The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(27)
HAIR INGREDIENTS
Day 9 of 150
World of Wonders
June 2013
Story goes: a woman became a carnie because she fell in love with a Ferris wheel. She called him Bruce. For seven years they traveled together. Then, in their eighth season, a hurricane hit their carnival and Bruce was destroyed, sent to a junk lot in New Jersey. She followed him there and, after finding his remains, asked him to marry her. They were wed. She’s working at a sandwich shop to save enough money to have Bruce shipped home to her in Florida.
I am not yet in love with any of the machines but also in love with all the machines. Seeing the half-assembled rides during setup was almost embarrassing, like I was glimpsing them in their underpants, not yet all dazzled up with long stiff arms and flashing lights, blaring the summer’s pop hits. But I like seeing them at night. Powered down. Sleeping.
*
We’ve just returned back from our first Walmart trip.
You want to meet a bunch of carnies? Head to Wally World after midnight when the carnival is in town. Hope they’re a little high, jovial. Hope they’re not squaring off in their rivalries, that food jocks stay in cereal while the ride jocks are in canned soups.
Walmart is an American carnie mecca. It’s cheap, familiar, and the only thing open after the fair closes late at night when we have the opportunity to restock food. Tommy tells us to meet back at the van in an hour, setting us free inside the bright halogen city. “I recommend that everyone take advantage of the, uh, facilities,” Tommy says as we’re walking inside, glancing my way. “As you know by now, the fairgrounds don’t always have the cleanest bathrooms,” he says.
“Or bathrooms at all,” Sunshine pipes in.
“Right,” Tommy says. “And here you’ve got air-conditioning while you shit and unlimited toilet paper. It’s a shitter’s dream.”
Our nine days on the road haven’t included any climate-controlled, toilet-papered, locking bathroom stalls, nor has there been any time to be alone, so even a few minutes by myself in a cool stall is exciting. As are the thousands of possible items to buy stacked in neat rows.
After the bathroom, I wander. When I was packing for the sideshow, I didn’t know what to bring. I still don’t totally know what I need from this shopping trip to see me through until the next, not really, though one thing comes right to mind. I’ve been sleeping on a plastic-wrapped mattress with a leftover sheet from last season, my sweat gathering and pooling around me like I’m a package of hot dogs left out in the sun. Separating sets of bunks in the semi’s back end are wooden boards that create the suggestion of tiny double rooms, though there are no doors. My personal space for the season is the two-foot-by-six-foot bed where I sleep—which also acts as my bunkmate’s step stool for getting onto her bunk—and the small plastic drawers beside it. At least I can try to make my bed my own.
I head over to bedding and am not surprised to see a few others from the crew.
“Why are these so expensive?” Spif asks, walking slowly down the aisle as he eyes the price tags beneath each plastic bundle of sheets. Fifteen, twenty, thirty bucks. “It’s just a piece of cloth,” he says, not picking up any package. “Fucking capitalism. This is some bullshit.”
“Over here,” Pipscy calls, her face free of the bandana she had veiling it all day to keep the sun off. She’s at the end of the aisle, fingering stacks of brightly colored sheets that are priced well below the others. We walk over. The sheets are stiff, the kind of material that will stand up of its own accord. They feel more like the papery sheet draped over your lap at the gynecologist, but they are less than twenty dollars.
“Still expensive,” Pipscy says.
“I gotta go take a draw,” Spif says.
“Me, too,” Pipscy says.
“Already got one,” Sunshine says, walking up behind us.
“You need one?” Spif asks me as he starts to walk away. “Or you got money?
I start to answer that I need one, that I don’t have money, that I’ve been in grad school for years and living on nearly nothing, but I stop. The truth is, I have a little bit of money in my bank account. A very little bit, but it’s there, enough to buy sheets and some groceries at least. This, it seems, is not the case with the other folks on my crew. This job certainly doesn’t pay much. And it’s seasonal. As a greenhorn, I make $275 a week, minus taxes, though the others who’ve been out longer likely don’t make much more than that. Still.
“I’m good,” I say. I could probably get the jersey sheets, six dollars more, softer, more absorbent, but I don’t. I’m embarrassed to have money for jersey sheets. I pick up the cheapest, scratchiest, most miserable sheets I can find, because that’s the team I want to be on.
I’m instructed to get myself food for the next few days—up to a week, Tommy says—plus whatever else I think I need to survive in the bunkhouse. I buy a pillow, the cheapest one I can find. I buy tiny cotton shorts for sleeping, as the bunkhouse is absurdly hot inside the metal truck’s container; a small clip-on reading light for my bed; and food: peanut butter, bananas, apples, pretzels, tuna, granola, hummus, and water.
In the semi’s hallway, we have one tiny fridge, college-dorm-room-size, for all of us to share. But things here are not like things in a college dorm room. Not because this world isn’t full of dreams for the future or folks who like to get rowdy and fucked-up on a Friday night, but because here is “like” nowhere. This is its own universe, enclosed by chain-link fences and kept just outside cities off long dirt roads—close enough to visit but far enough to forget. I’d always assumed the fairgrounds were outside town for reasons of space, but I’m also realizing that there might be suggestions of quarantine.