Sideshow Cubano…
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With your host… Professor
Laszlo… |
As I sat on the terrace of the Cuban walk-up café in Little
Havana, enjoying my breakfast of Café con Leche, Guava Pastry,
and Havana Hydro, I couldn’t help but reflect that it had been a
rough season…
Things were going a lot better now…
The “Creepy Menagerie”, and my other acts, were all a big hit
with the crowds at the “Halloween Haunted House of Terror”
amusement park, next door to the International Mall, right by
the airport, in the sun and fun capital of the world…
Magnificent Multicultural Miami…
The Cuban youth were quite easy to entertain, and were extremely
enthusiastic in their applause…
And really loose with their spending…
The amusement park promoters seemed to like my acts, and were
glad to have me at the show…
The Showground’s was packed every night with Cuban Cuties, these
Latina Lovelies paraded around in groups, wearing skintight
costumes, with many macho young men in hot pursuit…
The rapid fire Cuban Spanish of the crowd was like a machine gun
chorus behind the lights of the Midway, and the music of the
live bands…
It was an island of fun in the center
of a city in love with play…
And my Show was a hit…
The first weekend had passed with all the business I could
handle, and the play was to run through Halloween, another two
weekends…
I
had visions of grossing enough money to be financially secure
through the winter…
I hadn’t counted on Wilma blowing in…
By the time I became aware of the hurricane, it was beating hell
out of Cancun and the Florida Keys were under mandatory
evacuation…
The projected path of the hurricane on the weather channel went
right through the “Creepy Menagerie”…
I
could mentally picture my productions disintegrating in a
windblown cataclysmic explosion of debris…
This was in keeping with the way my
life had been going…
Insurance had fallen by the wayside…
Just one of many luxuries jettisoned in the desperate austerity
measures enacted during the roller coaster summer season of
spiraling fuel cost increases and dramatically diminishing
attendance at my events…
I
was now carrying only public liability insurance. The risk of
losses to the company were entirely mine…
I
could easily be out of business, or better still, dead, within
the next few days…
This sobering thought was quite unwelcome, as I had no desire to
be sober…
I
am in the business of fun, and apocalyptic annihilation is no
fun…
This was definitely gonna be bad for
business…
The first to go were the blue skies…
The second weekend had us under lead gray skies with Wilma
stalled in the Yucatan Peninsula, looming over our heads like
the axe about to fall…
Monday the vendors started to bail…
I
found myself operating endless hours in the rain with business
being slow at best…
Part II…
Wilma blows the show…
The second Friday of the date saw an upturn in business…
Saturday was the best day of my entire season. We had a huge
crowd that was spending money like the world was about to end. I
worked a full day and never got a chance to count up…
The minute the show closed (one AM Sunday morning) we started
tearing down. There was a major category three hurricane only
hours away and it was headed right for the midway…
The entire show packed up just as though we were leaving town.
All the rides joints and house trailers were on the move…
We arranged the lightest vehicles, the joint and house trailers,
in a tightly packed formation and surrounded them with the heavy
ride semis…
I
noted the ironic fact that we were protecting cracker box
trailers, each worth only a few thousand dollars, with a ring of
valuable rides worth millions…
After working all night long tearing down, as the sun was rising
on Sunday morning, I had paused to answer the call of nature. In
the process of discharging liquid into one of the many
ubiquitous portapottys, I couldn’t help but notice that they
were all filled to seat level, as I had mentioned previously,
Saturday had been a big day…
Sunday evening we headed for the
shelters…
We were ordered to evacuate by the authorities…
My contemporaries and I heeled in at the Baymont Hotel…
The hurricane party got underway…
There were two factions. The nervous, and the gay…
The hotel management now knows to put all the Show People on the
same floor, as this would save a lot of wear and tear on the
elevator…
Which, by the way, wasn’t the only thing going down a lot that
night…
The wind wasn’t all that was blowing…
Turns out that in a crisis, Show people are the most decadent by
far…
Some of us were simply nervous…
I
drank coffee, stayed awake the entire time, and fretted in
solitary misery…
The degenerates carried on the orgy without me…
Meanwhile, the wind was howling like
a legion of demons…
We experienced six hours of sustained hurricane force winds
frequently gusting in excess of one hundred and thirty miles per
hour…
From the hotel window on the fourth floor I saw the entire metal
canopy of a Marathon gas station go cartwheeling down a
four-lane highway…
The metal roof panels of the warehouse next door peeled off one
at a time, one right after another, like a pianist running his
fingers down the keyboard…
Trees snapped in half, roof tiles became airborne shrapnel, and
sheet metal was flying at Nascar velocity…
In the field across from the Hotel, a herd of cows were standing
completely still, all facing the same direction, ass to the
wind. Except for the bull, he kept turning around. I guess he
got tired of his nuts hitting him in the chin…
As soon as the storm passed, we
headed for the lot…
Part III
Spookyville was a ghost town…
Miami’s International Mall was a scene of disorder and chaos…
Countless trees were uprooted, light poles were down, not a
single banner, of the hundreds heralding the haunted house,
remained flying…
The amusement park was a scene of devastation…
Every building on the grounds had been knocked down…
The haunted house was spraying water from the sprinkler system
like a geyser…
Much to my relief, the menagerie had escaped unscathed…
The giant snake was snoozing, and the giant rat was trying to
chew his way out of the cage…
The trailers, rides, and show equipment were all in good shape…
Our fortress of show trucks, ballasted with tons of ride iron,
had withstood the fury of the storm…
We had dodged a bullet…
Part IV
The Flying Donikers…
There was no shortage of flying debris during the storm. The
evidence indicated that the most gruesome form of the massive
barrage of flying artillery during the winds had to be the
donikers…
The show grounds had been well equipped with portolets…
They had all been quite full…
These plastic outhouses had all become airborne during the
storm…
Great big fully loaded flying shit bombs exploding against the
walls of Macy’s and Sears…
The wind blew and the shit flew…
There are still blue and brown stains streaking the sides of
these temples of commerce…
Despite the fact that the whole deal stinks, we planned to
reopen for the final Halloween weekend…
Part V
The Show must go on…
The hard working Carnies once again embarked on a nonstop
marathon of hard labor and set the show up…
Gasoline was unavailable, ATM s were down, traffic lights
weren’t working, and power was out throughout Miami…
But the show was open…
Our biggest problem was now the curfew…
During the entire run, we had not seen big crowds until after
eight. The predominantly Latin crowd preferred to party after
dark…
The eight o’clock citywide curfew murdered us…
Thursday we opened at four and closed at eight. The show had a
total of twelve paying customers…
We had burned sixteen hundred dollars worth of diesel in the
generators, to set up and operate since the hurricane…
Not to mention the salaries of the actors in the haunted house,
the strolling performers, and the ride operators and food
personnel…
The promoters were constantly on their cell phones and the
situation was looking grim…
Would the Show make it through Halloween?
Part VI
Curfew ends…
Friday the curfew was lifted, and we played through midnight…
Business was slow due to the fact that most gasoline stations
were without power, and those that were still pumping had huge
lines…
A
few hundred people turned out…
The promoters bankrolled a last ditch, do or die, desperate
gamble of a media blitz, letting all of Miami know that the show
was still on…
Saturday had a packed midway…
Sunday was bigger still, coming close to the Saturday before
Wilma arrived…
Monday was Halloween and the final day of the event…
Thousands of young people costumed in full Halloween regalia
arrived to hear Latin hip hop in live concert, at ear splitting
volume, with costume contests, dance contests, and performed the
cha-cha slide in huge numbers by the main stage…
They rode the rides, played the games, visited my shows, and
played late into the night well past the witching hour…
The biggest day yet, setting an all time record for the event…
Wilma had come trick or treating, and
her final trick was quite a treat…
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