Welcome to the Carnival
A boy discovers his father is more than a...uhh...father.
In scraps of memories, in mute smells and pictures, one lost summer of my childhood keeps coming back to me. On a humid, moonless night when the solitary movie theater was dark and my father was away selling VacuLux vacuum cleaners, I took a shortcut home from the river through a tall cornfield. Farmhouses, lit like sparse tabernacles against the pitch black, misguided me to the forbidden side of town. I felt light-headed as I wandered, like a zombie, into a traveling carnival. Amid the discordant whistle of a calliope, drunks and roughnecks from the country pressed against me. I can still smell the exotic animals and damp canvas tents, see the sudden rush of twisted little faces in formaldehyde jars, and feel the chill that swept over me as an error of nature called the Snake Woman extruded her limbless body from a narrow opening at the top of an Egyptian urn. The red-nosed clowns took swigs from bourbon bottles hidden in their pantaloons. The contortionists and fire eaters sweated in the still summer air, plying their trade at the drop of a penney.
For what seemed like endless hours, I ran in and out of different carnival tents, asking the various occupants if they knew the whereabouts of my father, the top VacuLux vacuum cleaner salesman in the county. I broke into the makeshift boudoirs of the performing ladies as they powdered their breasts with talcum.
Had he said “drugged”?
I went to the study and turned on the small desk lamp. Pouring over my father’s encyclopedias I found the description of ergot:
The drug is almost exclusively obtained from infected rye. The active principals of ergot are a number of alkaloids that have lysergic acid as a basic nucleus. Ergot has no external action. When it is given internally it is a powerful stimulant of the pregnant uterus...
I ran down to another part of the description:
Chronic poisoning begins with cessation of circulation, resulting in gangrene, or a nervous disorder characterized by amblyopia, deafness, delusions, and other psychoses. The patient’s waking hours are experienced as dreams.
In an old book my father kept in an oak box, I found a brief history of its purposeful use as a drug:
Used in the Dark Ages as a sacrament by various Middle European religious cults. The last known epidemic of ergotism occurred in France in 1816....
I fell asleep with the book in my lap.
I am desperately running in and out of performers’ tents in search of my father, my queries always yielding the same answer: “Get your ass outta here, kid!” In one of my dreams one night I unknowingly walked into the Snake Woman’s tent and found her lying asleep next to vacuum cleaner attachments. Every morning I would wake up in my own bed, and back at the carnival the next evening Shade would usually say, “Yeah, kid, we got ‘ya home safe.”
One night he put his arm around me and said he was going to give me the big responsibility of guarding the gravel parking lot behind the carnival, where he and the carnies kept their cars and vans. I had never been there, and Shade must have seen my disappointment as I was shunted off to the carnival’s most prosaic job.
My dreams of the previous weeks had been a prophesy of what I was about to do. As I ran and searched through the tents looking for my father, each interior looked familiar, and instead of rebuffs, I was received with hospitality. “Come on in, kid. You in a hurry tonight?”
I pulled away the flap and walked in. My father was seated at a small table, where, across from him, sat the professor.
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
“I’m with the carnival, son.”
I trailed off as I noticed that the professor had adjusted a rubber tube, now fully visible, which emerged from the bottom of my father’s pants and extended across the floor to a bed pan.
“Dad, what is this for?”
“Some of these wandering cultures have been using the drug as a sacrament all along,” said Morel. “It’s part of their religion. You have to have a religion, my boy. If you don’t keep it alive, they take it away from you.”
I watched my father as he daubed on the makeup. His whole measured, paternal presence began to transform in front of my eyes through some effect that mere shading and filling couldn’t account for. There was an art to what he did that went beyond the surface, into the perceiver as well as the object. He applied a strange, shimmering paint in geometric designs that almost danced around the contours of his face like moving pictograms. I saw him get measurably younger until there was a jittery, multi-colored creature in front of me with a plume rising from its head like an Elvis Presley pompador.
Considerate of my confusion, he stopped and looked up.
iction by John Dentino (1990)
I lingered there, sawdust in my shoes, long after my mother, I supposed, had nodded off to sleep under the influence of laudanum. No families were left, only grown-up men, with their dates clutching at their arms. Suddenly a wave of gasps and groans hit the crowd and I craned my neck to see what could cause such cold shock. I climbed atop a wooden platform to get a better look and thought I saw a man bite the head off a long brown rat and expel the red stuff into his hand. Music blared from speakers above my head, and I fell off the platform, losing consciousness to a long dream.
In one tent I witnessed, from behind an Oriental scrim, the transformation of a person who could either have been man or woman, into a creature divided clean down the middle. She discovered me and glared, then laughed. “Would you like me to make you into a girl?” she said.
I sat perfectly still while she applied the white powder and makeup and watched myself soften into a lovely young girl under expert hands.
When I awoke from this dream I was in a little green tent, with the country doctor hovering over me. He turned to the carnies and said, “The kid’s OK. I’d almost swear he was drugged, though.”
The nurse at his side whispered, “Doctor, the ergot poisonings...” and he quieted her immediately.
“He’ll be fine. He just needs to go home and rest,” he said.
“Shade, show the kid out,” said the carnival master. The head roustabout, a husky man who wore a coyote skull around his neck, picked me up and carried me outside, then let me go. When I reached my house it was very late. I tiptoed to my bedroom and slipped under the covers, but the doctor’s voice played over again in my exhausted brain.
For the next several nights, with my father still on the road and without the knowledge of my mother, I lingered till closing time around the carnival.
My father came home at the end of the week and stayed for one night. He smelled like cigars and we played some checkers and laughed, but my mother’s presence made him quiet. He talked about his new vacuum cleaning attachments whenever she entered the room, but after she left he told me something that shocked me.
“No one knows how much I hate selling those machines, son. No one but you. There, now I’ve said it. There’s no other way to make the payments on your mother’s medication.”
Before I knew it, the screen door slammed and he was off in his old Plymouth again. Nights at the carnival became the only things I looked forward to, and soon they paid me to sell popcorn and cotton candy. I thought about joining up and traveling with them, but they were scheduled to leave the state soon, and I didn’t think I could leave my mother..
Shade and a man named Trippie the Clown introduced me to people who seemed out of place at the carnival, like a college professor named Morel, who stood smoothing his pointed grey beard and talking to the dwarves. None of them cared if I drank liquor with them, as long as I only took a small portion. But something strange began to happen. Every night my carnival excursion would end in the same dream:
When I reached the parking lot my feet stopped in front of an old green Plymouth. There could be no doubt it was my father’s; the VacuLux suitcase lay in the back seat, but in the front seat was a pile of women’s clothing. His car was parked in a spot whose sign read “Reserved for Guests.”
The biggest tent was the carnival master’s, a lamplit labrynth of folds and flaps, of flickering silhouettes that suddenly loomed up and flew off the orange walls. Here I asked for my father and was pointed in the direction of the carnival master’s private quarters in the center of the tent complex.
“Meet Doctor Morel, son,” he said casually, as if expecting my arrival.
My heart sank into my chest like dead weight, then began beating again. “Oh,” I said, “I thought...”
“Ergot. It’s the best, son. It’s the best.” He began applying dollops of make-up to his face.
“This is what I do now, son.”
“There’s another carnival coming through tomorrow,” said my father. “They’re mushroom eaters, so we have to clear out before they get too close.”
Morel shook his head with a grave expression, “It’s a whole different class of people.”
The carnival master walked in with Shade, who looked at my father, then at me, and back to my father.
“Don’t worry, Shade,” he said. “My son can drink with us.”
The professor took some glass vials out of a tin box and broke them open into some bourbon. Music started blaring out of the speakers, signalling that it was time for the geek to sacrifice another animal for the impatient crowd. Their yelling and clapping became louder just outside the tent.
“Oooh, baby, we gonna live forever! Welcome to the fuck’in carnival!”
He toasted me, and our glasses clinked together as the rest of the carnies toasted both of us. The professor broke another vial into my glass.
If I ever saw my father after that night, the memory of him just isn’t there. What’s left is a kind of white spot, not a dark mystery that stems from a poverty of images, but a great flash of light that burns its meaning in thousands of images, one on top of the other, for an instant, and can’t be deciphered in a month or a year or, perhaps, ever.