This story takes place in the summer of 1978. The title was borrowed from a song written by Rick Danko, Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson and performed by The Band, but the tale itself belongs to Billy Morton and his special friend.
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Chapter 1: The Carnival comes to Colonie.
There was a time in this fair land when carnivals used to travel up and down the east coast of the United States during the warmer months, following the good weather as they pitched their tents in small towns for a week at at time.
The rides were put up and taken down time and time again, and although their safety may have been questionable, I don't recall any accidents in the years that the outfit stopped in our town, and they provided entertainment back in the days when there wasn't a Six Flags around every corner, and watching TV meant a choice of 2 or 3 channels at best.
The people that traveled with these rag-tag caravans were more entertaining than the rides were, and we used to enjoy making fun of the motley looking crew as they tried to hustle us into playing their rigged games. Since they seemed to corral plenty of rubes into losing their money on games of no-chance, I suppose that in the end they got the last laugh.
They arrived on Sunday to set up so they would be ready to operate on Monday through Saturday before breaking it down late Saturday night and moving on to the next town. By daybreak Sunday morning they would be gone again until the next July. I knew the routine because they held the carnival just down the road from my house, on a field that was unused the rest of the year.
Out of the twenty or so years that I lived there, one year stood out for me for a very special reason. It was the summer of 1978, and the O.C. Buck Shows were making their annual visit to Colonie, New York in July. Many of my friends had just graduated high school and some of us were going to college, while the others were just living from day to day with no real plans for the future.
We had summer jobs during the day, and the nights were spent chasing girls or drinking beer. If you had the beer, the girls would follow, for the most part. I was hopeless, though. Shy and insecure, I didn't usually bother chasing girls because I knew they wouldn't let me catch them, so I concentrated on sports. While I would have much preferred talking about getting into Diane Lambert's pants, I settled for knowing how many doubles Chris Chambliss had.
The first night that the carnival was open, tradition dictated that we all flocked as a herd to check it out. Why we felt the need to do that, I'm not sure, because it was the same thing every year. Same rickety rides, and the same crooked games run by people with few teeth and fewer scruples, but our attendance was a ritual that reflected the boredom of our lives in the dog days of summer.
I remember being on The Scrambler that first night, when for some reason, it started running slow and never sped up, which made for a boring ride. They stopped it, and called for somebody named Ken to come fix it. Naturally, we hooted and hollered and bitched about it, and sat in the cabs while a guy jumped the low fence that surrounded the ride and weaved through the metal maze to get to the mechanical part in the center.
It was a skinny guy in a tank top and bib overalls that jumped up on the thing and started cranking something around with a wrench. For a skinny guy, he had pretty big muscles with tattoos bulging on his arms, and he was really busting his ass to do whatever it was he had to do to get the ride going again.
He jumped down and went back around the fence to a board where the operator ran the controls. The operator stepped aside to let the mechanic play with the controls for a minute, and the ride started moving again right away, only this time it started whirling around at top speed, and we all cheered this Ken guy for a job well done, He gave us a half-hearted wave in response to our ovation, and after watching the ride spin long enough to make sure it really was fixed, headed off to parts unknown.
As I flew by this Ken, I noticed something strange. I thought I was seeing things, but regardless, I couldn't wait for the ride to stop so I could ask the guys if they had noticed what I did. They hadn't, and thought I was crazy, or just seeing things when I told them about it.
I hadn't been crazy or hallucinating, and after asking a couple of questions of the single-toothed ride operator, I confirmed that my observation had been right on. The guy Ken that had fixed the ride, was not Ken after all. It was Kim, and Kim, as I had noticed in a fleeting glimpse from my perch in the ride, was a girl.
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Chapter Two: Kristy McNichol.
Happy to prove to all my friends that I was an astute observer, I gave them all the word that the Ken had in fact been Kim and was a girl. They were not impressed, which shouldn't have surprised me, but for some reason did anyway.
"Who gives a shit?" was the response from Dan.
I did. I thought it was neat that a girl could do something mechanical like that - something none of us would have had been able to do in a million years - and besides, I thought she was cute.
"You would," I was told.
I did, and as a matter-of-fact she reminded me of that girl on television. Kristy McNichol; haircut and all.
"Kristy McNichol is a dog too, and besides, whatever he or she is, we're talking about a fucking carny here, Billy!" Tommy opined derisively, and his human laugh track Dan howled in agreement.
"Check her out closer," I pleaded. "Don't you think she's cool looking? A little like Mackenzie Philips too, maybe."
"Mackenzie Phillips? One look at her and I can't get a boner for a week!" Tommy insisted, to a roar from some of the guys.
I should have known better than to admit to being attracted to somebody, let alone somebody not classically attractive, but my mouth had worked faster than my brain once again. Should have learned my lesson by now, I remembered with considerable anguish, as I recalled that time back in school saying that I thought Lois Randall was beautiful.
Lois was what some might call a hippie, but I preferred to think of as more of a free spirit, similar in build to this Kim girl but in a more feminine package, and after mentioning I thought that she looked cute I was ridiculed and had to hear about my questionable taste for months afterward. How long would I be forced to pay for this latest expression of my taste, I wondered?
My friends didn't want to chase after this Kim girl, so I didn't say anything else about it, but instead kept an eye out for her as we walked the grounds. At least it hadn't rained, so the walking was easier than it would become after a storm, when you would have to clomp through the thick mud and soggy hay they used to absorb it.
***
Chapter Three: Billy's Girl.
We were screwing around with the guy that was operating one of those rigged games - you know the one where you try to shoot out a red star on a card using BB guns with crooked sights - leading him on by pretending that we were actually considering letting him hustle us, when my friend saw her.
"Hey Billy," Dan called out. "There's your girlfriend over there."
Sure enough, it was Kim. She was pulling a hand truck loaded with boxes, and I stared at her bicep with the tattoo of an anchor on it, thoroughly fascinated. I don't know whether or not it was because she was doing stuff that you would normally consider man's work, but she was hypnotizing to me, and so I found myself following her as she delivered the supplies.
My group of friends proceeded to follow me, in an effort to make me feel as embarrassed as possible. Obviously I was not the most popular guy in the group, but this was common practice with all of us at the time. Giving each other a hard time was a way of life, and we all took pretty much as much as we gave, and this was apparently going to be my turn yet again.
Kim had stopped the hand truck at the french fries stand and was effortlessly passing cases of cooking oil up to the counter person. How sexy she was, I thought to myself while watching her work. She was wearing a white tank-top t-shirt under a pair of bib overalls, and as she lifted things her formerly skinny biceps bulged and the muscles rippled beneath.
"Hey, it is a girl," Jerry proclaimed loudly. "You can see her tits from the side! She's got hangers!"
"Oh, now I see why Billy boy is all hot and bothered," Dan observed. "Check out her pits!"
"Lois Randall revisited," chimed in Tommy, who knew me too well.
"Maybe she's got hair on her chest too."
"Ask if it grows down to her balls."
"Fuck all of you guys!" I snapped before stomping off in the other direction, violating the cardinal rule of hazing. Never let them know they got to you.
