Scream For Me, Long Beach!!
The carnie had three teeth in his head. They peeked out from behind his thin lips like shit-dipped Tic-Tacs every time he talked around the unfiltered Camel smoldering in the corner of his mouth.
“It’s a dollar a dart, kid. Dollar a dart. Bust any balloon, you pick a poster.”
The man reeked of nicotine, corn dogs, and bad decisions. He was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. He represented a free spirit unmoored to the societal constraints that were already beginning to embed their hooks into my psyche at the age of eleven. I yearned for a future where I could pass the time smoking cigarettes, sneaking gulps of Wild Irish Rose, and separating idiot kids from their paper route money.
“Hey, kid, you gonna throw that dart or you just gonna look at it like a moron?”
I just wanted to enjoy the moment. Even then, a young jackass without much in the way of ironic self-awareness, I suspected this time wandering the fairgrounds of Augustfest on the banks of Wolf Lake with the Indiana summer ebbing away, and the cool breeze off the water ruffling my hair would become nostalgic memories by which I would gauge my future unhappiness.
Though living in The Region provided more existential chaos than any kid should have to tolerate, there was something about the sensory overload inherent to the festival of the lakes that excited me beyond measure. The girls looked especially beautiful though they reacted to my presence with the usual ambivalence. But the food for a kid with a ravenous appetite and months of pigeonholing money in anticipation of the carnival was readily available for consumption. Corndogs, pizza puffs, street tacos, countless puffs of multi-colored cotton candy, fresh-squeezed lemonade, funnel cakes coated with a diabetic coma worth of powdered sugar, fried Snickers, tiger blood snow cones. No sooner had I devoured one ear of roasted corn than I was hitting up the next booth for a soft pretzel only to regurgitate it all in a rancid spray halfway through a somersaulting ride on the Zipper.
Augustfest also offered the Midwest’s most expansive beer garden, an area so huge and fraught with Old Style kegs the bacchanal was visible from space, and among its sodden patrons one could count the largest population of Polacks gathered in the entirety of the world except for the Polacks living in Warsaw, Poland.
As much as I cherished every aspect of the festival, I hit the fair grounds with one single priority, to redecorate my room with the posters I won at the dart balloon booth. At least fifty colorful balloons were affixed to the plywood wall. Surrounding the balloons, there was a cavalcade of mind-blowing images that defined the eighties era for me.
I tossed the dark and popped a green balloon.
“Hey, congratulations, you little shit. For a second there, I thought you were going to run off with my dart, there. I’d hate to have to run down a little kid and kick his ass. Eh, maybe hate’s not the word I’m looking for…”
The carnie also harbored little patience when it came to me studying which poster I wanted to decorate my room with first.
“We got the latest Spuds Mackenzie poster.” He pointed his cigarette without it ever leaving his mouth at a picture of some jackassy dog.
“Spuds Mackenzie…”
“Ha! I think I see what you’re looking for, kid. Too shy to say you wanted that Samantha Fox with her tits hanging halfway out of her bikini. I get it. They’re rolled up, anyway. No one’s gonna know you’re a little pervert.”
This was back in the eighties, of course, before Pornhub, when an issue of Hustler stashed between the mattresses could assuage a kid’s desire for female companionship for months. A time when it was perfectly acceptable to own a poster with eight females in thongs bent over a truck with the ledger “Haulin’ Ass.” This was a time when a simple T-shirt with a striking cobra entwined in a grinning skull imbued the wearer with the aura of a bad motherfucker.
“No way, man. I want that poster of the skeleton dude in the old timey British uniform, holding a saber in one hand and the Union Jack in the other.”
“Ah, The Trooper. That’s a popular choice, little kid. Not as popular as that cute blonde bending forward, but I guess I see the appeal.”
No sooner did he put the flame to another Camel and retrieve the poster roll, I had another dollar on the barrelhead. A yellow dart. A blue balloon.
“You looking at the brunette in the thong bikini?”
“No, below that. The corpse-looking dude breaking out of the grave with the lightning bolt striking the hinge on his skull cap.”
“Ah, yeah. ‘Scream for me, Long Beach!’ am I right?”
The fuck? I thought. We had Wahala Beach five miles up the road on Lake Michigan. This guy was seriously rattled in the brain. Which I respected.
Another dollar. A green dart. Pink balloon.
“Okay, 1984. Classic Van Halen.”
“No, to the side of that one. The corpse dude flying the World War 2 fighter plane.”
“Aces High.”
Was the carnie’s name Ace? He being high would certainly explain a few things. Another dollar. The yellow dart, again. Red balloon.
“I want the one with the corpse-skeleton dude with all the Egyptian stuff.”
“I want the corpse guy flying with dragon wings, holding the flame thrower.”
“I want the one where he’s dressed in army clothes with the nuclear explosion mushroom cloud going off behind him.”
“Look, kid. I got eight more different Iron Maiden posters, okay? Why don’t you just give me eight bucks, and I’ll give you the posters, and then you can fuck right off and leave me alone. How’s that sound?”
I set another dollar down. Yellow dart. Purple balloon.
“I want the Iron Maiden in the straight jacket in the padded cell.”
“Goddammit, kid.”
Carrying fourteen rolled up posters through the fair grounds while trying not to spill a container brimming with cheesy nachos pocked with coins of jalapeno posed a specific challenge I’d yet to replicate.
Once home, I must have gone through most of my mom’s Scotch tape hanging those pictures on the baby blue walls of my closet-sized bedroom. There was not a half-clad Samantha Fox to be found anywhere in this room. No jackassy dogs shilling beers, or fancy trucks hauling ass. Everywhere the singular living corpse guy dressed as an Indian or a space cowboy or a punk rocker. It gave the room a certain ambience. It told people, my parents anyway, here lives a kid who will worship Satan at the drop of a hat.
I was proud to have one of my few friends, Cas, visit so I could show off the posters.
“Oh, cool, you listen to Iron Maiden?” He asked.
“Listen…?”
Up until that point, I believed posters were a purely visual medium.
“You do know Iron Maiden is a band… right? These are all related to songs…”
And that’s how I came to be a fan of Iron Maiden. You could say I was predisposed to love their style of music. Forty years later, they remain my favorite band.
Pre-internet days were a strange time, man. I miss it, every day. How I discovered Metallica. Less than a year after my introduction to Maiden, I was hanging out in the alley behind my house and a neighborhood kid, Tobias, happened to be walking through checking garbage cans for interesting shit. We talked for a moment, I probably mentioned my recent infatuation with Maiden’s Live After Death LP, and he just pulled out Master of Puppets from his pocket and slipped it to me.
“Listen to this, dude. This will bang the head that would not bang.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I got plenty more where this came from.”
We may not have had the internet, but we did have Columbia House, twelve cassettes for a penny.
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
