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Lives of the Carnies

Nancy Rommelmann

Published on March 17, 2005

Photos by Virigina Lee HunterIt'sbeenrainingforthreedaysin Indio, a hard spring rain that's turned the beige concrete houses on one side of Arabia Street the color of a pork chop left too long on the counter. On the other side is the Arabian-themed Riverside County Fairgrounds — a series of Quonset huts and faux mosques, livestock pens and the Shalimar Off-Site Betting Center — home of the annual National Date Festival. Date palms 80 feet tall line both sides of the street, and when the wind blows, they bend, giving an unimpeded view of the Ferris wheel, a hundred-foot-high ring of pulsating light that tells the surrounding community the carnival is in town. Though the Datefest does not open until tomorrow, the carnival starts tonight: Valentine's Day. It's the first of the year for Butler Amusements, the biggest operator of carnivals on the West Coast; by midsummer, Butler will have four separate units simultaneously on the road, a combined work force of 1,500 carnies — not counting temporary help — putting on shows from Southern California to Central Washington. The company, which bills itself as the "Cleanest Show in the West," runs 60 shows a season and owns more than twice as many rides (128) as its close competitor Ray Cammack Shows, whose clients include the L.A. County Fair and the California State Fair. For the past two weeks, hundreds of Butler-affiliated vehicles have pulled off Highway 111 to build the midway, on and around which carnival workers eat, sleep, defecate, socialize and eventually entertain visitors. While the era of the superhighway would seem to have made obsolete the fantasy of running away with the carnival, the reality is, that's how most of these carnies got here. Take Brenda, who has been with the carnival only 10 days. The rain has finally stopped, and she stands in the center of the midway, combing the hair of a guy in a ROCK 107.5 T-shirt. This is not a savory job, as his hair is as matted and greasy as something pulled out of a clogged drain. Darting for dollars

"Hold still," says Brenda, whose own, bleached hair is striated brass, gold and platinum. "Shit," she says, giving ROCK a shove. "You got bugs." "Do not," he mumbles, and reluctantly lumbers off. "You do, too," she calls after him. "And that was a new comb!" This is Brenda's first carnival. She's in her 40s, bony, with sun-leathered skin and twitchy eyes behind tinted plastic sunglasses. She'd been living at a mission when the carnival pulled into town. "I went to [the unit manager] and tell him my situation and tell him I was wanting to work, and so he helped me," she says. She'll be in a Candy Land concession, selling hot dogs, soda and popcorn. "I'm gonna clean and serve the people and smile." She lights one cigarette off another, and simultaneously gnaws at the inside of her mouth. "I'm going through a divorce, and I just saw the carnival and decided to get with them, as family," she says. "It gives you hope. You don't have to live under bridges. They try to give everybody a job, and everybody tries to treat everybody right. No cussing, no messing up in or outside, or you're immediately fired. Everybody gets drug-tested; they don't pass, they gotta go. It's helped me."

The Great Zucchini

Though Brenda says she'd like to travel with the carnival all season, her hope is to get back to San Bernardino. "That's where my husband's at. Right now he's getting Social Security; he's got emphysema, he's sick." She takes a deep last puff of her cigarette, and nods at the small, gray-faced woman beckoning from Candy Land. "I was a dental assistant, and I had a good life, good life," she says, heading off for her first shift. "I hope to get back some day. I just slipped a little bit, now I'm coming back on track." Hang around the midway during the day while the carnival is readied, and you'll understand the literal meaning of "stayed too long at the fair." The rides and games show the stress of the road — and so do the carnies: Most of the workers washing down booths or bagging cotton candy look as though they haven't showered for a few days. Sweatpants are stained, sweatshirts splotched with circles of motor oil, and there's evident truth behind the fairground joke Whatdoyougetwitharoomfulofcarnies?Afullsetofteeth.In short, everyone looks poor. Which they are: Ride jocks earn between $150 and $250 a week; and renting a bunkhouse — the sort of portable dressing rooms actors use on location — will eat through $200 of that a month. During the nine-month season, if a carny does not splurge on a motel, there is zero solitude; there are always people on the other side of the bunkhouse wall, or waiting their turn in the john. While one can save a little money buying food from local markets and cooking on a hibachi, most take their meals from the cookhouse, which dishes out diner fare at bargain prices: pancakes for $2, stew for $3. Carnies without funds can run a tab. What is lost in money and privacy is made up for by a seemingly contradictory combination of freedom and job security. If a carny keeps his ride in good repair and his nose clean, there's no way he's getting fired, as the carnival is always shorthanded. In fact, it needs to hire in every town it pulls into; a few hours before the Indio opening, a dozen local teens, wearing Anthrax T-shirts and sporting mullets, pile out of two Butler pickup trucks. They have been brought in to restock game booths and touch up paint, but when no one immediately tells them what to do, they head for the mounted rifles at the Shoot Out the Star booth and start squeezing the triggers. Over in Kiddie Land, another set of new Butler employees — four Latino men with neck tattoos, an old white guy with a liver-colored nose, and two woman of indeterminate age, one with shoes clearly too big, the other with a wool cap over her eyebrows — are being shown how to seat children on the rides. 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 hardyharharharhar!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. TheDatefestopensslowand 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.

Carol sends in the clowns at the water race - The Equalizer.

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