A fairground is a funny place -- a celebration of the cheap, the gaudy, and the sinister.  No one at a fair is fooled by the clowns or the balloons.  They come for the dirty undertones, the sharp metal corners, and the viscous flow of bodies across the trampled grass.  "A brush with death and the disreputable," recited Cramer.  "We sell them an experience, and they come like sharks in bloody water."

He said this to me when I was eight.  We were sitting on a hill at seven in the morning, a few days after "Maudlin Marvin's Carnival Caravan" had become my surrogate home.  The sun was floating behind us, spotlighting a scene of glorious desolation.  The bestial forms of carnival rides were frozen in their nightly salutes around the field.  The line of shuttered-up game booths formed a shadowy corridor, down which blew the remains of a fairground night.  Cups, tickets, wrappers, cigarette butts, and souvenir photos all tripped over the muddy ground, urged along by the same wind that blew gustily in our faces.

"We're better than Church, really."  He spoke like Shakespeare over the abjectly silent scene.  "People go to Church to atone for their sins.  Well, who wants to do that?  It's better to revel in them.  The people who come here are steeping their boring lives in depravity and getting a whole hell of a lot more out of it than a preacher's sermon.  We're doing the public a favor, and you can bet we get twice the tithes that the Church does!"

This speech occurred before the other carnival-people had talked to me about Cramer.  I hadn't seen the fake business card they made for him, reading "Josiah Cramer -- Sententious Windbag, soliloquies by the hour."  I hadn't heard them cut him off mid-speech and pretend to stuff socks in his mouth.  I hadn't been taken aside and told that I could do better than to spend time with a brain-fried stoner like Cramer.

Right there, on a rocky hilltop, I could only hear his brassy voice trumpeting a message to the trees.  He was a talking statue, sending ancient words out like arrows to the world and letting them stick to whatever they pleased.  As beaten-up and crazy as he was, Cramer was a good speaker.  He let his words hang in the air, thrumming in the surrounding light.  I looked up at his gray face and the deep sockets in which his eyes were barely visible, and I saw a revolutionary.  Alexander and Caesar rolled up with just a hint of Ben Franklin.  At eight years old, it wasn't hard to be awestruck.

He stayed silent for a while, smiling at his kingdom in front of us.  A broken drink cup flew into the air and, hit by the sun, flashed a deep red at our hilltop.  They come like sharks, I thought.  If so, then surely it was Cramer who chummed the water.  He and his infinite reserves of dark charisma, the speeches that fell through his lips like a creek.  He was the attraction they unknowingly came for.  And he was the iron figure who welded my imagination to the fairground.