Carousel

One summer, on the shores of Lake Michigan, my family and I came upon a small town celebrating its 150th anniversary. We stopped at a motel and I went inside for a room. “Last one,” the clerk said. The customer in line before me, a motorcycle rider with a skull hand-painted across the back of his leather jacket, had asked if the place was American Owned. It wasn’t. He shook his head at the clerk, shook his head at me, then walked out and sat back down on his bike. His wife, who had been waiting for him on the bike the entire time, wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek to his leather back. He gunned the bike once, and together they shot out of the parking lot.

We walked from the motel to the festival. The kids ran immediately to the carnival rides. They slid on potato sacks down the two-story inflatable slide. They bumped through the dark hallways of the haunted trailer. They rode the dragon coaster, over and over. My wife and I stood by, each in our own world, watching. Then it began to grow dark, and the boat parade was about to begin, so we used the last of our tickets to ride the carousel.

I watched alone from the metal safety fence as the kids climbed onto the platform and picked their animals, my wife choosing the giraffe bench with our infant daughter. A young kid - he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen - was in charge of the ride. He slapped high-fives to all the kids as they walked past him and he helped the smallest ones tie their seatbelts. He was tall, gangly, his legs unnaturally long for his torso. He had just the shadow of a goatee. His hair was long and black, and he wore tight jeans and boots and a ripped Metallica T-shirt. After checking once more to be sure the kids were ready, he flipped the little switch and the carousel began to turn.

Next to him, on a stool, sat a CD player connected to an amp. The kid leaned over and hit play, and it blasted music – Barnum and Bailey type stuff: accordions, tubas, penny whistles, pump organs. Classic calliope music. I leaned against the fence and watched as he moved closer to the speaker, listening. He shook his head, disappointed, then reached down and skipped the song. He skipped the next one, too, as if he were flipping through tracks on some Led Zeppelin CD. All the songs sounded the same to me: same elephant beat, same bouncing melodies. But this kid, from the long stretch of days over the summer, had found his differences. Finally, he found the song he wanted, and, smiling with satisfaction, turned it up louder. Tubas oom-pah-pahing, piano tinkling, cymbals and snare drums crashing. He stood up, took a step back, and started hard-rock head-banging to the music.

This kid rocked it, really rocked it. Air-guitar, long sweaty hair flying around his face, lips tucked into his mouth, kicking one leg into the air. I couldn’t help myself, and I smiled, might have even laughed. He raised one hand in the air and made violent circles, as if cracking a whip. His feet scooted around the pavement. I saw my wife on the carousel, flashes of her with each turn, laughing now, too. The night opened before me.

Then two girls, teenagers, in halter tops and short shorts, walked up to the fence to wait for the next ride. They had matching hair, died blonde, loose perms. They passed a cigarette back and forth and tried to smoke it. The kid spotted them. He moved closer to them, showing off, ripping his hand up and down the neck of the air guitar, forcing even more face grunts, still kicking his feet, thrusting his head through the air. He smiled at them, broadly, and leaned against the fence on one elbow.

Both girls burst out laughing. Not a kind laugh. The girl in the front looked away, her face

hidden in her hands, ashamed, but the other girl couldn’t stop laughing and couldn’t stop looking. “Oh. My. God.” She mouthed and they both laughed harder.

The boy closed his mouth and straightened. He started moving to the music again, but his head had lost its tilting bobs, and his guitar chords lagged behind the beat. The tubas and trumpets played as loud as ever, almost deafening. The carousel continued to whirl. The kid stared at the girls for a moment, then moved away, still barely dancing to the elephant beat, not willing to give it up completely. Inconsequentially defiant. He slowly moved back to the controls of the machine, away from the fence and the girls, where he stood for a minute, with little diminishing jerks of movement. The carnival lights reflected off his face.

I stopped smiling, then. The boy turned his back to us, and leaned against the controls, his body no longer moving. The music played on. His feet no longer moved. He stood, hidden.

I imagine he forgot all about the girls then, and just huddled in the shadows of that great machine, watching the smiling and laughing faces of the children as they passed him in turn. Great blasts of music in the air. Blurs of blue and green and red lights, shining mirrors, mothers and children and babies, giraffes and horses, lions, tigers, unicorns, zebras. I imagine he lost himself in this motion, these unbridled streaks of joy through the darkening night.

Back in the motel, my wife and I put the kids to bed and settled into the quiet room. I drank beers from a cooler and she drank glasses of red wine. We drank without talking, each lost in our own thoughts, until we were dizzy and the kids were fast asleep. I took off my boots, my socks. We lay down on the bed and she fell asleep.

Later, I rose and watched out the window as the lights and shadows ebbed in the windows of

the other rooms. Lives were moving forward, hidden behind those curtains. Couples were fighting. Making love. Reading the newspaper. Watching late-night movies and eating dinner. Children were dreaming and reading books. Young sisters were laughing under covers.

Someone in a nearby room coughed. I moved softly to the bed and sat down. Trucks from the highway sped by. My wife was still asleep, white nightgown. The lights from the parking lot filtered through the curtains and lay on her white skin. The breathing of the children filled the room. A breeze blew across the bed, and I sighed, and I leaned back into the pillows.

Maybe there was a time I would have shared with her the twirling beauty of the ride. Maybe, at one time, she would have wrapped her arms around me and followed me into some unknown future. Maybe there was a time we would have spent these summer evenings together at home, the two of us cooking dinner, and I could have leaned against her back as she prepared the lasagna, and kissed her neck, and she would have paused, noodles limp in her hand, and everything would have stopped for a moment as I rested against her. But I couldn’t remember if there was, couldn’t understand if it had ever happened for sure.

About the art: Cables and Clouds used with permission of DisruptedStar