Mental illness was a household catchphrase when I was growing up, on the highest point, topographically, of Winnebago County, where my childhood house sprawled like a fat, stoned cat. Everything there seemed to die. We dug shallow graves for birds that choked on paint fumes, hamsters that perished from neglect, a cat my mom flattened beneath the tires of our car, and a pet rabbit that blindly convulsed under the willow tree. My mom’s favorite album was Don McLean’s American Pie. “Vincent,” a tribute to Van Gogh’s suicide, was the soundtrack we listened to while washing floors. My mom was a former psychiatric patient of my dad’s; he had wooed her after signing her discharge papers and divorcing his first wife.
In summertime, an archaeologist would dig in nearby fields for arrowheads left by Winnebago Indians, our county’s namesake, otherwise known as the Ho-Chunk people. Did relics of loss and grief stretch downward through centuries of soil? Did the Native Americans for whom our land was named imbibe peyote, commune with holy spirits, and if so, were they healed? As I was coming of age and into a disconcerting awareness of my troubled mental health, I wondered how I compared to the grown-ups in my parents’ offices. I resented the assumption that children were happy and blamed my dispiritedness on genetics and landscape in equal parts. Beyond our rural plot of land, parachutes from Skydive Adventure along Highway 21 mushroomed against the sky, hallucinations, fleeting dots of beauty we’d remember later, some of us hopped up on drugs, others desperately seeking other forms of pleasure. I never suspected that my body contained the means for both sadness and elation.
When McNally was not in jail or prison, he was a gamer with Tip Top Rides & Attractions in Wisconsin and Florida, migrating between North and South along some invisible groove. There is no lifestyle in America more transient, more unstable, or more unsightly than that of a carnival game operator. Step right up to the Ferris wheel, bumper cars, the Sizzler, corn dogs, fried heartburn on a stick. The guy with the smooth clothes and nice shoes, sweet-talking customers at the balloon-and-dart game, is McNally. The rules: shoot a needle at the vein and watch it pop.
“We’ll set you right up here! Come on now, don’t be a cheap date. Go for the big prizes,” he called out, demonstrating for me inside Ryan’s office, voice fast and clipped like an auctioneer’s. “The faster you talk, the more money you make. I could play them till they were broke and I was taking the chains off from around their necks.” Most important: the gig kept drugs in his pockets.
Ryan, straightlaced and sober, hated amusement parks and carnivals and any of their sundry associations—fireworks, bubbles, balloons, chewing gum, lollipops, roller coasters, streamers, and Disney World. If it cost money and combusted, he despised it. “You might as well light a hundred-dollar bill on fire,” he’d say. He loathed miniature toys, otherwise known as choking hazards—marbles, bouncy balls, and plastic beads. Worse yet: Slinkys, jump ropes, or any novelty that might be awarded as a prize and strangle a child. “Who invented this shit?” he’d shout to anybody in earshot.
Nor did he understand the merits of bargain-basement diversions or my instincts to maintain domestic harmony with food. One afternoon, I was checking out at the Oshkosh Pick ’n Save in front of an old friend from youth orchestra. She’d judged me back then, certainly, for skipping entire measures of music.
“Excuse me,” the clerk said. “This check won’t clear.” She printed a receipt embossed with two simple words: INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. I was genuinely surprised, as this was the first time I’d been caught with a bad check. The technology of linking check numbers to bank account balances had finally caught me. The clerk generously directed me to customer service. What did the violist think of me now, as I brokered a deal for customer service to keep my food cold while I scrounged up the cash?
When I called Ryan in a panic, he growled, “I thought you were only buying a couple of things to get us through the next twenty-four hours.” As was my reckless habit, I’d overspent by thirty dollars or so. Ryan said he’d swing by and pay for the amount we could afford. When he brought the groceries home, the kids and I hid in the sunroom as he plunked the plastic bags on the countertops with shaming force.
Ryan even hated the Dollar Tree—his clients shopped there; and money was money. Yet he also wanted me, year-round, to entertain our small children on the cheap. We’d make homemade play dough, chalk the sidewalks, crumble crackers into the anthills, collect pinecones and sticks, but at some point, a mother had to spend a nickel or dime. Prices at the tiny amusement station at Menominee Park across the street crept higher between our first and third babies, but in the early days, a ticket for the little red train and caboose cost a dollar. Small children with tattooed parents were little versions of McNally, getting started early on their carney careers.
Inside my own pockets were candy wrappers and pennies for the moon water, our wishing well in Oshkosh, where I’d pat the fire in my belly and imagine more children, an endless supply of my own vice, each baby a talisman for happiness, new human life the remedy to a family history of mental illness—unless, of course, I ended up passing on my depression like a burning hot potato, mental anguish paid forward into perpetuity. What great virtue distinguished me from Ryan’s clients, users and addicts who became informants on the witness stand to sell out Lazarus Jackson? Though they were younger than me by traditional calculations, their faces were taut as old rope. A processional of informants filed to the witness stand. They were clean now, so help them God. Each testified to buying forty-dollar bindles
