Revoltingly Young (28 page)

SATURDAY, September 3 – Payday at last. I got my $95 in cash, just the way I like it. No deductions for Uncle Sam or Social Security. Why should a kid have to fork over part of his meager wage to underwrite the retirement of a bunch of free-loading Baby Boomers?

That was today’s good news.

The bad news is that two of the younger roustabouts left to go back to college. Which freed up Randy to move back into the bunkhouse trailer, specifically the roomette adjoining mine. His repulsive unwashed person is now installed on the bunk directly below me. Yuck. I can feel waves of Randroid creepiness oozing through the thin divider walls. Not to mention the tinny blasts of his cheap radio tuned to the trashiest possible rural lowlife station. The idiot also smokes in bed and very likely will incinerate both of us one of these nights.

We jumped this morning to Grangeville, a small prairie town at the foot of the Bitterroot Mountains. I’m supposed to ride in the cab of the generator truck, but I find I can grab another hour’s sleep by staying put in my roomette while we roll along. Although Grangeville is the seat of Idaho County (which is larger than the entire state of New Jersey), only 3,300 reclusive folks call it home. The population of the county is barely 15,000, but Mr. Patsatzis is optimistic that a large fraction of them will turn out for the circus. After all, what else is there to do around here? Not that they have much time to think it over. After three shows today, we jump again tomorrow. Mr. Patsatzis says small towns can be lucrative–especially on big holiday weekends–but it doesn’t pay to hang around.

Time to man the bounce house, a task I’m now coming to rate even below toilet swabbing. All that boinging up and down must addle those little kids’ brains. They become so loud and unruly I just want to murder them. And their obnoxiously indulgent parents are so damn protective. Hey, why shouldn’t I give their little bastard’s arm a slight tug or twist when he disobeys my instructions? What I really need is a cattle prod to handle the kids, a whip to use on their parents, and a machine gun to take out those sneaky fabric slashers. Too bad life can’t be more like a video game–extremely violent with many satisfyingly sadistic opportunities to score.

5:47 p.m. Looks like my acrobat lessons are over. I was taking a ten-minute break between shows with Miren on the trampoline when her father told me to lay off. He wasn’t very nice about it either. He said it was a “professional circus prop,” not a toy for anyone in the company to use. Miren protested, but he said their insurance doesn’t cover use by “outsiders.” Guess I know where I stand with that dude.

As I was walking back to the bounce house, Señor Nunez stopped me to say he has something to show me. No, he wouldn’t say what it was, but he invited me to have a drink with him in his trailer after the evening performance. Should be interesting, since Miren says his decor is not to be believed.

SUNDAY, September 4 – I’m screwed. I mean like totally screwed. Things are still a little fuzzy. I remember going to Señor Nunez’s messy trailer, furnished in ornate kid-sized Mexican furniture. Kind of surreal with this mind-boggling clutter of clown memorabilia packed in everywhere. I remember he was drinking rum in pineapple juice and fixed one for me. Rather tasty and tropical. Then things start to get hazy. I remember feeling woozy like I was going to throw up and then I must have passed out. Later (much later?) I woke up damp and shivering. I was lying in a ditch in the middle of a forest. How I got there I couldn’t tell you. A half moon overhead gave off enough light for me to see I’d been dumped beside what looked like an old logging road.

Crawling to my feet, I was trying to curse that damn dwarf, but my mouth wouldn’t work. It was stuffed with little squares of paper. I spit out this sticky wad and was trying to figure out if it was a message or Sarah Nunez’s death certificate or something when things began to get really weird. It felt like the trees were starting to close in on me. I sat on a rock to get my bearings and tried not to panic, but I kept getting more and more anxious. I started hearing these strange noises like animals creeping up on me and weird voices of people I couldn’t see. I could feel muscles in my body I’d never noticed before clinching up and shutting down. Then it felt like my mind was somehow becoming detached from my body and that was really scary. Complete and total panic set it.

I shut my eyes and saw eight glowing red eyes staring back at me. That wasn’t working, so I opened my eyes and saw my hands and forearms were now covered with tattoos. Only these tattoos were moving like some kind of animated nightmare cartoon. Then I really lost it and threw myself back into the ditch. It felt like the ground was moving under me like I’d landed on a pile of 500 squirming rats. I started to scream, only it sounded like the massed voices of an entire city, a whole universe of people. Then I watched terrified as two furry arms unwound from my stomach. Fearing they were going to strangle me, I thought my pounding heart would burst, but the arms embraced me gently around the shoulders, which felt oddly comforting, although I didn’t like the prickliness of the hairs. Somehow I could sense the touch of every individual hair. I also could sense a different color for each follicle, including a whole galaxy of luminous colors that were entirely new to my eyes. I stared up at the moonlit trees, which seemed to take the shape of infinitely branching geometric designs. I watched fascinated as the stars in the violet-black sky rearranged themselves to form new constellations and pulsed out profound messages directly into my brain.

Don’t ask me how long I lay in that ditch. It seemed like hours and hours. I saw vision after vision like I’d plugged into some miraculous alien world. Sometimes I shivered from cold and sometimes I felt a warm tropical breeze like I was lying on a beach in Hawaii. Then the night sky began to lighten and I could feel the furry arms gradually release their grip. I became aware of a shooting pain in my hip from where I’d been lying for hours on a sharp rock. I crawled to my feet again and started walking back and forth to get warm. I had a sweatshirt on over my t-shirt, but was very, very cold and my teeth were chattering.

I tried to get a sense of where I was: steep hills covered in dense forest. I figured I probably wasn’t that far in off some highway, but I didn’t know which way to walk. I listened for the sound of passing cars, but heard nothing except morning bird chatter. I still felt woozy and a little sick to my stomach. I wasn’t sleepy at all, even though I’d been awake most of the night. I found the wad of paper I spit out and examined it. Little paper squares covered in brightly colored designs. Didn’t mean anything to me, but I stuck the soggy mess in my pocket. I felt around in my other pockets. No wallet and no cell phone. That dwarf had cleaned me out. I was starting to feel hungry too.

I remembered from somewhere that if you’re lost in the woods, it’s best to walk downhill. So I set off down the logging road. Every time I came to a branch in the road, I took the lane that appeared to be going downhill. But I must have missed the turnoff to the highway. I walked for hours and wasn’t getting anywhere. Sometimes the roads I followed petered out and I had to backtrack. The sun was well past overhead when I came to a big mountain stream tumbling down through giant boulders. I took a long drink of the icy water and decided to follow the stream as best I could. I struggled around rocks and over ravines for at least another hour when I rounded a point and spotted an old guy in boots up to his waist standing in the stream and flicking a fishing rod back and forth.

The men weren’t too happy to see me. It was a guy in his 30s named Gary and his laconic father-in-law. They had driven there in a four-wheel-drive pickup with a camper mounted on the back. At first they wanted me to wait until Monday afternoon for a lift back to Grangeville, but I managed to talk Gary into interrupting his trout-fishing holiday to give me a ride back to the highway. He also grudging fixed me a peanut butter sandwich. The trip back to the main road was 13.7 miles by Gary’s odometer. It appeared I’d been walking entirely the wrong direction the whole time. Gary said if I hadn’t found them there was not much between me and distant Montana except thousands of square miles of national forest. He dropped me on the asphalt and pointed the direction I should hitch to get back to Grangeville. Not many cars came by, so it was dusk by the time I made it back to the fairgrounds.

Of course, the Hercules Circus had long since departed. I walked around and found most of my stuff dumped in a drainage ditch. I shoved the muddy clothes into my backpack, rescued my battered poetry book from a puddle, and retrieved my $5 laptop from where it had lodged behind a rock. The thing still works as demonstrated by this sad blog entry, which I’m typing at the rear table of the only café still open this time of night in Grangeville. I just ate an entire extra-large, family-sized pepperoni pizza and still feel like I could wedge in another slice or two. Thank God, for the $50 bill in my shoe. Never did find my cell phone, so communication is a problem. No, I don’t know where the circus was headed next, and nope I never bothered to write down their phone number. No, I don’t have a place to spend the night.

As I noted before, I’m screwed. Big time.

MONDAY, September 5 – Labor Day in Grangeville, Idaho. Not the most festive of holidays in this burg. Most of the stores and businesses are closed down tight, including the café where I was hoping to eat breakfast. So I had to content myself with a plastic-wrapped pastry from a gas station. I asked the clerk why I couldn’t find a working pay phone in town. She seemed to think it was because everyone had cell phones these days. So sorry, but company policy prevented her from letting me use their phone. She suggested if it was an emergency that I walk over to the sheriff’s office and ask to use their phone. Of course, that was the one building in town Dr. Richard Kimball and I weren’t going anywhere near.

It had rained overnight, but I had stayed dry. If you walk down a residential street in small towns in rural Idaho, you’ll discover that lots of houses have trailers or motorhomes parked next to them. And in such locales people are not as inclined to lock their doors. The second trailer I tried was unsecured. Smelled a bit musty inside, but I made myself at home. Didn’t dare switch on a light, but I found a sleeping bag rolled up in a cupboard so I didn’t freeze. Slept like a dead dwarf, but woke up early enough to sneak out without being seen. The RV toilet flushing mechanism didn’t seem to be working, so I left behind an unpleasant memento in the bowl.

3:13 p.m. I’m in a laundromat in a little shopping center. My clothes are finishing up in a dryer. I knotted my soggy poetry book inside a t-shirt and tossed it in as well. A nice Mexican lady with four little kids just lent me her cell phone and I made a collect call to Veeva in L.A. Actually, she was in Newport Beach where she had been dragged by her parents to watch young Nipsie (the real one) compete in a video game tournament. Therefore, she could not access a computer to look up the Hercules Circus tour schedule. She did clear up a few mysteries. She said the knockout drops they used on me were likely chloral hydrate or gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), which are popular “date rape” drugs. She knows all about such menaces because her paranoid mother is always handing her articles to read and warning her never to leave her beverage unattended at parties. The little paper squares are called blotters, and each of them contains a potent hit of LSD. The normal practice, Veeva informed me, was to put one or two of them under your tongue. Packing in a great wad of them definitely was not recommended.

“
Sounds like someone wanted to send you on a very bad trip,” she commented.

“
Yeah, well, they did.”

“
Have you had any flashbacks yet?”

“
No,” I replied, alarmed. “Is that common?”

“
Mostly for chronic users, Noel, but since you did a whole lifetime’s worth in one night, you may have some. Don’t they know anything about acid in Owatonna?”

“
That’s Winnemucca, Veeva. No, we’re totally into meth there.”

“
I hear that stuff turns your teeth to cheese. God, Noel, what are you going to do?”

“
I’m considering therapeutic suicide.”

“
I guess you’ll have to stay put. I’ll overnight you another cell phone and the circus schedule in care of general delivery there. It should be at the post office by Wednesday.”

“
Oh, fuck!” I groaned. “Can you add some cash too?”

“
I’ll try, Noel. God, the situations you get yourself into!”

I didn’t point out that I wouldn’t be stranded in Podunkville, USA with an acid-fried brain if it weren’t for her.

TUESDAY, September 6 – More rain. Cold too. Does Idaho go straight from summer to winter? I’m holed up in the little public library. They have a computer with an Internet connection, so I was able to find the circus schedule. I also e-mailed Mr. Patsatzis that I had been inadvertently detained in Grangeville and to please hold my job open for me. Also did some emergency research on LSD flashbacks. They can happen anytime–even years later! I did find out that many famous people have taken LSD and still get written up regularly in
People
magazine. All of which makes me hopeful that I have not permanently toasted my brain.

I got kicked out of my trailer last night. The homeowner’s little ratty dog sniffed me out and barked his damn head off like I was Charles Manson on a crime spree. All the other ones I tried were locked. So I sat up in the laundromat until it closed at midnight, then crashed behind a dumpster in an alley. I don’t know how the homeless survive in cold climates. Perhaps they don’t and nobody cares. First thing this morning after the stores opened I blew $8.99 from my dwindling stash for the warmest thrift-shop coat I could find. I think it may be intended for chicks, since the buttons are arrayed down the wrong side. Plus, in direct daylight the burnt rust color veers suspiciously toward pink.