Lives of the Carnies

Riding "Big Eli," The Eagle 16

“Watch where your hands be; you got little girls riding,” a veteran tells the new carnies. “Always keep your hands where parents can see them.” She directs the group to the Jumping Jumbos, and tells them to get on. One of the men doesn’t want to. “You’re too scared to ride?” she asks. “That’s all right.” The other trainees board, and as the flying elephants rise, they wave like children and squeal. The woman in the cap laughs behind her hand because she has no front teeth. The biggest ride in Kiddie Land is the Eagle 16 Ferris wheel, 60 feet high with more than 3,000 light bulbs. Brad and Rick have to change every one of them. How long does a spin on the Eagle 16 last? “About three minutes,” says Brad, who joined the carnival last year. “People tend to get sick if they go any longer,” says Rick, who’s in his 50s and has been with Butler since ’91. “But sometimes we go shorter or longer. It’s all up to us.” Do they have to balance out the riders? “Absolutely,” says Rick. “And if they don’t weigh out, we have them drink more liquid.” They keep up the repartee. “Customers will try to psych you; they’ll ask if you’re having a nice day when they know you’re not,” Rick says, just before Brad mentions that the look on a woman’s face when the wheel drops down is “the same as when she orgasms.” They’re a regular Abbott and Costello, if Abbott had a complexion darkened by axle grease and poppy seed–size blackheads, and Costello were a buff 41-year-old dude recently out of jail. At 4 o’clock, the Kite-Flyer is given a test run for cameras from a local TV station. As a little dog yips at stuffed Pooh bears hanging from the eaves of the Go Fish booth, the first riders of the season trickle in, mostly young moms pushing baby strollers, and packs of skinny teenage boys, who rattle the barriers around the rides and look to see if someone is going to tell them to stop. This is not the carnival’s magic hour — one can too easily see the rides’ many coats of paint, the flimsy-looking construction of the Fun Haus, the cigarette butts on the ground and paper cups crushed into the topiary — but the midway gets exponentially better-looking as the sun sets. The rides churn up; the lights flash on; calliope music does battle with Eminem’s “Without Me” and the boom of a fun-house hardy har har har har! More visitors arrive, falling or not for the entreaties to toss a ring, test their strength, scale a ladder, pitch a dime into a spray-painted fishbowl or chipped water goblet in order to win it. Riders board the Vortex, the Zipper, the Flying Bobs, the Spin-Out, and from all corners of the midway starts the teen scream-a-thon that is high soprano in the carnival’s cacophonous opera. The Datefest opens slow and easy the next morning. Game operators scrub down booths, and concession-stand workers spin cotton candy, while senior citizens mill about a hangar where a simulated supermarket displays regional agriculture: kumquats and limquats and more than 20 varieties of dates. In a small outdoor manger, Sourdough Slim the Yodeling Cowboy plays his red accordion. “I thought the kids would like this song, but it turns out, their grandparents danced to it,” he tells the crowd of 10, and launches into an ululating version of “Proud Mary.” The carnies were at their posts early. It wasn’t a long commute for Brad. “I got my stuff laid out under a ride,” he says. “It’s a big old comforter, blanket, big old sleeping bag. I sleep better than anybody.”

Earl "Butch" Butler: "The ridesdon't have personalities, it's thepeople who sell this show."

It’s 10 a.m., and Brad is on his first break of the day — he and Rick trade 90-minute shifts — having a cup of coffee and basket of onion rings at a picnic table in sight of the Eagle 16. “Man, I have a blast running that machine,” he says. “Rick and I are gonna set it up and tear it down 40 times this year. And we’re going everywhere, I mean, Vegas and Portland and Boise — some of these places are just incredible — Santa Maria, Phoenix.” Last year, he was just out of jail (he declines to say for what), and homeless here on the streets of Indio. “The carnival had just come; I walked up and [they] hired me on the spot,” he says. “There’s a lot of responsibility on that ride. You gotta set the tone. If you’re not friendly and nice, the people will eat you alive. If they see you’re there to genuinely help them and genuinely give them fun, it travels all the way through the whole line, because they see what you’re doing, and they study you.” Being studied appeals to Brad, who says he taught tennis all through the ’90s for $65 an hour. “I was working in Fort Lauderdale, for the Hyatt and Marriott. I brought up a lot of kids. There’s no one that knows how to handle kids like I do . . . And what I do here, it’s the same thing, just different language. Only I’m not teaching. But then again, I might be teaching people demeanor or something, you know?” Brad grins. “Do you know Chris Evert? I do; I worked for Jimmy Evert. Pier 66, at the Hyatt, gets these billionaires coming on their yachts. I’m talking people like Gary Busey, him and his girlfriend; he was out there hitting balls over the fence with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, hundred-dollar tip every time.” And then there was Brad’s own girlfriend. “She was beautiful, Serbian-Canadian. Her dad was an immigrant from Yugoslavia, entrepreneur, very, very, extremely wealthy.” She died in a hit-and-run accident. “After she was killed, I flipped out; I tried to kill myself in Vegas. I drank a bunch of whiskey, a bunch of beer; I took the whole thing of pain pills. I woke up the next day. I got rid of my condo; I had $131,000, and I blew it. There was one day I spent over $50,000 gambling. I wish I had some of it now, because I earned every nickel of it. I know Kathy rolled over in her grave to see how I reacted. ‘You stupid son of a bitch!’ ” Brad drags a few onion rings through a pool of ketchup. “I didn’t even go to the funeral,” he says. “She got hit outside of Niagara Falls. Ontario. We used to go to the Sky Dome all the time, in Toronto. Ah, that place is phenomenal; it’s the only stadium hotel in the world. It’s a huge dome, and it’s a hotel, too. You can get rooms where you can see the Raptors game. It’s the most phenomenal place on the planet . . . My favorite breakfast in the whole world was this skillet breakfast; it’s got home fries, bacon, sausage, ham, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, cheese. ‘Where do you want to stay, Brad?’ she’d say. ‘Oh, let’s go to the Sky Dome. I want breakfast.’ ” Brad pushes the onion rings down the table, where they become breakfast for a bunch of bottleflies.