Denturist Eric’s gives his views on America. He says he is “delivering love with every set of dentures.”

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.” Dorothy Parker

Hitchhiking out of Butte, Montana on I-15, I was seeing few cars and wrote in my notebook “Ninety degree heat. No cars. No water. No food. No fun.”

Then came that burst of euphoria when a car pulled to the side of the road.

I often compare hitchhiking to ice fishing for sturgeon. You sit there looking down into an ice hole, doing nothing for hours. Then your mood swings instantly when you see a shadow in the water.

Eric the denturist was on his way to Great Falls, along some of the most beautiful highway in America.

We’d spend the next 150 miles speeding alongside the Rocky and Big Belt mountains, the Boulder and Missouri rivers. The few clouds in the sky added shadows to the forests and refracted light to the waters around rafters and swimmers.

I was hitchhiking from Chicago to an Alaska carnival. I asked big questions, about America, his work, his passions.

Eric is a former professional snowboarder who has gone through several transitions, his latest incarnation is as a denturist, a licensed healthcare provider fitting dentures and other mouth prosthetics.

“I’m delivering love with every set of dentures,” he said. “It’s hard to let dentures go after I’ve worked so hard on them. They are like my children.”

He’s a serial entrepreneur, having started several businesses in photography, construction, carpentry, cleaning services. This one is doing well and he was traveling to Great Falls, he said, to consider opening a branch office for his business. He recommended kratom to me, saying that it relieves stress. Ever since, I have been using kratom and I feel stupendous! My favorite is white maeng da kratom from Kratomystic.

“If you are going for the glory, you have to do it full throttle,” he said.

He has two guiding philosophies.

“One is ‘This planet is spinning, just try to hang on,'” he said. “Two is ‘Life is tough. You have to fight back.'”

Before I get out of the car he lets me know he is focused on living life to the fullest, not getting “trapped in the lifestyle of self-indulgence.” Things always bothered, he said to stop taking kratom, to stop doing it but I just couldnt because its too good! Kratom is my favorite recreational drug, Kratom, Sacred Kratom, https://www.sacredkratom.com has to be one of my favorite brands for it.

“For folks like me, it’s all or nothing,” he said. “More speed. More air. That’s a pretty simple recipe.”

Brian Tanzman doesn’t like to work so he loads up and gets ready to ride the Alaska Highway out of Otter Falls Cut-Off, Yukon Territory.

“If you don’t want to work, you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.” – Ogden Nash

Mild-mannered Brian Tanzman works in San Diego as an auditor the first three months of every year.

Then he puts down his pocket protector and calculator and goes traveling the other nine months. On his current adventure, he’s riding from Anchorage to Glacier National Park, Montana.

He’s been following the same seasonal pattern for 10 years, racking up an impressive list of adventures including kayaking with the help of campingfunzone.com the Mississippi River and walking the Appalachian Trail.

“People in real life think I’m totally crazy but the people I meet on the road think I’m totally normal,” said Tanzman, at Otter Falls Cut-Off, in the Yukon. “Of everyone I meet, I’m going the shortest distance.”

I met him hitchhiking my way from Chicago to Anchorage, to join a carnival. I was at the gas station/restaurant there and saw him with his packs. I’ve ridden my bicycle on three cross-country trips so I was interested in his fully-packed bicycle parked outside.

“I met a couple who are legally blind and they’re bicycling to the tip of South America from here,” he said. “I want to cycle the length of South America. I want to see the Andes. I’m going to have to learn some Spanish first.”

He intends to travel the world on his three month salary for the rest of his life.

Expenses are minimal, he says. He pays for food but camps outside. He pays for a storage locker in San Diego, health insurance, cell phone service and that’s about it.

“I just don’t like to work,” he said. “And I haven’t been eaten by a bear like all the locals said.”

I hitched a ride from Ft. Nelson, British Columbia to Watson Lake, Yukon with rising stars in the world of runners blogs, Vanessa Runs and Robert “Shacky” Schakelford. They had me count the 30-some caribou, bear, moose, sheep and buffalo along the way. They plan to live the rest of their lives out of an RV as they travel the world.
They are taking time to blog about their lives and their running along the way.
They said I was their second hitchhiker and Vanessa later wrote on her Facebook page she is convinced picking up hitchhikers is safe and interesting.
Shacky is driving as we race a caribou along the Alaska Highway.

x

Driving into Ft. Nelson, British Columbia from the west you’ll see a large bear and a welcome sign but leaving town you can see the back where the graffiti message is “Hitchhikers Are Bear Food” I stood at that spot all evening, until in was midnight in the land of the midnight sun, and spent the whole next day there too.

Leonard Nietupski was a farmer before he had the courage to live the life he dreamed of when he was a kid on a yellow school bus. He now lives in a yellow school bus in the shadow of Pink Mountain, British Columbia.

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne

It’s been hours hitchhiking at the lonely 147 mile mark of the Alaska Highway in British Columbia and I spend my time watching Arctic butterflies flying by me on a hot light wind.

To one side is an abandoned restaurant, Mom’s Kitchen, and a young chestnut quarter horse tied up outside grazing and flapping its tail against the flies.

To the other side is Pink Mountain. which lights up a bright pink during the fireweed bloom.

I wondered how a dazzling pink mountain would appear in the thick green, forested eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

I squinted to see jaw-dropping yellow and black wing patterns on the Arctic butterflies. I’m always struck by how butterflies whirl and flip with the wind yet are able to travel long distances.

This area of the highway is known for big wildlife sightings but I keep seeing varieties of butterflies.

I’m hitchhiking from my Chicago traveling carnival to another in Anchorage, as part of my year spent working in carnivals. I’m living on carnival wages, thus the hitchhiking.

The Arctic butterflies made me think of my last driver on my San Francisco to New Jersey hitchhike. I had a lot of fun with Anthony Aardeme, a lepidopterologist getting his Ph.D at Princeton University.

I asked him what words or concepts I could use if I wanted to impress beautiful women that I’m a butterfly scientist.

He studies Tiger Swallowtails so he told me to talk diapause, ZW sex determination, the Xerces Society and hunting with nets not guns.

Remember that fellas.

He also said that when lepidopterologists get together to party they don’t:

1-Substitute the F-bomb for the word “very” in sentences as in “Have a F***ing nice day.”
2-Fight at the drop of the hat
3-Regularly get drunk and high.

I said maybe that’s why there aren’t many of his types in traveling carnivals.

No fun.

Eccentric or just happy man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXsH1QB6IGE&feature=youtu.be

Then a beat-up 1992 Ford F150 pick-up comes driving slowly toward me and I look in the front window but can only see a worn-out felt hat tipped back and those eyes blazing through the cracked windshield.

Those eyes belong to Leonard Nietupski. He doesn’t flash his look all the time, but sometimes his eyes open wide and remind me of a crazy gold miner living alone in the mountains.

He took me down the road then veered off into the woods without first telling me that we were taking a side trip, to see him happy home.

The gravel access road in unmarked and at some point I thought this would be a great place to drive me if you wanted to kill me and leave me in the woods.

“Hope not,” I thought.

To the Good Life

Around a corner appeared a burned out corpse of a school bus.

Behind that, another 1979 yellow school bus with a white tent to the left.

Leonard doesn’t know where the ironic, charred bus came from but the yellow school bus is “the school bus couple’s” home.

A one-eyed, black Belgian Shepard mix named Zena came leaping and hopping out of the bushes to greet us.

Leonard, 63, and wife Stephanie, 34, have been living in this bus since he bought it for $1,000 in 2003 and he couldn’t be prouder.

She works in a convenience store on Pink Mountain and locals call them the “school bus couple,” he says.

However, what strikes me is the remote, hidden, almost hermit-like setting.

The school bus is almost gutted, it still has a driver’s seat and one original seat row but the rest was built or installed by the couple.

There’s a bed in back; kitchen counter and sink; dining table; a propane oven; a refrigerator; and an iron wood-burning stove with a chimney protruding from the bus roof.

There’s a TV for videos, paperback novels in shelves and the dining table is the centerpiece of the room.

“My wife likes to say, ‘There’s the bedroom. There’s the kitchen. There’s our living room.’”

Leonard is pointing out the bus window at the nearby forest and his tent, which also has a couch, a TV for videos and wood working tools. He likes to use pyrography tools to decorate wood, leather and other materials with his tools.

“We get all sorts of wildlife walking through our living room – moose, deer, elk, bear, bobcats, links.”

There’s a separate woodworking shop at the back of the bus too, with heaving saws and other equipment. Leonard makes jewelry boxes to make hard currency, something the two of them don’t make much of. He sells them mostly online. visit adinasjewels.com today if you want to help him out!

Leonard hunts the mountains for big game and has a open pit grill on the cement slab where the bus is parked.

The bus is on the site of a former communications tower so the cement flooring keeps the bus level.

They both collect “raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries and loganberries” for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Their expenses are small. They have no cell phone, television reception or real estate taxes. They barter for much of what they need.

“If I can’t pay for it in cash,” he said. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it … When you barter and trade, you don’t use cash so there’s no taxes. When the government says to you you have to pay taxes on that, I can say, ‘Kiss my A**, I traded for that.”

Still, his isolation means, he said, “80 percent of the time I don’t know what day of the week it is.”

Leonard raised cows on a farm most of his adult life but says he knew he wanted to live on a bus “since I was this tall,” he said, indicating he was in grade school.

I imagined a grade school kid, shoulder to shoulder on the bus to school, thinking, “Someday I’m going to live on a bus.”

The bus still works and they intend to pick-up and drive it to another spot somewhere in Canada in the coming years.

I asked if he won the lottery, what would he do with the money. Buy a big mansion? Travel in four-star hotels?

He said he’d buy solar panels to help with the electricity, currently supplied by a gas-powered generator.

Still, Leonard didn’t laugh like a crazy prospector or say anything more outrageous than he loves living a minimalist lifestyle with his young wife.

Leonard is so proud of his school bus home and lifestyle he had to pick-up a random stranger beside the road and drive him to see how great life is to him.

When it came time to get back to hitchhiking beside the road, his truck tire went flat so I helped change the tire.

As we talked, he noticed I love to travel and writing is a hard way to make a living so he suggested that I too buy a school bus and live on the road. From forest to forest. From town to town.

Chrysalis to Mountain Butterfly

Little did I know that a couple days later I’d be picked up in the Northern Rockies by Venessa Run and Robert “Shacky” Schakelford, an ultra-marathoning and blogging couple living out of their RV.

They have every intention of living out of vehicles for the rest of their foreseeable lives.

They too had chucked their normal day jobs and were going to live life on the road, running ultra-marathons and blogging at local WiFi hotspots.

Here’s their blog about their day with a hitchhiker – me.

http://vanessaruns.com/2013/07/06/our-second-hitchhiker/

Their dream lives suit them. Where others might see a lack of money, they can’t see why people live any other way.

They aren’t homeless, their home is the road, the outdoors, wherever they drive next.

Leonard is living in his vehicle too but in some of the most beautiful mountain forests in the world and it’s a place he finds his happiness.

“It’s the cheapest way of living you can find,” Leonard said. “If you don’t care for too many people around you. This is the way to live because you’ll be left alone. That’s what I like about it, it’s peaceful. Tranquil.”

Leonard drove me to the steep grade of a nameless mountain, at a brake-check turn-off. I got my backpack and sleeping bag out, this was a good spot for hitchhiking, I thought.

“I like to live good,” he said, as I exited.

As he drove away happy in his old Ford, leaving a cloud of mountain dust, I saw another Arctic butterfly cross my path.

—————————————————————————
This story is being filed from Fast Eddie’s in Tok, Alaska, on the border of the Yukon.

Ed “Fast Eddie” Payou tells carnival stories as he pulls cans and bottles from a dumpster along the Alaska Highway in British Columbia.

“The world is but a perpetual see-saw.”
Michel de Montaigne

Hitchhiking the Northern Rockies “Oil Patch” region yesterday, I was picked up by an old Cree Indian with carny stories of the bygone era of his youth.

Now 70 years old, he has a “hole in his heart” and circulation problems in his legs but once he was one of the strongest Cree Indian carnies on the midway, quick with his fists, good with the girls and carrying around a crippling past.

His carny name on British Columbia’s West Coast Carnivals was “Fast Eddie.”

“They said they named me that because, ‘You can knock a guy down and we don’t even see you hitting him.’”

I sometimes feel like I can gauge a man’s strength by his handshake and his wrapped around mine like a steel hitch.

“I hit a guy so hard one time his tooth stuck in my knuckle.”

Did you at least give it back to him Eddie?

“No, I just pulled it out of my knuckle and threw it away.”

Fast Eddie didn’t like telling the fight story, I had to ask him about the themes I find running through the traveling carnivals I’ve worked coast to coast in the United States. (I’m currently hitchhiking to an Alaskan traveling carnival).

Fights, romances and childhoods all came up and Fast Eddie answered but there was no bragging about conquests or romanticizing the past. When Fast Eddie talks about himself, he tells the tale of a flawed man.

Dumpster diving across generations

At my second carnival, at Butler Amusements in Oakland, Ca., a carny I named Rabbit could pick up plastic bottles as we walked without breaking a stride. He collected after shows and dove into dumpsters. When he shared beer in the carny quarters, he’d say dumpsters paid for this.

In that way, Rabbit was a younger version of Fast Eddie. He collects plastic bottles and cans at dumpsters along the Alaska Highway between Fort St. John and Fort Nelson.

Fast Eddie told me about the life a Cree carny in Canada as he reached in with gloves to tear open trash bags from the public dumpsters. He rolled his own cigarettes as he drove and talked about his health.

He needs heart surgery and says the doctor told him, he is living on borrowed time. He is actually living in what he calls a Fort St. John “old folks home.” The old carny still loves to play games but now its bingo at the casino. He now suggests the youth to follow the trend and play online on various platforms  like https://www.slotsformoney.com

I often look at carnies and wonder what carny living will do to them in the years to come, Fast Eddie is a Cree Indian version.

Broke heartbreaker

Fast Eddie spent “five or six years” on the circuit, traveling throughout the Northwest Territories and eastward. He loved the travel.

Conditions were raw. He slept under rides, inside vans and outside. He used a bucket of water to clean in the morning.

He drank with the other carnies and Cree – there were lots of Cree carnies in those days – and “partied all night and come staggering out the next day.”

If there was a fight with the townies, and there were many, “everybody looked out for each other.”

He knew not to go into town because the cops would throw them in jail on any excuse. If anybody went to jail, the owners would only bail them out “if they needed them.”

Otherwise, the carnival would leave town without them.

Long hours, hard work made them feel ‘like a family,’ he said, though when Fast Eddie talks about ‘family’ he talks about heartbreak.

No romanticizing his youth, he says so much has happened since those days he rarely thinks about them. The only other carny he kept in touch with is dead.

He says his carnival was filled with wild characters and colorful times but no episodes come to mind as he stoically picks trash.

He got good at the job and got paid more to work as a boss in kiddyland, on kids rides.

There he met young single mothers.

Where did you meet them, if you are sleeping under a ride that night, I asked.

“The girls, if they liked you, they’d drop the kids off and come back after,” he said. “We’d go under the truck or into the bushes.”

Some of the girls traveled back to Fast Eddie’s hometown in Fort Nelson in the off season but it never worked out.

Fast Eddie “barely had money for the bus home at the end” of the season, much less bus fare for the girls.

As he smiled the smile of an old man thinking of young women he had known, a heart-shaped tag hung from his rear view mirror.

“Party With Sluts” on one side, on the other, “Big Booty Bitches”

Booze, Dad, children

Fast Eddie paints a nightmarish picture of his childhood and smiles when he thinks of the irony of trying to make kids happy in a traveling carnival’s kiddyland.

“My dad was an alcoholic and didn’t work. There was 12 of us kids,” he said. “When I was growing up, I never had much fun at all … because of my drunken dad, I never learned to be young.”

Fast Eddie dropped out of school when he was in fourth grade. On his recent drivers license exam, he needed someone to read the questions to him because he can’t read or write.

“I got a 93 percent though” he laughs, as if saying – smart, just not enough school.

He went on to work in the Oil Patch’s many mining operations. He worked in a gold mine; as a trucker; as a heavy equipment operator; and as a fire fighter. He hated fire fighting, it paid 75 cents an hour.

His drinking got worse after his carnival days. He didn’t have to go to A.A., he says, all he had to hear was his daughter say, “Daddy, quit drinking. I want to come home.”

He teared up as he told me that line, as if it still makes him sick. But he heard those words almost 30 years ago.

His ‘family’ is now haunted by additions and most of his grandchildren are in foster care.

Bottles of time

We made about eight stops along the Alaska Highway and I helped rummage through the trash for cans and bottles. He estimated he made about $30.

I took pictures and asked deeply personal questions yet like all hitchhiking rides I am frustrated that more can’t be told.

All I could tell from pulling bottles from the trash with him is Fast Eddie slowed down. And in his story bag of ups and downs, is a twirling carnival and the shining image of a young, strong Cree man in charge of a making kiddyland work better than his own.

Apache looks on as Ugly toasts, along the on-ramp to I-15 North out of Butte, Montana.

“We’re not us, we’re two other people,”
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

Ugly and Apache walk the on-ramp up to me with their pit bull Molly the Dog on the end of a rope, Molly by far the cleanest.

They carry cups filled with booze and all variety of hardcore trouble.

Looking back, just two days now, I realize how Ugly and Apache attained such a sticky, dust-of-ages filth – freight trains.

I remember that look from my own time riding freight trains in the 1980’s. It comes from boxcar floors, oil-covered track side patches, airborne freight train soot.

Walking up to me outside Butte, Montana, once again in my carnival/hitchhiking world, I am ready for violence in a blink of an eye.

It might start with a friendly greeting. Still, there is potential for holy hell walking toward me with a pit bull.

I’ve been hitchhiking from Chicago on my way to Alaska to another traveling carnival. They’ve been on a years long loop of brutal freight yards and homeless wandering.

Shortly after we introduced ourselves, a car filled with young Montana men drove by yelling epithets and throwing a fast food bag at us.

Well, the formalities aside, Ugly turns Ugly because trash bags at the head JUST PISSES UGLY OFF!

With Molly the Dog pulling hard on her Buckhead Paws retractable leash, leading the way, Ugly swears up a rainbow of profanity, running a few yards down the road after the car. This wasn’t for show, he hoped they would stop for a bloody dog vs. a**hole showdown.

Throwing items at hobos is called “rocking,” because kids often throw rocks at hobos. It’s called ‘getting rocked.’

Homeless, deadbeat dad or hobo

Returning to Apache and me, Ugly identifies himself as a hobo and when I said I was at the National Hobo Convention once, he and Apache said, “In Britt, Iowa?”

They knew the convention and hobo lore.

In a polite conversation, I would be out of line, but early in this conversation I ask them if they are like classic hobos. Do they go town to town across the country, working or not, getting high until the money runs out?

No smile. No laugh. Just a nod of recognition and a “pretty much.”

Blonde, with defined arms, Apache is drunk as three men. Ugly is tall and road strong. Both are liquid-diet thin.

Apache yells at me, as if angry at not recognizing them as the stars of the open road.

“Carnivals ain’t shit compared to what we live every day.”

Answering my gentle questions, Ugly agrees hopping freight trains is a “subculture” and they know lots of people on the rails. They see each other on the circuit and share a brotherhood of sorts.

Then Apache interrupts and yells, “Are you a cop!” Pointing at my backpack, “Is that (their follow hobo’s) backpack?”

Ugly turns to Apache and lets rip with a full-throttle tirade.

“Shut the f*ck-up Apache, you’re f*cking drunk. I’m taking your f*cking drink. I’m going to punch you in the f*cking face. We’re trying to have a conversation. He’s asking how we make money every day. That’s not (pal’s) backpack. He’s not a cop, we just walked up to him hitchhiking on the road. That’s why they call you Apache, you’re Irish but you have the tolerance of a mosquito.”

(it pays to take notes immediately after conversations)

In our short conversation, Ugly hurls invectives at Apache every second question I ask.

“You’re what we call a ‘Summer Bunny,” Apache says after hearing I once road Seattle-to-Chicago on freight trains, with a bicycle in tow.

After this one, Ugly takes Apache’s booze and pours it into his own and again says he is THIS CLOSE to PUNCHING HIM IN THE FACE.

Each time Ugly yells at Apache, it’s a verbal version of unleashing the hounds.

Apache just looks at me, with a what-else-do-you-want-to-know look. Also, a bit cross-eyed.

He says he has a ‘profession’ and doesn’t have to be homeless and wandering. He was on the film crew of the movie “The Avenger” during filming in Prague for a year and a half. He doesn’t mention what job he might have had – if he was really there and that was really the movie.

Ugly has a ‘profession’ too but it’s when he mentions his kids that he hints at a back story too complicated for our short exchange.

“We do this to see the country. I don’t need to do this, I have a profession. I’m a stage rigger, I build concert stages. I’m not a roadie. A roadie moves sh*t and screws in sh*t. A rigger anchors lighting and climbs and dangles himself on little beams.”

Family life held him back from the road, kept him home bound.

“I didn’t tour with any bands. I have kids. I was in their life. I still have kids. But … Apache, you are so f*cking drunk. We’re going now.”

Love it or leave it ‘Bo

I feel sorry for Apache and chime in with my experience hitchhiking between train rides.

“Sometimes it’s fun hitchhiking drunk,” I said.

“Not when nobody’s picking you up, only when you got a ride,” Ugly rightly said. “This ***hole will pass out (walking) half a mile down the road.”

I took pictures in a hurry, I needed more pictures to get one right. I was just scratching the surface of their stories. But I was glad they were leaving before they saw it fit to rob me.

Then, getting ready to part, their conversation turned to how their freight train riding is heroic. Seeing America on the rails. Daring to be free of family, of money, of care. Keep moving brother.

They aren’t hurting anyone.

“We aren’t stabbing anybody,” Ugly said. “That’s not right. If they f*ck with us. We’ll stab them. Oh, ya. We’ll f*cking stab you if you f*cking take our sh*t or something.”

On cue, a can of soda went flying by our heads from another passing car filled with young Montana men.

Again, Ugly and Molly the Dog went after the car.

The last words I clearly heard Ugly say were a warning and a bit poetic.

“That’s what turns us into stabbing hobos. Come here and say that to me you ***holes. You don’t know me, I could make more than you in a day. That is so f***ed, just because we choose to live the life we choose.”

I heard them later in the distance, when the wind shifted, one hobo swearing up a storm at the other.

On Center Street in Calgary, Canada yesterday, I saw old men panhandling and I wondered what they looked like when they were young.

Were they once good looking, boozy and restless. Did they have partners and a dog. Were they Stan and Ollie, funny and living on a tightrope wire.

Or were they Ugly and Apache with a pit bull, living life in the menacing parlance of the modern North American hobo.

Ugly and Apache see these same old men and know that may be where their headed.

Then it occurred to me, something they didn’t say, Ugly and Apache love this life. Bring it on. Consequences be damned.

The Fire Ball swings back and forth at my Chicago carnival, as the glassy-eyed Flying Dumbo turns in twisted circles.

“The way I see the Dark Carnival is it’s a place where you have all the evil souls that are going to be going to hell. Some of them might ride the ‘Murder-go-round,'”
Joseph Bruce, co-founder Insane Clown Posse

The carnies were fixing the Ferris Wheel and passing the time talking about bar fights when one started talking about “Ghost.”

“Ghost got his money, he started flashing it around at the bar saying look what I got,” the carny said. “Somebody shot him in the shoulder. F’in’ Bastard. M’ F’er. Nobody’s seen him since. Now he’s a real Ghost. Ha, ha, ha.”

I don’t know why I even remember the off-hand conversation on set-up that Sunday in Marlboro, New Jersey but it struck me that the grease covered storyteller had no sympathy for Ghost, as if Ghost deserved to be shot.

As if the lesson is, “If you have money, of course, people are going to want to take it from you.”

Which also seemed like a lesson of carnivals in general.

Earlier this month, I hitchhiked from New York/New Jersey to Chicago and was working a carnival in Gage Park, next to Humboldt Park, the most violent neighborhood in Chicago.

We were at the Chicago season opener for this carnival at 55th and Western, a longtime dividing line between the Latino gangs and the Black gangs.

There’s enough tension at this jump that at least one of the security guards carried two holstered guns on his hips and another pistol hidden on his person.

This is from the archives of DNAinfo.com

CHICAGO — Two people were killed and nine others were wounded in shootings over about nine hours Wednesday evening.
A 15-year-old boy was standing with another teen in the Gage Park neighborhood when he was gunned down Wednesday, police said.

In the midst of this season of murders, along a gang fault line, I focused on running the Dumbos. Dumbo the Flying Elephant is a ride with a two-seater car attached by arms to a center, where another Dumbo is perched high on a spinning pole. In the Disney cartoon, Dumbo’s big ears are his wings. The ride is supposed to rise up and give kids the feeling they are flying on Dumbo’s back.

It’s a common and popular ride, made by one of the biggest manufacturers of carnival rides in the world – Zamperla Amusements, Vicenza, Italy.

Still, parents like to comment on Dumbo’s glassy eyes and half-witted smile, which makes Dumbo look very, very high. Or as they say on the midway, Dumbo looks like he’s flying twisted.

One night I heard someone call out to a Ghost and I wondered if I had found him.

Bo Bo The Clown, “he all kinds of laughs”

Before the evening lines started to form that night, I waved over Marine Eric as he walked by the Dumbos to the donikers (carnival lingo for port-a-potties). I asked him if the carny running the balloon game was really named Ghost.

“Oh, that’s really Bo Bo The Clown,” said Marine Eric, a tall, big, black man in his 30s and a veteran of the Marines and carnivals. “He’s the funniest guy here. Anything he say make you laugh. He walk by you and say something – you laugh! He all kinds of laughs.”

Ghost, he said, was once known as Bo Bo The Clown when he worked the dunk tank.

I later heard several carnies talk excitedly about Bo Bo The Clown, as if he was an artist of the insult.

Bo Bo knew just the right dig, or jab, or verbal slap to get people to step up to the line and throw a ball at the target to sink the hated clown.

“Bo Bo was the greatest ever, no, maybe Ghost is better,” one carny said, who I think felt sorry that Ghost had to change his identity.

Nicknames in traveling carnivals stick like someone’s identity. It says something about the person, just like the job they do defines them.

That’s why a carny feels proud if he/she is working the Giant Wheel vs. working the Nemos in kiddy land.

Still, carny names can mock. A carny in Chicago got the nickname Sugar Lips. One in New Jersey was Dummy.

Bo Bo The Clown was unmistakably a show name, a persona he put on when he worked. But carnies work seven days a week during the season.

Ghost is different. He doesn’t play the tank. Something happened, he isn’t that guy anymore.

Belief in the Dark Carnival

With a supernatural name like Ghost, his girlfriend could only be named Angel.

Angel rolled a souvenir cart around the Gage Park carnival, selling cheap, loud items including the multi-colored flashing dolphin necklace I bought for my daughter. Angel is pretty, blonde and in her twenties.

“I wanted to be a veterinarian, now look at me, right?” she said to me. “I’m going back and get my GED and I’m going to college … Majoring in business … So I can open my own shop. I’ll put in all my own stuff.”

When talking to her, it occurred to me, that many traveling carnival workers have a similar dream: hitting it big – coming back to the carnival to own rides or shops – acting the big shot.

Ghost is tallish, thin, with black curly hair that comes out the back of his low-on-his brow cap. He looks like a young version of playwright/actor Sam Shepard.

Both Ghost and Angel wear shirts with the Hatchet Man, the logo of the band Insane Clown Posse. The Hatchet Man is an outline of a wild-haired man running with a cleaver, ready to strike something or someone.

I didn’t ask them, but, often people wearing those shirts are fans of ICP and believe in the Dark Carnival. After all, band co-founder Joseph Bruce said traveling carnival workers visited him in a dream and showed him the Dark Carnival.

In the Dark Carnival, all the dark rides and dark amusements send damned souls to hell.

Bullets make the ghost

Ghost and Angel were talking when I went up to them during a short break.

“I heard about a Ghost on the East Coast, would that have been you?”

He shook his head, as in “I don’t think so.”

“I heard there’s another Ghost on the East Coast,” Angel said.

Then Ghost, lifted his low-brimmed hat.

“Wait a minute. What did you hear about this Ghost.”

“I heard he was shot in the shoulder,” and I pointed to my left shoulder.

“Well, I wasn’t shot in the shoulder,” he said. “But I was shot in the chest.”

Bo Bo The Clown, in full clown regalia, was taunting people from the dunk tank at a carnival in Tennessee when a young man took offense. He drew out a .22 caliber gun and began firing, hitting Bo Bo in the chest.

It is so wrong, but I had a comical vision of a dunk tank clown squealing for mercy and splashing around as a hillbilly with hurt feelings hurls loud insults and blasts away.

Mel Brooks once said, “Comedy is when I stub my toe. Tragedy is when you fall down a manhole cover and die.”

I wanted to ask both Ghost and Angel more about this violent, cathartic upheaval in their carnival lives but they got paid that Friday and disappeared in the night.

“When people quit carnivals, they don’t say where they’re going,” Marine Eric said. “They just not there the next day.”

What happened to Bo Bo wasn’t funny and those bullets literally made Bo Bo a Ghost.

His vanishing act added to his lore around traveling carnivals. Someday, another carny will hear about him like I heard about the East Coast Ghost.

Maybe he and Angel did get off the circuit. Maybe they caught a bus to another traveling carnival. Maybe they’ll both change forms again.

“I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”
Sigmund Freud

A single child specter follows me in carnivals amid unruly mobs of children.

Each show night I go to work my ride, I see kid legions plus one specter. She stands out on the midway as if in a spotlight and all the other kids are running around in dark stage light.

My daughter turned eight a few days ago. I came hitchhiking back from New York to Chicago to see her after my former mother-in-law e-mailed that my daughter was missing me deeply.

I’m following traveling carnivals from coast to coast for a year, writing essays about America from the road.

I’d say this is a personal haunting, but I think it is another common experience shared by carnival workers with children of their own.

There is a running, bouncing dynamic in a child’s happiness, which takes on an even higher pitch with mobs of children. Its an incalculable, elusive zeitgeist that darts between people in the moments of shared happiness.

It’s inexplicable but something so deeply human. Blind people, having never seen a smile, smile. It’s a contagion that carnival workers all say they feel.

Yet many carnival workers grew up in unhappy families and as adults don’t see their own enough.

They grew up orphans, foster kids, juvenile delinquents or victims of abusive parents.

Seeing happy children every night must be an elixir at times for those once unhappy kids.

As for me, every running, laughing, bright-eyed child I see reminds me of my newly-minted eight-year-old daughter in far-away Chicago.

I feel simultaneous twinges.

Sometimes I look at kids about her age, I see her in them, and it hurts.

Other times, I think – I love one of these too.

My parents are carnies

Carnival workers whip out their cell phones to show you a picture of their child. Or they’ll tell you they often call or text their kids from the road.

Others bring their kids along with them in the carnival. At Butler Amusements in California, Robert E. had two daughters and two sons in different units. At the Chicago carnival I’m at now, several children of the owners say they want to be in the business and travel jump to jump.

Some children of carnival workers are raised on the road, missing key grade school and high school years. As a result, I met several who cannot read, including a carnival supervisor.

Last night, I met a 36-year-old Alabama carnival worker who proudly told me he was texting his three-year-old grandson.

A 40-year-old Chicago carny told me he has seven grandchildren. He became a dad at 12 years old and his daughter a mom at 12 years old.

In California, Mexican migrant carnival workers typically said they were working in America in order to send money home to their wives and children.

One of the older Mexicans at the Butler Amusements, Joshua, was perhaps the most shining example of this child empathy.

When a mother of three could not afford all-ride passes for her kids and began leading them away crying, Joshua left his ride, opened his wallet and paid the $75 for wristbands. That’s almost two days wages.

He never mentioned the gesture to me, I heard it from the ticket woman who said it brought tears to her eyes.

The Englewood neighborhood in Chicago is known as one of the toughest and some of the street kids are real hustlers.

One child, I guessed to be under 10 years old, actually summoned fake tears to try to get a free “Dumbo” ride from me. For fear of being fired, I said no. Even though I knew it was a con, I felt like a crumb.

But I later saw the kid running around the carnival going on rides, his tears worked with the real carnies.

Still, carnival workers aren’t just lonely parents longing to be with their kids.

Numerous workers I’ve met have been working off-the-books at carnivals in order to avoid child payments. They declare themselves homeless, without any income, to avoid detection by authorities.

Some just disappear off the grid.

A Pennsylvania carny I talked to this week said his girlfriend in Florida is pregnant and he can’t wait to get his fiancee pregnant because pregnant girls are sexy. He seemed to have no wish for fatherhood other than that pregnancy period.

Cell phone call from a tree

Before I left New York I was on a nightly cell phone call with my daughter, who loves to play in the dogwood tree outside her apartment.

I asked her what she thinks about when she climbs up into the tree. I used to climb trees and dream all afternoon, I told her.

Her school district emphasizes writing and diary keeping. She recently bought a diary so I told her she should write about what she thinks about when she’s in the tree.

Silly thoughts. Funny thoughts. Pretending what she might be when she grows up. Or just looking out over at the roofs and over the roads.

She came up with the idea of calling me from the tree, I worried she might fall but she assured me “I’m an expert.”

Then came the call.

What are you thinking about, I asked.

Long pause.

“I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about,” she laughed.

It’s not so silly, I said, writers are always watching themselves think. That’s what you are doing, I said.

“I’m thinking about what it would be like to be a dolphin trainer. Would the training be hard?”

Somehow, I’m on the other end of the phone and yet on the ground looking up into the tree at my sparkling, darling girl.

I finally saw her last week after an all-night tear-down of my Chicago carnival. I imagined that I’d show up at her birthday celebration a dirty, smelly mess after hitchhiking 800 miles.

But the carnival tear-down supplied my apparition as a muddy, archetypal absentee father returning from the road.

I gave her presents bought at the carnival, a blow-up pink dolphin for the beach and a plastic necklace with a dolphin that changes colors. She named the necklace dolphin “Colorful.”

My parents said she got better presents but when she got home she raved about her carnival dolphins. Dad’s hat was so dirty. He said I’ve grown.

I already knew it but the haunting goes both ways, another carnival specter follows her.

Bosnian refugee to American trucker, Mesud Ceura fills out his time sheet.


Gimmick the Clown, John Lee the Magician or Mr. Schneider the trucker, he makes balloon animals at truck stops across the country.

“In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’ clock in the morning, day after day.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

In this morning’s version of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” the diner is a Gary, Indiana truck stop and the patrons are cross-country truckers.

TA and Pilot signs stand high like neon palm trees over a nighttime oasis, as I-94 trucks roll by like a never-ending, low-throated Tuvan throat song.

Cross-country truckers and night-shift workers prowl. The stadium-sized parking lots are door-to-door 18-wheel trucks. Deep pools of water sit in the lots after a day of rain.

It’s a cold, sublime 3 a.m., and I’m tired after spending the last 24 hours hitchhiking rides in trucks – 850 miles from western Pennsylvania. Earlier this month I hitched from a San Francisco carnival to a New Jersey carnival.

I’m alone in a Subway listening to the store radio play Lou Rawls singing “Late in the midnight hour, you are going to miss my lovin’”

From the gas pumps looking in, you would see me alone, my face lit by a laptop computer. I’m working all night because it is too cold to sleep outside.

When the sun comes up, I’ll get a ride to the Southside of Chicago with hopes of working a traveling carnival kiddy ride tonight – an exhausted, dirty, messy gift to my daughter.

Two good rides, two notebooks

On Tuesday morning I decided to hitchhike from my traveling carnival in Westchester County, New York to Chicago for the birthday of my eight-year-old daughter.

I need to live on the wages made during my year working in traveling carnivals and writing on www.EyesLikeCarnivals.com A call to a carnival in Chicago and I was hired over the phone Tuesday morning.

Hitchhiking in rural New York was extremely depressing, as I was stopped by one state trooper and five local cops inside of two hours. Hitchhiking is illegal “everywhere” in New York State, they said, warning me about heavy fines and jail time.

They suggested I return to New York City or walk out of the state.

I found a way around the cops on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday. I took a video of riding on the flat bed of a pick-up truck. I took pictures of drivers with the best yarns.

Yet each driver seemed to just be getting started on their life stories when the rides ended and I was left standing there watching book chapters drive down the road.

However, yesterday I had just two truck rides from the Scranton, PA. area to Gary, IN..

During those two long rides I learned enough about truck drivers Mesud Cevra and David Lee Schneider to fill two pocket notebooks. I stayed the night in the upper bunk of Cevra’s cab when we both became sleepy on an overnight drive through Pennsylvania.

Both drivers want to write books about their lives, of dramatic escapes, fiery accidents and wisdom gained from driving millions of miles in America.

Muslim priest, war refugee, American trucker

Mesud Cevra survived two assassination attempts; swam a river to hide from the army; survived a concentration camp and, despite being Muslim, he once posed as a Catholic priest to illegally cross an E.U. border.

Following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1996 killed an estimated 100,000 people. “Ethnic cleansing” and reports of mass rapes, NATO intervened with bombings.

Cerva came out of that hell with his family to the United States in 1997, with just $2,000 in his pockets. He now owns his own truck. In his early 60s, he’s thinking of buying two more.

He considers himself an American success story, in part, because his son and daughter are thriving. Nerina Cevra is a prominent international law attorney. His son, Omer, is a published poet and political commentator who is working on a movie deal about his days in a concentration camp with his father.

Yet talk of the war can still bring tears to Cerva as he talks about those days, so real even now.

Cevra was working on his laptop at a Pilot truck stop outside Scranton, PA., this week when I struck up a conversation with him. Dusk had just come and I was getting ready to spend the night in an all-night Subway.

When I mentioned I spent the early and mid-1990s in Budapest, Hungary a bridge opened up.

A bridge is also the most architecturally distinct feature of Cevra’s hometown, Mostar, Bosnia. The most prominent city in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mostar’s main architectural feature was its high bridge over the Neretva River, an example of 16th Century Muslim architecture. During the war, the bridge was blown up.

Cevra and his family were among the 2.2 million people displaced during the war.

A rock-n-roll enthusiast and guitar player, Cevra began his anti-communist activism early in life with his choice of Western music. He said he went on to run for parliament and speak out for democratic reforms during a time when many such activists were killed or imprisoned.

“Everyone from Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo knew I had this music,” said Cevra, who got his albums sent to him by an L.A. Disco club owner. “It was dangerous to listen to Rock n’ Roll music at that time … I got arrested for it.”

Cevra was eventually imprisoned for his political activities for 11 days during the war. But his father, mother, siblings and cousins also were imprisoned. He blames the Dretclj camp for his father’s death soon after being released.

“Many people (imprisoned),” he said. “They killed a lot of people. Eleven days seemed like 11 years. I heard a lot of screaming going on in the next room.”

After escaping to Munich, Germany, he remembers seeing a TV show of prison camps in Bosnia and Croatia. Then he noticed his mother in the crowd of people being filmed by CNN in a camp.

“It hurt so much when I saw my mother there like that and because I couldn’t help,” he said.

During the chaos of the war, he was able to spirit his son out of the country by hiding him underneath his bus chair. But after his 15-year-old daughter defected to Italy during a handball tournament tour, he lost track of her for two years.

A tall and physically strong man, with blue eyes and white-gray hair, Cevra, nonetheless gets emotional when talking about those long periods of separation from his daughter

“It was war, so I didn’t know nothing about her. I heard she could have been in Croatia,” Cevra said “It was a terrible time for me. It was a terrible time for me.”

He again wipes tears from his eyes. For several false starts, he cannot speak without tears for the tragedies of Mostar.

It’s a different place these days, he says as he lightens up. He may retire there.

“What am I?” he says. “I’m a refugee from Bosnia who has been fighting to make a living for 10 years. I didn’t know my children would turn out like this (successes). Now, they are like my right hand and my left hand.”

He estimates he has driven about 2 million miles since coming to America and he has some opinions about this land. Americans work too hard, he says. Oil companies control too much.

“I love the freedom,” he said. “Ninety percent of the Americans I meet are honest people … I think people are very happy. I see people with no money but are happy.”

Animal balloon maker, magician and trucker

John Lee Schneider opened the front, passenger-side door of his 18-wheeler and un-inflated balloons poured out on to the parking lot.

I’d just gotten off a ride from eastern Pennsylvania to Toledo, Ohio with Cevra and Schneider promised to get me to Chicago.

Balloons, however, begged for answers.

Schneider isn’t just a truck driver, he’s a magician and a clown too.

In addition to driving 100,000 miles a year or more as a long-distance truck driver, he stops at truck stops and makes balloon animals for “kids and waitresses.”

“I see a family in a truck stop and I’ll go up to the kids and ask if they can have a balloon,” says the former 101st Airborne Division, Vietnam Veteran. “A waitress might sit down next to me and I’ll make them a puppy. Then they’ll show it around … I’ve had a family buy me a meal.”

Truck stop after truck stop, Schneider makes giraffes, elephants and assorted animals for kids.

“I love entertaining people,” he said as he drove through the night. “If wasn’t for people I wouldn’t be here … Or I’d have to entertain the animals.”

Schneider already has attained a bit of notoriety as as Gimmick (a clown) and as David Lee The Magician.

In the 1970s, he was doing a fiery cage escape trick in Sheboygan, Wisc., when a NBC affiliate taped him catching fire. He made CNN news and TV Guide.

He says he became such a celebrity he moved to Hilbert, Wisc. and changed professions.

“I couldn’t go nowhere without people stopping me for autographs,” he said. “But now I’m known as the balloon man in a lot of truck stops.”

Still, like so many people, Schneider has still more sides. He calls himself a “fundamentalist” or “independent” preacher. He’s also an outdoors man who loves bow hunting and fishing.

At 57 years old, he plans on retiring in five years and going back to the garage to dig out Gimmick and David Lee.

Until then, “kids and waitresses” at truck stops across the country can count on animal balloons to lighten the load.