Fairground for the greater Masses

There were boys in t-shirt circuswear, faded pinstripe graphics peeling in thick chunks of paint, there was a unicycle and tumbling girls with tiny skirts, those special corn dogs painted American flags with cheese and ketchup and something, maybe, blue raspberry Ooze tubes. Turning rounded fountain corners the fanfare amplified, musique concrète, dipping electronic notes that slipped through reverberating, tinny hallways with narrow stairs; my pants were looser than they’d been all summer. Up and over in Montana, I’d read words by Lenny F. underscore my own in the spring, amid a back-and-forth unrelated to his work with my newfound stepbrother; we, he and I and a handful of latched strangers, knocked on a wooden door sure there’d come an answer and when there wasn’t, sat in layered clumps rolling cigarettes. I hadn’t done that before. I’d eaten plenty of dirt. Dust and dried chicken shit and something  powdery and naturally orange that we smoked in those clumps, and it felt so smutty, all of us lying around in no certain veneration. There were five, six people in the clumps, and in the city, five, fifty, four hundred folks milling around kicking microplastics and sealed cigarette butts. I was stopped when washing my hands clean in the fountain. I thought, who’s and what’s keeping it so clean for? I thought, in Italy you can drink the mother’s afterbirth water, wash your face in baby oils and blood, drink and let your body do the separating. I thought, had you a body lapping from this water here, you’d pull ‘em at the collar and wipe their mouth dry like a newborn. Who’re you to preserve this holiest of waters, here, in this sideshow? I eat two corn dogs with zero ketchup, and watch with envy those who can’t be bothered to wipe their chin between bites, whose WetNaps bulge from skintight, pocketless bottoms, whose sneakers reek of this and last summer’s corn dog. There’s a wooden church somewhere around here, so I’ve heard, one that survived a fire by sheer force of will, like a tree with chained bodies. I heard there’d be teenagers fucking in there, if I found it. I heard there’d be young people fucking and staring out the stained glass window hoping I’d be there. I heard, too, it existed only for those who had heard an exhort baled in fantasia, exhausted exultation, wet eyes and stiff nethers. The local cops found us there, in Montana, digging steel toes to clay with our fingers all stretched up and out, twinkling like we’re touching little electric stars, kissing on each other’s cheeks. They’d caught up to us far past their ideal, just spilling over one another like wet dogs, so somnolent and silly. Our eyes cheered with shaking flashlights. Best they could do. Swift pat on the ass, Get it goin’, now, Pack it up. I watch a man in a purple tracksuit fold up his tent, using one free hand to wave over a little woman, a little girl, in a purple tracksuit, put her to work, Grab that side y empuja! She empujas with all her might and when the corners meet she furrows her brows so thickly she’s got a tumor bursting from her head. The velcro snags and the two high-five, near missing, she’s overshot it while checking the pulse of the audience, feral eyes latching smooth borders, I hope she’ll catch me and she doesn’t. That was great! That was really, really great! At the rear of the park, there’s a stone and metal drinking fountain. I should be a comedienne, the way my hands shot up in performative enthrallment. I trigger the stream with my inner thigh and trickle my sticky joints in the water. For all I know, hey, for all I Know, there’s a direct-fucking-pipeline between this here bubbler and the sham of a fountain centerstage; so then, I drink, and shut up. I shut up through the arches, I shut up and nearly let a biker take me out, I shut up because in the circus, the entertainment should never speak. In the mountains, I lose my pace and roll tobacco ‘round my mouth, still kicking and dancing when the rocks trip me up, some honky-tonk bit I adopt in rurality, some quaintness, where the hills have more eyes than the city has people, so sometimes it’s less scary to perform for the Greater masses.

Art;

Plate (page 82) from Cirque

Fernand Léger

1950

One from an illustrated book with eighty-three lithographs (including wrapper front and back)

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/27327?classifications=any&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2022&direction=fwd&page=2&q=circus&utf8=✓&with_images=1