You only get one first rodeo.
Mine happened on a hot Thursday afternoon in July of 1967.
I was a wide-eyed twelve year old with a little money, exactly one dollar and Seventy-five cents. That was the first dollar I ever earned. A neighbor, Mr. Mackey, had paid me to mow his lawn that morning. My landscaping career was just getting started and Mr. Mackey was my only customer. My first efforts lacked a certain something called quality. But Mr. Mackey patiently pointed out that I was not overlapping my rows with the lawn mower and therefore I left ridges of un-mowed grass. The lawn became a maze for rabbits. Additionally I failed to trim the grass around all the trees. He had a lot of trees. One other thing, his wife, a Rubenesque woman, hung her laundry on the clothesline, including some exotic undergarments. At least they were exotic to me. I had to duck under her dainties as I mowed.
It seems strange now, but that was the first time I had more than a dollar that was truly my own. I was thrilled beyond belief.
Time for this cowboy to ride his bike into town and go to the annual fair, Frontier Days. Every July, the Chamber of Commerce organized a three day carnival. Frontier Days included a sidewalk sale where all the store owners put out the crap they couldn’t get rid of the rest of the year. Various charities had booths with games of chance. More booths pushed cotton candy, hot dogs and popcorn. There was a beauty contest and a band concert on Friday night, a parade on Saturday morning and rides. Frontier Days was created solely to separate locals from their money.
My family lived a little more than a mile and a half out of town. I asked mom if I could ride my bike to Frontier Days. She replied ok, but I doubt that she listened to my question. I had the opposite of helicopter parents. She raised nine free range children. I could have asked if it was OK to go dinosaur hunting down by the river and she would say, “Be home for dinner.”
The first thing I did in town was buy lunch – a hot dog, popcorn (extra salt and butter), a large coke and a massive, greasy and sugar coated hunk of fried dough. Just what the doctor ordered on a humid ninety three degree afternoon. I slammed that food down. This wasn’t a leisurely fine dining experience. Chewing was optional; I was too excited.
Next I focused on the rides. Unfortunately, the operators were still bolting the contraptions together. For a while I watched them assemble their machines like the world’s largest Erector Sets. Years later I read stories about how these things flew apart with catastrophic consequences because many carnies shouldn’t be trusted with the safety of hamsters, much less human beings.
After half an hour, I got bored and went to the sidewalk sale. Nothing caught my eye. The clothes store, Langworthy’s, offered argyle sweaters and socks – with the temperature over ninety, the sweaters weren’t jumping off the shelves. The drug store, Wilson’s, featured decades old bottles of cologne, eau de toilette. The toy store, Taylor and Seiler, might have had something of interest. Sorry, pal. They were pushing outdated board games and lame magic tricks, stuff they bought eighteen years ago and sat on ever since. On to the sports store, Sportsman, I was not in the market for a new hockey stick or used ice skates in July.
Eventually the rides opened. I still had seventy-five cents and a choice to make. Some rides were fifteen cents, but the good ones were at twenty cents. What distinguished a good ride was its size and the thrill quotient. A merry-go-round or ferris wheel had negative thrill quotients. The best rides involved heights, speed and sudden changes in direction. I desired thrills. My first choice was The Octopus. It was big and fast and complex and black. The Octopus had eight arms extending from a center pillar that spun around. The pillar was offset so as the arms revolved the riders went up and down. You sat in buckets at the end of each arm. To add to the dynamics each bucket rotated on its own. The person who designed The Octopus deserved Nobel Prizes for physics, biology, literature and peace.
I was the first customer to buy a ticket for The Octopus. I was the only customer to buy a ticket for The Octopus. So I laid my money down and jumped into my bucket.
That’s when I met The Carny. I had never encountered anyone like him; he oozed malice.
He was what I called old at the time, over 30. He wore peg leg jeans with the cuffs turned up about 6 inches to expose his tough guy biker boots. The sleeves on his tee shirt were torn off so you saw his crude prison tattoos. He tucked his shirt into those jeans so everyone could appreciate his wide leather belt with metal studs and a huge turquoise encrusted silver buckle. His jeans and tee shirt featured festive grease stains where he wiped his hands. However, he polished his boots to a high sheen, probably a habit left over from a stint in the military – I’m thinking dishonorable discharge. He pulled his long dirty dishwater blond hair behind his massive ears. The lobe on his right ear was partially bitten off. The cigarette in his mouth came from the pack of Chesterfields tucked under the left shoulder of his tee shirt. The carny was skeleton like; he had no butt and skinny arms with ropy muscles. His sunken cheeks carried the scars of a horrific battle with acne. Several teeth had gone MIA and the survivors were more green than white. His intense blue eyes looked at me with contempt. When he took my ticket I smelt his sweat, tobacco and Budweiser, the breakfast of champions; I also saw he had a huge black eye.
He fell out of Stephen King’s imagination and into my life.
What could go wrong?
We waited for the more customers to arrive. Nobody came, so after five minutes he fired up The Octopus and I was flying solo.
Everything was fine for the first two minutes, the standard length of a ride. This buckaroo had his thrill and was ready to move on.
The Carny had a different plan. He wasn’t going to let me off. As the ride dragged on, my lunch said, “You idiot, why’d you eat me and get on The Octopus? Chew your food next time, numb-nuts.” I experienced a new level of dizziness. Three minutes into this astronaut training I asked The Carny to stop the ride each time I whizzed past him. At first I just asked. Then I begged. For a while he looked at me, smiled, and waved. Then he started to just look away. He knew he was torturing me and enjoyed it. At one point he even walked over and talked to the operator at the next ride, The Scrambler. They were probably former cellmates. I flew around for about 20 minutes. It felt like three hours before a line formed at the ticket booth and the SOB stopped the ride – only because he had to.
I fell out of my bucket onto my hands and knees. I climbed to my feet and staggered away from The Octopus. The new riders laughed at me, including a couple of my classmates. The Carny had humiliated me, literally brought me to my knees. I sat in the shade of an oak tree and sorted out what had happened.
To this day, I wonder why he did it. Maybe he wanted to give me a bonus ride because he liked the cut of my jib. More likely he was a sadistic bastard who hated twelve year olds with money to blow on carnival rides. Here it is over fifty years later; if I had to guess, he’s dead. Hopefully he changed his evil ways or at least tightened all the bolts before torturing his customers.
It was a long pedal home. All my remaining change had fallen out of my pocket. The Octopus had eaten it all. I was physically and emotionally exhausted with a throbbing headache. But mostly I was angry at myself for being a patsy and resolved never to let it happen again. The end of my childhood began that day and it hurt.
That was my first rodeo. I made it home for dinner, but never told mom or anyone about the Carny and the Octopus.