas, or seen it, you're missing a lot, in two ways. You're also not really missing much at all. I think that if Gotham city were real, it would probably be Dallas; the whole city is nothing but cement, steel, skyscrapers, mirrored glass panes, and angled architecture that makes a person feel small and rather insignificant. It's like Ayn Rand and Frank Lloyd Wright had some really intense mind sex that somehow spawned a major metropolis. The Deep Ellum club district is legendary, so is the city's crime rate. If you've lived in the place for more than 6 months without having your car or house broken into, you are in the statistical minority. I won't say there's not fun to be had and things to experience, because there most definitely are, but the fun is limited to commerce of some kind or another; very few places there are pleasant enough to just hang out, and there are no sights to see.
As soon as I got there, I had to learn, in two days, how to set up and operate a carnival ride. Setup is labor intensive, and to learn the entire assembly and disassembly process of a single ride by heart takes about a year I'm told. Operation is relatively simple, but there are lots of subtle nuances from one machine to the next. The job carries tremendous responsibility and liability, and yes, things go wrong. Ask any ride owner who's been in the business for more than five years about that, and if they're not full of shit they'll tell you they've been to court at least twice over severe accidents resulting in the death or critical injury of a patron or employee. I'd still ride a carnival ride though; they're too much fun.
I worked for an older lady from the Midwest. She's a grandmother of five, was once a paramedic in her hometown, and, according to some veteran carnies, once set a land speed record on a motorcycle. She and her soon to be ex- husband hauled two rides all over the country for 30 years as independent contractors. She co-owned the company, but caught him cheating, so they split. After the fine print came up and the lawyers had their day, she got left with the older, smaller, and less lucrative of their two investments. She lost her son in law to cancer recently, and her daughter has just been diagnosed. She has lots of shit going on. That didn't make her any easier to deal with. To say that she was difficult would be an extreme understatement but, as colorful as my language often gets, I'd rather not take it any farther than that out of respect for her, because it is a tough fucking business, and those are some tough life breaks. But in the end, empathy and sympathy couldn't take the edge off this confluence of the 3rd and 4th circles of hell enough for me to stick it out.
So, the State Fair of Texas: It's the largest fair in the country. Everyone who works the circuit knows it as the most difficult run of the season, and it’s usually the last. The city of Dallas "maintains" a large, permanent site just for the event. Locals refer to the spot and surrounding neighborhoods as "Fair Park". Ironically, it's one of the worst parts of the city. The second night after work, I started walking off the trailer lot next to the fairgrounds to go and buy myself some food from the store down the road. The Mexicans in the big trailer next to mine asked me where I was going. I said I was going to get groceries; they told me not to leave, said I would get mugged, and invited me to eat with them. We had about three days to set up.
I find the very idea of the state fair mind boggling, vexing, and pretty distasteful in light of the things I now know about just what's really going on, how and why the "thing" runs, who pays the price, and who makes the money. That said, to me it shows, in a strange, miniaturized caricature of sorts, all kinds of things about America.
Upon entering the fair, patrons exchange all currency for coupons that are worth fifty cents apiece, so that items commonly purchased in dollars end up with an inflated price in dollar values, but since people are thinking in terms of big sheets of coupons instead of cash, aren't allowed to spend cash, and get subjected to tons of sensory stimulation, money flies. Thus, most things at the fair sell high, especially food that is very cheap to produce and so unhealthy you'd think it's a damn parody of nutrition; deep fried oreos, twinkies, ice cream, soda, or butter anyone? You can't forget cotton candy. Don't you love it? It's the ultimate confectionary illusion. The things of highest value in a fair aren't bought outright, but won in games; ring tosses, lucky shots, and other gambles. Of course there's the agricultural side of things, which has never never died; stock shows and the like, but relatively few people have any interest in it, and so it's been relegated to a subculture. Mostly, it's about the food like products, the games, the rides, the funhouses.
I have to admit, carnival rides are special things; a synthesis of marvelous engineering, theatrical presentation, and technically accomplished, if really kitschy airbrushed artwork. The way they fold up, fold out, come apart, come together; they're like the biggest, most expensive toys ever. A brand new ride costs $400,000 minimum; prices usually fall somewhere between half a million and a million dollars after transport. Many rides are manufactured in Europe; sometimes their names and even their designs make more sense in light of their countries of origin. Hard Rock and Magnum are both German made, the Space Roller is from Holland, the Storm and the Kamikaze are both domestic, but based on Italian schematics, and both rides share a "smooth" motion; they spin, and swing, respectively. There are others; the Viper, the Crazy Mouse, the Sleigh Ride, Fast Trax, the Windsurfer, and then some. I wonder who conceives of these contraptions in their entirety. Who takes the work of an engineer and turns it into a marketable magic experience? Who looks at a massive hydraulic machine, examines its shape, its movements, rides it, then decides to paint it a particular color, commission art, and call it something thrilling, enticing, and exotic? I could ask similar questions about lots of things, and I do. I wish I could remember all the other attractions on the grounds, but that park is just so big, especially when you include the adjacent areas.
"The lot" is about seven acres of concrete, plus some outlets, spigots, and a bunch of porta-potties that don't get serviced nearly enough. There's also a complex with a company convenience store, a laundromat, and showers. This small town of trailers houses about six hundred people for a month out of the year. Most of them are traveling with a contractor, if they aren't contractors themselves; ride jocks, game jocks, a few concession stand workers. They come from different walks of life, but tend to have a history in the military, industry, or crime, or some combination therein. A large portion are immigrants on visas from Mexico; one company employs about three thousand from a single small city, which goes without most of it's men during the peak of the season, sometime around midsummer, when scheduling for fairs and carnivals in different states overlaps.
The big bosses have trailers that fit on the back of semi trucks just like cargo holds, but they hold people instead; ten utilitarian rooms with cots, dressers, and minimal space for other necessities. The contractors have nicer individual trailers, and the rest have their own campers. All kinds of things go on at night. Usually it’s just people improvising a semblance of home and taking care of daily needs. I see grills, smokers, artificial turf, awnings, plastic lawn furniture, potted plants, boom boxes, and lots of beer. The women do laundry every night, and charge a dollar an item; " I don't wash no socks or underwear, 'cept for me n' my old man's" one tells me. After everyone passes the drug test to work, people start selling pot, pain pills, and crystal meth. I know that some of the women, and a few boys, are getting pimped, or just going at the old profession solo to supplement income.
The Mexicans are always cooking food in a crazy makeshift kitchen of hotplates and plug in broilers that sit on the pavement, or on top of wheel wells. They know how to make this work better than white people, because they make $300 a week and send money home, so they stick together; one guy cooks, another washes shirts in a bucket of water with dish soap, another cuts hair, another washes dishes with a hose, everyone goes in on groceries once a week, but each buys their own soda, cigarettes, and beer. They also stash away coupons they get from working the games and rides and use them for free lunch on the midway during the day.
One night, a guy pulled up next to their trailer while we were eating, all spun out, and, in really broken redneck Spanish, tried to ask permission to park his van on the spot until he got a pass. I told them what he wanted, and they said that they really could care less where he parked, since they didn't own the lot. He gave them all porno DVD's as a peace offering. That shit was so hardcore it's actually illegal to sell in my hometown. Their eyes got huge, like they'd never seen porn like that. Another night, I sat down to have some beers with them, and this obese dude on a golf cart kept dropping off twelve packs; he must've given us about five cases. I asked the guy next to me why he kept giving away beer.
"He owns a game where you have to shoot the cans. If you puncture one, you get a prize. He gives us all the beer we want, as long as we don't fuck up the cans."
"You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Another batch of workers showed up next to my trailer. White guys from Colorado. I met a man in his late sixties who said he'd been a carnie for over thirty years. He smoked mad cigarettes, and his hands were always shaking. He gave me lots of smokes, and coffee every morning. Said he shared cheap motel rooms with some other guys and did day labor in the off season. I later found out that he had fallen off the top of a Ferris wheel about twenty years ago. He spent fourteen months in the hospital, in a full body cast. It had left him with at least his life, despite a slew of joint ailments and chronic pain. He said he worked a game joint now, but still wanted to travel the circuit.
He had also worked for John Wisdom, owner of Wisdom Industries in Merino, CO, whose logo is an owl; they are one of the oldest and most venerated manufacturers of carnival rides in the United States. Soon they'll close their doors for good. Apparently someone from within or without botched contract/s they had with the U.S. military and NASA to build combat and flight simulators, and bankrupted the company. Never would have made that connection myself.
The week went on. Over the course of three days, we set up and cleaned the rides. I started giving some really basic English lessons over beer and tacos; common useful phrases, questions, cardinal directions, pronunciation guides. One guy told me that he sent $480 back home every two weeks, which apparently works out to almost 7,000 pesos. He owns a small plot of land that’s been in his family for a long time (I’d guess generations), and doesn’t have another job in Mexico. Every three months, he nets about 90,000, and he hopes to triple that figure next year. He said that he really wanted to learn English, but it didn’t make sense to him, and I’m not the least bit surprised. After all, it's English, and this is Texas. He told me that so many words with different meanings sound the same, he can’t properly sound out words he reads, the rules change too much, they’re too complicated, that people don’t speak the English he’s read in textbooks. I can actually identify with the feeling, the frustration, just in a different way.
He also told me a story that I’ve heard too many times at this point; about how he wants the best for his wife and kids, how he wants them to learn English, wants to live here. I ponder this. He wants “the best” for them, his idea of it, based on a linguistically limited experience of and participation in this thing called America; this process of feeding individual nightmares and then begging for a collective dream. The best was my birthright, and according to his standards, it was probably yours as well, and if he works hard enough, it may belong to his grandchildren.
If he lives to meet them, they may not even know how to speak Spanish anymore, or they might prefer not to, beyond a few curses and some slang they can use to encrypt their speech when convenient. They probably won’t be Catholic, they’ll confuse him, he’ll see the depth of the changes and, God forbid, maybe even start to wonder why he worked so hard in the first place. The energy their bodies get from food will stop feeding viscera and sinew, and struggle to find new outlets, fuel libidos that may grow insatiable and draining, fill their brains and force gears to turn ever faster, create new cravings, false appetites. They will be left to deal with a realm of desires and abstractions, feeble imitations of the real, vain and monotonous tasks, paltry substitutes for full sensory experience and physical involvement with their environments, vast compendia, rubrics which have no real function other than to establish context and pretext and provide explanations, excuses for the archaic institutions that birthed them. That’s not to say they would live idyllic lives without such a sacrifice on his part. I suppose all ways of life have their trade offs, but I feel that “the best” is long overdue for a reassessment. That said, I’m always happy to teach some English at the end of the day.
The fair started. I’d already been working the ride for close to two weeks. In that time people had offered me some of the strangest bribes: money, food, drugs . . .
“I’ll give you the rest of this beer if you let us ride.”
“Ummm . . . you do know that I have to operate this thing, right?”
“Hey, my girlfriend will show you her tits if you let us ride for free.”
“*long sigh* I want to keep my job. I don’t know why, I just do. And we’re closing. I’m tired. You’re drunk. She’s drunk. Look man, just . . . I don’t have a camera. Go home . . . please tell me you’re not driving.”
I spent most of my time just trying to make sure no one got hurt. Making sure I got everyone locked into their seats, not letting stupid people take really small children who would slip out of the lap bars onto the ride, shit like that. When I wasn’t dealing with people, I just stood in the operator’s booth pushing buttons, listening to pop tunes on satellite radio over the big speakers, watching the ride go round and round and round, the pulsing lights at night. I did that for 12 hours a day, eating large quantities of heavy food, slamming energy drinks just to pay attention, twisting and clasping my hands into different mudras so I could focus. I’d end up so exhausted at the end of the day that I couldn’t even eat dinner sometimes, much less shower, shave, do laundry. It got sucky, but, there’s something about watching so many people have a good time that makes it hard not to have a good time yourself, despite yourself at that. Everyone smiling, hooting, hollering, singing along to the radio . . . kids, scared of getting on the ride, just telling them that it was OK, that it was fun. I wasn’t lying either, I knew it really was fun, especially to them. I’d let people ride for free if they were older, and looked scared, or said they hadn’t done it in years, or if their kids were too short to ride alone but really wanted to. When you see a middle-aged mom or an old man acting exactly like the five year old sitting next to them, it's just, funny, and puts some things in perspective. I can’t explain it beyond that.
Sometime around day five, I decided that things weren’t looking good. The first day I showed up on the lot, the Mexicans told that the last guy my supervisor had hired left after two weeks, because she didn’t pay him. They also told me his name, and a girl had showed up at my ride asking if I knew who he was, where he was, if I had seen him. I didn’t like the sound of it. Other people who had worked with her before warned me that it would be hard to get money out of her, that she still owed them money for helping out at some point or another. As it was, I had drawn $80 the first week to buy food and clothes; she claimed I drew $100, and I had to push her for three days after payday to get the other $200, and this for eighty six hours of work, so, about $3.60 an hour. I’ve told people before that money literally confuses the hell out me, but I thought that I might have the opportunity to save at least a bit, to make my travels easier. I saw that this would get me nowhere quicker than going nowhere on purpose. If I’d known I was in for such a swindle, I would’ve walked to the coast like I’d planned to do in San Antonio. I still have several destinations in mind. I also took some issue with the verbal abuse that she heaped on me and everyone else daily, as well as some demands that, shall we say, would have gone beyond the limits of typical employer employee relations. It’s taken me awhile to learn that some things just aren’t my problem. Her son in law showed up, I personally trained him to set the ride up and operate it. He didn’t like me. She went back home for her daughter’s operation, within two days of payday. I understood how this worked.
I also wanted my guitar, worse than I’ve ever wanted a material possession. My stomach had some kind of hemorrhage that had lasted over a month, and just kept getting worse, not to mention problems with my foot. So, I got up one morning, packed up everything I had, took the $80 left over from expenses, briefly entertained a passing thought that involved setting the trailer on fire, and left. I bought some cigarettes, and a train ticket home. I lost the rest of the money in a hustle before I boarded the train, which didn’t really bother me at the time. I called my mom, and asked for my guitar.
I just had an operation on my foot a few days ago, and I’m waiting on a panel of bloodwork from the doctor. As soon as I can walk properly, I want to be gone again, with a fully functional instrument this time, so I can play music for food and maybe a few motel rooms. I managed a room and a meal about five days a week in Denver, just selling pictures. I haven’t seen any friends, and I probably won’t. It’s nothing against them, because I can be a real asshole, and I’m not easy to be around, but I know where they are, and what they’re doing, and I’d just rather not participate, although I’d really like to talk to some people one on one, face to face. It’s good to see my family. I do love them, but they all want me to stay, and I’m tired of everyone crying like I died, or giving me shit about living a lifestyle that they call pretty stupid, insisting that it will kill me in three years maximum. I’m aware of that possibility, and all I can say is that I’ll do my best to keep from dying, as long as I have as much freedom as possible, and with regard to death: c’est la vie. Things got pretty heated over the topics of counseling, medication, etc. I’ve considered stopping my own ride and just stepping off the platform for awhile, but I don’t think I can do that yet. This is not over.
I went to mass yesterday, mostly to be with my grandparents, and see the church, because it’s the most beautiful in the city. Lots of stained glass windows, dedicated to wealthy parishioners who paid for them, marble statues, gothic arches. The priest who gave the sermon used to speak at St. Peter’s, another church that I was forced to attend growing up. I especially dislike him, but I just sat, quiet, watching everyone, thinking that Jesus probably never existed, but that if he did I wouldn’t mind meeting the guy, or all the guys sorta like him that they turned into him, figuring that he, or they, couldn’t of been like they say, and imagining them throwing a collective shit fit over these last two millenia, just like when everyone was selling things on the temple steps. But I don’t know, maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part, not that I even wish it all that much. I was baptized at this church, my parents were married here. I walked up the aisle for communion, took the wafer, and approached a lady holding the cup of wine.
“The blood of Christ.”
She said, looking me up and down, staring at my shaved head, my boots, my necklaces. I reached for the cup, and she held it back.
“Do you believe?
She asked. I thought about how she didn’t ask what I believed in, or if I believed in anything, or if I believed that something was true, or false, or real, or imagined. She just asked if I believed. I chose to interpret this as her asking if I engaged in the act of belief at all; if that was something, the sort of thing, that I did.
“Yes.”
I said. I drank from the cup, and walked out to have a cigarette.
Thank you very much for reading, whoever you are, really. I’m going to go read some things myself now, and yes, I am going to listen to music.
- Mood:
Neutral - Listening to: Hyperstory - a happening
- Reading: City in All Directions
- Drinking: Tea
Onward.
Content
