Carnivals and carnivores

The time arrives for Manny and I to go our separate ways. He's ready to get across Australia and fly to India. We'd caught a ride in a semi to the next town - a couple hundred miles. The semi was part of a traveling carnival - hauling the Super Slide - and we had been offered some work. Manny had an uneasy feeling about working for the carnival. I let myself get caught up in the adventure impulse. It sounded cool, getting picked up hitch-hiking by a traveling carnival in Australia and then working for it for however long. What could be more classicly random? I tell Manny I'll meet up with him in India but I never see him again. It turned out that he was pretty dead on about the carnival folks. In the states we call the people who work them carnies, in Oz, they call them showies. So, I end up working the carnival in Australia for 5 or 6 weeks. I help set up the Super Slide and the Bumper Cars in each town and then helped break them down in a mad rush like the very devil himself was spurring us on with his leer, horns and trident. During the carnival, I am the ticket guy for the Super Slide. The kids all come up and throw their dollar coins at me. I sit back and watch. The social behavior is strikingly different between the Caucasian Ausies (CA) and the Aboriginal Ausies (AA). The CAs and AAs rarely associate. The CAs social structure consisted of the classic nuclear family - 2 parents 2 kids and the boys had little toy guns which they used to pretend to shoot everyone with. The AAs typical socail structure consisted of 2 women and 3 to 8 kids running around without shirts on. They were free and wild with musical voices, smiles and sparkling eyes. Sometimes I'd see the AA male. The ones I saw were almost always drunk. The empty wine boxes are everywhere, blowing across the outback like tumbleweeds. Some of the Aboriginal kids run by me without paying, flash me a smile, climb up the slide, fly down it, again and again. I pretended not to notice. I don't really care I guess. The whole monetary thing feels like outdated scaffolding to me anyway. The end of my showie days approach, I feel isolated and friendless. All the showies are in to drinking and fighting. And surprise surprise, there are no chicks. In there eyes, I am a sepo or yank tank (Ausie slang for Americans) and a vegetarian to boot. Finally we arrive at Katherine, in the Northern Territory. Some showie punk decided it'd be funny to rip out the last page of a sci-fi book I'd been reading. This became the last staw. I approach little Elwin and tell him that I am quitting. He pushes me. I start to get angry and then I see the fear in his eyes and I watch him shrink. I grow and walk away slightly stunned at the ingrattitude. I'd been working 10 hours a day for next to nothing. I walk from the fairgrounds to the town and easily find a hostel. It's filled with girls but I am invisible. I spend one night there. The next morning I walk to the edge of town with my thumb out but no one picks me up. I hear a bag flapping in the wind, caught on barb wire, it calls to me. I walk over, unwrap it from the wire and start filling it up with garbage: beer cans, candy wrappers and square cardboard tumbleweeds...