I am awakened from a deep sleep by a thud, no, several thuds. A very loud knock at the door, the kind where someone is using their forearm or fist. Jerry, the truck driver, onion peeler, Pall Mall smoker, and Vietnam Veteran sharing my motel, looks up from his bed of a blanket and pillow on the floor of the cheap room in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He looks at me, and I sit up in my bed and give a clueless stare. The door, only three feet from my head, explodes with sound again. “Who is it?” Jerry yells. “It’s Johnny Cash”, a man with a deep voice replies. Jerry looks at me again with a twisted smirk and barks out, “You’ve got the wrong room, brother."
The next morning, the weather turns bad in Albuquerque. Tornadoes, they say, are possible. It’s windy in the morning, really windy. I’m from the Midwest, and don’t know about the desert. My co-workers at "Chuck Charles Whole Hog Wild West Barbeque", selling ribs, chicken, and all the fixings at the New Mexico State Fair, engage in a discussion about tornadoes as opposed to dust devils. “Ain’t no tornados out here with all this sand," Jerry says. “Just dust devils, but they ain’t no fun neither. Big ones like a sand storm. Sand everywhere. Bury you alive. It’s a good thing there ain’t tornados here. See all these rides at the fair? They’re made of pig iron. Big wind pick ‘em up and break up apart. Ever see pig iron go straight through a man? I saw it once in South Carolina. Bad storm at a fair. Wasn’t pretty.” By ten in the morning, Jerry and I decided that if the weather turns really bad and we are going to die today, we will die in a drinking establishment, washing away our sorrows.
They close the fairgrounds due to the weather, and then air raid sirens start, but Jerry and I saw the wind picking up and had already abandoned our posts at the barbeque pit. I didn’t even bother to put out the whole hog, a pig with an apple it its mouth in the center of the barbeque pit, to display on the grill today.
It wasn’t always this way. I was seventeen years old, I had just quit high school in the middle of my junior year, I was a long way from home, in the Southwest United States and completely on my own for the first time, and I was making plans to for my own potential demise.
I started working fairs and festivals when I was thirteen, helping out at a lemonade-shakeup booth at an annual community festival. Working at a festival or fair here or there around Ohio had, by the time I was 15, turned into my first career, working the entire summer away from home, traveling from town to town. I referred to myself as "a food concessions worker at fairs and festivals." I was, as my friends still like to say, "A Carny."
The dive of a bar has a decent crowd for eleven in the morning, just hardcore alcoholics and people from the night shift having an extended happy hour after work, and the TV is turned to the news. A shopping mall a couple of miles from the fairgrounds lost part of its roof in the storm. It’s the first tornado that has been seen in New Mexico in a long time, the TV reporter says. Jerry and I order beers and shots of cheap bourbon. I still hate bourbon today, twenty years later, unless it’s really, really good stuff.
In Ohio where I’m from, I would drink beer, wine coolers, and occasionally vodka mixed with something else. During high school breaks between periods, my best friend Tomas and I would head over to closest Dairy Mart Convenience Store and pick up a six-pack of the cheapest beer we could find. Usually, it was Milwaukee’s Best Light for a dollar and sixty-nine cents. Tomas would sometimes help me escape from high school by dropping me off at my job at the local wedding cake bakery, where I did accounting on the computer, and also helped with the retail store and occasionally the baking or bagging of bread or icing of wedding cakes. That’s true friendship, I think, driving a friend to get cheap beer during a morning break in classes and then dropping him off at work. To this day, Tomas is still one of the coolest cats I know, and we still keep in touch.
The TV news continues, and they are reporting a murder from the night before. Jerry and I both look in disbelief as they say the name of motel where the body was found. It’s our cheap motel, and the room they show in the video clip removing the body in a bag is exactly two doors down from our room. I order another double-shot of bourbon for both of us, grateful that Jerry didn’t open the door of our room last night for the self-proclaimed Mr. Cash, who indeed appears to have had the wrong room.
After the events of last night, Jerry tells me he doesn’t want to share the motel room anymore. He’d rather take his pay for the day and use it on something besides splitting a twenty-one dollar hotel bill with me. I couldn’t really blame him, the room was disgusting, and he slept on the floor. A few nights before the knock at the door, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning feeling something on my chest. Laying on my back, I glanced down at my chest and saw what must have been the world’s largest German cockroach. Or, maybe it just seemed bigger since it was on my chest, and it appeared to be staring me down, or sizing me up, like a boxer ready to touch the gloves of their opponent. I jumped up faster than I ever had before or ever have since, ready to kill or be killed, but the roach moved fast and scampered under a corner before I could smash it with my shoe. This woke up Jerry who looked at me, then looked at the re-run of Sally Jesse Raphael on the television that was left on that night, and then he yelled “don’t make that kind of racket at night boy, I might think I’m getting’ shot or something and turn crazy on ya without thinkin’ about it.” He was a Vietnam Veteran, so I can’t even imagine what kind of things woke him up in the jungle, I just knew I wouldn’t make that kind of noise again. I wondered later if he would have been able to handle our mysterious motel room visitor without issue.
Jerry probably spent the extra money he saved on the motel room on more booze and slept in one of the trucks that carried our wares from fair to fair, I never really knew. I decided the cheap motel was way too dicey to stay there on my own. My boss, Chuck Charles, made an appearance for one of few times at that fair, and offered to let me stay at his mobile home, which he had hooked up at a campground on the outskirts of town, and he wasn't using. The problem was I had to get a ride out there, and he couldn't drive me, he was too busy cheating on his wife. I probably could have driven one of the company trucks there, but my parents didn't let me get my drivers license the year before, when all other sixteen year-olds were sporting their parents wood-paneled station wagons, beater cars, or the occasional new Chevy Chevette, the cheapest car of the day, in the school parking lot. No, I had received the first bad grade of my life, a D in Algebra II my sophomore year, and as punishment, incentive, or whatever it was, I wasn't allowed to get my license. This didn't stop me from occasionally making a delivery run in the van at the bakery, at least until I clipped the mirror of a brand new truck driven by an off-duty suburban police officer. There’s little more humiliating than having to ask your parents to help you fix a problem like that—drive me to the car dealer to buy a new mirror and drop it off at the police station.
The first night to get to the campground I hired a cab, but it turned out to cost as much as the cheap motel. A young Mexican-American family was working at the fair with us; Jorge, Luisa, and their young son Jose. The husband and wife would alternate working the front counter or do food preparation work in the back while tending to their two-year old son. They were from East L.A., headed to Texas, and working along the way. The second night they offered to drive me out the campground for half of what it cost me to hire a cab, and I graciously accepted. They just needed to make “a little stop along the way.”
They drove a beautiful and completely restored large sixties convertible, I’m not sure the make or model, but it did that have feature where it could bounce up and down. We drove to a house, stopping off to pickup a 12-pack of beer to drink along the way. The house was in a working-class part of town and Jorge went in with a wad of cash. There were very loud voices inside, but he emerged unscathed, and we drove away quickly, I’m now suspecting I just witnessed something illegal, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. We drove less than a mile, and I sipped my beer, praying to God that I wasn’t going to get killed and I’d actually make it to the campground, when a police car pulled up behind us, sirens blaring, lights flashing. In my panic, I lofted my half-full beer can out of the convertible, and was instantly scolded by Jorge, “What are you doing!?! Trying to get us busted?” Jorge, who did seem like an honest man, quickly stashed something under the seat. A very tall, very white, county sheriff walked up to the convertible and immediately asked all of us for our social security numbers. We all rattled off numbers, when it was my turn, I gave him nine digits, but I don’t think it was as my SSN. He didn’t seem to care, I was the only gringo in the car, and after checking Jorge’s drivers license and his registration of the car he let us go without so much as a warning. I made it to the mobile home, again unscathed. The next day they didn’t show to pick me up, and we didn’t see them again until the last couple of days at the fair, when they appeared one day and wanted their jobs back. I took cabs to and from the campground for the rest of the trip.
Many of the men I worked with at these fairs, like Jerry, probably couldn’t have worked anywhere else—at least not for very long. Either the Vietnam War, choices they made, or simply life itself, had left them as shadows compared to what they could have been. Jimmy from Illinois, a former boxer, was the comedian of the bunch. A large man with hands at least twice the size of most men, he protected me from getting beaten more than once by someone who didn’t like my smart-aleck mouth. While in New Mexico, he decided to save money by sleeping in the “pot-belly” (a storage area above the wheel well) of one of the trucks. Sometimes at night, when prepping for the next day or just drinking a beer after work, you would see the large steel door of the pot-belly open just a crack, then watch as an one of his extremities appeared and he proceeded to urinate on the ground. The first time I saw this, I laughed so hard that I almost peed myself.
After the new The New Mexico State Fair, we drove to Northeast to Tulsa, Oklahoma for the Tulsa State Fair. Camels, Saber-swords, the Carny Jamboree, and the Snake-Lady would await me there.
The next morning, the weather turns bad in Albuquerque. Tornadoes, they say, are possible. It’s windy in the morning, really windy. I’m from the Midwest, and don’t know about the desert. My co-workers at "Chuck Charles Whole Hog Wild West Barbeque", selling ribs, chicken, and all the fixings at the New Mexico State Fair, engage in a discussion about tornadoes as opposed to dust devils. “Ain’t no tornados out here with all this sand," Jerry says. “Just dust devils, but they ain’t no fun neither. Big ones like a sand storm. Sand everywhere. Bury you alive. It’s a good thing there ain’t tornados here. See all these rides at the fair? They’re made of pig iron. Big wind pick ‘em up and break up apart. Ever see pig iron go straight through a man? I saw it once in South Carolina. Bad storm at a fair. Wasn’t pretty.” By ten in the morning, Jerry and I decided that if the weather turns really bad and we are going to die today, we will die in a drinking establishment, washing away our sorrows.
They close the fairgrounds due to the weather, and then air raid sirens start, but Jerry and I saw the wind picking up and had already abandoned our posts at the barbeque pit. I didn’t even bother to put out the whole hog, a pig with an apple it its mouth in the center of the barbeque pit, to display on the grill today.
It wasn’t always this way. I was seventeen years old, I had just quit high school in the middle of my junior year, I was a long way from home, in the Southwest United States and completely on my own for the first time, and I was making plans to for my own potential demise.
I started working fairs and festivals when I was thirteen, helping out at a lemonade-shakeup booth at an annual community festival. Working at a festival or fair here or there around Ohio had, by the time I was 15, turned into my first career, working the entire summer away from home, traveling from town to town. I referred to myself as "a food concessions worker at fairs and festivals." I was, as my friends still like to say, "A Carny."
The dive of a bar has a decent crowd for eleven in the morning, just hardcore alcoholics and people from the night shift having an extended happy hour after work, and the TV is turned to the news. A shopping mall a couple of miles from the fairgrounds lost part of its roof in the storm. It’s the first tornado that has been seen in New Mexico in a long time, the TV reporter says. Jerry and I order beers and shots of cheap bourbon. I still hate bourbon today, twenty years later, unless it’s really, really good stuff.
In Ohio where I’m from, I would drink beer, wine coolers, and occasionally vodka mixed with something else. During high school breaks between periods, my best friend Tomas and I would head over to closest Dairy Mart Convenience Store and pick up a six-pack of the cheapest beer we could find. Usually, it was Milwaukee’s Best Light for a dollar and sixty-nine cents. Tomas would sometimes help me escape from high school by dropping me off at my job at the local wedding cake bakery, where I did accounting on the computer, and also helped with the retail store and occasionally the baking or bagging of bread or icing of wedding cakes. That’s true friendship, I think, driving a friend to get cheap beer during a morning break in classes and then dropping him off at work. To this day, Tomas is still one of the coolest cats I know, and we still keep in touch.
The TV news continues, and they are reporting a murder from the night before. Jerry and I both look in disbelief as they say the name of motel where the body was found. It’s our cheap motel, and the room they show in the video clip removing the body in a bag is exactly two doors down from our room. I order another double-shot of bourbon for both of us, grateful that Jerry didn’t open the door of our room last night for the self-proclaimed Mr. Cash, who indeed appears to have had the wrong room.
After the events of last night, Jerry tells me he doesn’t want to share the motel room anymore. He’d rather take his pay for the day and use it on something besides splitting a twenty-one dollar hotel bill with me. I couldn’t really blame him, the room was disgusting, and he slept on the floor. A few nights before the knock at the door, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning feeling something on my chest. Laying on my back, I glanced down at my chest and saw what must have been the world’s largest German cockroach. Or, maybe it just seemed bigger since it was on my chest, and it appeared to be staring me down, or sizing me up, like a boxer ready to touch the gloves of their opponent. I jumped up faster than I ever had before or ever have since, ready to kill or be killed, but the roach moved fast and scampered under a corner before I could smash it with my shoe. This woke up Jerry who looked at me, then looked at the re-run of Sally Jesse Raphael on the television that was left on that night, and then he yelled “don’t make that kind of racket at night boy, I might think I’m getting’ shot or something and turn crazy on ya without thinkin’ about it.” He was a Vietnam Veteran, so I can’t even imagine what kind of things woke him up in the jungle, I just knew I wouldn’t make that kind of noise again. I wondered later if he would have been able to handle our mysterious motel room visitor without issue.
Jerry probably spent the extra money he saved on the motel room on more booze and slept in one of the trucks that carried our wares from fair to fair, I never really knew. I decided the cheap motel was way too dicey to stay there on my own. My boss, Chuck Charles, made an appearance for one of few times at that fair, and offered to let me stay at his mobile home, which he had hooked up at a campground on the outskirts of town, and he wasn't using. The problem was I had to get a ride out there, and he couldn't drive me, he was too busy cheating on his wife. I probably could have driven one of the company trucks there, but my parents didn't let me get my drivers license the year before, when all other sixteen year-olds were sporting their parents wood-paneled station wagons, beater cars, or the occasional new Chevy Chevette, the cheapest car of the day, in the school parking lot. No, I had received the first bad grade of my life, a D in Algebra II my sophomore year, and as punishment, incentive, or whatever it was, I wasn't allowed to get my license. This didn't stop me from occasionally making a delivery run in the van at the bakery, at least until I clipped the mirror of a brand new truck driven by an off-duty suburban police officer. There’s little more humiliating than having to ask your parents to help you fix a problem like that—drive me to the car dealer to buy a new mirror and drop it off at the police station.
The first night to get to the campground I hired a cab, but it turned out to cost as much as the cheap motel. A young Mexican-American family was working at the fair with us; Jorge, Luisa, and their young son Jose. The husband and wife would alternate working the front counter or do food preparation work in the back while tending to their two-year old son. They were from East L.A., headed to Texas, and working along the way. The second night they offered to drive me out the campground for half of what it cost me to hire a cab, and I graciously accepted. They just needed to make “a little stop along the way.”
They drove a beautiful and completely restored large sixties convertible, I’m not sure the make or model, but it did that have feature where it could bounce up and down. We drove to a house, stopping off to pickup a 12-pack of beer to drink along the way. The house was in a working-class part of town and Jorge went in with a wad of cash. There were very loud voices inside, but he emerged unscathed, and we drove away quickly, I’m now suspecting I just witnessed something illegal, but I wasn’t sure exactly what. We drove less than a mile, and I sipped my beer, praying to God that I wasn’t going to get killed and I’d actually make it to the campground, when a police car pulled up behind us, sirens blaring, lights flashing. In my panic, I lofted my half-full beer can out of the convertible, and was instantly scolded by Jorge, “What are you doing!?! Trying to get us busted?” Jorge, who did seem like an honest man, quickly stashed something under the seat. A very tall, very white, county sheriff walked up to the convertible and immediately asked all of us for our social security numbers. We all rattled off numbers, when it was my turn, I gave him nine digits, but I don’t think it was as my SSN. He didn’t seem to care, I was the only gringo in the car, and after checking Jorge’s drivers license and his registration of the car he let us go without so much as a warning. I made it to the mobile home, again unscathed. The next day they didn’t show to pick me up, and we didn’t see them again until the last couple of days at the fair, when they appeared one day and wanted their jobs back. I took cabs to and from the campground for the rest of the trip.
Many of the men I worked with at these fairs, like Jerry, probably couldn’t have worked anywhere else—at least not for very long. Either the Vietnam War, choices they made, or simply life itself, had left them as shadows compared to what they could have been. Jimmy from Illinois, a former boxer, was the comedian of the bunch. A large man with hands at least twice the size of most men, he protected me from getting beaten more than once by someone who didn’t like my smart-aleck mouth. While in New Mexico, he decided to save money by sleeping in the “pot-belly” (a storage area above the wheel well) of one of the trucks. Sometimes at night, when prepping for the next day or just drinking a beer after work, you would see the large steel door of the pot-belly open just a crack, then watch as an one of his extremities appeared and he proceeded to urinate on the ground. The first time I saw this, I laughed so hard that I almost peed myself.
After the new The New Mexico State Fair, we drove to Northeast to Tulsa, Oklahoma for the Tulsa State Fair. Camels, Saber-swords, the Carny Jamboree, and the Snake-Lady would await me there.
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