My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

The Ferris Wheel lights were first. It stands the tallest in the parking lot. As Doug and I came up the elevated 880 freeway the Tilt-A-Whirl and all the other contraptions reveal themselves below us. It’s pretty to see the lights of the fair at night.

“That’s the best place to get wasted,” Doug says. I haven’t ever been to a city fair, and feel a little intimidated. All the tough kids from different neighborhoods, probably no 4H barn, and everything is set up on pavement. I’m used to dirt under my feet.

“What’s another great place to get wasted?” I ask.

“By a fire with water nearby,” he says as his head turns back to catch the last look from the window as we pass by. Doug’s wearing a shiny red jacket with “Budweiser” written on the back. It’s the stretch cuff and waist kind, probably from the ’70′s. Sean gave it to me when he realized the cigarette smell wouldn’t come out. I gave it to Doug when I figured it out as well. Doug smokes.

The Stratham Fair was the big one for me growing up. I could lie in my bed at night in Greenland and here the sounds of the action drifting through apple orchards and pine forests into my open window on the hot nights of July in New Hampshire.

Me and the fellahs were trying to sneak behind a tent one time and a large woman in a purple t shirt asked us, “You kids carnies?”

We looked at each other and laughed. I didn’t even know what it meant. She had asked us if we were the kids of someone’s parents working the rides. I thought about it all day, that I might look the same as the children of this lifestyle. I thought the woman was a fool to even consider that. I was a Greenland boy, not an itinerant carousel operators child.

Those early moments of defining yourself stick with you. I can look back and see the beginning of my ego, the beginning of caste and class definitions, or rather my first realization that those things were already strongly in me. It was like realizing I spoke a second language without having studied it. It was just there.