After I had talked to a few of the guys in Larry’s bunk, I went to find Animal to return the favour and pay him back a pack of cigarettes. Locating the cigarettes for me that night was part of Animal’s nature. The abruptness of the gesture was a truly Maritime trait; he didn’t want me to feel embarrassed about the cigarettes and the generous offer, so he did it without accepting a thanks and as far as anyone else knew, I had made a deal with him earlier. He grew up on the carnival and remembers well the old days when things were tough and mean and you had to find ways to survive. He used to loan shark, which was a lucrative business on the lot, and he’d act as bootlegger from time to time as well. It was sometimes difficult to live on a ride guy’s salary, so if you had an idea to make money, you did it. It was a magic little economy on the carnival lot, free enterprise, and it turns out quite conveniently for certain peddlers that everyone needs money and alcohol. But Jack Adams put an end to the loan sharking operation when he took over, so Animal, being the industrialist he is, set up a snack bar that he runs out of his trailer bunk now. It’s another of the larger ones, stocked full of chocolate bars, pop, chips, Chef Boyardee and other microwaveable meals. I even caught him smiling one day on the lot when he wheeled a mini-fridge he had picked up at Canadian Tire back to the snack shack with pride. It was a business investment.
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
Northern 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 t
hrough 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.
Under the Electric Sky Page 10
