(no subject)
On the Midway
As he sat somewhere deep in Indiana on the side of the road beneath the awning of the unlit funnel cake stand, Andy Evans chewed on a piece of grass, evaluating his life and wondering if it was time for another change. He’d thought about his life in this way four months ago when he woke up in a trashed hotel room with the cherry of a marijuana joint burning his wrist and two unclothed girls with mascara rimmed eyes lightly snoring on either side of him. Andy remembered them looking twenty the night before, or at least nineteen, but without their clothes and perfectly placed make-up, Andy could tell that the pale skin belonged to sixteen year olds…girls young enough to be his daughters. Girls who swore to their parents that they were having slumber parties at each other’s houses last night instead of messing around with a burned-out wannabe rock star. Andy didn’t think that he’d slept with either of them, but he was so drunk and stoned that he couldn’t remember for sure.
He pulled on his white t-shirt and black jeans. After looking around the hotel room and taking a breath, he caressed the brunette’s cheek with his calloused finger, stuck a twenty dollar bill into the jeans that were thrown beside the blonde, and then smashed the stub of his joint into the carpet: His time here was through. Not just this one night with the hotel room, the girls, the booze and the drugs…but with the rock-n-roll life forever, or at least for an extended period of time so he could pull himself together. As he shut the hotel room door, Andy thought that even if he could never fully regain his dignity, a different lifestyle wouldn’t continue to strip it off of him in layers and then force him to stand up on stage at hundreds of different bars with his guitar and parade his demoralizing self back and forth in front of gaggles of drunken strangers waiting to hear the “Freebird” guitar solo.
He strutted off the exit and onto the interstate in his cowboy boots, walked for a good fifteen minutes, then put his guitar case on the pavement and sat on the guardrail. Despite the humid air that seemed impossible to breathe in and out, Andy felt free and good. The rock-n-roll life seemed adventurous to outsiders, but it had trapped him like a pounding headache, beating him down until he just couldn’t handle it any longer. Andy stuck out his thumb, just knowing that things would get better.
He had the first car (a farmer with a penchant for saying, “ya hear?” after every sentence) drop him off in Leesburg where he pawned his guitar for some cash and treated himself to a cup of coffee and slice of apple pie at a local diner. The world felt so full of possibility: He could get a job, maybe even as a car salesman or something, and in the evenings work on a novel about his road experiences. Or maybe he could cut his hair, use the rest of the money from his guitar to buy a suit, and interview for office jobs. The thought of attending college even crossed his mind. He’d never liked school much as a kid, but things were different now; Andy had read Kerouac, Salinger, and even a little Joyce while the band traveled between cities in their beat-up van, and writing songs had given him an ear for poetry. He would have thought of more opportunities if it hadn’t been for his chatty waitress. She was twenty-two, dropped out of high school at fifteen when her boyfriend knocked her up, married her boyfriend at the courthouse a full day before the baby was born, kept the baby until social services took it away after the police discovered the Meth lab in the shed, and had worked at this diner through it all. And Andy learned that in a mere four and a half minutes.
But after Andy finished his slice of pie, the waitress offered him a ride to Reynolds that he didn’t want to pass up: He wanted to make it as far to the state line as he could before the next day. Even though she had been married for seven years, she told Andy as she gripped the wheel with one hand and touched the inseam of his black jeans with the other, things just didn’t feel right anymore and she wanted out. But she had grown up in Reynolds and it was too small of a town for her to find someone new to make her happy, and this was a problem. As she walked her fingers up his pants like a spider, Andy shuddered and told her that surely she would find someone in Leesburg since it was a little bigger and all. When she winked and replied That’s where I found you, Andy knew that he had a problem as well. He couldn’t even remember her name, and even though he didn’t want the rock-n-roll lifestyle anymore, he certainly didn’t want to settle down in some tiny town and have babies with this cock-eyed crazy. Spotting a Ferris wheel from the passenger window of the Pinto, Andy had an idea.
“When’s the last time someone took you out. Like on a date?” he asked.
“Well. Been at least a decade, I s’pose.” She fluttered her eyelashes, and Andy thought she looked ridiculous. Surely she had seen someone on television try that and it had worked. But for now it served its purpose.
“Pull over.”
So Alice, as Andy had decided to call her since he still couldn’t remember her name and didn’t want to be caught staring at her breast to find a nametag, pulled the Pinto off the exit and into the carnival sight. It was twilight but the air still felt like pudding, and Andy thought he might suffocate if he had to spend a full evening with this woman. Still, he figured that Alice wouldn’t understand a flat out please leave me alone, you are crazy, so he formulated a plan: He figured that she would want to ride the Ferris wheel, the reputation of it being so romantic and all, so when they got there, he would malinger and say that she must ride it and tell him all about it when it finished. If she didn’t go for that, he would promise to win her a stuffed animal and then ride the Ferris wheel with her a second time if she promised him that it wasn’t too scary. Then he would bribe the carny with a ten to stop it while she was on top of the rotation so he could convince someone else in the crowd to give him a ride to Johnsonville or at least Sharpsburg where he could find a roach motel and get some rest.
But losing Alice was easier than Andy thought; before they’d even passed through the muddy field, Alice ran into a girlfriend she hadn’t seen since she dropped out of high school. After she told her friend that she was calling her lawyer about divorce papers then introduced Andy as the new boyfriend she met in Leesburg, Andy politely excused himself to the port-a-john and disappeared into the crowd. As he tried his best to blend in with the children licking their bright pink and blue cotton candy and the teenage lovers walking arm in arm to the Tilt-a-Whirl, Andy thought that he should have felt lost, but he didn’t. In fact, he felt strangely at ease, like he was a kid again watching his father throw ping pong balls into empty fishbowls at their county fair. He remembered that when he was nine, his father landed the ping pong ball into the correct bowl and won Andy a goldfish that he named Arthur and kept beside his bed before he left home with the band when he turned sixteen.
To be safe, Andy ducked behind a vending booth for a moment in case Alice and her friend had tried to catch up with him.
“Hey man, got any smokes?”
Andy looked beside him and saw a skinny boy wearing a backwards hat and denim jeans that were cut off mid-leg. In all of his road travels, he had never seen a male wearing cut-off denim and he had never seen anyone who had them cut off mid-leg. The boy’s dark greasy bangs were long enough that they stuck out from beneath the hat, and he had to brush it out of his eyes between every sentence.
“Sorry. Fresh out. Aren’t you a little young to be smoking?” Andy knew better than to ask that, but he thought that he might have a chance at a normal conversation that didn’t end with a desperate woman feeling up his leg. The boy shrugged as if he’d heard the answer a hundred times before.
“No rules ‘round here.”
“So you work for this operation?”
“Yep. I run the Pirate Ship.” The boy covered an eye with one hand and pulled a invisible sword from a invisible scabbard. “Argh! Not a bad job, matey. Meet a lot of chicks.”
Andy reluctantly pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He tossed one to the boy who caught it between his fingers then lit it with a match.
“Must be a good job. Get to travel a lot, I imagine.”
“Mostly small towns. But chicks from small towns have cleaner pussy.”
Andy lit his own cigarette and thought it was worth a try; it would keep some cash in his pocket until he figured out what he really wanted to do. “Any job openings?”
The kid shrugged again and pointed to a van that resembled the Chevy that Andy’s old band traveled in. “You’ll have to ask Bishop, the boss man. He’s probably sleeping, but if you’re feeling brave, go ahead.”
And one black eye and a kick in the balls later, Andy had a job making funnel cakes with the Bishop Brothers Traveling Carnival. It paid $150 a week, but the benefits included free travel around the contiguous United States, free room and board in the Chevy vans, and like the kid said, clean pussy if Andy wanted it. Sometimes they had to work twelve hour shifts and no days off, but they had plenty of down time in between to shoot the breeze with the other carnies and ride the rides when the carnival closed its gates for the night. Andy had no training or experience in making funnel cakes, but after he watched Chunks, the skinny pirate ship kid, pour the batter into the hot oil, Andy caught on.
“Everyone ‘round here knows how to make funnel cakes,” Chunks said. “Except
Annabelle.” Chunks pirouetted, spraying batter everywhere. “She’s watching her figure.”
After figuring out how to keep from burning himself with the hot oil, Andy found funnel cake making cathartic, even fun. He enjoyed sprinkling the sugar on top then handing it to the children who could barely reach the window. If they dropped it, Andy always made them another one for free. He made funnel cakes for fat people, skinny people, lovers, loners, and everyone in between. And being someone with a slender figure himself, Andy snacked on the dough all day long and never gained a pound.
At nights when the gates closed, Andy liked to amble around the deserted grounds and dream about the future. After working a full month, he felt oddly content here at the carnival, but he doubted that he could do this forever or even much longer. He even considered that eating funnel cake all day would surely give him a heart attack, and then what would he do? And children…when he traveled with the band, he never wanted any of his own, but now that he watched them amble around the attractions with their balloons and sno-cones, he almost wished that some of them were his...especially the little dark haired girls with ribbons in their hair. If he had a daughter he would most certainly want to spoil her, but aside from letting her run around the carnival all day, he wouldn’t have the resources to do that working as the funnel cake man.
Sometimes Annabelle, the leggy woman whose age was impossible to guess, even by the carnival expert, would accompany Andy around the fairgrounds at night and tell him stories about her days as a prima ballerina before she broke her foot and joined the carnival as a contortionist. She always pulled every strand of her black hair off of her face and into a tight bun and wore thick black liner around her green eyes. Andy had heard that she had slept with all of the male carnies and made more money than any of them because she kept Bishop happy, but Andy enjoyed her stories about a world that he had never heard much about. She told of fancy dinners, her ex-husband and pas de deux partner who left her for the male set designer of The Nutcracker, and how she would to wear diamonds on every finger before she had to pawn them to pay her old rent. She also told of stages and bright lights, which Andy thought he could match with his stories of being a musician. Annabelle would cackle and say Oh sweetie, that’s not the same, but Andy didn’t take offense. They were both here now, and their stories about the past became an enjoyable way to pass the miserably humid nights that made Andy’s growing hair stick to his forehead in curls.
Annabelle wouldn’t ride anything but the carousel, and when she did, the lines around her eyes disappeared and her smile and laugh contained none of the bitterness and contempt they did when she talked or twisted her ankles behind her head. Andy loved to watch her climb on the unicorn and throw her head back like she was a child again, without the mark that the unforgiving adult world left on her. Andy thought that he just might love her, but he’d never been in love before, so he wasn’t sure what it felt like. His mother left a month after she had him and his father never remarried, so he didn’t even have anything to model. The best he knew of love was the two girls he left back in the hotel room the day he left the band and hit the road, and the few girls here and there that Chunks had offered to him for one night stands.
But he wanted to love Annabelle; he wanted to hold her in his arms alone in the van at night instead of sharing it with two other sweaty guys. He wanted to know that she was with him at night instead of with another carny or worse, Bishop himself. He made her a funnel cake in the shape of a heart one day, forgetting what Chunks said about her watching her figure. Of course she didn’t eat it, but he could have sworn that when he presented it to her, something happened in her face like it did when the music of the carousel started. He could have sworn that maybe she wanted to love him a little bit too.
As he sat awake at night in the sweltering van, he thought about what it would be like to stop in the next town with Annabelle and settle down to have a family. Andy hadn’t even kissed her yet, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about their future. He imagined her response; she would laugh and say something like Oh sweetie, you know I’ll never settle down, but maybe, just maybe she would think twice about it and give Andy a chance to give her the things in life neither one of them had experienced, like the kind of love that didn’t need jewelry, fancy dinners, or even carousel rides. He wanted to try with her, even if he didn’t know the best way to proceed. The temperature dropped a degree or two every night, and soon the Bishop Brothers Traveling Carnival would finish their east coast run before heading towards California for the winter. Andy figured that he and Annabelle could get off in a nice Mid-West town and start again; they wouldn’t even have to tell people that they use to be part of a traveling carnival if saying it aloud would embarrass the former ballerina.
Soon Andy’s fantasy exploded into the two of them settling down in a nice ranch style home. He would work as a restaurant chef and in the evenings he would write his novel about road life (a dream he hadn’t yet shook) while Annabelle would teach ballet classes at a local studio and home-school their two darling dark haired daughters which Andy would let Annabelle name whatever she wanted. In the early fall when the carnival would come through town, Annabelle and Andy would take their daughters to the fairgrounds; Annabelle would ride the carousel with them and Andy would win them goldfish just as his father had done for him. When their daughters came of age, Andy and Annabelle would tell them the stories of real carnival life, but not ones hard and truthful enough to diminish the bright watercolor pictures of Ferris wheels and cotton candy that their daughters would dream about every summer night until the carnival’s arrival.
Andy knew of his competition in his pursuit for Annabelle; all of the carnies were male except for the midway performers like Annabelle, who was much more attractive than Beatrice, the bearded lady, and Julie and Julia, the virgin conjoined twins. Julie and Julia weren’t terrible looking, and of course, they were the pinnacle of almost every male’s fantasy, but they would barely speak to any of the other carnies, more or less have physical contact with them. Chunks had bragged about sleeping with both of them, but no one believed him, even after Beatrice found a pregnancy test beside the midway performer’s private port-a-john. So every male carny constantly flirted with Annabelle, even before the gates closed. They would put a “Closed for Repair” sign on their ride then come and watch her pull a thin leg over her head and stand there as if in a trance while children scurried around her and tried to touch her black tights that she always wore despite the heat. All the while the carnies would smile with their crooked teeth, trying to catch her attention for even a moment. She usually wouldn’t pay any attention to them, but there were nights when Andy would wait for her to come out of the tent and she wouldn’t; sometimes he didn’t have a choice but to presume that she had headed out the back of the tent with someone else. He wanted to tell her that the others just wanted her for one thing, but he wanted her for everything. But during the moments they shared alone, it never seemed like the right thing to say.
And when he didn’t see her, Andy liked to tell himself that maybe she just needed some alone time, that he had not seen Timmy from the Haunted Tent go into an empty van with Annabelle and it did not rock back and forth ten minutes later. He told himself that if it was Annabelle in the van with Timmy, which he was sure that it wasn’t, that she would come back to him tomorrow night, that he shouldn’t worry about the things he could not control or change. But some nights when he was alone, he would wander restlessly around the rickety, rusted equipment and empty vendor stands, knowing that no matter how much he fantasized about settling down with Annabelle, it wouldn’t happen. She had lived this life for too long and he hadn’t lived it long enough. This was her home, Annabelle had settled down, and the closest he could come to having a normal life with her would be to stay with the Bishop Brothers Traveling Carnival forever.
But the thought of her with any of the other carnies or worse yet, a local at the town where they were currently stopped, began to drive Andy out of his mind. For three nights in a row he hadn’t seen her, and the longer he thought about it, the more he concluded that he would never see her again. She had decided that the carnival life wasn’t for her after all; she had met a single dad who brought his son to the carnival on his day off from doing brain surgeries; or maybe her ex-husband became straight again and left New York to search for her and bring her back to their mansion on the hillside. As Andy thought of these scenarios, he walked on the midway, picked up the giant hammer, and struck the bull’s-eye as hard as he could. And even though someone had turned it off, Andy saw the marker going all the way to the top and it made him feel good.
When they packed up after their last day in western Ohio to head for Paragon, Illinois, Annabelle had not returned and no one waited for her. Andy found Chunks by the Pirate Ship and asked him if he’d seen her, but his answer made Andy’s heart deflate like the blowup obstacle course that they had dismantled that morning.
“Carny life, man. Who knows. Timmy did tell me that he saw her come out of Bishop’s van crying. Had a stack of money...and you know that Bea found that test the other day...that’s why I stick with the locals, man.”
And then three hours later, there Andy sat somewhere deep in Indiana on the side of the road under the awning of the unlit funnel cake stand, thinking that this show had nothing left for him to see. He started wondering about Paragon, Illinois, and what he might find there. He didn’t have much cash (although he couldn’t remember what he had spent it on), but now that Annabelle had disappeared, he considered leaving carny life behind him just like the rock-n-roll life that he grew to despise. Or maybe, he thought, maybe he could buy a new guitar and start up another band, a country music cover band that would be much less rowdy. Andy had always leaned more towards country than to rock, anyway. Surely some bars in the Midwest would appreciate a decent country music cover band. But then he remembered how much he didn’t even really enjoy playing the guitar when he did it for a living, and that the only perks of the job were the things that kept him up at night with guilt.
Chunks would return soon with the part that the van needed, and maybe a couple cheeseburgers, then he and Andy would get moving again until they reached Paragon. After a while all of the eastern towns had started to look the same to Andy, whether they were in Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, or even Alabama. He wondered if the Midwest towns would feel any different or if he would even feel the change of the seasons when they headed towards the west. Ohio had felt the same as the rest. And although his old band had toured almost nonstop, they’d never crossed the Mississippi, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to all that much.
Andy promised himself that he wouldn’t think about Annabelle, but he did. He thought about her so much that he could feel his heart tighten in his chest. Sometimes he would say their names together over and over again in his head until they muddled together. Andy and Annabelle. Annabelle and Andy. Andy and Annabelle. AndyandAnnabelle. He created memories of her that didn’t exist; what she would smelled like when she stepped out of the shower of a morning (mangos with a hint of lilac), what kind of vegetables she would buy (always tomatoes and green peppers, sometimes radishes), and what kind of movies Andy would take her to see (mostly dramas, but she would compromise if Andy wanted to see action).
Andy had only fantasized once about making love to her lithe frame, and after he finished masturbating, he felt as guilty as he had after the night he spent but didn’t remember sandwiched between the two teenaged girls. Those were the only two sexual experiences that made Andy feel ashamed, and though it made sense that he would regret the incident with the teenagers, it took Andy a couple of lonely hours along the Indiana roadside to untangle this odd feeling towards Annabelle, a woman who had been married and supposedly had her share of carnies after the neon lights turned off and the Tilt-a-Whirl stopped spinning. Maybe it was because Andy had romanticized her back into the flawless prima ballerina that she had once been, someone twirling on a stage that Andy couldn’t go near. A small part of him even considered that it was better this way; if they would have settled down in some Midwestern town, they would have eventually grinded each other’s nerves down to nothing, especially in the ranch style home that wouldn’t give them the space and open air that the carnival life did.
But he couldn’t get Annabelle out of his mind, and he worried about her living out in the world without him. Andy surmised what had happened to Annabelle and why she left Bishop’s van crying: Either she’d gotten knocked up and Bishop had given Annabelle her last wages and told her to hit the road or he had given her the money to get rid of it and come back when it was done. And although Andy wanted the best for Annabelle, he couldn’t help but hope that she’d had an abortion and would meet up with the carnival once they made it to Paragon.
And after a trucker dropped Chunks off along the interstate, Andy replaced the fuel filter and the two continued on the straight road with the gray, unwelcoming sky pulling them closer and closer to Illinois. Although Andy would have rather propped his head on the passenger side window and sleep, Chunks told him all about how so many things had changed since he had joined up with Bishop Brothers just a year and a half ago.
“For one,” Chunks droned as Andy struggled to keep his eyes open, “We had the Scrambler back then but not the Tilt-A-Whirl. And I use to work the elephant ears before Bishop bumped me up to the pirate ship, but what I’d really-”
“She won’t be back, will she?” Andy interrupted.
“Buddy, I’ve tried to tell you all along. With the carny life, you never can tell. But it’s doubtful.”
Chunks didn’t talk much for the rest of the ride, and Andy almost wished that he hadn’t mentioned Annabelle. The silence gave him more reasons to think about her and more time to wonder what had happened and what would happen to her. He was ready to set up the carnival site and hear the whoosh of the rides, the laughter of children, and the tinkling music of the carousel, though he knew it would make him remember her again. And although Andy hadn’t seen rolling hills for two weeks now, it wasn’t until they had been in Illinois for a few hours and were finishing setting up the rides with the other carnies that Andy started to feel exposed and small, like the smallest zephyr could carry him away to the next carnival site where the same thing would happen over and over again until he landed in the Pacific Ocean. Andy had never pitied himself like this before, but he had never thought that he loved someone, and now he had convinced himself that he did love Annabelle, even if had no idea what love should look or feel like.
Andy couldn’t sleep that night. He rolled around in the van and tried to find a cool spot on his pillow, but it would only give him a few seconds of comfort then he would have to start searching again. He stepped over Chunks (who didn’t sleep with a pillow or blanket and whose snoring sounded like a chainsaw), and he walked out on the wet grass. Someone had strung white Christmas lights around their camp so the carnies could see, but the lights made Andy feel nostalgic and depressed. His dad had decorated the house with Christmas lights one year only, the Christmas after Andy’s mother left and before Andy had turned a year old. His dad never took the lights down, but never turned them on any Christmas after that. They became part of the scenery that made Andy’s life, and he figured that the unlit Christmas lights still hung around his dad’s old house like the bulbs on top of his funnel cake stand that went out weeks ago. Andy knew that if he mentioned the unlit bulbs to Bishop now, they had a chance of being replaced for next year’s east coast run.
Feeling restless, Andy shoved on his cowboy boots and walked towards the carnival site. The place looked so abandoned and dead at night, and even though he experienced the fair almost everyday, it was hard for Andy to imagine the red, blue, and green lights that twirled and blurred as rides spun, the sweet smell of the fried funnel cakes and elephant ears…it was hard for Andy to imagine the giggles of children on the baby rides and the cries of toddlers who let go of balloons with hopes that they would fly back to their chubby hands. He kept hearing an old Bruce Springsteen song float through his mind, one he used to play in his rock and roll days, and the line “you know the Tilt-A-Whirl down by the South Beach drag, I got on it last night and my shirt got caught” played over and over again in his head like a broken record that no one was around to pick up the needle and turn off.
As Andy made his way to the Ferris wheel, he thought about how his existence kept spinning in circles just like the ride: no matter what he did, he felt like the life of a drifter was one that he could never escape yet never get used to. He cranked the Ferris wheel into gear and hopped on a seat, swinging back and forth like an ornery twelve year old boy. He hummed to himself as he went higher and higher. He got closer to the top and wished that he would get stuck all night so that he wouldn’t have to even think about going back to sleep. He could just sit up there and look out onto dark Paragon, Illinois, and wonder about Annabelle and what he might do next. He could search for her, but he didn’t even know her last name or if she had one. Maybe if he stayed with Bishop he would get a raise and operate rides, or even do something on the midway like guess ages, weights, and birthdays. Andy thought that if Annabelle did come back, the first place she would come would be the midway, and he wanted to be the one to welcome her home. Andy took a deep breath and exhaled, thankful that he could do that now since the air was less humid. When his car reached the top of the Ferris wheel, Andy lifted up the bar and swung his legs again. The car squeaked, and he wondered if he would ever be able to stop thinking and wanting something more: He wondered if he could ever enjoy his life for even a second, like the brief moments that Annabelle let go of herself when she rode the carousel. From the top of the Ferris wheel, Andy looked down and could have sworn that he saw a skinny, graceful figure waiting for him at the bottom. But without the carnival lights, it was too dark to tell for sure.