Carny Clean

A bit of an oxymoron, eh? Dunno what it’s like out on the road, the carnival trail, now but way back then, when I was 'with it' (carnie slang for describing your state of carniehood -- are you with the show or no? Yeah, I'm with it.), indoor plumbing was definitely not something you could expect or count on. We could always dream.

That’s what this story is ultimately about -- my total, utter, consuming passion for indoor plumbing.

Have any of you seen the show Carnivale? To my mind, as much as I recall anyway, the it captured the dusty, gritty, hygiene-free atmosphere pretty damned accurately.

My big question, as we drove to each new spot -- I never lost hope -- was whether it was at a fair grounds. If so, there was bound to be indoor toilets and MAYBE even indoor showers. Woo hoo!

If there weren’t facilities at a non-fairground spot, which was usually the case, we made do-ish. There were often Port-O-Potties and, when those became asphyxiatingly nasty,  nearby gas stations and fast food joints. We mostly played Southern states in summer. Yup, we’re talking minutes, not days, before that level of mind numbing, atrocious reek set in.

Showers were another story.

If there was a water hook up on the lot, a hose would be attached and we had communal showers. Imagine this -- standing behind the canvas draped joints (games) on the dusty bare ground, in a circle of no fewer than 20 people, both genders. These aren’t people you know well and, with some, you hope you never will. Everyone's dressed in loose fitting shorts -- women in Ts and tanks, men shirtless. Along with the water hose, there’s a couple of bars of soap handed around and a bottle of shampoo traveling the circle. Amazingly, everyone -- ride jocks to concession stand girls -- bathed quietly and respectfully.

Freaky!

Now that I think of it, they were perhaps, like me, a wee bit embarrassed over bathing in public. Or maybe they were just concentrating heavily on getting the oil stains out that particular patch of skin.

I wanted to know how everyone else managed to wash their more personal bits so I attempted to surreptitiously watch. Hey, I was furthering my education -- being all anthropological and stuff!  What I found was that:

A) it’s almost impossible to do anything surreptitiously when you’re amongst carnies.
Happily, no one hit me.

B) the men, seemed to do a more careful and vigorous cleaning of their man bits than the women of their lady parts. Yeah, I was so totally shocked, let me tell you.

During the season when we played the south side of Chicago, the married-with-kids types found a campground outside the city -- a safer, more comfortable place to set up camp. The joint had showers and indoor toilets. YEA!

We shared the encampment with a band of Gypsies. For reals. I was so young, so ignorant of the world outside the various small towns my family had lived in, that I thought Gypsies were fairy tale creatures or, at least, people from long ago and far away times. And most definitely European. Hell, King of the Gypsies hadn’t even come out yet. These folks were the same as fairy princesses, trolls, elves and mystical forest dwellers to me.

I didn’t get to know the Gypsies at all -- they were every bit as insular as the Carnies -- and the Carnies were, surprisingly to my naive self, just as hidebound as the rest of society. That the Carnies felt the Gypsies were grifters, cheats and treated “their women-folk” poorly” was hilarious to me. Hello Kettle -- meet Pot. They were two sides of a single coin.

But try telling a Carny anything of that sort. Nah, I’ll save you the trouble. They can’t/won’t see it. Total lack of self awareness is desperately sad. There oughta be telethons and  big pink ribboned charities for this sort of thing.