Joyland (9 page)

Gary looked at him, hands fisted on non-existent hips. His jeans seemed to be staying up in defiance of gravity. “Listen up, son, I got three things for you. Ready?”

Ronnie nodded. He looked like he wanted to take notes. He also looked like he wanted to hide behind the rest of us.

“First thing. You can call me Gary or Pops or come here you old sonofabitch, but I ain’t no schoolteacher, so can the mister. Second thing. I never want to see that fucking schoolboy hat on your head again. Third thing. The foul line is wherever I say the foul line is on any given night. I can do that because it’s in my
myyyyynd.”
He tapped one sunken, vein-gnarled temple to make this point perfectly clear, then waved at the prizes, the targets, and the counter where the conies—the rubes—laid down their mooch. “This is all in my
myyyyynd. The shy is mental.
Geddit?”

Ronnie didn’t, but he nodded vigorously.

“Now whip off that turdish-looking schoolboy hat. Get you a Joyland visor or a Howie the Happy Hound dogtop. Make it Job One.”

Ronnie whipped off his FSU lid with alacrity, and stuck it in his back pocket. Later that day—I believe within the hour—he replaced it with a Howie cap, known in the Talk as a dogtop. After three days of ribbing and being called greenie, he took his new dogtop out to the parking lot, found a nice greasy spot, and trompled it for a while. When he put it back on, it had the right look. Or almost. Ronnie Houston never got the
complete
right look; some people were just destined to be greenies forever. I remember Tom sidling up to him one day and suggesting that he needed to piss on it a little to give it that final touch that means so much. When he saw Ronnie was on the verge of taking him seriously, Tom backpedaled and said just soaking it in the Atlantic would achieve the same effect.

Meanwhile, Pops was surveying us.

“Speaking of good-looking ladies, I perceive we have one among us.”

Erin smiled modestly.

“Hollywood Girl, darlin?”

“That’s what Mr. Dean said I’d be doing, yes.”

“Then you want to go see Brenda Rafferty. She’s second-in-command around here, and she’s also the park Girl Mom. She’ll get you fitted up with one of those cute green dresses. Tell her you want yours extra-short.”

“The hell I will, you old lecher,” Erin said, and promptly joined him when he threw back his head and bellowed laughter.

“Pert! Sassy! Do I like it? I do! When you’re not snappin pix of the conies, you come on back to your Pops and I’ll find you something to do . . . but change out of the dress first. You don’t get grease or sawdust on it.
Kapish?”

“Yes,” Erin said. She was all business again.

Pops Allen looked at his watch. “Park opens in one hour, kiddies, then you’ll learn while you earn. Start with the rides.” He pointed to us one by one, naming rides. I got the Carolina Spin, which pleased me. “Got time for a question or two, but no more’n that. Anybody got one or are you good to go?”

I raised my hand. He nodded at me and asked my name.

“Devin Jones, sir.”

“Call me sir again and you’re fired, lad.”

“Devin Jones, Pops.” I certainly wasn’t going to call him
come here you old sonofoabitch,
at least not yet. Maybe when we knew each other better.

“There you go,” he said, nodding. “What’s on your mind, Jonesy? Besides that foine head of red hair?”

“What’s carny-from-carny mean?”

“Means you’re like old man Easterbrook. His father worked the carny circuit back in the Dust Bowl days, and his grandfather worked it back when they had a fake Indian show featuring Big Chief Yowlatcha. ”

“You
got
to be
kidding
!” Tom exclaimed, almost exultantly.

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down—a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?”

“Uh . . . stuff that happened in the past?”

“Nope,” he said, tying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a
leetle
more forgiving.”

Tom opened his mouth, probably to make a smart comeback, then wisely closed it again.

George Preston, another member of Team Beagle, spoke up. “Are
you
carny-from-carny?”

“Nope. My daddy was a cattle rancher in Oregon; now my brothers run the spread. I’m the black sheep of the family, and damn proud of it. Okay, if there’s nothing else, it’s time to quit the foolishness and get down to business.”

“Can I ask one thing more?” Erin asked.

“Only because you’re purty.”

“What does ‘wearing the fur’ mean?”

Pops Allen smiled. He placed his hands on the mooch-counter of his shy. “Tell me, little lady, do you have an idea what it
might
mean?”

“Well . . . yes.”

The smile widened into a grin that showed every yellowing fang in our new team leader’s mouth. “Then you’re probably right.”

What did I do at Joyland that summer? Everything. Sold tickets. Pushed a popcorn wagon. Sold funnel cakes, cotton candy, and a zillion hot dogs (which we called Hound Dogs—you probably knew that). It was a Hound Dog that got my picture in the paper, as a matter of fact, although I wasn’t the guy who sold that unlucky pup; George Preston did. I worked as a lifeguard, both on the beach and at Happy Lake, the indoor pool where the Splash & Crash water slide ended. I line-danced in the Wiggle-Waggle Village with the other members of Team Beagle to “Bird Dance Beat,” “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight,” “Rippy-Rappy, Zippy-Zappy,” and a dozen other nonsense songs. I also did time—most of it happy—as an unlicensed child-minder. In the Wiggle-Waggle, the approved rallying cry when faced with a bawling kiddie was “Let’s turn that frown upside-down!” and I not only liked it, I got good at it. It was in the Wiggle-Waggle that I decided having kids at some point in the future was an actual Good Idea rather than a Wendy-flavored daydream.

I—and all the other Happy Helpers—learned to race from one side of Joyland to the other in nothing flat, using either the alleys behind the shys, joints, rides, and concessions or one of three service-tunnels known as Joyland Under, Hound Dog Under, and the Boulevard. I hauled trash by the ton, usually driving it in an electric cart down the Boulevard, a shadowy and sinister thoroughfare lit by ancient fluorescent bar-lights that stuttered and buzzed. I even worked a few times as a roadie, hauling amps and monitors when one of the acts showed up late and unsupported.

I learned to talk the Talk. Some of it—like bally for a free show, or gone larry for a ride that had broken down—was pure carny, and as old as the hills. Other terms—like points for purty girls and fumps for the chronic complainers—were strictly Joyland lingo. I suppose other parks have their own version of the Talk, but underneath it’s always carny-from-carny. A hammer-squash is a cony (usually a fump) who bitches about having to wait in line. The last hour of the day (at Joyland, that was ten PM to eleven) was the blow-off. A cony who loses at some shy and wants his mooch back is a mooch-hammer. The donniker is the bathroom, as in “Hey Jonesy, hustle down to the donniker by the Moon Rocket—some dumb fump just puked in one of the sinks.”

Running the concessions (known as joints) came easy to most of us, and really, anyone who can make change is qualified to push the popcorn wagon or work the counter of a souvenir shop. Learning to ride-jock wasn’t much more difficult, but it was scary at first, because there were lives in your hands, many those of little children.

“Here for your lesson?” Lane Hardy asked me when I joined him at the Carolina Spin. “Good. Just in time. Park opens in twenty minutes. We do it the way they do in the navy—see one, do one, teach one. Right now that heavyset kid you were standing next to—”

“Tom Kennedy.”

“Okay. Right now Tom’s over learning the Devil Wagons. At some point—probably this very day—he’s gonna teach you how to run the ride, and you’ll teach him how to run the Spin. Which, by the way, is an Aussie Wheel, meaning it runs counterclockwise.”

“Is that important?”

“Nope,” he said, “but I think it’s interesting. There are only a few in the States. It has two speeds: slow and
really
slow.”

“Because it’s a grandma ride.”

“Correctamundo.” He demonstrated with the long stick shift I’d seen him operating on the day I got my job, then made me take over the stick with the bicycle handgrip at the top. “Feel it click when it’s in gear?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s stop.” He put his hand over mine and pulled the lever all the way up. This time the click was harder, and the enormous wheel stopped at once, the cars rocking gently. “With me so far?”

“I guess so. Listen, don’t I need a permit or a license or something to run this thing?”

“You
got
a license, don’t you?”

“Sure, a Maine driver’s license, but—”

“In South Carolina, a valid DL’s all you need. They’ll get around to additional regulations in time—they always do—but for this year, at least, you’re good to go. Now pay attention, because this is the most important part. Do you see that yellow stripe on the side of the housing?”

I did. It was just to the right of the ramp leading up to the ride.

“Each car has a Happy Hound decal on the door. When you see the Hound lining up with the yellow stripe, you pull stop, and there’ll be a car right where the folks get on.” He yanked the lever forward again. “See?”

I said I did.

“Until the wheel’s tipsed—”

“What?”

“Loaded. Tipsed means loaded. Don’t ask me why. Until the wheel’s tipsed, you just alternate between super-slow and stop. Once you’ve got a full load—which you’ll have most of the time, if we have a good season—you go to the normal slow speed. They get four minutes.” He pointed to his suitcase radio. “It’s my boomie, but the rule is when you run the ride, you control the tunes. Just no real blasting rock and roll—Who, Zep, Stones, stuff like that—until after the sun goes down. Got it?”

“Yeah. What about letting them off?”

“Exactly the same. Super-slow, stop. Super-slow, stop. Always line up the yellow stripe with the Happy Hound, and you’ll always have a car right at the ramp. You should be able to get ten spins an hour. If the wheel’s loaded each time, that’s over seven hundred customers, which comes to almost a d-note.”

“Which is what, in English?”

“Five hundred.”

I looked at him uncertainly. “I won’t really have to do this, will I? I mean, it’s your ride.”

“It’s Brad Easterbrook’s ride, kiddo. They all are. I’m just another employee, although I’ve been here a few years. I’ll run the hoister most of the time, but not
all
of the time. And hey, stop sweating. There are carnies where half-drunk bikers covered with tattoos do this, and if they can, you can.”

“If you say so.”

Lane pointed. “Gates’re open and here come the conies, rolling down Joyland Avenue. You’re going to stick with me for the first three rides. Later on you teach the rest of your team, and that includes your Hollywood Girl. Okay?”

It wasn’t even close to okay—I was supposed to send people a hundred and seventy feet in the air after a five-minute tutorial? It was insane.

He gripped my shoulder. “You can do this, Jonesy. So never mind ‘if you say so.’ Tell me it’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Good boy.” He turned on his radio, now hooked to a speaker high on the Spin’s frame. The Hollies began to sing “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” as Lane took a pair of rawhide gloves from the back pocket of his jeans. “And get you a pair of these—you’re going to need them. Also, you better start learning how to pitch.” He bent down, grabbed a hand-held mike from the ever-present orange crate, put one foot up, and began to work the crowd.

“Hey folks welcome in, time to take a little spin, hurry hurry, summer won’t last forever, take a ride upstairs where the air is rare, this is where the fun begins, step over here and ride the Spin.”