Let me paint a picture here: there’s a DJ in a cool shirt with flames blaring 2002’s hottest dance mixes as one single, Dave Chapelle look-alike in a tweed suit and straw hat dances robotically with monk-like focus.

A chunky, nine-year old Mexican boy with a full mustache is running a series of five or six “carnival games” by himself—all of them based on the put-the-ball-in-the-hole premise: kick the soccer ball in the hole; throw the football in the hole; toss the baseball in the hole; the one exception being launch the rubber tarantula in the hole by hitting a catapult with a hammer. I think Jayson wet his pants when he was that one.

Suddenly, the DJ gets on the mic and encourages a group of eleven-year-old girls to join him in the YMCA dance. They sheepishly decline. The dancing Dave Chapelle look-alike accepts, and removes his straw hat to don an Indian headdress. Black Thunder and White Lightning perform the entire song. No one—kids and parents included—is visibly delighted.

Blaring sirens reveal more popular attractions in the nearby parking lot: a squad car and city bus open for tours. Now, without intimate knowledge of the Milwaukee area, it may be difficult to appreciate the irony here, but this will certainly be the last time most of these kids sit in the front seat of a squad car.

The DJ resumes playing old club bangers very loudly. Thank God.

After ten minutes of sitting on a bench with his head in his hands, Nick calmly asks me to wake him up so he can get out of this nightmare. I promise him one of my kidneys if he ever needs one.

I call a group huddle with my nephews, who have been waiting in a series of lines to unknowingly play the same game over and over again, only sometimes winning shitty candy. “Boys,” I say, “Your Uncle Matt and his friend Nick need to get out of here before they have meltdowns.” Josh and Jayson both assume whining postures. “Now I know you think you’re having fun, but you’re not,” I say. “So we’re leaving, and we’ll find something else to do.”

“But I didn’t get a pencil from that lady like Josh did,” Jayson says. Sure enough, there’s a woman wandering around distributing yet more pencils, and the kids are swarming her like she’s handing out loaves of broad and they’re fucking starving.

“And there’s a game over there that we haven’t played yet,” Josh says. Sure enough, there’s a game by the entrance doors mere inches from DJ Dipshit’s coffin-sized speakers. All I can see from where I’m standing is a large, elevated plastic tub filled with water and rubber ducks. I look closer and there’s a six-year-old Mexican running this one, his face barely visible over the tub. He doesn’t have the mustache, which is probably why he got stuck on such a shitty beat. The Facial Hair Hierarchy, if you will.

So I bounce a couple pre-teens, grab some more pencils from The Pusherman, and head towards the tub game. “What’s this game?” Nick says. “Pick up the rubber duck?”

As we approach, the true nature of the game is revealed: pick up a rubber duck, hand it to Shorty, and receive a piece of shitty candy. Maybe I should review the rules one more time, for clarity: 1) pick up a rubber duck floating in the water; 2) hand the duck to the kid; 3) receive a piece of candy.

Josh watches two kids “play” before he turns to me and says, “Uncle Matt, let’s get the fuck out of Dodge.”