It was that raucous alarm they used in all the video games and techno horror movies when a contagion was released that jolted me like a bolt of electricity through my senses. I sat up; my bearings whirling wildly off track. The dream I was having melted away from my eyes and my memory. It was a weird thing because I remembered it having been a pleasant one. Somehow none of it could stuck to the front of my brain. Like the callous pull of temporal gravity it yanked down the veil of fantasy to let the burning light come pouring in. I winced, and blinked, and caught my breath. My muscles were tight all around, they hurt. That was the first thing that came back to me. Then I heard the blaring tv right in front of the bed before I even saw the picture. It was Game of Thrones. I left it on before I fell asleep. That’s right! I’m in a hotel... this isn’t home... but where’s home... where am I? Oh yeah, I’m nowhere. In the middle of it to be precise.
It took me awhile to get the gunk out the gears.
I drove six hours to get there. Deep Texas, and most of Stephen King worthy Middle of Nowhere America was like that. You know where you are going until you get there. And then you dream of somewhere better. I remembered setting up my tent before checking into my hotel. I draw caricatures for a traveling carnival company. This episode in my life was spent with an unbridled lot that operates in the wilderness. Tornado Valley, oil country: where the nearest big city is always a hundred miles away, and the featured corporation that feeds the town grows their employees. Seriously! I had one memorable encounter with a guest some time ago who was stunned that I had once drawn in New York City.
“Oh, I wish we could go there,” the 24 year old husband and father of SIX said dreamily to me.
I asked, “why not take a vacation and go.”
He laughed it off as if the suggestion was just otherworldly absurd. He said, “we can’t leave, we’ll lose our jobs at the meat factory.”
Come to learn in that said town you had three options as a youth coming into adulthood: study for a better position at the slaughter house, study to aspire for bigger and move out of town almost like an exile, or get a job at Walmart. Before I left that town I drove along a road overlooking the holocaust fields of cows with a grim sickness stirring in my stomach.
That was awhile ago... well, maybe it was a week ago. Can’t tell anymore. When you are in a new place surrounded by a new corporate agenda driven ideology every ten days the weeks and days sort of blur together. When I was a kid there was this show called the Twilight Zone—this rout was an episode of that. These days I guess people would liken it to American Horror Story. I don’t know. Don’t have Netflix.
Anyway, I’m sitting in bed. My body hurts from traveling all night, working all morning, and now the plague timer went off meaning it was 4 o’clock. Time to get my ass to the fair.
In small towns like Canadian Texas (don’t ask, all these places got weird names) the annual rodeo and fest was their backyard theme park and swapmeet. The locals saved up their money all year to splurge on the carnival, and therefore it was often good business for me. “Ain’t never seen no one doing them funny face drawings around here before!”
The hotel I was staying at looked like a shit-bomb waiting to give me an excuse to buy a new wardrobe when I checked it out on the internet. This meant that I could afford it. In Oil-Vile the hotel jockeys jack up their prices knowing their visitors would pay it, having no other option. So it wasn’t too uncommon for me to have to fork out six or seven hundred dollars a week to work a show in town. This one was only 400 so I was relieved. Beats waking up in your tent to find that your air mattress was floating from the silent deluge had filled your campsite while you were past out drunk. Don’t ask me how I know that. But I got to the hotel and it was like a mansion. I couldn’t believe it. Newly renovated, new hd TVs, a pool, a gym, the works. Bad weather leveled the place not so long ago and they have been trying to Phoenix the hell out of it ever since. So I was spoiled that week.
Now keep in mind, at this time I was traveling alone, and thousands of miles from my closest lifeline. Some real gypsy shit. So now and then I have some crazy moments where I just don’t know how to proceed, and get a little panicky. That day, that fucking Day was one of them goddamn days.
I noticed nervous commotion in the lobby. But I figured something new and horrible was going on in the news and I did not want to stop and see. Going outside I am greeted to the cry of an alarm that put my heart into my throat. There, before me, was a group of oil workers crowding around drinking beer, laughing, and pointing up. I looked and saw the tornado terrorizing a vacant, flat horizon, swaying blithely like a dancer on ice skates. The alarm was defining, and disorienting. But the oil guys, fresh off their shift were eating sandwiches, pounding brews, and taking fucking selfies in front of the thing.
“Umm should we be worried,” I asked the lady at the desk. She just shrugged. “What do we do if it hits this place?”
“Pray?”
It was the best disaster plan an atheist could hope for. Just then an ambulance came blazing down the street to the hospital that neighbored our hotel.
I went outside and did the only thing I could do, watch as the fat black funnel sashayed around the Ferris wheel there in the distance, and called my mom. Then, as I was on the phone, the temperature went from hot to freezing in an instant. I turned my head up and saw the skated skies churning. The air around me went still. The party of drunken oil guys got excited. I got scared. A funnel started to form directly above me, where the heavens were turning. But it stopped and it dissipated.
Later we learned that the ambulance was carrying back an oil worker who died when the tornado touched down moments from where he was working. Nine twisters came down that night. But they never hit the carnival. I got to my stand knowing it would have been toppled by the winds. Instead I found it sucked into the ground somehow. I needed a couple of carnies to help me dig it back out. We opened the fair. Nobody came.
That was a night I had in Canadian Texas.
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