A Pound of Flesh

I’ve written often in the past about how the field across the street from where I lived granted me several opportunities for me to earn kid money. The field was known as the Bean Field, but it had always been just a hay field as long as I had lived there. It is now filled with a shopping center, a bank and hundreds of condominiums.

The Bean Field was the host of annuals events like a massive soldier bivouac where I would sell bottles of soda to the soldiers and then collect empty bottles for their deposit value. There was an annual Turkey Shoot where I’d get people at a neighborhood bar to take a chance and let me shoot for them and if I won they’d get the turkey coupon.

The strangest money making opportunity at the Bean Field came to me in the form of a Carnival. As a kid I go over to watch the Carnival set up for opening night. I’d get to see the real behind the scenes of the dirty and lonely people who spent their lives on the road hauling trailers, generators and machinery. They were a community onto themselves.

One of the Carneys asked me if I wanted a job for the week taking tickets at the house of mirrors. He offered me a dollar over minimum wage and I thought that was pretty good. There were two pieces to this puzzle that made me understand why he was paying more than the minimum wage. First I was going to be taking a crap from the customers because the house of mirrors was a normal trailer sized building that one could walk through in less than a minute. The second reason was that he played music through the sound system on the trailer. It wasn’t a variety, but rather an endless loop of five songs off the Bob Dylan Nashville Skyline album. 10:00AM to 10:00PM for five days straight. It was like the Clock Work Orange aversion therapy.

To this day I still cringe and feel slightly sick when I hear Lay Lady Lay, or Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You.