When the hot summer nights have really begun to gain some serious ground and are beginning to make me think that all this talk the rest of the year about the wine country being a ‘temperate zone’ is just the most foolish kind of babbling, I know that it will soon be time for the county fair. When the chirping of the birds is cut short in mid-flight by spontaneous combustion and hobos start dropping due to heat exhaustion, that’s the time when my neighbors decide it’s a good idea to put up some tents, invite in the carnies and gypsy-folk, and really get a great whiff of each other.

I know in my heart that it’s fair time when I can look down from the freeway onto the fairgrounds and see the ferris wheel and the tilt-o-whirl and people gathering about the food court and the police and metal detectors and… oh, is that someone being shanked? Well, no bother, there are still smiling faces amongst those patrons who’ve still got a life ahead of them. Even the ambulance drivers seem to go about their work with a certain good cheer these days.

The sweet smell of hay around the race track nicely balances out the sobbing and cussing coming from the stands, the trashy scum having slunk their way out of the local casinos to lose their entire unemployment checks on a series of horse races or wiener dog races or whatever they do now. Bunny races. Frog, perhaps. They’ll bet on silly unknowable things if given the chance, like how many legs a cockroach has or who Betty-Sue’s real father could be.

Last year, the fair was special for me for two reasons. Firstly, I played with my band at the fair, at the Blues Festival, and was treated uncommonly well for a working musician. When I arrived I was escorted backstage, across a small lot, and into an air conditioned trailer that had my band’s name on it. I was shocked. The fridge? Full of local beers and ales! The ice chest? Full of real ice! Let alone the fact that there was a trailer especially for us, but the fact that it wasn’t a roach-infested utility shed… well!

There was a shower and a dressing room and a few beds in case you’d been out late with some blues groupies and needed some shut-eye before you went on stage. Unfortunately none of us needed such rest, but it was good to know it was there. For later! Oh yeah!

The show itself went well, aside from a sound tech who ignored my mouthed pleas for more of the singer’s voice in my monitor, since that’s sort of how I take my cues for parts of the song. The singer can vamp on a chorus or take a guitar solo for a week and a half, and as long as I can hear when he comes back into the verse again, everything is kosher. If I can’t hear, however, well I might as well be playing an entirely different song, with a different band, with earmuffs on. In China.

Mr. Sleeveless-Van-Halen-T-Shirt-Wearer who was manning the sound board couldn’t figure out what I was trying to say, even when accompanied by my excellent amateur sign-language. I kicked myself for not preparing a cue card. Luckily, after a few additional moments of frantic waving, a look appeared on his stoned face that said “Oh! I understand now! Lemme just…”, and he turned the snare drum up in the rhythm-guitar player’s monitor full blast, much to our surprise.

In case you were wondering, this is business as usual when it comes to playing new venues. It’s always a bit of a crap-shoot with sound guys: some are talented, highly-skilled angels with the ears of symphonic composers and many are deaf, mentally-handicapped, ornery, probably drunk and/or high wastes of space who got the gig by sticking their tongue in the ass of the venue owner. Very few sit between these two extremes, I’ve found. But when it comes down to it, I have the same view on gigging as I do on car crashes: Any one you can walk away from isn’t all that bad. And if you’re dragged away from the scene in handcuffs after strangling the driver who caused the car crash, well, that’s just icing on the cake. Or par for the course. Gravy on the train? You know what I’m saying.

The second thing that made last year’s fair remarkable was that my wife and I had an opportunity to go with children, specifically my wife’s two nieces. I would have liked to take my nephews but we’re still trying to find a solvent that will dissolve whatever glue the youngest one used to stick himself to his GameBoy Advanced, and the oldest one is nearly a teenager and thus we fear he may be reaching shanking age, either giving or receiving. Much better, in each case, for their Daddy, my older brother, to bring them because I have this thing, call it a reluctance, about beating them in public that my brother thankfully lacks.

The nieces, though, are the perfect ages. The older niece, Ashley, has yet to reach the age at which she is self-conscious and so feels just ever-so-wonderful about the rides and the games and the stuffed bears you might spend fifty dollars trying to win, but she’s all smiles and merriment and spastic expressions of joy, so it’s okay. She cares not for boys, only for flashy toys and glittery super-balls and stickers and unicorns and scrap-booking, thus she is welcome to accompany the wife and I anywhere we go, spreading love and glitter over everything she touches.

And the younger, named Sierra, is still nearly a toddler, albeit a talkative one, and has a terrifically Buddha-like sense of wonder about absolutely everything, what with it being the first time she’s ever seen most of it. She claps delightedly at a clown blowing up a balloon and the enormous slide that you go down on a piece of cardboard and the small kiddie rides and even a stray dog having an unashamed bowel movement in the center of the midway is cause for a small peal of laughter.

She has her limits though, I would learn.

Both of the nieces wanted cotton candy and, given my own experiences with standing in line and waiting for cotton candy, I was reluctant to go buy some. Also, it was pure sugar, I reasoned, and so we would wait until just before we were about to leave and then buy the cotton candy, so they’d be nice and primed when we brought them home to their parents.

There was, I thought, a nice little ride that I would have loved to go on had I been her age, which was a slow ride in a small boat, a canoe I guess, around a long winding blue trough filled with water, through some scenery and little cardboard archways painted to resemble trees. The canoe was painted with simple little buffalo and stick figures with bow and arrows. There was a whole sort of Tiger-Lily / Little Hiawatha-ish vibe to the whole thing that appealed to my deeply refined and ingrained white-male aesthetics, which is not, for future reference, an adequate compass when it comes to judging what a toddler will enjoy.

I personally paid the five dollars and lifted the little munchkin into the air and planted her squarely in the small boat. She seemed excited enough to be in a little canoe and so I stood back and the mustachioed carny gently pushed the back of her canoe and sent it gliding down the first stretch of watery track. It was just at that moment that the ‘music’ that was supposed to accompany the ride kicked on.

What issued forth from the crackling speaker can only be called a cacophony of jungle sounds and Native-American tribal drumming. This was broken up every fifteen seconds or so with what I clearly visualized as a sharp-toothed, long-clawed, clown voice shrilly intoning the following messages from some unholy abyss:

“Enjoy the ride, little partner! Can you see the buffalo? How fun!”

“Don’t stick your hands in the water, kiddies! It’s not safe to drink! Hee-hee-hee-hee!”

“Please wait until the the ride is completely over before you remove your child from the canoe!”

I especially thought this last one appropriate and saw it for what it really was: an afterthought begging you not to give into your child’s cries for rescue, a message that was tacked on once the creator of this watery, tedious, sewage-canal of horror finally saw what his own twisted mind had wrought upon the earth and just before he ended his own life by drinking some of the water from his ride.

Sierra, upon hearing this recording and looking around and noticing the gray dishwater she was floating in and the agonizingly slow pace at which she was crawling around the long winding curves of the mock-river, began to gather a look on her face I’d never seen before. Her eyebrows first went up and then down and she scrunched up her face and began breathing hard through her nose. After about twenty seconds of this, she settled her features into a stoic little pout and knitted her eyebrows together. It was only as she rounded the final turn and began coming straight for the end of the ride, where we were standing, that I recognized exactly what she was trying to say to us without saying it, only because she was so young and couldn’t yet find the words.

“What the eff, dudes?!”

It was all I could do to look on with pity as she creeped slowly down the final stretch. After all, the devil-clown had commanded that I must not remove her from the sacrificial chariot before the water demons had had a good chance at removing my niece’s soul, and, well, who the hell was I to disobey a command like that? Twenty minutes later, in my mind at least, she arrived at the end of the ride and I lifted her out of the canoe and I swear I felt something, some-THING, trying to reach up out of the water. There was a bloodcurdling scream and a flurry of noise but we got away.

“Geez, Chris, did you have to scream like that?” My wife said, trying to pop her ears.

“I don’t know what you mean. I could have sworn that was Sierra…”

“I don’t think she even knows the word ‘hellspawn’.”

I looked down at Sierra, who was looking down at herself. She looked up at me, shaken, but intact. Her soul had suffered a bit but she’d come out the other end a little stronger, a little less trusting of her uncle.

“Cotton candy!” she commanded.

“Hell yes,” I obeyed.