Under the Electric Sky (6 page)

Betty shook her head.

“Everything changed after Clare died.”

On The Lot and In The Air, New Minas

The real carny often has that simple terrifying directness. He has long ago met and resolved an equation that most of us must decide. Just what are we willing to sacrifice for a goal we wish to attain? For carnies the equation often shakes down to a fixed abode, a clean collar and clean hands vs. a chance to turn a buck during a 24-week season. By their lights perhaps many of us allow the amenities to chain us to modest circumstances. Not carnies.

--Fred H. Phillips,
Mayfair Magazine
, October 1958

Carny, to me, well, that's me in a nutshell and that's my friends. But for someone else to come out and say that to me...You know, you go into a bar and it's ‘oh fucking carnies'; it's almost the same as being racist and it really bothers me.

--Bill Durham, carnival worker, on the lot in Halifax, 2008

T
he rain has finally stopped and the music is blaring from all speakers inside a tiny New Minas bar as the glaring yellow and red lights from the karaoke stage slap Amber – Amber Dawn – in the face as she readies to sing her verse of the Kid Rock/Sheryl Crow duet “Picture.”

Larry, another carnival worker, is already attacking the first verse with his best Johnny Cash impression. In that little space between the ends of the handlebar moustache, a small hole belts out the tune in as deep a tone as he can create through decaying teeth.

“Livin' my life in a slow hell, diff'rent girl every night at the hotel,”
Larry sings along in an unidentifiable twang as the words appear on the screen in front of him.
“I ain't seen the sun shine in three damn days...”

In the back of the bar, away from the flashes of the stage, six eerily illuminated faces hover above a dark table, absorbed in the tunes. A beam of fluorescent light slips through the noise and ambience from the front of the bar, striking this group with unflattering clarity. The picture is almost haunting.

“Been fuelin' up on cocaine and whiskey. Wish I had a good girl to miss me, but I wonder if I'll ever change my ways,”
the song chugs along.

The frightening countenances at the table start to expand and it becomes clear they are attached to bodies with names. Ian is one, an almost Lilliputian character who's been on the carnival since it was called the Bill Lynch Shows. Marc is next to him, a Frenchman from Quebec with warm, clown-like eyes who's starting his second year with Maritime Midways along with his girl Tina – the Candy Girl. Bobby, forty-seven, the only Black guy on the show this year, carries a strong ex-football player build with biceps that stretch his shirt sleeves to the tearing point. There's also Wayne, sporting a fantastic moustache that makes him look like an Old Western movie character. He's been on the show so long he knows everybody in every town, they say. At the end of the table a red-headed man named Pissy Fingers is eating wings and still offering salutations and catching up with everyone. Pissy has joined back up with the show today. A few years ago, he says, he served nine months in a New Brunswick jail for selling crack and just recently beat a separate charge, so he's back to work for the rest of the summer.

“I called you last night in the hotel. Everyone knows but they won't tell. But their half hearted smiles tell me somethin' just ain't right,”
Amber belts out on the multi-coloured stage, her soft, clear vocals mixed with extra percussion from pool balls smacking together on tables in the back of the bar.

The door revolves continuously throughout the night as different carnies take their shift at the table for a beer or a round of pool. A block and a half down Commercial Street, shrouded in darkness, lies the carnival, set up after a day-long struggle in the rain and muck. The rain they had hoped was left behind in Halifax had returned earlier in the day, causing problems and further agitating the workers.

That's the old story in Maritime towns for the carnival. Everybody knows the line and everybody still says it like they're the first clever enough to come up with it: “Well, the carnival is in town.” Chuckle, chuckle. “I guess it's gonna rain. You guys bring it with you, don't you?”

Everyone is sick of hearing it, but a few of the friendlier carnies have learned to just smile and roll with it. “I'm sure New Minas wasn't a desert before we got here, but yeah, whatever.” In every town throughout the summer, from Yarmouth to Grand Falls, these Maritime rain kings will be greeted by raving meteorologists with accurate forecasts. “It's gonna rain – the carnival is in town!”

As much as they are all sick of it, that stale, trite forecast had proven accurate so far this year. It had rained everywhere and Bill Durham was taking it personally. He was yelling at anyone who slacked off for even a minute while setting up that morning.

“Goddamnit! Just hold this here and don't move it,” he was yelling at one of the guys, while a group of them assembled the Scrambler. Another guy was yelling back an affirmative through the rain. Bobby leaned over to me as I helped out holding a cylinder in place.

“It's the rain that gets everybody crazy,” he said. “They'll all be fine later.”

Amber was hauling dozens of thick cables through the mud puddles around the lot as the rides were set up. It was a strange sight, considering most of the females on the show help out with light work like setting up game trailers or stands and carrying small boxes of plush toys and other cheap prizes. But here was Amber hauling heavy cables she referred to as “horse cocks” and assisting with the rides just like the guys. She is not a large girl but she is strong, a direct result of growing up on a junkyard her father owned.

We had met a couple weeks before when I was lingering around the lot in Dartmouth getting to know everyone. Amber works the cookhouse, grilling burgers, hot dogs and cheese sandwiches for workers and customers. She has two kids she doesn't see anymore due to various circumstances and fell into the carnival a couple years back for the same reason a lot do: to get away.

Amber is a no-nonsense woman and can pull out the junkyard dog routine if she feels backed into a corner. She was once a kickboxer, but now, at twenty-four, only gets physical when it's necessary. She has a few old prison-style, homemade ink-and-knife tattoos on her arms that connect to remarkable hands. For a girl as slender as Amber, her hands are large and disproportionate to the thin arms that frame her body. Her knuckles are scraped up like a streetfighter's from an assortment of chores around the carnival, making her hands appear more rugged than a lot of the male workers' hands.

I caught up with her after the horse cocks were put away while she was drinking a pink cooler back at the bunkhouse and trying to clean up. It was payday after all, and she told me she needed to get off the lot.

“I haven't left the lot for weeks,” she said with frustration dripping off her tongue. Under the faint eyebrows her eyes were burning. “There was nothin around the Ex Grounds to go to. I gotta get away from some of these people for a few hours. There's a bar down the street me and Bobby are going to. You can come if you want.”

I did.

There are rules for carnies when they venture off the lot. Any carny who drinks too much is expected to leave the bar and go back to his bunk. This is policy brought down from the top to avoid inconvenient misunderstandings with locals. The legendary and inevitable barroom brawls over the years have left carnival workers with a poor reputation in small towns the world over. Bar owners address them the way mall owners do, that is, with careful observance. Even the carnies get it and are charged with the task of monitoring themselves when they go out. The policy was reinforced earlier by carnival management when everyone was reminded not to wear their “show shirts” off the lot. But that rule is just for appearances. The bouncer recognized us when we entered. He could tell.

“Where are you guys from, anyway?” he asked Ian. “I haven't seen ya around here before.”

The answer was obvious. It was like Ian was waiting to jump into his showman persona: We're just good people looking for a drink, sir, and you know that carnival that went up down the street? Well, we're with that. And why don't you bring your kids over this weekend? Come see me. I'll make sure you're taken care of.

The bouncer looked a little leery but said he would, and “Remember fellas, let's not have any problems tonight, eh?”

I instinctively understood there would be problems tonight, but I kept it to myself. The scene was too conducive for violence in some form. Here we were, a group of carnies on a payday Wednesday night at a local bar in the heart of small town Nova Scotia.

I do not necessarily believe carnies go looking for fights and in this case they didn't, but conflict has a natural way of finding them.
It's in their blood
, as they say, and I knew it was inevitable. I once covered a brutal brawl amongst locals and carnies for a newspaper I was working for in Stettler, Alberta. One local kid who had thrown a few punches told me later he was sick of “these assholes coming into town and sleeping with our women and giving them STDs.” Other carnies were shaking down kids for pot in an outreach school, teachers claimed, and there was a group of conscientious CAA members in town accusing them of breaking into their vehicles and absconding with change.

Some of that stuff has happened and the carny notoriety in small towns is not solely a work of fiction that sprouted from someone's irrational preconceptions. It's a portrait painted with very fine strokes over a canvas of years in towns the world over. It's to the point now the whole image of the carny is that of the violent, thieving, sneaking vagrant who will lash out at anyone who stands in the way of the fulfillment of his basest needs. If the last three-quarters of a century has taught small-town, law-abiding residents anything, it's that carnies are not to be trusted. Whether or not that is true hardly matters; it's the general perception and adjusting that is not likely to happen. To many, carnies appear interested only in sex and money, which incidentally are the two main motivators for many successful businessmen, but there is something sleazy perceived in the carnies' take on it.

Even from the beginning, carnival work has never been recognized as a legitimate career. The business relies heavily on unskilled, itinerant labour that has always been looked down upon by society, and the reputation carnies earned a hundred years ago has taken on legendary proportions, entrenched in the collective psyche. Although it's difficult for many to believe, a lot of them work hard enough to call it a job and some possess talents that make money for them in their chosen career.

But in some dark hearts there is still an inborn illogical fear that carnies will swoop into town in the middle of the night and make off with their daughters. Missy will be strung up in a bunkhouse somewhere and ravaged by pestiferous men with long greasy hair and snake tattoos and then – indignity of all indignities – she will be forced against her will to produce candy apples for a four month term. There are few remedies for this ignorant fear and seeing things from the other perspective is a mentally taxing experiment.

Verney felt the sting of this kind of preconception last year, after attempting to hire a nineteen-year-old girl who wanted to explore her job prospects for the summer. Her father came to the lot under the pretense of discussing the issue while checking out the living conditions and general welfare of his daughter, but before Verney could show him around, he hauled off and punched him in the eye, detaching his retina. For Verney, that would have been the start of something that in the old days would ultimately end in the guy getting his face rearranged, after the other boys jumped in. Or they'd treat him like a thief and take him out back with four stakes and rope they would affix to the ground and the guy's limbs. Then they'd tear off his clothes and pour milk over his genitals and let the dog lick it off. But that kind of practice went out of fashion years ago. It's bad PR.

“We already have a poor image coming in,” Verney says. “We're gypsies. Hiring the girl shouldn't have been a big issue, but this guy was bound and determined his daughter was not joining a bunch of gypsies. ‘They're stealing my kids!' is how the story went down in his mind.”

That story has been played out many times in wholesome minds throughout the world. For a lot of people the carny
is
the present-day North American gypsy, with all the business ethics of a pimp, a man who lurks beneath every measure of human decency, a villain in the truest sense, a filthy testament to what happens when you don't buy into society's established order of finishing school, getting a job, marrying and settling down.

The kind of everyday existence of work and home and clean sheets and paid bills never appealed to carnies – not the serious ones, anyway. As far as they were concerned, it didn't work for their parents who they saw as constricted to a world of not only “modest circumstance”, but incurable misery. There was something free and romantically wild about being on the road, turning a buck and not having to answer to anyone. A lot of people cannot grasp the concepts behind someone's decision to live that life and the outright rejection of the natural order is enough to piss some people off for reasons they can never effectively articulate. So, the small-town man has to find other ways to express his frustration and ignorance in the matter.

Before Amber began the duet with Larry, she was singing a solo karaoke country classic when a local in soiled sweatpants jumped on stage with her. The man, in his forties, struck me as strange then, but I soon tuned out of the performance to talk to the others at the table. A little later on, the man reappeared and offered to shake my hand for reasons never made clear. He was drunk and alone, but there was something else about him that was off and the sweatpants didn't help. He wore a ballcap and thick glasses that concealed part of his grey, expressionless face. His body was lanky, but not tall, like it was made of rubber. There was something inherently offensive about him and everyone shared the same weird feeling. It was partly because he didn't say anything, opting instead to get his voice heard through abrupt gestures. Everybody's impression aligned; he was a true creep, the kind women talk about running into in places like this.