There Was Grass at the State Fair!

The great thing about growing up where I did was that the State Fair was held just north of town.

 

Every summer during the last week in August, the entire town would gear up to the onslaught of farmers, carnival workers, news people, 4-H kids and anyone else who was interested. Our State Fair was bigger than Christmas, New Year’s, the last day of school and the Fourth of July all rolled in one. They always said that we had the biggest midway of any state fair anywhere. Even though we lived in the city, my friends and I lived for State Fair week. It was like Disneyland coming to town.

 

I started to go to the State Fair by myself when I was about nine or so. It was easy enough to hop on the bus and take the short trip to the fairgrounds. Since I was so small, and because the security just wasn’t there back then, I could easily sneak in between animal trailers and carnival tents. If that didn’t work, I could always follow a family in and pretend I was with them. No one ever said a word. My mother was always working afternoons and nights, so she never missed me not being at home. I’d stay out until the fireworks show at 11 p.m., and then take the last bus back to my neighborhood.

 

The summer I turned 13, my best friend, Suzy and I decided we would go together. It was a blazing hot day, and we enjoyed the air-conditioned bus ride up Snelling. Suzy looked like a full-grown woman, so we were obviously going to have to pay for her. Besides, she wasn’t too smart and was so big that she couldn’t run fast if she got caught. We decided that I would sneak in, as usual. The plan was to meet by the booth where you could drink all the milk you wanted for a quarter. We only had about ten dollars between us, but a lot of the fun at the State Fair you didn’t have to pay for.

 

The first thing we did was tried to get our money’s worth out of the milk booth. Suzy drank about 15 cups of milk but I could only get down about five. My stomach felt bloated. Then we decided to hit the midway and go on a couple of rides. After the roller coaster and the Tilt-a-Whirl, I thought I was going to hurl up my milk. I sat down on the hot pavement trying not to throw up while Suzy threw a few dimes into some glass ashtrays. She wanted to win one, but she ended up just wasting her dimes, so we decided to walk around the rest of the fair.

 

For some reason, they wouldn’t give us any beer at the Oktoberfest tent. I was surprised, because I thought Suzy looked to be at least 20. It didn’t matter because I didn’t think I could hold a beer down the way I was feeling. Probably because of the heat, the milk and the rides, I was still feeling nauseous, and we walked slowly up Machinery Row as I tried to shake the sickness in my gut.

 

Suzy and I walked into the buildings and pretended that we were farm girls who were really interested in tractors and all the weird tractor attachments. I couldn’t imagine that a person would need so much stuff just to grow things, but I guess you do. That day we learned the difference between a round bale and a square bale, and the machines that made them. It was a whole different life than what I was used to, that’s for sure.

 

Then we went into the 4-H building and watched some animals being born. “Eww,” I said as a calf started coming out of the cow, and we took off. I didn’t want to be that close to nature. The pungent odor of horse manure didn’t help my queasy stomach, and we beat a hasty retreat. Horses are cool, but not what comes out the backside.

 

The food building was a much better bet. There were samples of jam to try out, and all kinds of cool gadgets. In my house, someone was in big trouble if the can opener wasn’t where it should be. We also saw a stand that French-fried every vegetable you could think of. They fried up onion rings, pepper rings, zucchini, tomatoes and mushrooms, even garlic. The smell was heavenly, and it was something you just didn’t see every day. I was lucky if I got a bowl of cereal for dinner. Next we found where they were judging quilts and hung out in that building since it was air-conditioned.

 

The sun was starting to go down, and Suzy wanted to go to the grandstand and hang out. Donny Osmond was headlining that night, and she had a crush on him. I thought we were too old for Donny Osmond, but you couldn’t tell Suzy who to like. She would twist your arm and hurt you. We couldn’t afford to get in to see the show, but you could still hear what was going on from the other side of the bleachers.

 

We picked out a good spot in the shade and sat there cross-legged with our cokes and cigarettes, trying to act cooler and older than we were. A lot of people were down there, trying to hear the concert without paying, and it was just like a big party. A guy came out of a trailer parked near the grandstand opening. He was probably in his twenties, had long hair, a dirty tee shirt and jeans. He was pretty to look at, but all sweaty, smelly and hot. “I bet he works for the show,” Suzy whispered.

 

“Nee-ya, nah,” I replied.

 

Tall, sweaty and handsome came right up to us. He looked down at us. “Got a cigarette?” he asked Suzy. She gave him one, and he lit it up.

 

“You girls wanna party later?” he asked.

 

“Sure!” Suzy piped up, really fast before I could say a word.

 

“I’ll be back out as soon as the show starts.” He looked at us both closely. “How old are you girls, anyway?”

 

“She’s 16 and I’m 17,” Suzy lied. I just sat there and listened, and nodded my head at the appropriate moment.

 

“You sure? You girls look awfully young.”

 

“Oh, yeah, we’re old enough. We party all the time.” As soon as he turned away, I told Suzy she was the biggest liar I’d ever known.

 

The roadie came out at half past eight, and both of us jumped up quickly. He had three beers and handed one to each of us. This time, he pulled a cigarette out of his tee shirt pocket. It was thin and not very round. He lit it up and took a long hit, and held the smoke in for what seemed to be a couple of minutes. After a while, he exhaled very, very slowly. Then he passed it over to Suzy, who did the same. She was amazing in her control. I didn’t think she had smoked pot before, but maybe she did. Then she passed the joint over to me.

 

As soon as I inhaled, I sputtered and coughed. It had a different flavor than tobacco, in that it was earthy and sweet. I sneezed and took a big swig of beer to settle down my throat. The next time it was my turn, the smoke stayed down longer, and by my third hit, I was smoking like a pro.

The roadie went back to the show. I don’t remember much about that night, and I certainly don’t remember what Donny Osmond sang. I don’t know how we got home. All I remember was that we were giggling so hard that we fell down in the street – a couple of times.

My Family and How Suzie Became My Best Friend

Let’s be perfectly clear about this. I never had a dad.

Okay, I admit that I must have had a father. I’m not foolish enough to believe that I was the result of a virgin birth just like the Baby Jesus. Yeah, I fell out of the sky and right into the manger. I’m not that dumb. From what Granny said, as soon as the dude learned the news about me being around, he took off and never looked back. I heard later he joined the Army and never returned to the state. Granny always said he was part Indian, but he had blue eyes – that must have been the part that wasn’t Indian.

“My father” was a ghost in our house. Granny never referred to him as being mean or no-good or that she didn’t like him. He was just too young; he was only 16, so he ran. Personally, I can see how this happens. It’s not easy to be a teenager and have your girlfriend pregnant.

My mother wasn’t much of a mom either. In fact, I never called her “mom.” I always called her by the nickname her brothers gave her, which was “Pansy.” Why they called her that remains a mystery because her real given name was Joyce. She wasn’t pleasant or pretty like a flower, that’s for sure. Well, maybe she was when she was really little, but she didn’t end up that way later on. My mother had me when she was 14, so early motherhood probably pounded any sweetness out of her.

The weird thing is that Granny wasn’t really mad at Pansy for getting in the “family way” while she was just entering high school. If I was the mom, and the time was now, I would have a freaking cow and kill my daughter and her boyfriend. Yeah, even though I can understand how teenagers have raging hormones and all. Then I’d go over to his parents’ house and kill them, too. Not my granny. She took it all in stride. To Granny, this was all in the normal range. Probably it’s because Granny had her first child when she was 16, too.

Granny was the one who mostly took care of me. She was on disability, so she didn’t work. If she drank, it was only a beer or two. She said she didn’t like the taste much, but really she was so tiny, it only took a couple of beers and she’d be flying. Granny was a chicken, though, and she never liked to fly very high.

I ended up with my mother’s dark hair and my father’s blue eyes. Blue eyes are spooky if you’re a Native American. None of the 100 percenters in our town wanted to have anything to do with me or my family. Most of the white kids didn’t want to have anything to do with me either. What was left was my family, which wasn’t much of one, if you ask me.

My uncles were often drunk and when they got drunk, they were mean. And I mean, REALLY mean. They’d hit their girlfriends (thank goodness no one was dumb enough to marry any of them) and break up furniture or throw beer bottles around. They’d twist my Granny’s arm to try to get her social security money out of her for more alcohol. Pansy tried not to drink in the house, but she worked in a bar and came home wasted on a regular basis. She’s just fall into bed and black out. Pansy’s thing would be to get mean and angry when she woke up.

One day, a new girl came to school. She was a real brute, probably the biggest girl I’ve ever seen, and she had the palest white skin and dark hair. She looked like she easily beat up all boys in my school. I’d bet she could take on my uncles, too. For some reason, this girl, who was named Suzie, liked me. She would sit by me at lunchtime, and no one else ever did, and give me the parts of her lunch that she didn’t really care for. She especially hated tomatoes and plums, so I got a lot of those. This was a very good thing, because otherwise I would have to make my own lunch and a lot of times there wasn’t any food in the house. Certainly there wasn’t any worth packing up to take to school where everyone else in the whole world could see the kind of crap I was eating.

Pretty soon, Suzie started showing up at my house. I’d never think to invite her, ever! Are you kidding? I didn’t have any friends, and even if I did, I would never ask them to come over. My house was too weird. While my Granny was a nice old lady, she was really a strange bird. She’d come up with lots of strange sayings and she’d cuss like a sailor. My uncles were all pieces of work, and when Pansy was home, all she would do was sleep, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was chain smoking and watching TV.

One day when I was about 13, I was minding my own business, trying to get my homework done. Pansy was gone, working at the bar. Granny must have been gone, too. I think she went to the store. She might have been disabled, but she liked walking to the store and chewing the fat with some of the customers. My two uncles Tom and Gerald came in. They were really drunk, too, because they were falling over the furniture. I heard them coming, you couldn’t help but hear them, so I tried to make it out of the back door before they saw me. If they were drunk, it was better to just get the hell out of their way before anything bad happened.

It was too late. They came in, saw my books and started giving me shit about my schoolwork. “You think you’re better than us, now?” one of them said. The other one jumped on the band wagon and called me a Smarty Pants, too big for my britches. Then one started slapping me, and the other joined in.

I was small and pretty quick on my feet. I tried to get out of the way, but with the two of them coming at me, I just couldn’t do it. I kept up a good fight for a couple of minutes, but with two big guys, it was hard to keep fighting.

All of a sudden, I heard a terrible crashing. First, Tom flew away from me like he was a toy a giant had picked up. He fell against the screen door and took it right off the hinges. I think he bounced all the way down the stairs. Then I saw a beer bottle come down on Gerald’s head. He staggered away and landed on the couch and rolled off. The bottle didn’t break, but there was blood on it.

I couldn’t believe it. It was Suzie, who must have come in after they did. She picked those two goons up like they were rag dolls and beat the crap out of them. Then she grabbed me by the arm and we ran fast out the back door.

After that, my uncles stayed far away from me when they were drunk. And Suzie became my best friend.

 

This is How It Started

It was really easy to do, really it was.

Back in the ‘olden days’ things were a little looser than they are now. In fact, I would say they were a LOT looser. You couldn’t get away with those kinds of things now. The police will now have you in jail, or if you are a kid, you’d be taken away from your home and be slapped into foster care faster than you can blink an eye.

Back then was a different time. My mother would come home early in the morning (code word, partying all night long) and be sick until two the next afternoon (code word, hung-over). About two thirty, she would sort of wake up and give me a dollar to go down to the corner store and get her some cigarettes. I started doing this when I was about seven or eight, old enough to walk down to the store by myself.

The clerk knew my mother from high school. All I had to say was, “Can I get a pack of Virginia Slims for my mom?” and she would give them to me, just like that. Then I’d walk back down to my house and give her the cigarettes. She’d take a couple of drags and it would be enough to wake her up. She’d still be groggy, but it helped with the disposition. She wouldn’t be so likely to snap at me or hit me with a broom.

When I was about eleven, I had the brightest of bright ideas. I decided that I would see if I could get a six pack of beer out of the lady at the corner store. We didn’t have very much money, but I made a little by returning cans and bottles. Every now and then I would find a quarter on the ground and would scoop it up so fast. Sometimes my teacher, Mrs. Glass, would give me a dime for doing errands for her. I hid all of it in an old tin and hid the tin in a heating vent in my room. It wasn’t long before I saved up six dollars.

It was a really nice spring day when I took my six dollars and a bottle opener and went down to the corner store. My mother was at work at the bar. I walked into the store and asked for a pack of cigarettes, just like usual. The clerk seemed busy stocking cigarettes, so I thought the time was ready to slip in my extra purchase. So I casually added, “Can I get a six-pack? My mother said to bring it right back.” I held my breath. I thought maybe the clerk would be onto me and she would say no.

Lydia (I think her name was Lydia) turned away and put a six-pack of Schmidt beer on the counter. It was my mother’s favorite, and she and I both knew it. Then she totaled my purchases, put everything in a bag and said, “Five forty-nine,” and took my dollars, and gave me fifty-one cents in change.

I almost couldn’t believe it. Well, I could, sort of. After all, I’d been going there for years buying cigarettes. I thought I was so cool!

I took my brown bag and headed off to the river. Like I said, it was a really nice spring day. There were caves by the river, where we would go to play and hang out. My favorite cave was a really small one, where only two kids could fit. It was above most of the bigger ones that were closer to the shore.

The caves often made noises when the wind blew through them. Legend had it that the Indians thought there were spirits in the caves. The bigger ones would emit a very low moaning and it was very creepy. I guess bootleggers used the caves back in the day to store their whisky, or at least that’s what my granny said. The noise was fearsome and people would stay away. My little cave made a sound more like a lady sighing. I used to call it the Whispering Cave. Most people couldn’t even climb to it. You had to be really spry and small just to climb to it.

The big caves often had rats and other critters in them. I didn’t like hanging out in the big caves much. Besides, the bigger kids who were teenagers would hang out in them and party. It wasn’t a good mix. I liked my little cave much better. Besides, no one else could climb up. Either they were too fat or too lazy to try it.

I climbed up and sat down. The sun was just starting to go down a bit, so it was shining brightly right into my cave. I popped the top of my first beer and drank it. About half way down, I lit one of the cigarettes and took a couple of draws. I didn’t like the cigarette as much as I liked the beer.

I can’t remember, but I think I stayed there all night.

And that’s how it all started.