”It`s just like family,” I was told. And carnies have big families when it comes to fights. Back in the heyday of the carnival, when a beef with a mark looked like it would turn into a punching match, the carnies signaled one another by yelling, ”Hey, Rube.” Today yelling ”Fight!” sufficed.
Different states, counties and cities had different policies concerning midway fights. Montana was a carny hothead`s delight. There, any fight that developed on the midway was automatically the mark`s fault; off the midway, it was the carny`s fault.
One night one of my teenaged coworkers concluded a beef by hitting the mark with a stick as the man reached across the joint to punch him. My boss was not pleased. What upset him most was his employee`s choice of
battleground.
”He should of pulled him into the joint first and then pounded the s- – – out of him,” Bill said. ”That way we could say we thought he was trying to rob us.”
Fights were not encouraged by the joint owners; they were bad for business. Carnies could be ”DQ`d”-disqualified, meaning fired-for taking part in a ruckus. This was mainly done to appease law authorities and the offended party. But at the next spot the carny would be back at his old post.
Carnies who instigated fights didn`t win popularity contests with the other jointees or ride jocks, either. Although they wouldn`t walk away from a fight, none of them wanted to get his head busted or get hauled into jail for someone else`s stupidity.
Later at the Golden Stein, a downtown Houston bar, Fat Jack denounced the carny who hit the mark with a stick as ”nothin` but trouble.”
Fat Jack, in his late 30s, was a red-haired, gravel-voiced and tattooed carny who had lost 30 pounds, but whose huge paunch had earned him his nickname. He was from Cicero, Ill., the old stomping ground of Al Capone and his West Side buddies and not too far from where I had grown up. We compared notes on the Windy City, or rather I listened as Fat Jack talked. The words would roll off his gravelly throat with a poetry all their own.
”Aw,” he said of the nothing-but-trouble carny, ”He`s a hothead, and his old lady`s a hothead, too.” You could take both their brains, roll `em up in a ball, shove it up a cockroach, and it would look like a BB bouncing down a highway.”
Yes, Fat Jack sure could talk. He once made his living as a barker, for three sideshows. His favorite spiel was for Lizzie the Lizard Lady. He would get drunk and roll right into it.
She walks, she talks, she Sli-i-i-i-i-i-des on her bel-ly. She can twist herself into a noo-dle. Meet Lizz-zzie the Lizz-zzard Lady. Hey! Put away those five-dollar tickets, folks (there were no five-dollar tickets, he confided to me). Yes, tonight we`re going to let you in for just two dollars. ”So what happened to Lizzie the Lizard Lady and the rest of the sideshows?” I asked. The closest thing to her that we had in our carnival was a small circus that featured a bear and a couple of chimps. At that, the table grew quiet and my companions shrugged.
I was sitting then in a booth with Fat Jack, Snake and Bedsprings, a huge, muscular man in his early 30s who had a boyish face, beaming smile and easygoing manner. He wore a cowboy hat and called me ma`am. Bedsprings was from Tennessee and claimed to have ”been in the business near all my life. I got the name Bedsprings `cause I can make `em squeak all night, ma`am,” he said.
But Bedsprings and the others weren`t smiling after I asked about Lizzie and the sideshows. ”Aw, they`re not doing the same business they used to,” Fat Jack finally said.
Neither were the carnivals, for that matter. Although none of the carnies wanted to admit it, carnivals were becoming a thing of the past. They were being edged out by mass technology. Instead of the carnivals traveling to the people, the people were traveling to the carnivals-to the amusement centers like Disneyland and Six Flags. People also were bringing games of skill and chance into their own homes in the form of computerized video games. And the whole fascination with Lizard Ladies and other oddities was being wiped out as audiences became more sophisticated. The carnies knew this, but they would not talk about it. Instead they set out to explain the various joints and teach me kee-zar-nee, which is carny pig Latin. Carnies have a unique vocabulary, but kee-zar-nee was a whole different language.
Fat Jack said kee-zar-nee was falling by the wayside with the old-timers. He found one such old-timer in a nursing home when he went to visit someone else. The nurses said one resident was crazy because he ”talked in something that sounded like tongues.”
”But he wasn`t crazy,” Fat Jack said. ”He was an old carny who refused to talk in anything but kee-zar-nee. I understood him perfectly. We talked all afternoon, and teezey teezought wezay wezere beezoth crezazy.”
”They thought they were both crazy,” Snake translated.
There are three basic types of carnival joints: slums, hanky-panks and flat stores. Slums are joints that give away ”slum,” or cheap merchandise, like the floating-ducks game.
Hanky-panks are the joints mom and the kids can play, like my one-ball game, for example, and the basketball game.
Hanky-panks designed to attract kids are ”punk wrecks.” There are also ”buildup” hanky-panks-where you trade in smaller prizes and gradually build up to win a larger one. Most buildup agents make up their own rules. For one mark, it might take three small animals for the big one; for the next, it might take four.
And then there are the hanky-panks known as ”alibi joints,” so dubbed because agents alibi their way out of giving prizes. A good example is the bushel-basket game, where the mark is given a couple of softballs and is required to toss them into a basket. If a ball does go in, it`s, ”Oops, you stepped over the foul line,” or, ”Sorry, your arm went over that time.”
Flat stores and the flatters who work them are a different matter altogether. They are supposed to do exactly what their name says-flatten the mark. Flat stores are not hard to spot. They display expensive prizes-color TV sets, stereos, radios and huge stuffed animals called ”spoofers.” The flatters are clean-cut and well-dressed. Their usual approach is to extend a hand, smile broadly and say, ”Hi. My name is Joe Blow, and I play a gentleman`s game.”
The prizes are nice, the flatters are friendly and the game looks easy. But as the mark gets into it, the stakes keep doubling, starting at a dollar and ending up in the hundreds. But the games are impossible to win, or the flatter controls who wins and when. He can pull levers on the targets, say, of the Six Cat, a baseball-throwing gallery, and on some add-`em-up dart games, it`s virtually impossible to add `em up to win. And flatters are experts on speeding up the pace so the mark doesn`t think and just keeps on pulling out those green bills.
If a beef develops, they will try to settle it by ”blowing off” a relatively inexpensive prize. But if a mark insists on calling the
authorities, then someone known as a ”patch” steps in to pay them off. Flatters pay a patch fee, usually $5 or $10 a night, for just these situations.
How a joint is run depends on a number of factors, among them the laws and regulations set by various states, counties and cities; the standards set by the carnival and individual joint owners; the talent of the jointee; and the gullibility of the mark.
My milk bottles were weighted down with seven-pound weights. In some states the weights had to be no more than five pounds, while in others the only stipulation is that all the weights be the same for all the bottles (one bottom bottle heavier than the other two makes it much harder to knock the pyramid down).
Ride jocks were paid a salary of $100 a week and, if they lasted a whole season, a bonus of $25 a week. The jointees worked on strict percentages-either 25 percent of what they pulled in over the apron, or a 50-50 split with the joint owner after ”stock”-prizes lost-and ”privilege”-rental fees-were subtracted.
During a seven-day work week with the carnival, I grossed about $450. That came out to $113 for the week, or $16.14 a night, for me. The one night it rained, Bill gave me and my coworkers five bucks each.
I was considered to be doing pretty well for a beginner, pulling in about the same amount as my four teenage coworkers but still less than Jim. I was surprised at my success; I`m not good even at garage sales. But hunger is a great motivator, and I started thinking that someone on the lot was going to get that money, so it might as well be me. And then there were the marks who were determined to play until they won, no matter what you did or said.
