Carnival Supply
(2025)
Alfie slowly rose to his feet. He had not seen this woman before.
​
“Alfred Pierce?” the woman, a young physician and naval officer, had called out, medical chart in hand. She called again, walking toward Alfie in the nearly empty clinic waiting area, with its well-worn Formica floor tiles, long fluorescent ceiling lights, rows of bright yellow molded plastic chairs, and vending machines lining the walls.
​​​
“I’m Alfie,” he said.
She introduced herself as Lt. Elizabeth Jasper, Dr. Ginsberg’s replacement. That Dr. Ginsberg had retired was news to Alfie.
She looked sharp and capable in her navy-blue scrubs. She walked Alfie back to one of the examining rooms and asked him to take a seat. She took his pulse and blood pressure. She asked him to take off his shirt but leave his t-shirt on. She listened to his heart and lungs, examined his eyes, ears, nose, and throat, and palpated his abdomen.
“How have you been feeling, Alfie? Have you been having any problems?” she asked.
“I am feeling fine, doctor. I try to eat right and exercise every day. I never miss my medicine or my appointments,” he said. Alfie had had blood drawn at the clinic the week before, and Dr. Jasper smiled as she scanned his lab results. She scribbled some notes.
“Well, that’s great. You look fantastic. Your numbers are terrific. Everything looks good. I see that, for many years, we’ve been asking you to come in every 90 days. That’s to make sure you are well tolerating your medication. I must say that you have done so well for so long, I’m not sure that’s still necessary. How would you feel if we reduced your visits to once every six months? What do you think, Alfie?”
Alfie sat for a long moment in silence.
“I don’t know if I would like that,” he said. “Can we keep things as they are?”
“Yes, absolutely, let’s just do that, keep things as they are.” she said, smiling again.
“Let’s see how things go. I will call in a renewal of your prescription. Your next appointment will be in August. Do you have any special plans for the weekend?”
​
“No. I saw a going-out-of-business sign at the Carnival Supply on my bus ride this morning. I may stop there on my way home,” he said. “But I am not sure I want to.”
Alfie flushed with embarrassment in sharing this information. He knew it sounded like nervous talk from an old man. Which it was, and which he was. He surprised himself and was disappointed by his lack of self-control. Alfie’s adult life largely had been an exercise in self-control, staying busy, taking care of his room at the Waverly, the residential hotel where he had lived for more than 30 years. He had to keep it neat, make sure his laundry was washed and folded, go to Mass in the morning, visit the library, get exercise on his morning and evening walks, be punctual with appointments, keep up with his food and digestive routines. Self-control also meant taking his medication and not getting carried away.
The doctor subtly shifted her posture. She took her stethoscope, which had been draped around her neck, and set it on the small desk in the examining room. She took a seat on the low round medical stool with casters, put her feet out in front of her, leaned forward, her hands naturally resting on her thighs just above her knees, as though she was taking a break and had time to chat, and was glad to chat, and was not pressed for time. Alfie appreciated this but part of him recognized that it was clinically correct that she did so.
“I have not heard about the carnival store, Alfie. What is it?” she asked in an easy tone.
“Carnival Supply. It’s a local business. Wholesale. I’ve known about it since I was a kid,” Alfie said. “They sell toys, prizes and novelties for church, school, and community fairs and festivals. They sell the kind of prizes you try to win by playing games such as the ring toss, balloon dart, the milk bottle stand, the dime toss, and spin-the-wheel. My best friend from grade school worked there. His family owned it. They advertised on the back page of comic books: You could send in postage, and they would send you back a how-to pamphlet on putting on your own carnival and order prizes. That was a long time ago, though. I’m not sure they still do,” he said. “Now, it looks like they are going out of business,” he said, running out of things to say.
Alfie understood from a few hard lessons learned years before that self-awareness was the key to maintaining self-control. He wondered: Why am I still talking?
It was not like Alfie to wonder out loud whether he would go someplace or do something. Alfie’s nature, even with his troubles, was to be decisive. That was a big part of how he had kept steady for so long. His mother used to say: “Alfie knows not just where he wants to go but also where he is likely to end up. So, Alfie would just as soon get there, or at least start moving in that direction.”
Alfie’s attitude in other words was to lean forward toward the inevitable. If he were on death row and the day of his execution had arrived, and it was up to him to decide whether the execution should go forward at 10 a.m., after being served a classic last meal of steak and scrambled eggs, Bisquick biscuits, home fried potatoes with ketchup, and a well-shaken quart of ice cold chocolate milk, or wait until 3 p.m., after a final lunch meal of a tall, thin-sliced, bloody rare roast beef sandwich on a hard roll seasoned with salt, mustard-mayo potato salad on the side, and a can of diet orange soda to drink, Alfie Pierce would choose 10 a.m., and breakfast, every time, easy choice, even though he preferred the roast beef sandwich. What would be the point of sitting for another five hours? Alfie Pierce could not think of a reason to wait.
Alfie looked away from the doctor and lowered his head. He thanked her and let her move on to her next patient.
“I am glad to meet you, Alfie,” she said. “Thank you for your extraordinary service to this country. Keep doing what you are doing. See you in August, sooner if you need us.”
*
Alfie’s mind wandered as he boarded the Taft Avenue bus. The morning air had a pungent closeness, a fragrance that was a city mix of grass clippings, blacktop, and diesel fuel exhaust. Alfie scheduled doctor visits first thing in the morning because everyone just seemed more awake and alert – the bus driver, others out and about tending to their business, the folks at the doctors’ building at the veteran’s hospital, Alfie himself.
​
Alfie was anxious over whether his school friend, Lonnie Carmichael, would be at the Carnival Supply sale. Lonnie’s grandfather had founded the company, and a large collection of Carmichael cousins, including Lonnie’s family, worked in the business. They ran it, and all of the Carmichael children, there were nine, helped out.
​
Lonnie and Alfie would stop by the Carnival Supply as they walked home from school. If you stopped by you were put to work, and Alfie never missed a chance to step inside that wondrous place and earn some spending money to boot. The Carmichael tradition was for the children to become “official” employees of Carnival Supply once they turned 7 years old. Lonnie’s grandmother referred to it as the “age of rhyme and reason,” and with a smile she would say: “Child labor laws be damned.” When the Carmichael kids reached their seventh birthday, Lonnie’s grandfather would stage a fanciful ceremony in which he would administer an oath to the young hirelings and present them with child sized Carnival Supply work shirts on which their names would be embroidered. The children would gather near. Their grandfather would clear his throat, and stand face-to-face with the initiates. He would raise his right hand and ask the children to raise theirs, too.
​
Then, in a solemn tone, he would say “Repeat after me.” The children did. They weren’t sure of the meaning of all of the words they were being asked to repeat. They might stumble or mumble in their attempts to pronounce some of the words. But even little children understood they and the oath they were affirming were part of something special. They understood that their job was to play along. That meant you could smile, but not too broadly, because suppressing laughter, at least for the moment, made things more fun.
​
The older children had been through the ritual many times. They knew their grandfather only appeared to be reading an oath from the piece of paper he would pull from a pocket. They understood he was holding up some random sales invoice, and that he had committed the oath to memory:
​
I, say your name,
do solemnly swear
to faithfully pursue
and loudly ballyhoo
the sale of gaudy commodities
each with magic qualities
that are sure to amuse
children who peruse
them, Amen.
​
The children loved the word “ballyhoo.” They waited for it, all of them, and would join in in unison and repeat the line with gusto.
​
The warehouse was a brimming mass of ordered disorder – tall-ceilinged, concrete-floored, dimly-lit, swept clean but damp-smelling, chaotically-organized, shelves stacked high, a tidal wave of merchandise. The only island of deliberate calm was a bright, glass-partitioned business office with a half dozen desks in the back.
​
During the annual inventory, it was all hands on deck for long days of work on successive weekends. The children understood the purpose of the exercise: Making sure the warehouse was stocked and ready to go for the big sales that kicked off in late winter. The Carmichael kids were allowed to recruit friends, but only their most reliable friends. The job was a plum and the young seasonal workers were handsomely paid – 90¢ an hour, plus, when the job was complete, the chance to fill a brown paper lunch bag with prizes the children could pull from special odd-lot bins.
​
Alfie took part in inventory for two years. To this day, when he closed his eyes, he could see the set-up as clearly as if he were watching it in a movie. The warehouse was vast in every dimension. It held in store an infinite number and variety of small toys, prizes, charms and other novelties. The supplies of each product sat in open-topped cardboard boxes, with the product name and number written with black marker on all four sides. The boxes were situated side-by-side on long runs of wooden shelving, 6 shelves high, on both sides of narrow aisles. The aisles were not laid down in a logical grid. They were more like a street scheme in an ancient city, straightaways unexpectedly giving way to tangents and sharp turns and even impromptu dead ends and cul de sacs that defied explanation, a maze-like scene that added to the sense of mystery.
​
Taking inventory, nevertheless, was simple as child’s play. Precise counts were not required. The children wore smocks with a large kangaroo pocket that held a chunk or two of dark blue chalk. The children moved up and down ladders and used the chalk to mark with an “X” boxes that appeared to be less than half full.
​
When the kids were through, the adults would walk the aisles checking for blue marked boxes and recording on an order sheet the product that was running low. As the contents of boxes were replenished, the chalk marks would be wiped clean with a damp cloth.
​
That was it.
​
But, oh, those boxes! With neatly fastened cellophane packets containing tickets, flags, pennants, balloons, crepe paper, confetti, necklaces, rings, bracelets, clickers, pins, badges, pinwheels, beanies, tops, dreidels, dominoes, jacks, whistles, flicker rings with lenticular images that winked or nodded or drew and holstered a pistol when you tilted the viewing angle. All things kids like. There were compasses, rulers, checkers, playing cards, dice, marbles, pens, pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers, brightly colored animals, domesticated and wild, fruit and vegetables made of molded plastic, crayons, in three-pack boxes and clear plastic sleeves. There was more than you could imagine.
​
Mini watercolor paint tins had a well for water and places to stow thin brushes, and there were balls of all sizes, kinds, colors, material, and bounce – plush, plastic and super – and there were wallets, billfolds, money clips, dress purses and change purses, fists full of silver, bronze and gold coins, and wads of green banknotes, some ostensibly minted or printed by the U.S. Treasury, others claiming to be currencies of mythical or far off lands. There was everything you might need.
​
Carnival supply was the place for clown noses, fake beards, bald caps, eye patches, pirate hooks, cigars and pipes (bubble and fake tobacco), cigarette holders, wind-up chattering teeth, dolls from baby to rag to troll, plastic toy soldiers, plastic nurses and doctors and cowboys, rubber farm animals and bucking broncos, miniature coloring or joke books or fake famous novels, some barely taller or wider than a postage stamp, do-it-yourself tattoos and color transfers, fright wigs, crowns, tiaras, horned Viking helmets, prosthetic vampire fangs, eye-patches, masks, medals, epaulets, swords, daggers and knives, hats and helmets of military, nautical, old western, firefighter, police officer, court jester, and circus ringmaster styling. How easy it was to get lost in the fantasia.
​
There were squirt guns, cap guns, mini six shooters, finger puppets, hand puppets, trophies, loving cups, blue ribbons, wands and close-up magic tricks, charms and trinkets, telescopes, binoculars, monocles, pince nez, lorgnettes, sun glasses, model cars, trucks, motorcycles, fire engines, ambulances, hearses, police vehicles, rockets, jets, balsa wood gliders, single engine bi-planes powered by a rubber band, pepper prank gum, teeth-black chiclets, whoopie cushions, handshake buzzers, dribble cups, plastic vomit, squirting boutonnieres, plastic spiders, snakes, cockroaches and mice, bottles of invisible ink, and Chinese puzzles. There was more than you could put to use in a lifetime.
​
“A world in every prize,” was the Carnival Supply motto.
*
Alfie showed the bus driver his commutation pass as he climbed aboard and asked: “If I forget to pull the bell cord, would you please stop for me just before Eichelman?”
​
The driver was looking into her side mirror, watching for oncoming traffic, left turn signal flashing. She nodded yes.
​
From his time in active-duty service to this very day, Alfie carried in his pocket an item that dated back to Carnival Supply times: a rubber oval squeeze change purse. It was the kind of change holder he remembered seeing old men carry when he was a boy. It had a small chain loop on one end on which he put his room key from the Waverly, as well as a fancy novelty aluminum charm with a horseshoe cast on one side, a four-leaf clover on the other, and a real Indian Head penny set in the center.
​
Inside the change purse he had his ID from the VA. He also carried a carefully handwritten note on a small piece of paper: “Please return this to Fillmore Library, 875 Eagle St. Tell the librarian it belongs to Alfie Pierce.”
​
Alfie’s change purse also held a $50 bill tightly folded in a square. It had been a gift to him and other veterans from the USO. He received the bill as he was being discharged from the hospital after his last big stay. The bill was unfamiliar in its design. Rather than carrying the regular green cast of paper currency, it was printed with charcoal gray ink with a seal set in maroon. Alfie remembered the matronly, warm-hearted, pink complexioned lady with big red hair who handed it to him in a decorative envelope printed with patriotic colors, the kind of envelope in which a child might receive a gift of a U.S. Savings Bond upon graduation. The woman wrapped her warm, soft, dimpled hands around both of his hands, and said “God bless you, son, and good luck to you!”
​
Alfie believed the $50 bill had been a source of good luck. He saved it for an emergency. Over all of the years, there had been no emergency. Alfie received a disability pension from the Army from which his monthly bus pass and room and board at the Waverly were paid directly. For many years, so was his child support. His monthly pension included a small cash allowance for personal items, too. Alfie was careful with this money.
​
He kept the $50 bill just in case. Periodically he would remove it from the pocket purse, unfold it and admire it. Alfie appreciated the engraving of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had the face of a man who had known war and had not forgotten war and did not want to forget. Grant seemed to know it was better to live with memory as best you can, that trying to forget is futile and might do more harm than good. To forget might make you forget self-control, Alfie thought. To forget might mean forgetting the Carnival Supply.
*
Alfie had settled into a seat next to the window, a few rows back from the front, as the bus moved along the main thoroughfare from downtown. Alfie knew the 30-minute route between the VA and the Waverly by heart. He could picture from memory the order in which the bus passed every tavern, beauty salon, apartment house, donut shop, and filling station. He knew what came next and what came after that. Through landmarks he charted his progress. Ace Used Cars marked the midway point. As the bus continued down Taft, Alfie kept a lookout for the brick warehouse that housed the Midland Carnival Supply Company, its full formal name.
As the bus was stopped at the traffic signal at the intersection of Alma Street and Taft, one block before the Eichelman stop, he could see the Carnival Supply lot. It appeared to be empty except for the presence of a lone pickup truck. He also could see that the tall, rusted overhead door on the loading dock was rolled open slightly more than halfway. He saw two men wearing coveralls, work gloves and hard hats, standing by. Both rested their hands on their hips and stared at the door as though it was stuck. They then ambled across the dock and ducked under the partly raised door. One leaned and bowed his head forward as he passed under the door. The other clowned, and leaned backward as though dancing the limbo, clearing it by plenty. Both disappeared into the dark building.
​
As the bus passed in front of the building Alfie saw two other men, one on the roof, lowering the white vinyl banner. It looked like a partly descended flag, now at half-staff, still announcing with electric blue block letters:
​
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE TODAY ONLY EVERYTHING MUST GO
​
Alfie could hear his heartbeat. A mist of sweat formed on his face. “Today Only” meant gone tomorrow and, then, no more. Alfie came to realize: The “today” referred to on the banner may have been from a prior week and already have passed.
​
Alfie remembered when Lonnie Carmichael’s father had been killed in a car crash. It was in the spring of sixth grade. The school secretary had come for Lonnie in class. The Carnival Supply, as best Alfie could understand as a child, had been taken over by Lonnie’s uncles. Lonnie, and his mom, and his brothers and sisters moved to Ohio that summer, to be near one of Lonnie’s mom’s sisters.
​
The Taft Avenue bus rolled up to the Eichelman stop. Alfie remembered when his wife and young daughter had moved, too. It was long ago, during his time of trouble. His daughter had been a toddler. He could hear echoes of a loud, distant, shouting voice from that time. It was his own voice. He could not make out the words.
​
He had lost touch with them and still thought of his daughter as a little girl, although he realized she was grown and probably had children of her own now, children who may themselves be grown. When his daughter was small, even after she and her mother had left, Alfie imagined, back then, he would have a birthday party for her, one day, someday.
​
Alfie also had dreamed his ex-wife and daughter might someday surprise him with a visit. But he also thought: even if they had wanted to come, where would they get together? Alfie’s room was so small.
​
Alfie sat in his seat in the bus, hunched over, looking over his $50 bill. “Taft and Eichelman,” the driver called out.
​
“No, thank you. I would like to go home, please,” Alfie called back.
​
The bus barreled ahead.
​
Rain clouds had formed, and thunder rumbled low as Alfie walked from his bus stop back to the Waverly. When he got back to his room, he sat at the small desk and, on a lined page from his spiral notebook, began work on a note to send to his daughter along with the lucky $50 bill.
​
“I had to make sure I never again caused trouble for you or your mother,” he wrote. “I learned that when all else seems lost, small things may help us hope for better times.”
​
A steady rain began to fall. Alfie lay down on his bed, on top of the smooth bedspread, and drifted to a restful sleep. He would rise for supper, he told himself, and his evening walk.
​