The One About Carnie Rejection

I was 19 in 2000- pre-9/11- which means that crossing the border really wasn't all that difficult, at least between the US and Canada.  To the point that I'm not even sure why the border existed.  Despite this, every year when we went camping for two weeks in Sarnia, we got to the Blue Water Bridge, and my dad became very serious about everyone shutting up and behaving as we were questioned by the border guard.  These border guards were no joke, asking such hard-hitting questions as "Where are you from?" and "Where are you going?", before waving us through, looking bored as hell.

I don't blame my dad though.  If anyone would have thought it would have been hilarious to say something smartass at the border, it would have been me.  But who doesn't love a full car search??

We grew up an hour from the border either way- Port Huron or Detroit- and so when we turned 19 what we did was we went to Canada.  To drink.  Obviously.  And when I say we, I mean people who grew up in that area, not my dad and I.  Although that might have been interesting..
It was June after our first year of college and Jenn was turning 19 and so we said, "Yeah!  We're going to go to Canada!  To drink!"

And we did.  And we felt very badass about it.  A carful of us- drove down to Detroit and took the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel over to Windsor.

WOOHOO!!  WINDSOR PAR-TAYYY!

Something that we had maybe neglected to consider was that it was a Tuesday.

While you all know that there ain't no party like a Windsor party, it turns out that a Windsor party does stop.  On Tuesdays.

We sat in an almost-entirely abandoned bar- five girls.  I cannot speak for the rest of us, but I know that I myself was sipping on the Seasoned Drinker's Drink of Choice, Amaretto Sours.

I am almost entirely sure that the sour mix I consumed for my first two years of college is 100% to blame for the ulcer I carry to this day.

So there we were, living it up in Windsor.

Five of us, pretty much the only customers in the bar.

Someone was rolling silverware in the corner.

This reminds me of a story where my baby brother gets a ticket in Windsor for flipping off a cop, but that is a story for a completely other time.

Anyhow, this is quite obviously a wasted trip right up until someone gets the idea that we should go to Danny's.

I know that you know what Danny's is but, if you're going to pretend like you don't, I will just go ahead and say that Danny's is a male strip club in Windsor.

And I will also go ahead and say that it was NOT my idea.

Let me tell you how I feel about strip clubs.  Like being forced to pretend to love sunsets, strip clubs make me want to cry.  Here's a short explanation about that:

Strip clubs remind me of Valentine's Day in elementary school.  Remember how it was so exciting, and you got to make your Valentine card box and pick out what sorts of Valentines you wanted to give out?  Except that the entire damn thing was ruined by the fact that you HAD to give out Valentines to EVERYONE in your class.  Even the people you didn't feel particularly Valentiney towards, and people whose names you could barely stand to scratch out on the "To" line.

Now, as an adult and a parent, I fully support the All-Or-Nothing Valentine Rule; but at the time it was a kill-joy.  How were you supposed to know if What's-His-Face totally had a crush on you, seeing as he had not choice but to give you a Valentine?

Spoiler Alert, 5th Grade Laura: He didn't.

But strip clubs are the same damn thing.  I cannot fathom why you would ever want someone to display any sort of interest in you/do whatever it is they do for you when you know that they are receiving a paycheck for and paying taxes on said interest.  That's horrifying to me.  And it's not a judgement of the strippers, who probably really need the money, it's a judgement of people who willingly go forward to pay for that fake Valentine.

Is it so, so awful to just want some genuineness??

So we went, the five of us.  To Danny's.

This would be a good place to talk about peer pressure.  But I'll skip it.

I'm sure that this is probably a false memory, but I remember the building being a lot like an abandoned Chinese restaurant.  Again, probably a lie.

What I know for sure is not a lie is that, beyond the five of us that came together, there were roughly 5-8 additional people in the audience.

1.  That's important later.

2.  I am not comfortable being 10% of this particular audience.  You know how when you go somewhere and there aren't a lot of people, you feel like you need to cheer twice as loud to make up for the lack of an audience?  Yeah.  I wasn't going to do that.

Knowing that we were all friends, I think it would have been interesting for you to see the different reactions to said establishment.  A few of us were pretty into it.  Like, dollar-waving into it.  And then at least two of us- that would be Sara and me in this particular scenario- spent about five minutes in the middle of that hot mess and then waited out the rest of the show in the lobby, leaving the remaining 80% to hold down the fort.  On top of the above objections to strip clubs, I have to tell you- this one was repulsive.  The damn mirrors were dirty.  All I'm saying is, the standards in a strip club aren't that high to begin with- don't you think you could clean the mirrors?

I also think this was a really depressing thing to do at 19.  At 19, you're still trying to figure out exactly what adult love/relationships/whatever look like.   So everything you take in is, consciously or not, asking the question, "is THIS what it looks like?"

Is it like Jennifer Gray in Dirty Dancing?

Is it your mom watching Law and Order while your dad sleeps in the recliner??

And then you walk in to Danny's and you're like.. oh, holy crap- don't let it be this...

So Sar and I waited it out in the lobby, and when everyone was ready to go, we got back in our car and headed back for the States.  At this point, though, something was wrong with my eye.  I couldn't tell you the point that it started, but all the sudden my right eye was watering like CRAZY.  I couldn't get it to stop, and so I rode home in the backseat the entire way with my hand covering my right eye, and my cheek completely soaked from the watering.  Do you ever have snapshot memories of your life?  I have a snapshot memory of that night, riding in the back right hand passengers side seat at 2am, watching the street lights go by, with my eye in horrible pain.

The next morning, it was just as bad, except now I could see that it was incredibly sensitive to light as well.  I tried to wait it out.  It didn't work.  So I called Sara.  She came and picked me up and we went and had lunch at Wendy's, and I wore a pair of the sunglasses the entire time and probably looked like Sara's crazy hungover sister whom she was attempting to talk into rehab over a Frosty.  Then Sara took me to the urgent care center, because I couldn't drive myself.

I would pay approximately 1 trillion dollars to have a picture of both myself and of Sara's reaction when I walked out of the urgent care office and into the waiting room.  Here's what I looked like: I had a massive patch over my eye.  Not like a pirate patch.  A huge wad of white gauze taped over my eye.

I said: "Yargh!" (true)

Sara's eyes got REAL big.

And then we both lost it.

What had happened was I scratched my cornea somehow.  I think it probably had to do with the nasty images of disgusting men being burned onto my retinas and my body rejecting that horrible image.  Whatever.  I was wearing a damn eyepatch, and I had to wear it for several days.

So naturally, all of my friends came over to see it.  We spent a few days- Sara, Jenn and I- lying around my living room talking.  Except, the patch and my eyelid weren't enough to keep the sun out, so I had to lie around with various pieces of cloth- blankets, clothing- draped over my face to keep it from burning.  So, in summary, I laid around my living room talking to my friends with a blanket over my face for a few days.  At one point, we decided to get ice cream, and I decided to ride along even though I obviously wasn't going in anywhere.  Danny came, too.  So the three of them- Sara, Jenn, and my brother- went into Ice Cream Junction.  My two closest friends- with my younger brother, who would have been 15 at that point.  I stayed in the car.  With a sweatshirt draped over my head.

Everyone in Davison knows everyone, and so they all knew that this particular arrangement of people was super weird.  One girl turned to Sara and said, "...do you guys usually hang out with Laura's little brother?"

Then they said, "Oh, Laura's out in the car."

While I can obviously never know this to be the truth, I can only imagine that she looked out of the windows of Ice Cream Junction and saw me sitting in the front seat of Sara's car with a sweatshirt over my face.

So that's normal.

A few days later I was either feeling better or couldn't stand my family's pirate jokes anymore, so I took off the patch.  But we were far from returning to contacts.

Also, I looked like hell.

Huge, swollen eye.

Glasses that were so old they were no longer my prescription, because I NEVER wore (wear) glasses.

And Sara said, "Let's go to the carnival!"

And I said.. okay?

I still don't get that.

1.  The carnival is not somewhere I want to be when I'm feeling my best

2.  Why in the world would we go to the carnival?

But we did.  We went to the carnival.  I can still see the exact outfit I was wearing

Me= wearing a huge neon-orange shirt that belonged to my much-larger-than-me boyfriend, swolley-face and glasses

Sara.  I don't know what Sara was wearing, but Sara always looks cute.

We walked around the carnival for a while.

Truthfully, I don't remember what we did.  It's all overshadowed by what is to come.  Probably we rode a ride and saw some creepiness.  The usual.

And then there were these two guys, and Sara kept saying, "Why do I know those two guys?"

"Huh," I said "no idea."

"Let's go talk to them and find out", she said.

Me: "Okay"

But before we got there, she figured it out.  Remember those five horrifying minutes we spent in the nast-o strip club room a few nights back?  Oh yeah, she recognized them from there.  They weren't strippers... they were there with their girlfriends?

That conversation went something like this:

Sara: "Hey, did I see you guys at a strip club in Windsor a few nights ago?"

Them:  Uhh....

Long story short, it WAS them.  They went to great lengths to explain exactly what they were doing in a Canadian male strip club.  And they weren't FROM Davison (where the fair was at), they were there because.. they were pseudo-carnies.  Their job was to travel from carnival to carnival in Michigan, filling up the moonwalks.  Which, it turns out, is a thing.

Perhaps you're thinking, "Well, that's not an OFFICIAL carnie...", but what I'm telling you is that you can take the moonwalk filler out of the carnival, but you can't take the carnival out of the moonwalk filler.

CARNIES.

One of the pseudo-carnies was REAL into Sara.

He said (to her), "Hey, do you, uh, want to go get something to eat or something?"

And she said... yes?

That's all fine and good except that:

1. I'm clearly not sending my best friend off with a strip club-going carnie

2.  There were two of them

You know how this goes.  There are two of them.  There are two of us.

Honestly, I'm not usually too down on myself.  I mean, I make FUN of myself, but mostly because I'm beyond that stage where I feel like I'm the Phantom of the Opera.

But on this Carnie Love occasion- swolley eye, big glasses, huge shirt- even I have to admit that I'm nothing to write home about.

We went to Archie's, which was the one and only 24 hour restaurant in town, and therefore the only thing open after 9pm.  We sat at a table and talked about carnie things.  I would tell you about it, except that Carnies are a lot like the Free Masons in terms of secrecy, and we've all read The DaVinci Code.

It was solid awkwardness.

You know that I'm a social weirdo to begin with, but I look like a crazy-face AND I'm out eating with carnies.

I ate cottage cheese.

I don't remember what Sara ate, but let me tell you what happened when her bill came.  Carnie Boy was totally into her, and apparently filling moonwalks gives you at least a little disposable cash.  When the waitress brought the checks, he reached his carnie arms across the table and said "I got this".

She also brought my check, but I guess the other carnie boy didn't make as much?  Maybe he was like a carnie apprentice or something?  I'm sure that was it.  I'm sure he was just saving his money for college, and that it had nothing to do with me.  Because no move was made to pay my bill.  It stayed there.  A grease spot grew from the size of a penny to that of a silver dollar while we wrapped up our carn-versation.

It's not that I can't pay for my own cottage cheese.  And it's not that I was into whoever #2 was.  It's that, here I am, mere days after getting rid of an eye patch, and I'm getting rejected by a carnie.

But I think that the real story here, 10 years later, is- wait... didn't those carnies have girlfriends!?

Exactly.

And when you put it that way, the whole perspective shifts.

I'm not going to be your carnie roadie girlfriend, carnie boy!

I'll buy my own damn cottage cheese.

My integrity is boundless.