Joyland (10 page)

He lowered the mike and gave me a wink. “That’s my pitch, more or less; give me a drink or three and it gets a lot better. You work out your own.”

The first time I ran the Spin by myself, my hands were shaking with terror, but by the end of that first week I was running it like a pro (although Lane said my pitch needed a lot of work). I was also capable of running the Whirly Cups and the Devil Wagons . . . although ride-jocking the latter came down to little more than pushing the green START button, the red STOP button, and getting the cars untangled when the rubes got them stuck together against the rubber bumpers, which was at least four times during each four-minute ride. Only when you were running the Devil Wagons, you didn’t call them rides; each run was a spree.

I learned the Talk; I learned the geography, both above and below ground; I learned how to run a joint, take over a shy, and award plushies to good-looking points. It took a week or so to get most of it down, and it was two weeks before I started getting comfortable. Wearing the fur, however, I understood by twelve-thirty on my first day, and it was just my luck—good or bad—that Bradley Easterbrook happened to be in Wiggle-Waggle Village at the time, sitting on a bench and eating his usual lunch of bean sprouts and tofu—hardly amusement park chow, but let’s keep in mind that the man’s food-processing system hadn’t been new since the days of bathtub gin and flappers.

After my first impromptu performance as Howie the Happy Hound, I wore the fur a lot. Because I was good at it, you see. And Mr. Easterbrook
knew
I was good at it. I was wearing it a month or so later, when I met the little girl in the red hat on Joyland Avenue.

That first day was a madhouse, all right. I ran the Carolina Spin with Lane until ten o’clock, then alone for the next ninety minutes while he rushed around the park putting out opening day fires. By then I no longer believed the wheel was going to malfunction and start running out of control, like the merry-go-round in that old Alfred Hitchcock movie. The most terrifying thing was how
trusting
people were. Not a single dad with kids in tow detoured to my pitch to ask if I knew what I was doing. I didn’t get as many spins as I should have—I was concentrating so hard on that damn yellow stripe that I gave myself a headache—but every spin I did get was tipsed.

Erin came by once, pretty as a picture in her green Hollywood Girl dress, and took pictures of some of the family groups waiting to get on. She took one of me, too—I still have it somewhere. When the wheel was turning again, she gripped me by the arm, little beads of sweat standing out on her forehead, her lips parted in a smile, her eyes shining.

“Is this great, or what?” she asked.

“As long as I don’t kill anybody, yeah,” I said.

“If some little kid falls out of a car, just make sure you catch him.” Then, having given me something new to obsess about, she jogged off in search of new photo subjects. There was no shortage of people willing to pose for a gorgeous redhead on a summer morning. And she was right, actually. It was pretty great.

Around eleven-thirty, Lane came back. By that point, I was comfortable enough ride-jocking the Spin to turn the rudimentary controls over to him with some reluctance.

“Who’s your team leader, Jonesy? Gary Allen?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, go on over to his bang-shy and see what he’s got for you. If you’re lucky, he’ll send you down to the boneyard for lunch.”

“What’s the boneyard?”

“Where the help goes when they’ve got time off. Most carnies, it’s the parking lot or out behind the trucks, but Joyland’s lux. There’s a nice break-room where the Boulevard and Hound Dog Under connect. Take the stairs between the balloon-pitch and the knife-show. You’ll like it, but you only eat if Pop says it’s okay. I ain’t getting in dutch with that old bastard. His team is his team; I got my own. You got a dinner bucket?”

“Didn’t know I was supposed to bring one.”

He grinned. “You’ll learn. For today, stop at Ernie’s joint—the fried chicken place with the big plastic rooster on top. Show him your Joyland ID card and he’ll give you the company discount.”

I did end up eating fried chicken at Ernie’s, but not until two that afternoon. Pop had other plans for me. “Go by the costume shop—its the trailer between Park Services and the carpentry shop. Tell Dottie Lassen I sent you. Damn woman’s busting her girdle.”

“Want me to help you reload first?” The Shootin’ Gallery was also tipsed, the counter crowded with high school kids anxious to win those elusive plushies. More rubes (so I was already thinking of them) were lined up three deep behind the current shooters. Pop Allen’s hands never stopped moving as he talked to me.

“What I want is for you to get on your pony and ride. I was doin this shit long before you were born. Which one are you, anyway, Jonesy or Kennedy? I know you’re not the dingbat in the college-boy hat, but beyond that I can’t remember.”

“I’m Jonesy.”

“Well, Jonesy, you’re going to spend an edifying hour in the Wiggle-Waggle. It’ll be edifying for the kiddies, anyhow. For you, maybe not so much.” He bared his yellow fangs in a trademark Pop Allen grin, the one that made him look like an elderly shark. “Enjoy that fur suit.”

The costume shop was also a madhouse, filled with women running every whichway. Dottie Lassen, a skinny lady who needed a girdle like I needed elevator shoes, fell on me the second I walked through the door. She hooked her long-nailed fingers into my armpit and dragged me past clown costumes, cowboy costumes, a huge Uncle Sam suit (with stilts leaning beside it against the wall), a couple of princess outfits, a rack of Hollywood Girl dresses, and a rack of old-fashioned Gay Nineties bathing suits . . . which, I found out, we were condemned to wear when on lifeguard duty. At the very back of her crowded little empire were a dozen deflated dogs. Howies, in fact, complete with the Happy Hound’s delighted stupid-and-loving-it grin, his big blue eyes, and his fuzzy cocked ears. Zippers ran down the backs of the suits from the neck to the base of the tail.

“Christ, you’re a big one,” Dottie said. “Thank God I got the extra-large mended last week. The last kid who wore it ripped it out under both arms. There was a hole under the tail, too. He must have been eating Mexican food.” She snatched the XL Howie off the rack and slammed it into my arms. The tail curled around my leg like a python. “You’re going to the Wiggle-Waggle, and I mean chop-fucking-chop. Butch Hadley was supposed to take care of that from Team Corgi—or so I thought—but he says his whole team’s out with a key to the midway.” I had no idea what that meant, and Dottie gave me no time to ask. She rolled her eyes in a way that indicated either good humor or the onset of madness, and continued. “You say ‘What’s the big deal?’ I’ll tell you what’s the big deal, greenie: Mr. Easterbrook usually eats his lunch there, he
always
eats it there on the first day we’re running full-out, and if there’s no Howie, he’ll be very disappointed.”

“Like as in someone will get fired?”

“No, as in very disappointed. Stick around awhile and you’ll know that’s plenty bad enough. No one wants to disappoint him, because he’s a great man. Which is nice, I suppose, but what’s more important is he’s a good guy. In this business, good guys are scarcer than hen’s teeth.” She looked at me and made a sound like a small animal with its paw caught in a trap. “Dear
Christ,
you’re a big one. And green as grass. But it can’t be helped.”

I had a billion questions, but my tongue was frozen. All I could do was stare at the deflated Howie. Who stared back at me. Do you know what I felt like just then? James Bond, in the movie where he’s tied to some kind of crazy exercise gadget.
Do you expect me to talk?
he asks Goldfinger, and Goldfinger replies, with chilling good humor,
No, Mr. Bond! I expect you to die!
I was tied to a happiness machine instead of an exercise machine, but hey, same idea. No matter how hard I worked to keep up on that first day, the damn thing just kept going faster.

“Take it down to the boneyard, kid. Please tell me you know where that is.”

“I do.” Thank God Lane had told me.

“Well, that’s one for the home team, anyway. When you get there, strip down to your undies. If you wear more than that while you’re wearing the fur, you’ll roast. And . . . anybody ever tell you the First Rule of Carny, kid?”

I thought so, but it seemed safer to keep my mouth shut.

“Always know where your wallet is. This park isn’t anywhere near as sleazy as some of the places I worked in the flower of my youth—thank God—but that’s still the First Rule. Give it to me, I’ll keep it for you.”

I handed over my wallet without protest.

“Now go. But even before you strip down, drink a lot of water. I mean until your belly feels swollen. And don’t eat anything, I don’t care how hungry you are. I’ve had kids get heatstroke and barf in Howie suits, and the results ain’t pretty. Suit almost always has to be thrown out. Drink, strip, put on the fur, get someone to zip you up, then hustle down the Boulevard to the Wiggle-Waggle. There’s a sign, you can’t miss it.”

I looked doubtfully at Howie’s big blue eyes.

“They’re screen mesh,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’ll see fine.”

“But what do I
do?”

She looked at me, at first unsmiling. Then her face—not just her mouth and eyes but her whole face—broke into a grin. The laugh that accompanied it was this weird honk that seemed to come through her nose. “You’ll be fine,” she said. People kept telling me that. “It’s method acting, kiddo. Just find your inner dog.”

There were over a dozen new hires and a handful of old-timers having lunch in the boneyard when I arrived. Two of the greenies were Hollywood Girls, but I had no time to be modest. After gulping a bellyful from the drinking fountain, I shucked down to my Jockeys and sneakers. I shook out the Howie costume and stepped in, making sure to get my feet all the way down in the back paws.

“Fur!” one of the old-timers yelled, and slammed a fist down on the table. “Fur! Fur! Fur!”

The others took it up, and the boneyard rang with the chant as I stood there in my underwear with a deflated Howie puddled around my shins. It was like being in the middle of a prison messhall riot. Rarely have I felt so exquisitely stupid . . . or so oddly heroic. It was showbiz, after all, and I was stepping into the breach. For a moment it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

“Fur! Fur! FUR! FUR!”

“Somebody zip me the hell up!”
I shouted.
“I have to get down to the Wiggle-Waggle posthaste!”

One of the girls did the honors, and I immediately saw why wearing the fur was such a big deal. The boneyard was air conditioned—all of Joyland Under was—but I was already popping hard sweat.

One of the old-timers came over and gave me a kindly pat on my Howie-head. “I’ll give you a ride, son,” he said. “Cart’s right there. Jump in.”

“Thanks.” My voice was muffled.

“Woof-woof, Bowser!” someone called, and they all cracked up.

We rolled down the Boulevard with its spooky, stuttering fluorescent lights, a grizzled old guy in janitor’s greens with a giant blue-eyed German Shepherd riding co-pilot. As he pulled up at the stairs marked with an arrow and the painted legend WIGWAG on the cinderblocks, he said: “Don’t talk. Howie never talks, just gives hugs and pats ’em on the head. Good luck, and if you start feelin all swimmy, get the hell out. The kids don’t want to see Howie flop over with heatstroke.”