Under the Electric Sky (4 page)

The policy on this carnival and every other one in the country is not to rip people off and Verney says he's okay with that. He's lived the carny life in its purest form and is a kind of seasoned showman now, mixed with the aura of a cheap hustler. You can sense the old tendencies are lurking somewhere close to the skin – he'd love the chance to “Fairbank a mark” for old time's sake. That's established lingo for a simple series of gestures letting the guy playing a game think he has an advantage and a shot at winning “the big one” when he actually stands no chance. Verney's worked joints in the States where people have blown their rent and food money for the month on one game. If the sucker was stupid enough to do that, nobody on the carnival was going to apologize or give him his money back. The games were rigged after all and the carnies had to eat, so it hardly mattered to anyone on the show where the money came from.

And if a particular game wasn't rigged, it would be what they call an “alibi” game. The ball toss/tub joint is a good example of this, where even if a person gets the ball in, the jointee can say he went over an imaginary line thereby disqualifying the win.

These kinds of business practices come with a few risks and things can get ugly quick when a man realizes his kids will be eating out of a garbage dumpster for a month. A fight was out of the question, unless the mark wanted to go home penniless and toothless, but the real fear for Verney was that the police would show up to investigate a complaint made by a mooch. The professionals have ways of avoiding these situations too, picked up over years of grifting; it's mandatory learning in the carny curriculum.

“What you do when you have a guy playing like that, is you say and do silly things. For example, you pat him on the back.” Verney demonstrates by slapping my right shoulder blade with a firm whack.

“'Don't overspend yourself'. Hard enough to irritate him, but not hard enough to make him mad – just enough to irritate him. Try and let them spend all the money they want. If somebody comes back with a cop who asks ‘What's going on here? How did this guy spend $600? How could he not win after seven hundred tries?' I say ‘Sorry officer, he kept missing it. Hey listen officer, I tried to tell the guy don't overspend yourself.'

“Then the guy remembers me saying it. He can't lie – the cop saw it in his face. Then the cop says that's all he can do.”

Life is not easy for a carny willing to engage in that kind of strong-arm stuff. “You gotta be a hard-ass in that system,” Verney says. He knows guys who can't grab a burger at a fast-food joint without expecting some form of physical violence by a disgruntled mark looking for revenge on a carny who wandered off the lot on his own.

The new psychology among carnival owners is to let people win cheap garbage prizes for their kids. That way everyone is happy. “Rag-in-a-bag” prizes, they call them. Trading up on stuffed animals is a new angle that's been working as well. It cost Verney thirty-eight cents and he gave it away for two dollars – plus entertainment value – so there's no reason for either side to harbour bad feelings and he can still go to Wendy's or a movie on a Saturday night without looking over his shoulder.

But Verney still has those professional carny tendencies and he gets bored easily with the new business practices. He takes pride in new marketing endeavours, even if they don't adhere to all copyright laws. Verney's the mind behind putting a
Survivor
logo on the monkey ladder to attract people to the old game and he also reinvigorated the ring-toss-around-the-bottles game by printing off some Duff beer logos, slapping them on the bottles and calling it
The Simpsons
' joint. That one was such a hit he actually had people offering money for his empty beer bottles.

“People played the shit out of that,” he says.

Last year in the Valley, the old days came roaring back to him. One of the workers' kids brought his bulldog puppy to the midway where it would typically curl up on a stuffed horse and sleep on the ball toss game. After a day and a half of turning people away who wanted to play for the dog, Verney finally gave in. He put the little bulldog up on the prize block.

“I tell ya, that dog won ya a lot of money,” he says. “I was prepared to pay the kid a couple hundred bucks for the dog if I blew it, ‘cause there's always the chance the guy might get it in the tub. But that's why they call it an alibi game. I could say you went over the line, you hit the rim; I could alibi them. There were a couple of scary moments. That guy went up to $200 – he wanted that dog.

“And the kid was prayin' he wouldn't win it: ‘Please don't lose my dog',” he adds with a laugh.

Verney finishes his alfresco decoupage and is content with his stamp on the new location. The idea to block what would be the main entrance off from view with game trailers is, of course, pure genius with just the right touch of showmanship. He's obviously pleased with himself and it's as if the idea of this wonderful, curious set-up has triggered grand, forgotten carny memories that flash through his mind as he stares into the distance. The lot will resemble an old carnival where the secrets and mysteries hide between the musty, canvas tents. People will just have to come right in or peep through the spaces like the old days and a little bit of voyeurism never corrupted anyone's soul.

“It's really like the girly show. Lift the curtains, leave it alone, let them peek through,” he says with the air of a true porn merchant, as the rest of the caravan starts to filter in.

The next four or five hours were spent backing the old rides into place intermittently and aligning the game trailers accordingly. Some of the rides like the Tilt-A-Whirl and Ferris Wheel are the very ones that have circumnavigated the Maritimes for decades with the old Lynch shows. All of them have been maintained and overhauled throughout the years, the lights replaced and special paint jobs matched, and look no worse for the wear. I travelled back to Halifax one final time with Bill for the last haul, arriving in New Minas for the night close to one a.m., tired and ready for a few hours of sleep.

I was directed to my bunk through the dark field by a large man named Robert who serves as carnival victualler. We came up on a white semi-trailer in the back of the lot behind the rides that would be my residence for the next week. The trailer is sectioned off down the centre into roughly five six-foot-by-four-and-a-half-foot bunks on each side with two larger bunks, “for couples” I was told, on the ends. My bunk had a four-foot-high partition in front of me as I entered on which a soiled, two-inch-thick mattress rested. There was a useless ladder with no room for toes to pop through, snug against the side of it for propping yourself into bed, but the low ceiling made this a nightly gymnastic feat. The bunk on the opposite side has the partition above the bed, which means that I will essentially be sleeping above the person in the bunk opposite mine, with nothing but a thin board under me and one on the side preserving the illusion of privacy.

The light switch was broken and it was dark when I entered, the only light coming through the tiny window from a generator standard in the distance. It smelled like deodorant body spray, the kind advertised on TV where attractive girls pick up the scent and savagely tear guys' clothes off like animals. I made out a tall cupboard next to the bed that extended all the way up to the mattress, which acted as a night stand. It was littered with a Doritos bag, some loose tobacco and a roach from a long ago extinguished joint and a few crumpled up rolling papers. Leaving the door to the bunk open for extra arm room, I unrolled my sleeping bag and tried to stretch it the length of the bunk, over the ratty mattress. Drunk tanks do not offer mattresses, but they will one day and this will be the style. My sleeping bag fit, but I soon realized I wouldn't. These bunks were never made with comfort in mind. They were designed with no more thought than keeping the workers dry and contained. The taller ones would just have to cram in as best they could. I felt like the old magicians' assistant squeezing into the box before being sliced in half.

These quarters are a large improvement from conditions that lasted well into the 1980s, however. Around the time Lynch was promoting his carnival as the largest and cleanest midway in Canada, his workers were sleeping wherever they could find a place: in the oil-soaked ride trailers, in a field, on the deck of the Gravitron, in a tub on the Tilt, wherever they could lay their heads for a few hours. The more well-to-do carnies owned tents and lived like kings. The more cunning carnies would pick up women in whatever town they were in and go back to her place. That would guarantee them a decent meal and a bed to sleep in for the night and chances were good a hot shower would be included for free. The next day, they'd pull the same scam on a different girl in town.

I stood at the door of the bunk and lit my last cigarette of the day, contemplating exactly how I would find rest in this little cell when one of the workers swept pass the door with his head down, marching to his bunk. I recognized him in the shadows as a kid named Justin I had met at Penhorn Mall in Dartmouth when the show was there a few weeks back. He struck me then as a loudmouth jackass and in the few brief times we talked since, I had no grounds for changing my opinion. He had joined to be with a girl named April, who he had met in Fredericton a few months before at what they both told me was an “acid party”. She had made it clear then that she worked for the carnival and would be going back out as soon as it turned nice, but here was a girl who had talked to him and if the years of life before that moment had taught Justin anything, it was to hold onto anyone like that as tight as you can. True love is never left to chance. So here he is tramping to his bed, wherever it was.

“Hey, Justin, how's it going?” I offered.

“Who's that?” he asked, trying to see through the darkness. I identified myself and he stopped for a moment to mumble something and kept walking.

I finished the cigarette and successfully mounted the bunk, with my feet sticking out over the side. There was a group of carnies on the other side of the bunkhouse engrossed in muffled conversation and enjoying a nightcap of whatever substance they could find. I heard Justin saddle up beside them.

“Do you guys know that goddamn reporter is out here with us?”

For all I knew – and if Justin had possessed any type of influence or authority – they were about to get wild on whatever they were passing around and come whip me with plush stuffed animals filled with rocks. My interactions had been friendly to this point, but there was no way to be sure. There was no point taking my shoes off, I figured, in case I needed to throw a few punches in defence and run through the field.

As it was, the conversation faded out and the group disbanded to their bunks after the long travel day. But Justin was still teeming with energy, presumably from hiding out all day while the other guys moved everything.

I heard the bunk door opposite mine shut and Justin started whispering to someone. After a few seconds of muted rustling, the whole bunkhouse started to shake.

This is what Bill had tried to warn me about earlier. It was a nauseous feeling lying above the carnival's newest couple as they turned the bunkhouse into a carnival ride. It was the Seasick Simulator, the Love Buzzer or the Fornicator or some name like that. I imagined old-time, tawdry paintings on the side of the bunkhouse similar to romance-novel cover art. I could hear the old showman's voice in the distance:
Step right up here, all you love birds. Hey fellas, if your girl hasn't fallen for you yet, she sure will on the Fornicator. Guaranteed to make her lean close and fall in your arms. But don't take it from me, folks. Hop on board and see for yourself
...

The Bruiser from Charlottetown

“Our fair will bring you back to the days when you dreamed the dream of a boy,

Before you learned the world and its ways,

And life was one round of joy. It will bring you a vision of old time friends,

A handshake and how-do-ye-do. One hour of it will make amends,

For the pain of a whole life through.”

----Advertisement for the PEI Provincial Exhibition

The Guardian
, Charlottetown, August 16, 1935

S
oggy Reid always struck for the heart. As a sturdy, broad-shouldered sixteen-year-old, Reid had already established a reputation in amateur boxing circles throughout the Maritimes as a tough kid, a two-fisted pugilist with enormous strength who never backed down. Although his five-foot, eight-inch, 158-pound frame would qualify him for middleweight status, the kid had a heavyweight heart and was always ready to fight, in some cases issuing challenges to any boxer willing to rumble.

It wasn't that Soggy “Kid” Reid was arrogant, or that he harboured a secret blood-lust that could only be satisfied by pounding on someone's face in front of hundreds of spectators. It was his personality that seemed to shine in the world of boxing and everywhere else for that matter. He liked a big crowd and he knew how to be the centre of attention. There was no ego, just a confidence that exuded effortlessly and a natural charisma that drew people in. There was something admirable in his character, even as a young man, and everyone who met him was swept up in the adventure by strength of his gregarious personality.

As for boxing, he simply loved the sport and for a poor kid from Charlottetown, the $20 he made off a fight was a small fortune. The Kid made it known he'd fight anyone, anywhere, anytime. Aside from the much needed money, there was an energy in the ring that he feasted on. It was his place and he knew it. He fought as much as he could, sometimes as often as once a week in venues across the region.

“Reid was a sawed-off stick of ring dynamite who loved to fight,” it was once said of the young boxer. “He had a heart of iron and fists of tempered steel.”

Although his slugging power was enough to win matches on its own, Soggy was a proficient defensive boxer as well. One of his favourite ring manoeuvres was a left lead punch followed by a stinging right to the opponent's heart. Hardly crowd pleasing, but effective in its end result. Boxing enthusiasts understand the damage body shots can wreak on fighters when administered correctly. After a while, breathing becomes difficult and the muscles start to fatigue, leaving the fighter vulnerable to a winning knock-out punch. The jab was enough to take the fight out of any opponent after a round or two and for the man with the “heart of iron” the tactic was fitting. He was testing everyone's for the same mettle.

In October of 1946, the sixteen-year-old found himself in a Saint John ring for what would prove to be the biggest match of his life. Although up against a larger fighter by the name of George “Big Boy” Peterson, who stood an even six feet, two hundred pounds, Soggy stuck to his game and defeated the much favoured Peterson. Although at times throughout the fight Soggy looked like he was going down, he steadied himself with that iron heart will of his and landed his short-armed blows when he needed to. It took every ounce of fight the young man had to pull it off but he did and in fine fashion. Reid won a three-round decision by throwing everything he had into it: his strength, his truculence, his manic determination, a blind will to win, everything that makes a good fighter great. The iron heart had won and showed no signs of weakness.

The champ would fight for years after, finally ending his boxing career in the early 1950s, not before earning the titles of middleweight and light-heavyweight champion along the way. Over half of Reid's fifty fights ended with his opponents knocked out by way of the fists of tempered steel. There's a group of bruised gentlemen from the ‘40s and ‘50s with names like Kid and Slugger and Hambone and Big Boy who have all tasted the sting of Soggy Reid's sheer strength. And the champ came out of it clean, with no recognizable scars.

But there was a different world out there in need of a man with Soggy's talents and as things often go, it had a way of finding him. In fact, it already had.

Clarence Reid was born in Charlottetown on August 6, 1930 – a child of the carnival season – to parents Frank Farris Reid and Alice Mamye Reid. Frank Reid immigrated from Lebanon to Prince Edward Island in his late teens, arriving on the island sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, finding work wherever he could. He had friends already living on the island, so after leaving his home country, P.E.I. seemed liked the best place. Alice arrived in 1924 from Lebanon as well and the two met shortly thereafter through mutual friends. Alice was thirty years younger than Frank, but nobody seemed to mind and the two married and moved into a modest home on Dorchester Street in downtown Charlottetown where they would raise their children: John, George, Clarence and Betty.

With four kids to feed, Frank roamed the countryside as a peddler while his much younger wife stayed at home attending to the children. Shoelaces, razorblades and other essentials became Frank's staples out on the country beat around the island. He also sold aprons Alice made on the family sewing machine for thirty-five cents. Selling came easily to Frank, who was never content just walking around selling goods. If he was going to move items, then a certain amount of showmanship had to be applied. His cases of goods were like tiny treasure troves, filled with everything someone on the island could get their hands on. At night, the kids would ask their father to show them his wares and he always obliged to giggles and bewilderment from the amazed children. It was like the old man had a general store in the worn, black dispatch box he lugged around. If he didn't have what somebody needed, he'd find it and be back to their house to collect a modest sum for his troubles. There was no real money in this, but it was good honest work and the kids never starved.

Dorchester Street is a typical downtown Maritime residential road, with old, brightly painted clapboard homes crammed together a few feet off the sidewalk. There are no real front yards on Dorchester Street, but on the south side of the east end, the backyards stretch down to King Street, a few hundred feet from where the old train yard used to sit. It was here that the Reid boys spent a lot of their summers, playing games and exploring the area. The train coming in was a daily excitement for John, George and Clarence, who would hang around and see if a dime or two could be made by helping unload freight.

One clear August morning at 5 a.m., as five-year-old Clarence slept in his bed in that old house on Dorchester Street, a whistle blew through the cold dawn as his future came chugging into town. The Bill Lynch Shows had just completed what in 1935 could only be described as one of the greatest and longest carnival transportation efforts ever recorded. The Lynch shows had finished an engagement in Newfoundland and had loaded out of St. John's on a Thursday, carrying fourteen railcars and roughly seventy personnel to Port-aux-Basques by Friday morning. There they loaded onto a steamship that would take them into North Sydney by Friday night, only to load back onto a train for the jaunt to Port Hawkesbury where they met a train-ferry destined for Mulgrave, Nova Scotia. From there the train continued through Moncton to Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick, where the railcars were loaded once again on a train-ferry and shipped to Port Borden, P.E.I., arriving finally in Charlottetown early Monday morning.

That was a long haul, but that's the way the carnival operated in those days and it was the price of doing business in Atlantic Canada. Lynch hired Canadian National Railways to transport his show rather than buying and maintaining his own train, which meant he was operating what was then called a “gilly” show – and a rather large one at that.

By later in the morning Clarence and Johnny were milling around the railyard, asking questions and watching the carnival workers unload the rides and concession stands. It was an excitement beyond excitement for the boys. It was fantastic to imagine the possibilities this trainload of magic would bring to the city for the brief spell it was here. It was like another world was created in front of them and young Clarence's heart welled up with emotion...
dreaming the dream of a boy
... and
life was a round of joy
when the carnival was in town. What Clarence was witnessing was like nothing he had ever seen. It had a profound effect on him that he would remember forever.

The boys would help out every August the show pulled into town. They'd make a dime for a few hours work and if they were lucky one of the workers would wink at them and say, “Come see me and I'll put you on a ride”. That was as magical a saying as there ever was to the Reid boys, who often couldn't afford to go to the fair on their own. Alice would take her kids down to the show once during Old Home Week, scrimping and saving to find the ten-cent admission for each child. It would turn out to be money well spent for the family because in addition to providing some amusement for the kids, it also provided dinner for the evening. Once inside the fairgrounds, Alice would meet up with family friends, the Michaels brothers, who owned and operated a hotdog stand, and purchase half a dozen wieners for the family to be cooked later that night at a discounted rate of twenty-five cents. They were selling to the general public for ten-cents a pop, but the Michaels knew the Reids and that's what friends do in lean times.

Clarence got his start on the carnival working for the Michaels as a teenager, running errands for them or operating the stand if someone needed a break. It was Clarence's way of being a part of this other world with its flashy lights and merry times.

It was Bill Michaels who bestowed on young Clarence the sobriquet that he would come to be known by in all corners of Atlantic Canada. At thirteen, Clarence was muscular and strong, but carrying a little extra flab. So one day Michaels, half kidding, called him “Soggy” and the name stuck. It became the
nom-de-guerre
, the handle that was pure carnival and would solidify his future career. The odds were out of favour that a man named Soggy was going to attract thousands of patients as a dentist or an optometrist.

But there was something about the name he liked and he quickly adopted it. The bruiser from east Charlottetown had a handle all his own and it kind of went with the old iron heart. The name was the thing that would separate the life of the everyday world of reality and chores and church into the other – the Carnival. The place that awakened in every small-town lonely soul an opportunity, however brief, to feel life rush through them the way nothing else could. The carnival pulling into town was
it
. It represented life and adventure outside the quadrant streets that marked their cages. On the carnival, those cages swung in every direction, lit up in the night sky like criminals with the flood light thrown on them as they make the break over the wall. The Ferris Wheel offered the first real glimpse into the distance. The Chair-O-Plane would send you spinning into the summer night sky in orbit, like you could follow the trajectory right out of town and into a cosmically rearranged universe, dripping with possibility.

It opened the eyes wider, filled the nostrils further, pumped the heart in new rhythms and the hometown people were happy in a way never seen at any other time of year. There was music and the sweet smell of cotton candy lost in the summer air, men with beards shaking hands, caught up in their own affairs. The voices of the megaphones called out into the smoky dusk as children screamed with delight in the distance. An hour of it really did seem to make amends for the mental clutter and monotony of day-to-day life. There are certain breeds of the human creature who, after being shown the bright lights from on high, cannot go back. Everything after just seems dim in comparison.

Soggy Reid was one of these men and the carnival was his mythic place, his El Dorado, The City of Lights. There would be no going back to the everyday world he had known – not now. So Soggy quit school at the end of grade seven and took a job at the Clark Fruit Company, which permitted him to work the hotdog stand during Old Home Week. After two years of learning the ropes at the Michaels' hotdog stand, he quit the job at the fruit company, bought the stand, and took it on the road for a season with the Bill Lynch Shows. He soon parlayed that into a cookhouse he operated on the number two unit of the show, under the management of Jack Lynch, Bill's brother. Jack saw potential in this kid with the pompadour and strong arms, but it was the very pugnacity that made him a great boxer that also got him into trouble on the road. Jack knew he was rough and warned him from the get-go.

“If you get in any trouble, back home you go,” he admonished. He liked the kid and he did work hard during tear-down, but there was a business to run here and fighting with the customers would not be tolerated.

Trusting his instincts, Soggy got into a fight with a guy the first day out. The manager was not impressed and threatened him with a ticket home if there were any more altercations with the public. But fighting was in Soggy's nature and there was no way to properly exorcise it.

The show was in Newfoundland and Soggy kept his cool through Corner Brook and Stephenville, but Bishop Falls proved a final test of patience for him. A big, blonde, moustached man came to the cookhouse, ordered a hotdog and refused to pay for it. He snickered and walked off. Soggy could feel the rage boiling up inside, but the old iron heart kept a steady beat and he let the guy go. The troublemaker went over to one of the games Soggy was managing and tore a plush panda bear to pieces to demonstrate his might and again, the iron heart seemed to paddle away harmlessly. But underneath, it took every ounce of will Soggy had to keep from tearing the man's head off. The guy then came back to the cookhouse and ordered another hotdog. Against his better judgment, Soggy served it to him. He swallowed it in three bites and told him he wasn't paying for that one either. That was the breaking point for Soggy, who came out of the cookhouse ready to give the hotdog thief a taste of the fists of steel.