Posted in Small Rides Discussion: “Does anyone else remember the Armenbutte Fairgrounds carousel?”
By Lou151991
Posted: June 2, 2020, 3:33 AM
Hey, I don’t post here a lot, but maybe there are other midwesterners on this forum who will know what I’m talking about.
I keep dreaming about this one carousel at the Armenbutte Fairgrounds. I lived about 20 miles out from there, from 1996 until we moved to St. Louis in 2007, so most of my childhood, pretty much. I remember going to the county fair there every year. It wasn’t much, but I was a kid and had never been to Disney World, so obviously it was the best thing that could happen to me other than Christmas.
This carousel had a red and gold-striped circus tent roof. Horses, carriages, and maybe a couple unicorns thrown into the mix. The poles were braided brass. There were mirrors lining the inside.
Has anyone else seen this carousel before?
All the big kids used to fight over this one horse—the only white horse, a demigod we mythologized on the playground and named Lightning. Its front hooves reared up. Its teeth and tongue splayed out like it was screaming. Its irises were robin’s egg blue. A rumor spread that this white horse moved up and down faster than all the other mounts. It wasn’t true, but we treated it like it was because it gave us something to covet. If you missed a chance to ride Lightning, you had to swallow the notion that you were less than important, less than the hero of your own story. That’s what we all wanted—to feel like the center of the universe. So we hurt each other to prove ourselves to Lightning.
I remember going to the county fair there every year. My parents would finally wake up on those mornings with the same fairy light shimmer that danced behind my eyes every day. They bought me all the junk food I wanted, and I wasted most of it. They bought me balloons whose curled ribbons would slip out of my palm on cruel breezes. They bought me tickets to as many rides as I could stand. Rides were harder to waste. I vomited all over my shoes when I got off the tilt-a-whirl, and still I begged for one more ticket, one more chance to feel my insides gelatinize and my skull flush with wind.
Does anyone else dream about the Armenbutte Fairgrounds carousel? There were mirrors lining the inside. These mirrors stoked a special dog-brained joy in me that left for good when math first introduced letters. Clinging to the pole, I could turn to my left as the world moved right, and wave to both my mother and myself at the same time. She smiled on from behind the barricade, and I giggled at the shiny charm of watching us spin in a parallel reality.
Has anyone else seen this carousel before? I went back recently and it’s not there anymore. Just a ring of discolored grass where it used to spin. The food isn’t even good anymore. Even if I still had that wall of mirrors in the magnetic pole of my universe, Mom is dead now. Spilled popcorn rolls through dirt like vertebrae through a graveyard. They sold me a cold pretzel.
We hurt each other to ride Lightning. Hands that only just mastered shoelaces, hammy and weak-knuckled, suddenly weaponized. Against anyone worth fighting, we were as good as punching through water. Against each other, we were crusaders without decorum. We bit, scratched, and pulled hair. I shouldered and shoved toddlers to the ground to take Lightning’s reins, to live my quixotic fantasies on a white steed built from fiberglass. If we tasted real world pain for Lightning, the magic would be real too. He would go faster.
One summer, I hurled another child into the mirrors. I saw it happen three times at once. The glass shattered on impact, and his forehead split open in a weepy diadem of blood, and we weren’t sure if he was going to get up.
It was the best thing that could happen to me other than Christmas.
Does anyone else dream about the Armenbutte Fairgrounds carousel? I go there every night. When I wake up, everything still spins. There’s grit in my molars where the cotton candy melted. When I wake up, I squint through a dark and spiraling tempest, crying for my mother, drowning in my own rimy blood vessels, sitting in a puddle of my own urine. It all keeps spinning. When everything rips around you, you drink the thing you fear or you surrender.
I keep dreaming about this one carousel at the Armenbutte Fairgrounds. Every night, the same dream. I’m riding Lightning, still a child. Its white mane is flung back by gales barbed with earthen debris. The beveled edges of its reins are slick with blood. Its teeth and tongue are splayed open, and it screams like a man being strangled. Has anyone seen this carousel before? I whip around to look for my mom. I search the crowd around the carousel, but all their backs are facing me. When I look at the mirrors, the other child is still there, his forehead kissing the glass mid-flight as it shatters into a distorted web of gory fragments. Over and over, the collision restarts on the next revolution.
I’ve attached an old picture of me as a kid on the carousel. Please let me know if you recognize it.
Attachment: armenbuttecountyfair98.jpeg
[ID: A low resolution photograph of a white man in his late 20s, taken in a dark room. He is sitting on a bed. His eyes are red from crying. END ID]