"Death's Benefits" a synopsis of the carnival. unedited

The customers or ‘mark’s, would come back after riding, a lot of times with “tips” that ranged from money to drugs. I was instructed not to accept them, so I let my alter ego handle that department. 

Sometimes people would pay me to get on, deciding to go on a ride after all but not wanting to go through the hassle of buying any tickets.

 There was a young guy with a crippled arm, that ran a food wagon, who told me that he would watch a joint at each spot, studying the traffic and business. 

He would tell me that my little freak show was getting all the ratings at the Berlin Fair, saying that it was the most interesting and entertaining thing he’d seen since he had been on the circuit.

 Feeling proud that night but not feeling proud enough of myself to want to live; it was a momentary thing. 

Maybe it was ego more than pride or maybe it was blind stupidity but there was plenty of stupidity on the carnival circuit, so I blended right in.

Only they don’t call it stupidity because it’s not at all recognized as anything but normality.

 George Orwell may have written about it already or Hunter S. Thompson, but I am going to try to explain it anyway:

Working for the carnival is just like anything else in life. There are maybe three sides to the politics.

There are ride jockeys, food vendors and barkers, and then there is the management, which would be the governor or dictator. 

The rides are mostly owned by the management except for some privately owned rides that follow along either by invitation or bid.

 Management sells tickets and each ride collects them, each paid a percentage of the tickets it draws. 

Barkers run the games in the same type fashion only it’s cash from the marks, directly into their hand so, even among those with no honor, there is an honor system to split a percentage with the management. 

So you should be able to see how the jockeys and barkers are competing for the same monies.

Food vendors are always neutral because everyone has to eat. The food vendors are like Cleopatra’s in the carnival. 

Fights often break out between the jockeys and the barkers, and it’s always due to their frustrations with getting money out of the marks. 

Either they are just pissed off because people aren’t spending money at the games like they used to, or expect them to- blaming it on the rides, or they claim they can’t be heard well enough over the noise of the sirens and sounds that are used to add a layer of attraction or saliency- calling the attention of the potential riders.

If you want the truth, or my version of it, it's because everyone is so overly self endulgent to be able to make ends meet- blaming their financial strains on anything but the alcohol, gasoline, drugs, and various forms of un earned entertainment they freely shove down their throats- sucking the phallus in their face yet homophobic just the same. 

At then end of the night it’s party time- drugs, booze and sex. Eleven P.M. comes and then it’s all too crazy. The clans group up and who knows what will happen next. 

Someone almost always gets beat up. It’s like the freaking jackals or hyenas on the African plains- 

just a bunch of beggars around me, biding their time until they are completely freed of responsibility as earthlings, ..

earthlings who are sick of having to wash up for supper even.

Biding time until death was mostly what I was doing but I wasn’t dying from anger and hate, I was dying from a broken heart. 

It was typical of me to get mixed up with the dregs of society because I was born, inconveniently. 

And being aware of that, as well as being socially scarred because of it, placed me right where misfits end up a lot of times- on the streets.

Tom Kloosterhouse worked with me at 84 Lumber, where I met him. After I joined the Carnival, he landed a job working with me. 

Now that I look back with my experience on Earth, I see how we both thought it was a good idea- we both had our bells rung. 

My bell got rung six consecutive times in the collision with the Semi, and he got his bell rung when a stack of Trusses fell from their foolishly upright, stacked position. 

So, we both were dealing with concussions. And now that I have been educated on what concussions are, and what PTSD is, I clearly understand why we did something so utterly stupid.

They got rid of Tom over the workman’s compensation suit, and they got rid of me because I was having serious issues with my mathematical computations- being a sawyer and cutting the truss parts, my head injury was a serious issues.

 My numbers were always miswritten or misread, as if I had Dyslexia. That was fine with me because I had enough of that operation anyway.

 Seeing my mistakes was a constant source of frustration and aggravation that only made the drinking and using more consistent, routine and copious. 

Even though it would appear as though I was partying, I was miserable and hated everything I was doing to myself, which only compounded my misery all the more.

So, there we were, him and I, and our demons. 

One night, being locals, we let someone talk us into finding them some cocaine, one of the other jockeys. 

By the time we got back to the lot, we were pretty lit. In the bunkhouse room we were assigned, Tom gets out the coke he had gotten for us and puts down a couple of lines.

 I passed out right in the middle of trying to snort one; my head fell forward onto the mirror. Tom just grabbed me by a wad of hair and scraped it off of my forehead with his identification card. 

It was just an average night in the life of a Carney.

We’d pull out in a day or two and head for the next spot… Gladwin County Fairgrounds, where I’d end up getting fired from the Carnival.

 It wasn’t really a secret that I was playing a drunk but it would be the reason I was given- a simple truth but not the real reasons for getting the axe.

 It was okay with me, I had seen enough. 

The truth was, the guy who ran the bulldozer game was irate over the horns and sirens and the sound system on the Force Ten. 

He was aggravated because his game was placed right next to this ride, for what I saw the second spot in a row, drowning him out and frustrating him in his efforts to draw players. He took this out on me, especially since the female he worked with was admiring what there was of me to admire, while he was intent on getting something from her that was not available to him regardless of if I had any interest in her or not. 

At one point he crawled under the ride and all but silenced the siren by stuffing a rag in it but me, being a take charge kind of fool, I crawled under and found the reason for the sudden change- removing the flannel shirt that was stuffed in it. 

The electrolysis of the big picture made me the zinc plate on this vessel that was almost certain to sink. And I was so green, as Captain, that I had no idea of the type of tact to use to escape the Despondent Sea.

 It was his mutinous attitude, I’m sure, that made the management of Jerry’s concessions decide to keep placing him where he had been placed- probably trying to get rid of him altogether.

The day I was fired was definitely interesting, with my first puker, and a drunken lot lizard. 

The day was just getting started when the kid threw up on the ride. 

Puke went flying everywhere but it was quickly hosed down and ready for the next wave of riders. 

There weren’t really many people around to want to ride except for a couple kids, two fortyish looking partier types and a woman who had stumbled from the back lot, where the campsites were for the crew in the show. 

This woman was pretty loaded, having a hard time walking even. After a long-winded session of her begging, I let her on. When the ride got into full swing, she was writhing in the bucket like she had a broken neck so, I was forced to stop the ride but it wasn’t stopping in her mind. I opened the gate on the bucket while there was a county cop observing- apparently he had watched the whole thing because this woman was a community drunk with mental problems that had been all over the park the night before, combing the place to suit her agendas among the campsites.

 She stepped down and fell into a flailing heap, what looked like tumbling in place. People who hadn’t seen the whole episode had made me out to be an abuser.

The cop, witnessing  entire ordeal, would explain her to me and drive her off of the lot, taking her home.

Fortunately, for me, I had made an impression on the kids in the community. The man who hired me said he was going to drive me back to Grand Rapids. Quickly deciding that was not my intention, I told him that I had family in the area, and that I would just go there.

When I hit the streets, the neighborhood kids took me in. For a while my home was with an eighteen year-old kid with handicaps, both mental and physical. They called him “Mike on a bike,” and he had his own apartment at a complex not too far from the fairgrounds. It was an apartment on the second floor that his father managed to get for him. A very many people were social security recipients at this complex.

 His father said Mike was born handicapped due to his exposure to Agent Orange while on tour in Vietnam that affected his sperm. 

This was the first time I had witnessed a lot of new things that, looking back now, I wish I had sense enough available for any of it to mean something to me.

At some point in my excursions with, Mike, we were at a Pamida grocery store near a Veterinarian, where we ran into a married couple that he knew, and had done odd jobs for in the past. They arranged for us to come out to their house where they were doing work to prepare the place to be their full-time residence, having been relocating there from Bay City. 

One of the tasks for the day was, going on one last moving run. Now, this would have been an excellent opportunity to just have them take me to a relatives house in Bay City but my step-father destroyed all familial security with his taking us far from anyplace where his failures and his many under-achievments could be viewed by any of mom’s relatives. 

I only know that now, where, I could never put my finger on it before. As for what was important to him, self-indulgence, Golf, mostly. He invested all of his time and money on golf. Of all the years he was with us, he rarely spoke to any of his ten kids from his previous marriage. He actually spoke more often of his ex-wife, Gloria, than all of them combined, for whatever reason.

Now, I see how typical this is of today’s so-called man. But it wasn’t his fault entirely. 

For, my own failure at helping myself had created a disaster that I was just too blinded by my own actions and grief to see. 

I was too busy feeling sorry for myself, and too willing to give the control over to alcohol and whatever or whomever else was around. 

My binge drinking and misery would not allow me to see my options in the least. It’s really too bad, and a lot worse than I thought at the time because, little did I know, people that loved and cared for me were there suffering with the complications of growing old, and in dire need of help and support that I could have easily provided. 

We could have helped each other at a mutually difficult time in our lives.

My Aunt Bernice Russo had been afflicted with Polio when she was a very young girl. She was struck down and forced into a wheelchair, where she sat for the rest of her life.

 My Uncle Bill met her when they were in school together, which is when they fell in love. They were High School Sweethearts. 

He had been placed in a convalescent home with Alzheimer’s, and she was at home being tended to by in-home nurses and such. I would learn they passed away twelve hours apart but that would not be until about six months after the fact. 

I recall my mother mentioning the situation of Uncle Bill and Aunt Bern around the time of my divorce in 1997 but due to never receiving anything that I understood as love and affection, I was unable to respond to their needs. 

So poisonous, the regret is, over wishing I had responded to Aunt Bern’s need for my help but I failed us both.

 It was not possible to receive the messages that love and intuition sends, primarily failing because I was polluting myself with whatever I could get while dwelling in self-pity. 

Lobotomized by the closed head injury and alcohol, I remained ignorant. 

Ironically, of all the loss giving me worlds of grief, I was about to lose more, and quite possibly two of the last loving family members I had left.

With Polio at eight or ten, and leg braces and a wheelchair, Uncle Bill never left her side. They were both smokers in high school and their younger days, as many were. 

Most likely a product of the WWII promotions, smoking Camels way back then but they both decided to quit one day, as far as she knew. 

Being confined to a damned wheelchair, she was left only to roam the main floor and deck, which was always odd to us kids because Uncle Bill was extremely inventive, if not ingenious.

Uncle Bill had an air compressor system that he had built out of some automotive parts. And he engineered and manufactured his own boiler system that provided heat and hot water for their home. He also had a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T. God only knows when he bought it but he kept it alive, driving it right up until he couldn’t drive any longer.

Everywhere he went, someone would offer to buy this car- literally begging him to sell it. People would ask him to race, and to see under the hood, really lusting after that car. It was the same make and model that was used on the “Dukes of Hazzard” show. 

Uncle Bill wasn’t selling. This car was being saved for me. He had told me this himself when I was maybe twelve years old. The car is now gone. Nobody knows where it went but one thing I know is, I was never invited or informed of the funeral. 

The funny thing about Uncle Bill, with all of his inventiveness and genius, never built a lift for Aunt Bern to climb the stairs to the lower level. Come to find out, he had his own pad down there, complete with a kitchenette and an exhaust system in the chimney so he could smoke cigarettes.

It wouldn’t be until too late, until Aunt Bern has been long gone, while here at Jackson Prison, that I would finally realize what it was like for her to be imprisoned in that condition, and feeling as lonely as she must have felt. 

She would mail letters to us quite frequently that would always contain pictures and articles from these tabloid type newspapers you find in the grocery store checkout lanes, within reach of her wheelchair: 

Largest ball of twine unwinds; Thirty nine pound cat eats whole pizza; Man with no legs climbs mountain.

There was always a “can-do” aspect to everything she shared with us. 

The problem was, having been going through the motions of life with a dysfunctional family, we were never motivated to write her back, that I can remember or maybe the thought was overridden with traumas from the past or a beating, replaced with the hungers children have for the love they are starved of.

My poor Aunt Bernice was a sweetheart that showered us all with hugs and kisses but having never received them, they were strange to me, and I would cringe and try to resist, like an animal that never has been in human contact.

Odd to look back on, the sheer irony, that I have been literally killing myself, in my search for a place to be in life, and in my head- searching for love and affection. 

And the very people that had it for us kids died before we could become wise enough to understand what they had, which denied them of the love they deserved just as much.

All I have of my Aunt Bernice is a picture of her seated and smiling, spectacles and shawl- the silver in her hair matching the bluish yarn. 

Extremely saddened with the truth in her memory, I realize now how very, very important love is for our children, and for one another. 

It’s the main message in almost every religion, and the Bible: God is Love. Love one another…  

Stealing from our children brings pain to us all, in that moment, in their tomorrow, and finally, to us when we look around and find they’re not by our side when we are transitioning into the final phase of life- our death.

 So, I failed in all respects. That is, if any of it is respectable. It was a perfect opportunity for so much, to come to her rescue, as well as my own.

[I would later hear of how the in-home nursing assistants were unable to move her around without hurting her. 

She really would have appreciated it if I could have been able to stop feeling sorry for myself long enough to see that I was truly needed; 

another irony since I am a Pisces.]

It was a perfect opportunity for me to find my safe haven. It was another perfect opportunity to have love and support that I so direly needed. 

It was a perfect opportunity to position myself to take over the familial reigns, replacing my grandfather- becoming the pinnacle.

I couldn’t help but wonder if having a father to talk to, in this very tough time, would have changed any of it. 

Even still, I am not without the understanding that the drugs and alcohol compounded everything, making it all far worse than it really was or needed to be. 

Stupid me.

I can still hear my Aunt Bern’s voice echo in my head: “Rutabaga soup! Rutabaga soup! That’s all they fed us at the damned VA Hospital!”

Between the memory and a photograph, that’s all I have of my Aunt Bern, and from what I’ve witnessed after the deaths of loved ones these days, it’s probably the best thing I could have.

Thanks, zachery scott polk 

4/24/2017 updated