There`s a high that comes from being on the road that is unlike any other high. Maybe it`s the freedom that comes with movement unrestricted by deadlines and space, like drifting on a rubber tube on ocean waves during an endless summer day. Or maybe it`s a sense of greater harmony with the transitory world because being on the road means that you, too, are just passing by and through.
Or perhaps it`s because I had read too much Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson, but in 1979, when I was a 20-year-old graduate student in journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I decided to hit the road and join a carnival for my master`s-thesis project.
I found my ”hole,” or job, with a carnival wedged at the moment beneath an underpass on the seedy side just outside downtown Houston. It was the second week in March and the first week of spring break.
I found this carnival by accident.
I had consulted a carnival publication in the university library for the schedules of the various big carnivals, whose seasons ran from early May till late fall in October or November. Then I caught a ride with some students driving to Texas, planning to get off in Lufkin, where a carnival was scheduled to be playing that week.
It wasn`t. I got back in the car and just happened across the right carnival for my purposes.
I walked from one ”joint,” or booth, to another, asking for work. There were no application forms; just two questions: Who was I, and why did I need work? I told them I was a student at the University of Illinois, but that I was disgusted with the school hassle. So I was traveling, short on money and in need of work.
I wasn`t really lying. I just left out the fact that the whole point of the trip was that I planned to write a piece about the carnies. I withheld that fact because I didn`t want it to color their treatment of me; I wanted them to accept me.
I also wanted to see if I would be treated differently by those outside the carnival as well.
And I was.
If I presented myself as a university fellow, I was treated one way. If I presented myself as a carny, I was treated differently-usually badly.
And so I tried to become one of the carnies I wanted to write about, intending not to expose them or their schemes but to show them as people-very special people with a very special language living in their own special world. And to a carny, there are two types of people in this world: those with carny blood and those without. Those without are called ”marks.”
Carnies work hard, passionately and almost paranoiacally to keep their world separate and their bloodline pure. You are either born with carny blood, or you are destined to be a mark and work all your life at a ”sucker job,”
which is any work that is not carnival work-especially a 9-to-5 grind.
And carnies know who they are-no matter where or to whom they are born. One day, the carnies say, all those with carny blood eventually find their way onto a midway. And even if they leave, they will always return because the carnival is in their blood.
So I walked around that midway in Houston trying to convince the carnies that I was one of their own. My backpack finally did the trick. The first time I went around the lot, I had left it in the car. Then my traveling companions left, so when I went around a second time, I had the pack with me, and the carnies became friendly. They stopped hustling me and wanted to talk.
Where was I coming from and headed for? Did I want to get stoned? Did I need work? If I couldn`t find something here, why not there?
One guy spied the pack and came out of his booth. He first asked me if I had an old man, then, if I wanted a job. The answers, no and yes, sent him looking for his boss to ask him to hire me.
The pack made them feel that even if I wasn`t a carny, I was at least good carny material. And I did look the part. I wore an imitation sheepskin jacket, a funky black felt hat, jeans, hiking boots and a flannel shirt. I hadn`t had a shower or more than a few hours` sleep for the three days I had spent in the car. The pack was just the finishing touch. It opened doors.
They took me on and set me to work in the one-ball, or milk-bottle, joint. That`s the game where you try to knock down a pyramid of three milk bottles with one softball.
So I became a ”jointee,” or ”agent.”
Every carnival has jointees, along with ”ride jocks,” those who operate the rides. And there are the office men, those who own most, if not all, of the rides and a string of joints and more or less run the carnival. They are the business people who travel in the coveted carny luxury of a trailer and who negotiate with various fair boards, town councils and counties to play their carnival at given dates and locations known as ”spots.”
Each carnival has its own turf and is quite possessive of it.
Some carnivals, such as mine, have rather elaborate routes. It began its season in Texas, traveled north through Canada and then came back south again to close the season in Denver, where its winter quarters were located. Going back to winter quarters is also called ”going to the barn.”
Carnivals that do not travel long distances are known as ”40-milers”
and usually play just shopping centers and neighborhood festivals.
A carnival usually travels a similar route each season. Traditionally, most owners meet at a large convention in November to wine and dine and bid for various contracts. A large fair may contract with more than one carnival to play its spot. Also traditionally, individual owners of joints and rides meet later in the winter months with carnival office men to contract to play all or part of the carnivals` routes. Thus my carnival grew and shrank in size depending on the joints and rides needed for the various spots.
Another important thing that the carnival`s office men do is lay out the lot, which is always in a circular pattern, at each spot. The joints owned by the carnival office are given the prime locations. Joints of those who are not in tight with the office are relegated to what the carnies call ”doniker,”
or toilet, locations.
All of this was explained to me by Jim, my coworker who had gotten me the job.
Jim also showed me how to set the heavily weighted bottles so that one of the two bottom bottles was slightly behind the other. That made it nearly impossible to knock them all down from any distance unless you hit them at exactly the right angle with the right amount of force.
It was difficult, but still possible, for a mark to win my game, and that solved my moral qualms about cheating the people who played it.
At about 11:30 p.m. on my first night with the carnival, Jim came into my joint to show me how to ”work the play” on my game. The crowd had thinned out. Some of the rides weren`t spinning for lack of riders, but their glow was bright against the black Texas sky and lit up the semis, whose sides read
”OUR BUSINESS IS FUN.” Rock-and-roll music, piped in from a radio station, blared loudly against the night`s peace. Against the music, the jointees` voices could be heard as they tried to call in the last few dollars on the lot.
I was glad for the break. My legs and back were hurting from all the walking back and forth and the bending up and down I had to do to reset the bottles and retrieve the balls. I lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall of the joint to watch Jim operate. He was showcasing for my benefit. Talk, talk, talk, talk it up. It was very important. You had to set up a cadence, a rhythm, a flow, and keep it going.
How about it? Wanna give it a try? How about you? How`s your pitching arm? All you gotta do is knock over these three bottles. Just tip `em over. For 50 cents, you get your choice, the bottom two rows. A dollar a shot for the top. Just tip `em over, and you win. No small prizes here. Just big ones. Wanna give it a try?
”Just tip `em over; for a dollar, you get your choice,” Jim called to a couple walking past the joint.
There seems to be a double edge to the carny hustle. On the one hand, the carny is providing the mark with entertainment, a ”We`re all here just for a good time,” so to speak.
”Wait, you; yeah, you; I wanna show you something,” Jim motioned to the man. ”All you have to do is knock them down like this and you win.”
Jim walked quickly back to the pyramid of three bottles. Softball in hand, facing the man and keeping his attention with his eyes, he pushed the ball into the bottles and knocked them over. The bottles fell heavily with a dull thud.
”I don`t know,” the man said. He stood there awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and so did his woman companion. Jim walked back to stand in front of them, highlighting the contrast in his and their clothes. The man was dressed in tailored pants and jacket, the woman in a flimsy cotton dress and heels. Jim, who was short and had dark hair, was wearing blue jeans, a loud print shirt, a red Budweiser cap and black-rimmed glasses.
Jim turned to the woman.
”Which one of these animals do you want? Aw, c`mon. . . which one do you want?”
She pointed to a large purple dog.
”This one?”
”Yes.”
”Okay,” he said, as he pulled it down and handed it to her. ”You just hold it, and he`ll win it for you.”
He handed the man the softball, and the man pulled out a dollar bill. . . .
On the other side of his hustle, the carny has the deck of cards stacked, the levers to pull, the odds on his side. He controls the gimmicks, known as the ”gaffs” or the ”G`s.” And when a mark is hooked and keeps on pulling out those dollar bills, the carny gets an immense satisfaction that goes beyond that of the percentage he receives of each hustled dollar.
Jim, as he told it, came from a broken home. His father had run off, leaving a stack of unpaid bills, when Jim and his sister were in grammar school. Jim quit school and worked at odd jobs and in restaurants busing tables and then joined a street gang involved in burglaries, which was more lucrative for him. He then found himself shuffling in and out of detention centers and jail cells until his mid-20s, when he discovered the carnival. Now he was 31 years old, and the tables were turned. He couldn`t win in the mark world, but now he was calling the shots in a world where marks couldn`t win.
And right now, in that one-ball joint, Jim would keep on calling the shots if he could work the mark right by toying just enough with his ego.
The man threw the ball, missed the bottles completely and pulled out another dollar.
”Ya gotta hit `em to knock `em down,” Jim admonished. The man nodded sheepishly and wound up for a second try. This time he knocked two bottles over.
The woman clutched the stuffed animal and peered expectantly at her date, her chin resting on the purple dog`s head.
”Try it again,” Jim prompted. ”She wants that dog.”
On my very short breaks, I wandered the lot, and when I tried a ride, I invariably found myself hanging upside down. It was a rite of initiation. The ride foremen and jocks would stand below, waving and yelling, as the machine I was on was jacked up to the highest possible speed or stopped to leave me hanging upside down in midair. I knew, though, that if I started yelling, they would leave me up there that much longer, so I kept quiet, hoping they would think I had passed out and let me down. That usually took about 10 minutes, and then I was allowed to let the blood return to my feet.
As I stumbled out of the Sky Rocket, a Ferris wheel-type ride with spinning ”space capsules,” Rocky, the ride foreman, patted his machine.
”A beauty, huh?” he said. ”Real nice.”
Each ride foreman felt the same way about his beauty and keenly wanted me to sample it.
The ride jocks were also a breed unto themselves.
Take Snake. Even his name sounded mean. His arms and chest were covered with tattoos, the one on his chest a depiction of two birds holding up a banner. He had a grizzled face, wore a red carnival baseball cap and had an earring-a silver skull-hanging from one pierced earlobe. He wasn`t very big physically, and his hair was cut short, but he was the type of ride jock who would prompt your mother to keep you away from his ride or, not having noticed him at first and thus allowing you to go on it, whisk you off it as soon it came to a stop.
