To be honest, I’ve never had fun at a carnival. I always get sick. Once in fifth grade my mom took me to a carnival in a neighboring town, where I went on The Cobra to impress a group of older girls with big earrings. On the way home I lay across the backseat with my arm over my face and refused to speak, except to demand that the radio be turned off. Since then, I have only been to a few carnivals; once, when forced to go on a school fieldtrip (waited in the bathroom until my friends thought I was lost, then sat on a bench and fed French fries to geese); again, to a carnival with my friend’s family one summer in Cape Cod (held back vomit on the way home by focusing on the bald spot on the back of her father’s head); then to this Washington Street carnival freshman year (afterwards we came back to “party” and I pressed a cold beer against my cheek and went home to lie facedown on my bed); and once to a carnival two years ago on a first date where I threw up behind a building. That last time on the date I didn’t even go on rides, I was just hungover and got carsick on the way there.
This time I didn’t get sick, but only because I’ve turned into my mother. When I was five we went to Disney World, and my mother rode only the teacups, but she refused to let anyone spin them. Laughing families whirled around us while we sat there, silently, moving in a slow circle to the groaning tinkle of Disney music. I said DON’T touch it, she hissed. I’ll never be like that, I thought, no way.
But then there I was with Peter, ticking off the rides I refused to go on. I refused to go on the Gravitron, the Round-em-Up, the Ring of Fire, and anything else that spun in unnatural directions. Can we go on the Tilt-a-Whirl? No. Can we go on the merry go round? No, that’s boring. Can we go on the Dragon Wagon? No, that’s a child’s ride.
The first ride we went on was 1001 Nights, a row of yellow seats that spun around like unnatural clock hands. At one point, in the middle of hysterical, miserable laughter, I looked over at Peter and yelled, “A carnival is the most overrated thing ever.” He kind of smiled and yelled back, “You made me come here.” It’s true, I did. When the ride was over, the safety bars released and we saw that they had left strange wet spots in our laps.
The carnival had all the typical stuff—sleazy looking people harassing Peter to win me ugly toys, pimply girls in tight outfits holding ugly toys as status symbols, kids hyperventilating for extra tickets, mothers with stringy blonde hair smoking cigarettes while their children rode the carousel, fat people selling fat food, and teenage boys in carefully askew visors loitering around the Gravitron.
The Gravitron is the coolest ride and I should have remembered this from high school. They made me go on the Gravitron once during that eleventh grade field trip before I ran away and it felt like my brains were seeping out the back of my skull and my muscles were turning to mayonnaise. Afterwards I sat on the curb and said all I really wanted to do was people watch, seriously. And no, I wasn’t hungry. Or ever again, probably.
Mostly then, as now, I just wanted to walk around and eavesdrop and write down what the weird people looked like. “We should remember all the details about these nasty people, okay?” I said. “We should also remember the volume of our voices,” Peter answered with a sidelong look.
I lost three dollars playing the machine gun game, and spent eight dollars on fried dough and Italian sausage. The food was actually pretty cheap, and admission was only a dollar. It was the end of our visit to the carnival, and we used our last tickets to ride the Ferris wheel. At the top, we saw the sun setting in a pastel sky behind the witchy monochromatic woods of Middletown. At the bottom, the sweaty, expressionless ride operator in sunglasses and a leather Broncos jacket.
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