or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Bucketeer.
The Beginning
I am half-naked and chained to a bench. Spectators pass by, half of them asking my price, the others scoffing at my depravity. My captives draw the curious crowds closer, taking their money in exchange for the promise of a spectacle.
It is the third week of the Renaissance Faire, and there is no sun at the drenching booth today. Our ‘wench’ being doused is a bearded man in a corset and dress we’re calling Esmeralda, who is battling today’s hangover with last night’s peyote. For two dollars, patrons get to throw a ball at a target and ‘Esmeralda’ gets a bucket of freezing hose water dumped on him by our bucket monkey in the water tower. My job is to stand out front, dressed as Slave Leia and fish for customers. They don’t get to touch, just look, and if they paid their two dollars, they can hold my chain for a photo.
Faire is the last refuge of the carnie life. Faire family takes you in, becomes your center, grounds you in your fantasy of running away to join the circus. Backstage is cigarettes and complaining, wardrobe malfunctions and massages. Merchant vs cast politics float between camps, shift meals are wolfed down, fairies are distracting the knife throwers, boot blisters are aching, corsets are being re-laced.
“Should we do Ruby Tuesday’s or Applebees tonight?”
“I need more jingle jangles!”
“Who’s got my lighter?”
After dark, the cherries of lit cigarettes illuminate noses, gear is stashed, the gravel crunches under tires with too-bright headlights. Four of us sit straddling the crossbow railing, two rubbing shoulders, one holding on tightly to the body in front of them, and one merely sits as the sturdy post in front. Nineteen year old flirts hang over twenty & thirty somethings, married couples make passes at a possible third, after parties are planned. We each collect our take for the day, stuffing it in with our tips, and return to pawing at one another in the dark. Night time is for release. Darkness signals we can come out to play for real, strip off the G-rated mask we’ve worn all day and become real creatures.
The Middle
The funnel cake people have offered my employer $150 for me. I am not consulted. The property of pirates has no voice in a pillage. It is decided I am worth a larger sum to them, and I remain throwing knives and smiling knowingly at gawkers in sunglasses & screen printed shirts. Everyone’s throwing arms grow stiffer with each demonstration, while our resistance to remain throwing only at the non-human targets grows thinner.
“I need to buy a cactus.” Says Esmeralda, stroking his beard with one hand and wrangling a cigarette with the other.
“For what?” I ask.
“Some of my best friends have been cacti.”
I am satisfied with the answer and go back to counting the money on my lap. I like the quiet company of certain eyes like his, the sort that see my legs and don’t think I am something who must be had, can be had, have been had. I feel like the newest mechanical pencil everyone wants to write with before the lead cartridges wear down.
“No one here would ever judge you.” He says, pointing to the ruined roadmap of scars on my legs.
“I know.”
I’m not afraid to expose here, in any capacity.
We spend the warmest day of the October season at the drenching booth, hawking at passerby to pay to see us doused in a bucket of cold hose water. Boys under the age of ten select the man in the dress when they have playful faces, but when they point for me to occupy the target area, something darker glints in their young eyes. I read it as confused intent. Something in them or beyond tells them they should want something from me, that I should be something to them. But not knowing what it is flips a curiosity switch into uncanny vengeance, I don’t know what she is, but I want her to suffer, crosses their faces. I see the same but more refined, knowing look on their father’s faces when I look for confirmation. I still look as if I’m for being had, and they’ve come eagerly to wear down my pencil lead. But they paid their two dollars, so I’ll stomach it.
The End
The last day, the last minute, the last cannon fire, and it's over. Everyone gathers their things and begin to tear down.
Summer camp is over.
We reminisce, lament better years while numbers and embraces are exchanged, promises of reuniting in the off season while we hibernate inside cocoons of our normal lives.
I’ve not been home in days. I’m out of clean, dry clothes and spend the remainder of the day in tied scarves and the unrelenting wind. The public is gone, we can loosen, drop remaining puns and accents and modesty. We cease to be theme park mascots. Adidas and sweatshirts come out of the woodwork.
There is still magic floating through the grounds. I can feel it as I dance and run circles through the grass in the headlights, wind blowing my little clothing into the air, exposing what it barely covered before. Kicked dust billows up with my boots, a cloud of it swirling around me in the halogen. It is giving me our last dance before midnight, when I’ll be a simple bank teller again, and it will simply be dirt. But it is already in my hair and clothes, covering my car, inside it where the axe boys sat, grey brown outlines on the black interior. It is in my eyes and mouth, and when I shower and spit and cough and launder, it will drain away from me.
But next year, we’ll be dancing again.
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