Life was not coming up roses for Georgette at 16. “I left my Mom and Dad because when we tore the show down, every so often he’d go into the tent to check if we had problems – and sometimes he’d see me naked. And I’d see him watching.”

One day they were in a car sitting at a stoplight. My Dad reached back and said, ‘You wanna arm wrestle?’” Georgette indulged him, thinking it was harmless. But Bob had something else on his mind. “He reached back, ripped open my cowboy shirt and tried to grab my snatch. I knew exactly what was goin’ on, so I jumped outta the damn car.” She went back to the semi and slept there with the door latched. The next day she decided to jump ship and work for somebody else on the midway. “You’re not supposed to do that, it’s taboo in the carnival.”

She got a job working one of the games. “Here comes my mother. She grabbed me by the ear and starts draggin’ me down the midway to Bob Hammond, the owner of the carnival. And there was the patch, Harry. They dragged me into the office and wanted to know what the problem was. Well, I told them.

“I said my Dad got fresh with me. I told ‘em he’d also asked me when I took a shower did I play with myself. I hadn’t even had sex at that time! Even though I’d been strippin’ at 12. I was 16. I didn’t know what was fuckin’ goin’ on, to be honest with you. I knew…but I didn’t know.”

Delilah reacted. “She grabbed me by the fuckin’ hair, took me back down the midway through the back of the carnival to the G-top where all the carnival guys were gambling. She hollered for Bob.” Her husband appeared. Delilah grilled him—did he ask Georgette if she had touched herself in the shower? His response was to take it out on Georgette. “He slapped me – ‘Why did you tell your mother?’ Well, my mother had no choice but to stay with him. Because he’s the one who put up the show, tore it down and drove the semi truck. So I knew I had to get the fuck outta there.”

Georgette snuck off to work a girl show in Atlanta and decided to track down her real dad, Kenneth, after 16 years. “I called the police department – that’s how you found people in the old days.” Contact was made and he came to visit her out on the road. “It was fine – until he pulled the same shit that happened with my stepfather. My real Dad wound up goin’ into the tent and seein’ me naked.” Things got ugly that night in his motel room. “He brought another broad, he’s fuckin’ her, then she passed out…that’s when he come over tryin’ to get into bed with me – ‘You look so much like your mother, I just can’t help it.’ He grabbed my wrist and all of a sudden I got a fuckin’ dick in my hand.

“I didn’t leave right away because I had a big snake – a boa constrictor – and he was getting sickly, so we went out in the woods and I let it go. My Dad had the other broad, so she kept his attention. He took me back to the carnival. I just never mentioned it again.”

Only a teenager, Georgette had seen a lot, some of it truly hellish. Such horrors didn’t stop her, though. She kept moving.

Georgette Danteself.__wrap_b(":R2qe7j6:",1)

Georgette Dante