Tennesee

I'm waiting for my friend to get here from Tennessee, it got me to rememb'rin what I did in Tennessee.
The first time I was there it looked like a tv Christmas special.
I was in the corporate circus, we were headed to West Virginia to do shows in the two big cities there.
I was riding in a big rig with Pee Wee (a 70 year old ex elephant trainer turned profiteer,
James, my 19 year old boss and head tormentor and JR, a human pimple.
The whole circus caravan drove through treacherous mountain roads in the snow until we eventually found a diner. We (they)passed the time discussing just how much of a queer I was.
For the record, in all the years I knew those guys, I'm the only one who EVER had a girlfriend and I did it twice, not bad for only being in towns for a day or two.
The windows were frosty and it was warm inside, snow covered forest stood in all other directions, it was beautiful.
Because I was the youngest on the concession crew I had to sit in the passenger seat, it was uncomfortable and there was a hole in the floor so it had been hours of frozen misery melting off when I got to the front door.
I sat at the table like a real human, I made sure not to sit anywhere near the buttholes I had been stuck with, I found a seat at a table next to the prop boss,s daughter Lania, I had a huge crush on her, she would amaze me every day with her high wire act.
She was my age but rarely spoke to me.
I had coffee, I didn't like coffee so much but I was trying to “age up” being the youngest feller there.
All the tables had wooden puzzles to do, and I smoked cigarettes and ate pie ala mode.
When we were leaving I looked into the woods at the winter wonderland.
I kept expecting to see Santa come out and maybe some Star Wars characters, it looked so TV but it was real.
That was circa 1988-89, many times I went back through that state and I found out that you can never return to magic moments, I just got to see something special.
The other times I visited were filled with desperate people doing desperate things, very surreal.
I once had to pretend to be a christian missionary to get off the Nashville streets, the church was just as bad and I even had to steal my clothes back and jump out a window to escape.
I hooked up with a school bus full of christian hippies headed out of town and never have been back.
Pee Wee retired, he was the nicest, his son was a boss in another part of the show and he was always good to me.
I don't know what happened to JR, I hope he went back to Misouri and got someone he didn't like pregnant.
James got his come up in's in Florida later that year, he was still making me sit in the bad seat so when he was asleep in the back, I tied his shoe laces to some knobs in the big rig cab.
When we stopped at a rest stop, he went to get out and dropped like a sack of old shoes.
I left the door of the cab open for him, he fell out and quickly was hanging upside down yelling at me.
I watched him pull his knife out and cut his laces and drop, back first.
His body had a long way to go before it hit the ground and we all could hear the air leave him as his back struck blacktop.
He popped up enraged and then his knees gave out and he kissed the floor again, he got back up and went after me.
Two things James didn't know, one is that I was taking the hazing because I wanted to be in the circus, not because of any weakness, in fact before I joined the circus I was a brawler and a hoodlum, the other thing James didn't know was that the prop crew was really mad at him for selling them wet fireworks (you can't make this crap up) I let him catch me and push me down in front of them.
He pulled his knife back out and I think he was going to cut off some of my hair (I don't think he was going to stab me.) thats when some red jumpsuits grabbed him off me, they took his knife away and they made him fight me fair.
When we got back to the truck, who had to sit in the hell chair?...hint
wasn't me.