Stalking the Nightmare (40 page)

What did I do? I was a gopher.

“Hey, kid, go fer some coffee.”

“Hey, kid, go fer some canvas.”

“Hey, kid, go fer that spieler, Sam.”

Furless, beardless, clawless, I was a gopher.

I was a honeydipper in the hyena cage, I was a shill for the hanky-panks, I was a lookout for the laws, I was a water boy for the girls working the kootch bally, I was a swamper in the cookhouse. I was three months worth of scut, and didn’t know how crooked the whole operation was, till we got busted in Kansas City, Missouri.

The show had moll dips, it had cannons, it had boosters and paper-hangers, it had everything but a square deal for the marks who frequented the flat stores on the midway and came away lucky to have their shoe soles.

One of the cannons tried to whomp a guy for his wallet in K.C. Turned out the guy was an assistant D.A., fifteen years on the Force, and he threw the muscle halfway across that time-zone. The entire carny wound up in the K.C. slammer.

Pretty quick, everyone was sprung. The “management” couldn’t afford to have its crew locked up for very long: first, because there were dates that had to be played in towns down the line, and second, because there were enough complaints and warrants out on that show to send
everyone
away till the next Ice Age. So everyone was sprung.

With two important exceptions.

The first was the geek. The second was me.

Anyone unfamiliar with the term “geek” should seek out and read William Lindsay Gresham’s now-classic 1946 novel, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, for the most chillingly accurate description ever set in type. A geek is usually a wetbrain; that is, a young or old man so far gone into alcoholism that his brain has turned to prune-whip yogurt. When he sweats, he sweats sour mash. A gilly locates a skid hi whatever town it’s in, and carries him to the next stop, and as many stops as it can get out of him before he either dies or wanders off. For the splendid honorarium of a bottle of gin or two a day, the skid will dress in an animal skin, go without shaving, sleep in a cage, and on cue wallow in his own shit, eat dead snakes, bite the head off live chickens. No reputable camy will carry a geek. It is a terrible thing. It plays to the basest hungers and most primal fears in the human repertory. Anyone who could derive enjoyment from watching a debased creature, seemingly only half-human, scuttling across the floor of a foul, stinking pit or pen, smearing itself with feces, rubbing its privates on the gnawed skin of a dead rattlesnake, moaning and rolling its eyes as it devolved before one’s eyes, reverting to a stage of subhuman existence not even Cro-Magnons knew … such a person is beneath contempt, lower even than the poor bastard in that cage.

I have seen hordes of rural goodfolk, pillars of their communities, churchgoing Christians and advocates of the Protestant Work Ethic, who devoutly enjoyed watching a geek. Stand behind the tent flap. Watch. You’ll learn more about human nature than you ever wished to know.

The geek and I were thrown in the drunk tank, a holding pen, together.
He
wasn’t sprung because he wasn’t really “carny,” he was a pickup, and there were skids all along the road, so why spend hard cash on a slob so beneath notice that he couldn’t even be thought of as human? I wasn’t sprung because I wouldn’t give the cops my real name; I didn’t want to go home.

So the gilly took off, minus their geek, minus their gopher.

I spent three days in the K.C. slam with that old man, that subhuman geek.

I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since 1947, in that cage in Kansas City, that I haven’t thought of that old drunk.

Three days we were locked together. The hacks, the guards who shepherded us, even they didn’t want to get near us. The smell and look of that geek made them want to puke. They used to slide our food through the bars on the floor, at the end of a pushbroom, I was scared, and ill.

Because they wouldn’t give him anything to drink, and he started having convulsions. He whimpered all through the night, and in the mornings his face was bloody and his lips bitten clean through. Along about the second day he went crazy from delirium tremens, and he climbed the bars of the free-standing cage where we were penned, and he began smashing his face against the metal ceiling. He fell and screamed, and lay on his back on the metal floor, moving his legs and arms idly like a turtle on its shell. His face looked like a pound of raw hamburger. And he smelled.
A
special smell. Not just his pants full of shit, and his clothes stinking from the dirt of his carny pen and garbage; he was sweating sour alcohol. A special smell. I’ve never forgotten it. I can’t describe it to you … it smelled like such and such … there is nothing to compare. A million dead bodies turned up in a communal grave, maybe. But I’ve never forgotten that smell.

I don’t drink. I have never drunk.

Finally, on the third day, they took me out. They had to. The Pinkerton Agency men my family had hired to find me had contacted the K.C. police. There had been missing persons flyers sent out on me, dodgers they were called; and someone in K.C. had matched a dodger with my description, even though I wouldn’t tell them my real name or where I was from. And the Pinkertons sent an operative and he came and took me back on the train to Ohio.

I had spent three months with the carny.

And there was very little of romance or adventure or swashbuckling about it. All I came away with was the smell of rotten liquor sweated out through gray, dead skin … an even greater hatred of cops than I’d had to begin with … and the cynical, deadening, utterly inescapable knowledge that if one stands behind the tent flap and watches, one learns more about the darker side of human nature than any kid should ever know.

The Author, besotted with humility, would like to take this opportunity to thank all the
little
people whose support and assistance made his climb to the top possible: Lemuel Gulliver; Billy Barty; General Tom Thumb; Barbie & Ken; Dr. Miguelito Loveless; the representative of the Lollipop Guild; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Scott Carey, the Incredible Shrinking Man; Tattoo; and all the gang over at Dr. Cyclops’s.

But seriously, folks. I couldn’t’a done it widdout’cha, friends:

Diana Adkins, Sid Altus, Isaac Asimov; Richard Fontaine, Dale Hardman, Bobbie J. Kroman and Willie Wilson of B. Dalton Bookstores; Greg Bear, Alex Berman, Arthur Bernhard, Ben Bova, Mayer Alan Brenner, Jeff Bridges, Edward W. Bryant, Jr.; Sharon Buck, Mark Carlton, Alan Chudnow, (Ms.) Marty Clark, Jon Clarke, Ed Coffey, Catherine Crowell; Arthur Byron Cover, Lydia Marano and Linda Mayfield of the Dangerous Visions Bookstore in Sherman Oaks, California; Buzz Dixon, Clint Eastwood, Audrey and Edward L. Ferman, Charles Garcia, Mel Gil-den, Joanne Gutreimen, Burt Handelsman, C.E.; James Haralson, Joe L. Hensley, Walter Hill, Richard Hoagland, Michael Hodel, Nancy Hodel, Terry Hodel, Stephen King, Steve Kirk, T.E.D. Klein, Cele Goldsmith Lalli, Shelley Levinson, Barry R. Levin, Tim Lewis; Jane Mackenzie in a class by herself; Elinor Mavor, Jon R. McKenzie, Larry McMurtry, Joyce Muskat, Sharon O’Hara, Frank Olynyk, Jerry Pournelle, Eric Protter, John Ratner, Mary Riordon, Jeff Rubenstein, Bonnie Sue Russell, Jared Rutter; John Sack, W.W. Scott, Larry T. Shaw, Robert Silverberg, Judith Sims, Tad Stones, William Stout, Genadie Sverlow, Leslie Kay Swigart, the impossible-to-locate Mike Taylor; Emily Boxer and Tom Brokaw and Jessica Savitch of the
NBC Today Show;
Dan Turner, (Ms.) Randall Warner, and my former editor at
Future Life,
the long-suffering Bob Woods.

For each and all of you, a blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: “God be between you and harm in all the empty places you walk.”