At the Fair

Today,Kristin and I went to the York Fair ,to see a young man I know,play guitar and sing. Well to make a long story short, if he was playing, we could not find him. The fair is a good place to watch people and critique them (make fun of). Not really. Ok really. The place serves nothing but fried food. Fried everything. I had a fried oreo cookie, and Kristin had a funnel cake. We also ordered a large cup of lemonade. The large lemonade dispenser looked like it had some nats swimming in it. Today was the last day of the fair so all the oil and grease had an extra strong smell to it. While there it brought back a memory of when I worked at a fair in Alaska. It was 1985, I think. I was 32 years old. I had already spent the spring and summer fishing and working at different places in Alaska. When the fishing season was over I hooked up with a carnival in Fairbanks Alaska. I ran the Tilt a Whirl ride. When the carnival was over in Fairbanks it moved to Palmer Alaska for the State fair. They asked me if I wanted to go and run the ride there. Since I was not really doing anything else I said "yes". The month was Sept. The Alaska State Fair starts there on about the 16th of Sept. and runs for about two weeks. The days are beginning to get shorter and the temperature was getting cooler. The nights get really cold. All I was sleeping in was a small tent with a sleeping bag. One benefit of working at the fair was you could take a shower every day. When fishing, you don't take a shower until its over. That could be anywhere from one week to three weeks. It really depended on what boat you were on. Anyway back to the fair. You will see why the shower became an important item to me. One night while I was running the Tilt a Whirl ride, these three teenagers were waiting in line. You could tell that they had been drinking. They were getting loud and obnoxious. I just tried to ignore them and hurried the riders on before them so they could get on and get it over with. I wasn't supposed to let drunk people on the ride, but I wasn't about to get in an argument with some drunk teenagers. I would run the ride about four minutes and then slowly stop it for about another minute. When it would stop I would make sure everyone got off safely. It was a fun job and easy to do. Finally the three boys got on with about twenty other people. After about two minutes the ride was running at full speed. For you who don't know what the ride is, it's a large round disk that you stand on. The back part of the wall that you lean against is a wire type cage. You stand with your back to the cage and hold on to these handles as everyone faces each other. As the disk starts spinning I would pull on a leaver and the disk would lift up a about a forty degree angle. You would get real dizzy if it went to long. Like I was saying, the ride had been going for about two minutes and it was all the way up. As I was watching, I could see one of the drunk boys ,turn around so his face was pressed against the cage, outwards facing me. He looked a little green. I was just about to say something, about turning back around, when all of a sudden this red vomit came spewing out of his mouth like a fire hose. Before I could even think what was happening, all of this stinking red puke cheap wine, hit me. I was completely covered. My hair, shirt,pants and shoes. I stopped the ride so fast that the other people almost fell out of the cages they were standing in. While all of this was happening there was this little black kid standing there with his friend. He was probably about 12 years old. As soon as the puke hit me the little kid yelled out "OOOH he hit you". As soon as he said that I started cracking up laughing. I shut the ride down and headed to the showers. On the way, the owner of the carnival ask me where I was going? She started to tell me that I could not just walk away from the ride. She started to get mad, until I told her what happened and she got a good wiff of me. She just said "hurry up, you have twenty minutes". She started laughing too. That is my carny story. At least one of my Carny stories.