Chapter 1

I was a wild one when I was a boy. Cock-sure and swaggering and loaded for bear. I couldn't help myself. That's just the way I was.

I was always looking for a chance to bust out and have myself a really good time.

And I had good times, back then.

Good times were part of my life. Part of ALL of our lives.

You see, back in 1974, me and my family (my ma and dad and Cookie) were carny people. We were a part of a carnival that traveled through the south, in the winter months, and the midwest in the summer.

I know we weren't what you'd call "high class" people. But we always had food on the table (in our trailer) and clothes on our backs.

The work wasn't too hard. Well, breaking down and setting up the attractions WAS hard but, after that was done, it was just a matter of tending to the rides. Taking money at the booths. Running the carny shows or fleecing the locals at the chance games.

I did it all. I was good at it.

My family had been with Trooper Midway Shows since I was nine and my sister was seven. That would be eight years at the time of this story. (I was seventeen, going on eighteen, when all of this happened.)

When you're with a carnival, the world is made up of only two kinds of people: us and them. Carny people and straight people. We who supply the fun and games and them who come to have fun, play and lose their money.

Carny people and straight people have an unwritten code of conduct with each other. We look at them as fools and chumps and local suckers and they look at us as scum and filth and crooks.

That sounds bad but it works out for the both of us.

It ain't no sin to take money from fools and chumps and suckers and it ain't no sin to be pissed off at the scum and filth and crooked thieves who fleeced you out of your money.

We weren't really scum. At least, we didn't think so. Carny people are just a very odd group of folks. We seem to find each other and stick with each other because we could never fit in noplace else. And we're a loyal bunch because it's us against them

Leon also had "Zundar the Lizard Boy".

Zundar was me, or one of the other carny guys. We'd take turns. Leon would have us wear nothing but a big diaper and he'd smear us, all over, with this mud stuff and, when it dried, it would get hard and crack and make us look like we had grey scales all over. We had to put on this bald-head cap too. Then he'd chain us to a stake and have us sit in a dark corner of the tent on a bed of straw. We weren't supposed to say nothin'. Just sit and let the chumps stare at us. He'd give us twenty bucks for workin' the show with him.

Me, Glen, Rob, my dad, and Trooper (he was the owner of the Carnival) and his two sons (Nick and Steve) would set up and tear down the rides on the midway. We had a Tilt-A-Whirl, a Scrambler, a Super-Himalaya, a Salt & Pepper (that big thing with the arms that went up and down and spun you till you puked), a Round-up and we had a Ferris wheel (which was a bitch to set up and tear down). We also had about a half-dozen kiddie rides.

At the center of the midway were the games and the food booths. Dad operated them with ma and Sneaky and Will and me and my sister. We had the Rifle Shoot and the Ring-Toss and the Ball-In-The Basket and the Dart-Throw, Skeebo and the Milk Bottles.

My ma did the "Guess-Your-Weight". She was always dead-on.

Dad worked the caramel corn/cotton candy trailer and Gus and his wife Laura sold the Italian sausages and burgers and fries.

I worked the rides and the games. I worked the Ball-In-The- Basket a lot. The baskets were placed, almost on their sides, up against the back of the tent. You had to toss an over-inflated basketball into one of the baskets. It was fifty cents a try to win a worthless stuffed animal and, if you won three times, you could get a TV set. None of the chumps could see the board that pushed against the back of the baskets. If that ball hit in any of those baskets, the hard board would cause it to bounce right back out.

I had a foot lever that I could push and that would move the board back and let someone win. We had to have a few winners or the chumps got suspicious and wouldn't play.

Trooper always had us let the cops win-- win stuffed animals anyway.

Cookie, my kid sister, worked the Ring-Toss or the Dart-Throw. She always had lots of chumps gathered around her game. She was fifteen then. She had, shoulder length, straight, blond hair and bright, blue eyes below her bangs. The guys liked her jugs. They weren't big boobs. Just regular size tits but she liked to wear tank-tops and she didn't like the confinement of bras so her nipples would always push out against the front of her shirt. Cookie didn't like shoes either. She was usually bare-footed or in sandals and she always wore shorts. The change-apron (which we kept the money in) would wrap around her thin waist and cling against her rounded hips like a short skirt. She had long legs and she was thin (like me) and had my ma's facial features, like I do. Ma's looks made me look like a kind of a muscled, "pretty-boy" back then, but (as so many guys told me) they made my sister Cookie look like a foxy little knock-out.

I didn't care about all the guys who would hang around her booth and try to talk with her as she worked. Even though she was slightly built and curvy and pretty, that was very deceptive. Cookie could be a mean handful if you messed with her or got her mad. Eight years of carny life had taught her how to handle herself with the drooling local boys. She made them play, if they were going to stand around and look at her, and she never allowed any fooling around (unless it was her idea).

Cookie always held a hardwood pointer that she used to flip the rings off of the bottles or unhook a doll, from where they hung near the ceiling, when somebody won. She could work that stick like a rapier as she stood behind the low counter, with one foot up on the stand, and ran the game.

She always whacked that stick down, hard on the formica top, and yelled, "Abada! Abada! Abada! Three rings for a dollar! Ring a bottle and win a prize! Abada! Abada! Abada!"

She used that stick once to break some asshole's nose when he leaned over the counter to get a close look at the butterfly tattoo on her shoulder and copped a feel of Cookie's thigh instead.

That dumb bastard would have been better off coppin' a feel of a pissed-off rattle snake.

The cops were called and came but nothin' happened. Trooper took good care of the police, wherever we went, and everybody, in our whole carnival family, was most protective of Cookie.

When we were in the south, we had another attraction. An attraction that was our biggest money maker by far. It was called exactly what it was: a Pussy Show.

Everybody in the southern, Bible-Belt knows what a carnival Pussy Show is but people in the north and the midwest have no idea because we can't do it there.

See, all carnivals, in the south, are expected to have a pussy show and they all do. We were no exception.

The Pussy Show was a big tent with a low table inside, like a small stage, by the back. Me or one of the other guys would stand out front and draw the chumps by yellin', "Pussy Show! C'mon in boys! See the thing that teases and pleases! See it up close! Only five dollars! Pussy Show! So near, you can smell it!"