The narrator concedes that "she makes me nervous. She puts me in minds of all the cruel beauties of my high school days, and I cannot look upon our red-haired rider without suffering old hot-hearted fears." (82) the young girl signals something of his childhood experiences, where his confidence was not yet developed. It reveals some of that timidity still hiding within him. There is equally present a sense of the young man as being a runaway, both distant and fearful of the first real rift between himself and his childhood and yet exhilarated and wide-eyed over the newness and, one might even suggest, the fuzziness of his experiences. His second day 'on the show,' a rainy afternoon occupied by few fairgoers, would reveal new pleasures of a life already distinguished in manifold ways as base, uncomfortable and often repulsive. The grime is beset by the quiet giddy pleasures which the narrator shares with others. In a particular moment, when he helps a blind lady to and from the ride, we capture something of the good nature in the character, as though he is a child with an affable innocence. He reports that "when the boat subsides, I help the woman off the platform. She is giggling uncontrollably. She keeps saying, "thank you, thank.' And I start giggling, too. She could not have enjoyed riding the Pirate as much as I enjoy the sight of her laughing face." (84) There is the quality of enchantment that lay directly beside some of the most ghastly griminess of description that the author can muster.

The narrator's second night on his own bring about new revelation as to the travails of the jobs, as Gary, the slightly 'retarded' captain of a ride called the Zipper is bashed on the head by a metal cage while dancing beneath for fallen coins and drugs. The Pirate's three-man crew must therefore dismantle the ride in...

The experience was underscored by the cold rejection of the red-haired girl who earlier that evening had occupied his short break time with the false promise of a rendezvous. Altogether experiencing a new depth of dejection, the character finds himself desperate to return to the security of childhood. He calls his mother in desperation. She does not express anger with him over the phone for the nature of his departure, denoting that in her perception, he and his stepfather are equality idiotic for their behavior. Still, when the narrator essentially pleads for her to come and pick him up, to free him from the terror of his new foray into adulthood, she essentially consents to his passage to maturity. She refuses him the help for which he practically begs, contending that she didn't feel it would be appropriate for him even to remain in the house.
The stark realization is now upon our character that indeed, manhood is a tough road to hoe. At the juncture of his coming of age, he is greeted by a sense that he is truly alone. Those who portend support prove immediately to fall somewhere on a spectrum from unreliable to downright treacherous, with the motley and revolting array of characters and experiences at the carnival presenting an unmistakable sense of the world to a child as filled equally with horror and wonder. The threshold of adulthood for the narrator is aggressively immediate and, one might argue such to be the case with any passage there unto, terribly painful. The isolation and fear which become the narrator's show him tumbling alone into the abyss where his childhood can be only a distant memory lest he falsely take refuge in a place to which he cannot return.