Under the Electric Sky (9 page)

I had him agree to sit down and talk, so we each grabbed a drink and met at Ian's bunk a few minutes later. I sat on an old stool and Animal took the top of a bucket inside the fair-sized bunk. An acrid odour permeated the place that we later discovered was the result of Ian hoarding every discarded beer bottle he could find in two provinces in the little room next door. We ignored it and began to talk, as Ian closed the door, leaving the night outside.

Animal speaks in an entirely original form. It's difficult to determine the exact locality of the accent. It's not all Maritime, although there is some of that in there. It seems like an entirely original native tongue not yet documented. It's the obscure phrasing that makes it so unusual; he spits out quick short lines mixed with a brutish brogue.

He's a little agitated tonight, he explains, because someone has stolen $20 from the snack shack.

“I'll kill em. If I find out who it is,” he says, the dark eyes wild with rage. Animal earned his nickname sometime ago, when he terrorized Charlottetown locals in a gang, he says. He would whack his head against things and smile as the force of the blow rolled his eyes around like little black marbles inside carved out holes. He served time in jail as a young man for some of those deeds. “Nothing serious,” he adds.

“I don't feel pain. Dat's da way I brought myself up. I'm a bad tempered man when I get mad. I black out. I just don't remember nuthin.”

Although he's not sure of his exact age now, he remembers he was around 16 when he first left with the Bill Lynch Shows sometime in the 1980s. He's worked his way up and, now in his forties, is the foreman of KiddieLand on the show. Back in the 1990s he married his wife on the Hampton ride in a ceremony that made the newspapers and a few years after that, Animal came back to his bunk one night and found his wife engaged in a threesome with a couple of co-workers.

He was mad, but his anger burned at her, not the other guys.

“She couldda decided not to,” he says.

She left the show after that and went home. Animal moved back in with her that fall, when the season ended, but it didn't last long. On Christmas Day he came downstairs with his luggage inside garbage bags and told her he was taking out the trash. He made it to the curb and kept walking, ending up in Toronto.

Animal is a rare beast on the carnival these days. He has the old carny aptitude in a world that no longer has much of a need for it. Carnies today are nowhere near as industrious and clever as they were years ago. Working on a carnival is not for everybody – it is hard work and most do not possess the kind of tenacity and grit it takes to do the job well.

When Soggy was running things, there was a sense of excitement; electricity burned in the air, a feeling that anything could happen and would. Animal was young and free and the world was wide open. He didn't just leave town in a truck at sixteen, he hitched a ride on the Ferris Wheel and rolled right out into the distance in one of the buckets, laughing, as the lights burned brighter than ever before while the machine gained momentum, demolishing the streets he had never ventured outside of. He was sure what he was looking for was just a few miles further, a few more turns of the ride.

But now, it's like somebody sucked all the pus and life out of the carnival at some point over the last decade and replaced it with contraptions that don't move anywhere. Some days it's like the rhythms of the rides have all been explained, Animal thinks, in some complex arithmetical equation that lacks the imagination needed to fully appreciate what they mean. It is true that the Merry-Go-Round is nothing more than a fan lying on its side; the scrambler is just a spirograph that continually makes the same pattern; the Ferris Wheel is only a large wheel, turning incessantly without a destination. But the rides were the thing, as a kid, that would stretch the fantasy further. You could hop on one of them and ride it right out of town, right out of the miserable situation you found yourself in. Those devices could go anywhere. Now they hum and roll like appliances, like a steady job, like clippers through the hair, like soap and shampoo.

The magic is almost gone for Animal, but there is nothing else he can see himself doing now. The carnival has always been able to retain a sense of timelessness, where the workers remain ageless, dreaming the dreams of boys and hustling where they could. But now, it's different.

“I always wanted it. Now I'm getting sick of it,” he confesses. “I like to make kids happy. I always did. I don't like the idiots. I never did.

“It's not like it used to be no more. Now da people dat work for me are dickheads. They're stupid. Or just acting stupid. We call them Kiddiots now. They're lazy and stand around wit hands in pockets.”

He stands up and mimics them in a crystal clear tone: “Duh, what do I do?

“It's not the same. Like dat fight da other night, for fuck's sake. Back then it was fight and dat was dat. No bosses involved. Boss was sleepin. Done and over wit. Ya get beat and go da fuck ta bed.”

Besides the magic being explained, the essential decency of the carnival as Animal knew it has been expunged in the name of insurance and profits and taxes and any other real world issue that forbids it today. The new policy on Maritime Midways is not to let anyone on the rides for free, for any reason. Jack Adams says the liability concerns of putting handicapped people on are too great. But telling old Maritime carnies to stop that time-honoured practice is like swiftly and coldly amputating a part of them. The older carnies who remember how things were despise the new rules, which they see as a direct affront to everything Lynch and Soggy held sacred. That was why they always feared someone from Ontario might one day buy the whole outfit and replace the holy Maritime carny spirit with business plans and liability issues.

An older woman I spoke with who worked for Lynch and Soggy for years said part of why she doesn't tour with the show anymore is because they stopped letting handicapped kids on for free.“That's just wrong,” she said. “Those people have nothing and we always did it. It's despicable they don't do that anymore.”

As ornery as he is naturally, Animal has come to understand these things over time. Although Soggy Reid hired a crazed, aggressive creature in the 1980s, he was sure he would get it sooner or later.

And Animal did. Like a message passed down from on high, he got it. After decades of fights and sleeping in greasy transport trailers, of drinking around the lot and boozing in local bars, loan sharking and hustling, he developed it, like some sort of biblical lesson that could never be taught, only learned through daily ritual. And one day, long after Soggy Reid had died, a little kid started crying on the lot. Animal picked him up, terrified little grubber, and threw him on the Hampton Umbrella ride with very little tact, almost aggressively.

“I don't like feelin' bad,” he says. “I don't like rippin' people off.”

The kid stopped crying and looked up at Animal the way he and Bill and Ian and Amber and Verney and Soggy and even the creep from the bar looked at ride guys who put them on rides for free as children.

“You're a very nice man,” said the kid.

“No, I'm not, but get on,” Animal replied.

Perfect. He got it. The way Soggy had hoped. The way Lynch had hoped. This was the way it was meant to be on the Bill Lynch Shows. They were your people, after all, and you had an obligation to them. You were connected whether you wanted to be or not. What was it that Lynch had said? “I figure you have to leave something behind in the way of good will.” Yes, that was it.

“Soggy and Lynch didn't care about taxes or anything else,” Animal says. “They just fuckin cared about people.

“It's fuckin dyin now. I miss the old days.”

There's a movement being undertaken across the continent by owners like Jack Adams to clean up the image of the carnival. It's a sanitization mission to cleanse the carnival of any remnants of the old days, with the hope of creating a certain amount of respectability in the eyes of the public. It might be too late for the desired PR effect, but gone nonetheless are the days of carnies sleeping on rides, of long hair and tattoos, of dirt and spit and grease.

Now the boys are dressed in uniforms – show clothes, as they say – which is more of a golf shirt embroidered with the show's logo. Included with the fresh shirts was a new-found covenant of law and order. The workers are obligated to shave and bathe before reporting for work (showers are now available on the lot), they're assigned a bunk at the rate of $50 a week (half will be reimbursed at the end of the year if it's kept in good form), and they can drink and dabble in other private indulgences – but only after hours, in dark corners of the lot near the bunks away from the public.

In contrast to Lynch's efforts in the 1930s to clean up the actual nature of the carnival business by eliminating the illegal games and practices, the new wave of moral transformation centres on the esthetics of the carnival. Jack Adams is strict about the cleanliness policy and has ordered guys back to the showers if they report for work dishevelled.

“Public relations is very important as far as I'm concerned,” he says. “You want people to come, and they don't want to see some straggly guy with half a beard. You wouldn't want to put your kid's life in his hands. You have to make sure everybody is clean and shaved all the time.”

The idea is to present the external side properly to the people for careful inspection: get the show running like a machine that moves in fixed patterns with no fear or real sense of danger. It makes good business sense, but changing the natural rhythms of Maritime carnies with haircuts, pastel golf shirts and deodorant body spray seems absurd. Clean coloured candy shirts with cute logos embossed on them do little to change the public's negative perception of carnival workers, or their own tendencies. Here are these clean-cut teal and fuschia jelly beans running the rides and smiling at customers with brown teeth and crooked eyes. It's like the carnival owners have started considering the matter and stolen a page from the Mormons. At least they
look
professional in those white shirts and black ties, even with those eyes that betray something else going on underneath. On the carnival it feels like a hopeless endeavour because most of them have joined for the simple reason that they don't like that law and order stuff their parents and the rest of society tried to throw at them. The younger carnies can take it because they don't know the difference. But the older guys, guys like Animal, don't look right in pastel antisceptic cotton.

The big difference between Mormons and carnies is that Mormons supposedly conduct their business out of obligation to somebody or something. Carnies don't. They live life by their own morals, answering to no greater power than themselves. They have never settled for anything, choosing instead to live according to the whims of the road and absolute freedom, wherever that force might take them. That was the romantic attraction all along. It was the magical purpose, the magnetic energy that people gravitated toward.

There is a subtle difference in today's Maritime carny compared to that of years before. Most of the younger workers lack that inherent carny disposition that Fred Phillips called a “terrifying directness.” It means, simply, a tenacity to get the job done at any cost, the ability to read and relate to people, an all-or-nothing attitude, the desire to entertain and the willingness to abandon everything for a season on the road. A lot of people interpret these characteristics as menacing or frightening in some way and some carnival patrons are not accustomed to dealing with people who have nothing to lose, nor any aspiration for the things they hold sacred.

By those standards, the successful sanitization of the carnival the owners are seeking will only take place after the migrant Filipino workers start showing up to run the games and set up the rides. There is nothing frightening about foreign clean-cut tiny labourers who have no interest in the job outside of the paycheque, nor is there anything particularly entertaining about them. Migrant workers have already started on the carnivals in the western provinces and they don't share the North American carny's enthusiasm for the rough working conditions. (In 2005, a group of South African carnival workers walked off the job at Conklin Shows in Edmonton to protest what they – and subsequently the provincial government after an investigation – saw as an unendurable work environment. Conklin Shows was let off with a warning.)

Finding reliable labour is a major challenge facing carnivals these days. The younger guys just don't have the same passion for the job as the older ones. It's too much work, for too little pay and in most fields that means bringing in migrant workers to run the dirty jobs Canadians would rather avoid. For the Maritime carnival, it means the end of the core fundamentals upon which Lynch founded the operation: the connection and commitment to the people of the Maritimes. The term carny will eventually fall out of favour, replaced with the less threatening carnival worker. And with it will go a part of the thrill.

Love on the Road, New Minas

N
orthern Leopard Frogs, best recognized by a series of irregularly shaped spots on their green backs, share many of the inborn patterns of behaviour characteristic to other species of frog. They are known to seek copulation with anything their size that moves. They mate during the spring, from March to June, by establishing communal breeding ponds where the males will advertise their availability to females through a low, guttural snore, followed by a series of clucks and grunts. They will float at the surface of the pond and wait for females to respond.

Ranked as proficient stalkers, they pounce on prey by force of their strong legs and everything from beetles to flies to worms have been discovered in their stomachs. They are also known to attack and consume small birds and snakes on occasion and possess an inherent craving for eating their own.

A tub full of plastic replicas sits on the midway in New Minas, each of them fitted with a metal, partially rusted-out ring and large screw through their abdomen, protruding out of their backs. Children gather around the frog-pull joint wielding mini-fishing rods with magnets attached to the ends of them, looking to hook one for a prize. The underbellies have been painted black with letters rubbed on with what looks like white-out. Most of the frogs in this plastic pond have an S on their bellies, signifying a small prize, but there are a few Ls in the mix somewhere waiting to feel the pull.

The girl running the frog joint is an attractive young woman named Chelsey. Although she claims to be twenty, she gives off the impression of a seventeen-year-old trying to pass her way into a bar. Her looks would probably qualify the attempt a success in any bar with men for bouncers. She's flirty and light, with subtle piercings through her left eyebrow and right nostril. Her hair always appears well coiffed, like she's spent hours in front of a mirror in her bunk dosing herself with perfume and brushing until the hair grows a few inches longer, wisps lingering down to her chest. Her efforts have not gone unnoticed by the men on the carnival.

“I basically just tell them to piss off,” she explains of how she deals with guys wanting to sleep with her on the show. “If I'm gonna screw ya, I'm gonna screw ya. If I'm not, I'm not. Let's leave it at that.”

Chelsey grew up in Fredericton, ending up on the streets by the age of thirteen. Her father had abandoned her and she left her mother's house after her brother beat and tried to stab her, because, as he said, he had to “toughen her up”.

“Then he did something a little more vigorous and I snapped,” she says. “I ran to the streets and cops were looking for me and they were like, ‘Chelsey, you need to go home.' And I was like, ‘I'm not going near a woman beater or a rapist or nothing like that'.”

As a teenager she bounced around on the streets between worn-out futons and old sofas, resurfacing every few weeks to visit her mother with a new black eye or bruised face. She started using crack and became mixed up with dealers and addicts who always found a use for an attractive girl with no place to go.

“I was not in a good scene at all,” recalls Chelsey. “I was all messed up and hanging out with criminals. And then the carnival came and it was my escape.”

An old friend from Fredericton introduced her to Verney, who told her he'd take her on the show with a stern warning that if she started using drugs again, she'd be back on the streets. Upon hearing the news that her little girl had joined the carnival, Chelsey's mother expected the worst.

“Most people come to the carnival and they do certain things. They get really messed up. Everybody has this idea of carnies like sex, drugs and rock and roll. I came here to get clean,” Chelsey says.

The first couple of months were trying, but she made it through and says she's off drugs and doesn't drink on account of a kidney condition. The carnival gave Chelsey a safe place where she wouldn't be abused and she is grateful for it. She was a member of the family now and secure.

A couple of the older guys treat her like a little sister and the managers have okayed a lock for her private bunk. It's a better situation than she's had before and she's in the middle of the excitement of travelling on a carnival for the summer.

“I don't really know why, but I've always loved the carnival. You're never stuck in one place too long. I hate being stuck somewhere because it feels like I'm in jail. I like to be free like a bird. Like, I wish to God that I had a pair of wings. I wish to God that I could just fly away.”

She's planning to complete her GED and eventually would like to go to college or university. During the past winter, she lived in Fredericton with her mother, working at Tim Hortons and cleaning houses. When the spring came, she was itching to get back on the road.

“I love it out here,” she says on the lot in New Minas. “It's awesome.”

Girls who join the carnival without boyfriends are rare. Even the ones who follow their men out on the road are often ill-prepared for the consequences of life on the lot. They may start the year together, but they won't end it that way, and the girl will have bounced between a few bunks by October. Typically, a girl will join to be with a guy under the cloudy delusion that it will be a great summer vacation. But by the end of the first month or so the couple will have fought with enough intensity and anger to say things they regret. The female, finding herself stranded in a strange Maritime town in the middle of the night with little money and no means of transportation, will seek out the last male she remembers showing a slight interest in her and shack up with him. This is a matter of survival on the road.

Carnies are not romantic people by nature. And, like Animal's wife, there are girls in relationships who seek out those guys who have expressed interest while their boyfriends are working a ride.

“You bring your girl out and you're gonna find out whether she's a good girl or not,” Verney says in his gritting tone. “Be willing to live with the fact that she might not be a good girl.”

Some carnivals will only permit women to work on the show if they stay together with the guy they came with. If the couple breaks up, the girl will be sent home promptly in order to avoid the violence it always precipitates.

If a guy only joins up to be with a girl, he has a few options. When the girl inevitably hooks up with another guy, he can keep his bunk and continue on or – if he is of the sensitive type – he can clear out his belongings in the middle of the night and escape in the darkness to the nearest bus depot and buy a ticket home. This scenario plays out at least a few times during the run of a season and nobody is surprised when it does.

The first case that week in New Minas occurred when the balloon/dart joint kid's boyfriend disappeared one night without a trace. I spoke with him briefly the next day and he was upset.

“I don't know where he went,” he said as his eyes watered up. “I knew he was having money problems, but he just left without saying anything... I hope he's all right.”

It was unfortunate, but nobody was surprised. The other case involved my bunk buddies Justin and April. One morning I was awakened by their door slamming shut. Justin had come back from somewhere while April was waking up.

“Can I fuck you?” Justin asked and I could sense the rising waves of the Fornicator starting its test spins for the day. I left quickly.

A half-hour later Justin was on the midway, interrupting people with his natural charm. Ian was setting up the colour wheel game and talking to a young man named Jeremy who had just started back up with the show today. Ian introduced him as his “adopted son” and the battery acid gurgled around in his chest. Jeremy explained he was recently fired from McDonald's and is eagerly anticipating making a few bucks on the road for the rest of the summer.

“You must be some stupid,” Justin blasts out. “Are you retarded or somethin'? How the hell do you get fired from McDonald's?”

Jeremy looked startled. He couldn't explain in detail, only to say that he was told by the manager last week that it wasn't the right line of work for him.

Justin laughed.

“Don't worry about it, Jeremy,” I said. “I was fired from Wendy's when I was teenager. It wasn't the right line of work for me, either.”

Which was true and nobody laughed at me. I'm still not sure of the reasons behind Jeremy's termination, but my fast-food career ended at the age of eighteen, after being fired for failing to project “the image we would like Wendy's to have in the community.” I had ordered a few beers to be delivered at a staff meeting at a hotel to break up the monotony of the bullshit they were spreading and they called it drinking on the job.

Jeremy left to find Verney and get settled. Justin and I talked for a bit. I was curious about his relationship with April and where he saw it going. He told me they met in Fredericton where they're both from, at the acid party three months before where he told her then he wanted to be with her forever. His dull, brown eyes opened widely and he stared at me.

“I'd do anything for her, man. Anything,” he said, taking a step closer to me. He looked deranged and I left it at that.

Later that afternoon, I went to my bunk for my camera and a break when I heard April crying through the thin walls. Justin entered shortly after. It was clear he was a controlling lunatic and had probably caught a glimpse of me heading off to my bunk and with his type of brain, knew I was really on my way to see her. He would not be humiliated.

I heard them talking through the partition and made my way back to the midway. I met up with April later at the Survivor Rope Ladder game. I didn't ask what she was crying about earlier or that I had even heard her. Her joint was at the end of the lot, a fair distance from Justin's ride where she and Chelsey were taking turns sneaking over to talk to local boys in the parking lot.

April has striking pale blue eyes, framed with thick, heavily mascaraed eyelashes. Her hair is a dirty-blond colour, which she keeps tied back, a few strands falling down the side. She has a piercing just below the bottom lip and a mouthful of metal on account of her retainer. She says she's nineteen, but she told a few guys last year she was nineteen, too, when she stopped by their bunks for a visit.

“He doesn't treat me right,” she said, unprovoked. “My boyfriend from last year will be coming out this week and I'm gonna be with him.”

So Justin's days on the carnival were numbered. A few days after I left, he gathered his things and slinked off in the middle of the night and again, nobody was surprised. Just another failed loner, a man who couldn't play the game. Or understand the rules. Most male carnies try to refrain from developing emotional attachments to women on the road. It's too much trouble in the end and many are content with short-term monogamy. And then there's always “a woman in every port.”

The small-town attraction to the carnival is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Many women are attracted to the itinerant way of life because it is the exact opposite of what they're used to and exciting for the same reasons. Some women's brains are wired to feel sexual arousal to things they fear or can't understand and a mysterious carnival pulling into town in the dark of night is just the edge of excitement they crave. The fascination with this mechanical Wonderland just happens to express itself outwardly in the form of sexual desire for some women.

“I had a girl pick me up once and she explained it really simple,” Verney says while sitting at a picnic table by the cookhouse one afternoon. “She was a virgin and she didn't want to be one and she was tired of listening to her friends talk. She didn't want anyone to know she got lucky. So she went and picked a guy at the carnival for one reason; she could do anything she wanted and he was gonna leave. He wasn't gonna hang in town and tell everybody. Nobody was gonna know that she wasn't a virgin. It would be her little secret. That's why she picked a guy in the carnival. And she'd probably see him every once in a while, which would be kinda nice.

“That was her reasoning,” he concludes. “They all have their reasons.”

Carnies are good at keeping certain secrets – and that includes sexual ones. Your average carny can probably tell you more about the sexual preferences and fantasies of small-town Maritime women than psychologists or faithful husbands.

Glen McKay, who identifies his position on Maritime Midways as the “Ride God,” says women are attracted by the rides. They're sexual in some respects: high and strong and firm. In the old days, carnies would advertise the rides as designed to throw guys and girls together through gravity and force. Nature takes over from there. But Glen knows the rides, the big ones anyway, attract girls on their own. It's the lights and the fury.

“And you're sitting there and some broad's looking at you and you're like, ‘You know what? If I was sitting behind the counter at Hertz-Rent-A-Car, you would not even look at me twice.' But because I'm sittin' in this little box here....

“There's always groupies for this,” he continues. “There's groupies for anything, they just come with the territory.”