Our day in the wagon consisted of waking up at about nine A.M. to prep the dough, sauce and toppings. Thawing the goods was a crucial step. We’d make sure the soda pop was flowing like a river, too. The crowds would show up around ten A.M., with the first couple slices hittin’ the gums at about eleven.
Chad and I would stagger the slow time, offering relief to each other every hour. There would be a dinner rush around seven P.M., lasting a couple hours into the night, with the lights going down around midnight.
In no time, we were six weeks into the season and humming along. Man, we hit some ugly little towns. Clare, Irons (home of the annual, Michigan-famous Flea Roast and Ox Market festival), Ironwood, Iron Mountain and the Coleman Junefest were some of the colorful destinations. Our downtime on the road was spent reading, drawing, junkin’ in between ports and sweating the nights out in the fifth wheel. Things weren’t so bad, and hell, if anything, the constant
traveling was dirty, kinda reckless and fun.
The carnival’s family hierarchy is broken down systematically. At the top of the food chain you have the owners. They own the equipment, book the shows and cut the checks. The main guy had this perpetual look of disgust and
exhaustion on his face and his wife had big blond hair and lots of gold
dangling off her buxom chest. Oh yeah, and a couple of spoiled, shit-ass little kids running around getting into everything. Moving right along, the next step down is the food court. The court vendors rent space from the owners. If they are lucky, they’ll build a little empire of elephant ears and corn dogs and have a whole row of wagons set up at any given event. Ray and Rose were
responsible people, with a nice house in some little town somewhere, a couple big trucks and lots of determination to succeed. For all I knew, they took the winters off, due to the riches from their summer. Chad and I—somewhat reluctantly—were a part of the food court caste.
But our hearts, well, they were pumping carny blood.
The carnies. Oh man, what a wild lot. Rough around the edges, oddly enigmatic, stereotypically undereducated, dirty, colorful, loyal, sunburnt,
simple, repressed and “kinda lost” are descriptions that come to mind. It’s been over twenty years since that fateful summer, so the names are fuzzy, but the faces and their hearty personalities are ingrained in me forever.
There was this older lady named Alice, who’d lie like a rug. One day she’d
claim to have six kids, the next day, seven. Her husband, “Bob,” was this hefty bruiser some twenty years her junior with no front teeth, deep-set eyes, a dangling smoke and a big smile to share with everyone. He’d just nod along with her lies.
There was a guy with green, rotting teeth who’d get a big “Dew” from us each morning. After some time he and I got to know each other. He’d ask me about living out west. I’d ask him about living in Saginaw. One time I asked him if he ever planned to fix his teeth. With a toothy grin and a poetic delivery he said,
“Hurts too much to brush ’em, so I’m just waitin’ for ’em to fall out! Ta-ha- haaaaa!” And that was that.
Carny life is a tough go. First of all, they don’t get paid shit and are expected to work long, long hours. Set the shit up, run it all day, tear it down and travel to the next gig. And that’s their summer. Each night after this crew shut the fair down, they were allowed a “draw” on their earnings. Now, if I remember correctly, the cash was dispersed in an envelope, carefully recorded and doled out to the eager workers. Their money often went to smokes, trashy food and beer. And, man, the whole draw thing was one more way for the owners to keep the carnies under their thumb and eating out of their hands. Because when payday would hit, well, they would be taxed for the whole amount and would have tiny paychecks. Plus, they had to rent their sleeping quarters. The deck was stacked against them in every way. The work, the hours, the safety issues, the food options offered . . . nothing was in their favor.
So I took matters into my own hands. After seeing how much the wagon made, and how fast it made it, I started to “give back” to the people who I felt were taken advantage of. The carnies had to pay for the food, which, considering how they were treated overall, was complete bullshit. So, say a guy would come up to get his daily fifty-ouncer of Mountain Dew. It was three bucks. He’d give me a five-dollar bill, I’d give him the wink and then give him seven
dollars in change. And so on. I took it upon myself to give these guys a break, and in the process, won them over.
Now if anyone messed with Chad or me, the carnies would come to our rescue.
I remember some drunk frat fucks messing with us somewhere in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and having one of the carnies come over to police the
wagon’s canopy area. Backup. Brothers. And it’s not like Ray and Rose lost very much from my benevolence that summer. Maybe a couple hundred bucks,
which I’d gladly pay back. It put smiles on the carnies’ faces, and maybe, just maybe, made ’em feel like someone gave a shit about their plight.
The highlight of the weekend was “going AWOL” long enough to hit a thrift store or a local restaurant. That, and when friends would visit. I can only wonder how we looked inside that cockpit.
Now, things were rolling along just fine, and some ten weeks into it, a meltdown changed everything.
It was a late night in Norway, on the west end of the Upper Peninsula. We were busy right up until closing, and, being hungry after a long day, we shut the rig down and left without cleaning up, in order to get into town before all the restaurants closed. So we go and eat, hitting a Subway or something. (I remember that felt “premium” after spending a whole summer around corn dogs and shit.) When we rolled back into the site—to do our nightly cleanup and then hit the sack—we noticed the wagon’s back door was open and the light was on, with some movement inside.
We walked up to find Rose feverishly cleaning up. “Rose, we’ll get that,” I said.
“We just wanted to go into town to grab something before everything closed.”
She didn’t reply, visibly miffed, scrubbing away.
And that’s when Ray showed up and went nuts. Accusing us of “making Rose clean up after us”—which was bullshit; we always cleaned the place up, like we were supposed to—and of “not caring anymore.” He was getting close on the latter, as our paycheck stayed the same with the days on the job being more and more each weekend. For instance, he never told us about the fairs that were Thursday to Sunday, which meant driving out on Wednesday night and back on Monday morning, in turn becoming six days all together. But we still made it and honored our pact.
I remember him specifically bringing up an incident about the panty hose. At the end of the night, we were “trained” to put a panty hose on the release drain, and then release the waste water into the grass or dirt, catching all the crud in the panty hose, and then remove it and cap the drain back up. This was against the law, as we were supposed to drain the waste water into a state-sanctioned receptacle. So this one night, we forgot to remove the panty hose. We crashed out, and as we were walking up to the wagon the next morning, we were
greeted by an official from the Michigan State Health Department. Well, Ray got a big fine for that one, and was pretty bummed at us. Thanks for the good training, boss.
Then he started to talk about how “he oughta fire us,” when I interrupted him and said, “Nah, you won’t have to do that. I quit.” Or something to that effect.
And, man, it stopped him in his tracks. He went double nuts at that point. I think I said something about how pathetic his “career” was as a fucking corn dog huckster. I just remember Chad cautioning me as I unloaded a summer’s worth of disgust on the guy. And I let it all out.
We worked hard for him and Rose and never lost a sale or turned people away.
We made them a ton of loot and were always on time. And this one time we broke protocol in the name of getting somewhat of a square meal and he loses it and freaks out on us.
So I quit on the spot, and, man, it felt good. I had saved all my summer loot, so my western nest egg was secure. Then they asked Chad what he was gonna do. I remember him saying, “Nah, I’m outta here. I’m not gonna listen to you talk
shit about Aaron for the rest of the summer.” My brother had my back. I remember being outside the owners’ fifth wheel and hearing that little snake- tongued wife say something along the lines of “I wouldn’t give them a thing.
Get ’em out of here, then” as Ray sought guidance on how to handle our leaving. And that was it. We were free.
It was two A.M., in the middle of the U.P., and we were done. Ray paid us for the weekend and gave us a hundred bucks for Greyhound tickets back to Traverse City. Then he recruited this guy with spotty hearing and one eye with Coke- bottle glasses to drive us off the premises and to the next little town, where we’d wait the night out until the next bus came through.
Once we were on the road, we bought the guy some smokes or a big Dew or something and he drove us all the way to Escanaba, down on the Lake
Michigan coast. He dropped us off at a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, where we caught up on laundry and watched the sun rise.
Luckily, Mom and Dad came to our rescue the next morning, and drove us back down to Traverse City.
Two weeks later, after an amazing Ryder truck road trip back to Bend, we were settling into our second winter in Oregon.