LIFE AS A CARNEY: ON THE ROAD WITH NOWHERE TO GO

The midway at the SEMO District Fair was eerily empty Friday afternoon. Parents took pictures of their small fry going round on the kiddie rides during "Tiny Tots Day," but the big rides with the scary names were closed, and the narrow-eyed carnys working the games of skill weren't wasting their breath on the few passersby.

Twenty-year-old Scott Campbell looked out of place sitting on a chair in front of his game. He was drawing on a pad. Someday, he said, he wants to be an airbrush artist.

Campbell left home when he was 14. "My family said, `You're too much trouble,'" he recalled matter-of-factly."My mom split, I don't know where she is. My dad and I get along as long as I'm not in the same building with him."Campbell just turned 20, somewhere on the road with the carnival. With his skateboarder pants, his eyebrow and tongue piercings and his crew haircut, he looks like half the big-city kids in the United States. But he has been a carny for a year now.

He followed a friend into the business, although the friend no longer works for the carnival. That's the nature of the game.

Campbell started out at $20 a day operating a kiddie ride and now makes $225 a week running a racing game that costs $1 to play and can take in as much as $3,500 a day for the owner.

Though his is "pretty legitimate," he doesn't like the games, especially those where more money is involved. "There are times when somebody loses they get all uptight," he said.

Campbell sleeps on a couch in the back of a small truck, and has a roommate.

He showers with a garden hose.

No matter how uncomfortable the life might sound, this is the best he's had it as a carny so far."This is a luxury to be able to sit down knowing I've got money coming in -- when it comes -- and a place to lay my head," he saidCampbell had no romantic notions about how life would be in a carnival. "I had never ever been to a carnival," he said.

He has only a few friends among the other carnys. "Ninety percent of carnys are running from something," he says. "I'm running from something, but I don't know what it is."He doesn't know what the others are running from either."A lot of people here are pretty much the rejects of society, but they're out here trying to make something," he said."I respect that."Campbell, who was born in Dallas and says Albany, Ga., was his last permanent address, wants to stop traveling with the carnival soon.

But, he says, "I don't have anywhere to stop. I don't have anywhere to go."