If I had to do this story over again, I definitely would have hung out longer with the carnies -- I think they'd all go party in their trailers once the work was done. That would've added a whole other dimension to this piece. As it is, though, I'm pretty friggin' happy with it, even today.
Published in the VC Reporter, 8/4/05:
The last nomads
You think you know carnies — but you have no idea
by Matthew Singer
VC Reporter (cover feature), 8/4/05
Nothing can happen until he gets here.
Within a week, this large expanse of oil-stained asphalt at Seaside Park will transform into a hyper-sensory wonderland. It will glow like a sin-free Las Vegas, with flashing lights advertising two to three minutes of completely legal, stomach-rotating pleasure. The sound of children laughing, parents screaming and gears moving will converge into a single unified roar. That unique summer aroma—a mixture of gloriously unhealthy food, livestock stink, gasoline and ocean air—will overwhelm the atmosphere. For ten days, this place will become a living, breathing, spinning, flipping, swirling, swinging organism.
But until Terry Grace gets here, this parking lot will remain a barren, lifeless stretch of hellishly hot pavement.
If the Ventura County Fair really were a living being, Grace would be its cerebellum. He is the coordinator of this year's festivities, the boss hog, the head honcho. Three years ago, the fair's midway went independent, meaning that instead of hiring one contractor to bring and set up all the rides, games and confection stands along the ground's main drag, the administration hired several—29 in all, to be exact—each responsible for a handful of attractions apiece. Grace's job is to place all the other organs into position and keep them functioning. In essence, he's the king of the carnies.
When he finally does arrive, about a week and a half before opening day, he isn't greeted by a welcoming committee offering bouquets of cotton candy or any other form of tribute one might imagine carnival royalty would receive. Instead, he simply strolls out onto the empty midway, alone, wearing a blue shirt and tan shorts, carrying a bag filled with the tools of his trade: cans of spraypaint and some rope. He strikes an authoritative but hardly imposing figure, with wispy blonde hair, a tanned skin tone and squinty gaze, which he uses to survey the sea of concrete in front of him. To him, this is a blank canvas. Or, at least, a jigsaw puzzle, using pieces that weigh a few thousand pounds. The first order of business is to outline on the ground where every ride and stand is going to fit. He just flew in from doing the same thing at another midway in St. Paul, Minn., and he's a bit jet-lagged, but he needs to get to work in order to stay on schedule.
First, though, he takes a moment to absorb his new surroundings. It's a bright blue afternoon in Ventura, the heat perfectly balanced by a cool breeze coming off the Pacific. Grace has been in the carnival business, in one form or another, for 45 years, but this is his first event in California. Rarely does he get to work with the sound of waves smacking the shore just a few yards away. "It's like something out of a picture book," he says. Minutes later, as he starts to put some marks down, a train rattles by on the opposite end of the fairgrounds. "This is a hobo's paradise."
Eventually, Grace’s inner circle meet him on the midway: Michael Wood, the thick 38-year-old head of Wood Entertainment; Patrick Sheridan, 39, the tall, toothy and genuinely nice owner of Alamo Amusements; and Grace’s wife, BJ, a quiet woman with a clipboard permanently welded to her hands. It’s been a little while since all four have stood on an open midway together. They’re a tight-knit group, bound together by their lifelong attachment to one of the most simultaneously beloved and misunderstood institutions in our society.
America has a strange, contradictory relationship with the fair. It has made the traveling carnival a vital thread in its cultural fabric and maintained it as a seasonal tradition passed down through generations. Amid all the chaos and confusion of the modern world, the fair remains a quaint reminder of simpler times, one that comes around once a year to relieve some of that new millennium tension. Yet the reputation of the people whose labor keeps it alive is almost entirely derisive. The image of a carnie in the mind of most Americans is a grimy caricature: a burly, bearded and grizzled biker-type in tattered clothes who chugs moonshine and sweats axle grease. What teeth still reside in his head are crooked and blackened. He’s an unskilled weirdo on the bottom rung of the social ladder. We’ll plunk down a few bucks to get on the ride he helped build, but we’ll make jokes about its safety and mock him behind his back. And we certainly won’t let our children around him when we’re not looking.
Grace and his colleagues don’t deny that the stereotypes about carnies are, to some degree, based in truth. But they insist those are the product of another era. Today, outdoor amusement is a legitimate industry, and the owners are its representatives. These guys aren't Old World hucksters, speaking in coded language and conspiring to hustle rubes out of their pocket change. They're businesspeople in the mold of Walt Disney, tempering fertile imaginations with an eye for the bottom line. Maybe it seems ludicrous to compare the operators of a county fair to an international icon, but these people truly feel that they are part of the same lineage. And as such, they’re bent on shaking off the stigma that has dogged their profession for decades.
"The outdoor amusement business is more sophisticated nowadays, so it must be treated as a business,” Sheridan says. “And the employees are a direct reflection of the owners.”
"Y'ever seen a drive-by shooting?" asks Bob Jansen, a 51-year-old employee of Alamo Amusements and a carnie for the last 18 years. He has. One night in Minneapolis—the city he calls home six months out of the year, when he's not on the road—he was inside his house when, across the street, he saw a car pull up, somebody point "somethin' shiny" out the passenger-side window and fire three shots into the victim's back. He also saw, quite vividly it appears, another guy get his pinky finger blown off before the vehicle made its getaway.
It’s nearing dusk on the second day of the fair’s construction, and the midway is beginning to come alive. When most of the rides first roll onto the fairgrounds, folded up on the backs of diesel trucks, they don’t resemble anything other than massive piles of cables and painted steel. Once they start to get put together, however, they gradually blossom into huge neon beasts. There’s Starship 3000, a giant UFO that spins around at warp speed. There’s the Sea Dragon, a swinging faux-Viking ship that produces a tingling sensation one worker compares to “having sex on a washing machine.” There’s Techno Power, a circular behemoth with yellow lightning bolts jutting out the top of the centerpiece and six rainbow tentacles emerging from its sides. There’s X-treme, a candy-colored monstrosity that does God knows what. And, off in one corner, still collapsed, is the undying mother of all carnival rides: the Ferris wheel.
But Jansen and his coworkers don’t get to operate those gut-twisting, scream-inducing, adult-oriented rides. They’re stuck with the five kiddie rides owned by Alamo, Sheridan’s company based out of San Antonio. They just put the finishing touches on a low-force, hang-gliding simulator called Kite Flyer, but another project lies ahead of them. It’s the bane of the entire crew’s existence, a scourge born from the bowels of their own personal hell: Winky the Whale.
“Everybody wants it to fall off a cliff,” Jansen grumbles as he watches the mechanical orca get driven into its designated spot on the midway. Despite his wide, warm smile, Winky is apparently a big-time son of a bitch. Appropriate enough for a whale—actually, a pod of eight that slowly orbit in a circle around a red-haired mermaid—the pieces are incredibly heavy and the whole thing is a pain in the ass to build. No one is looking forward to it, but it needs to be done because some of the workers may be flying back to Texas tomorrow to help transport another ride.
Perhaps to delay starting on the bastard, Jansen shares his disturbing drive-by-shooting anecdote. At first, it's unclear what the story has to do with the carnival business (and it's a bit jarring to hear this big, childlike lug of a man go from talking about how much he loves seeing kids smile to describing what sounds like a scene from a John Singleton movie). After talking to other carnies, though, it gains some context. It becomes indicative of the reason why these people would choose to go and join what is really the last remaining nomadic lifestyle in this country. Just like attending a carnival, working on one is a form of escapism. Only, a lot of these people are trying to forget about problems that are larger than the simple pressures of the daily grind. They’re escaping broken homes, violent neighborhoods, divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, and the scars of such experiences are etched into their sunburned faces. It’s not hard, then, to understand the allure of traveling across the United States, surrounded by fantasy and innocence for most of the year. It’s the ultimate shield against the harsh realities of life.
Curtis McDaniel has needed that insulation twice in his own life. Covered in grease at the end of a characteristically long day—up at dawn, off whenever the job is done—McDaniel matches the physical description of an average carnival worker, his curly mat of blonde hair and bushy mustache turned dirt-brown, his skin weathered beyond his 52 years. But he’s far more articulate and intelligent than his appearance lets on. He’s something of a carnie’s carnie out here. He joined the business the first time around in the late 1960s, after running away from his family’s horse ranch in Mississippi. “It was one of those things where my father said, ‘As soon as you can kick my ass, you can leave,’” he says. “So I beat the shit out of him and left.” He eventually quit and returned to a more stationary existence, getting an education, a well-paying job as a licensed water purveyor, a hobby collecting motorcycles, a wife and some children. Then, in 1991, he got divorced and nearly spiraled into an alcoholic depression. That’s when the carnival came calling for the second time. He needed something productive to lose himself in, and “the best place to hide is in the middle of the public,” he says.
Currently, McDaniel works for Wood Entertainment. As one of the veterans of the midway, though, he’s in a position to spread his knowledge around. On this night, he’s overseeing the construction of one of Sheridan’s other attractions, a two-story funhouse called the Monkey Maze. A lot of the Alamo staff is young Latinos in their late teens who’ve already been at this for a few years. McDaniel is particularly empathetic toward this group; like him when he was their age, most of them are here trying to disconnect from their troubled backgrounds. “The majority of these young kids want to try something different with their lives, and they get stuck doing this,” McDaniel says, motioning toward one with a cigarette clamped between his lips, aiming a hose at the chimps painted on the side of the funhouse.
Not everyone here got sucked in as impressionable youth—Phillip Diers, for example, became a carnie only two years ago after driving a tow truck for the previous 28. But his motivation was much the same: After having four back surgeries and going through a divorce, he needed a change of scenery. At 47, Diers is one of the greenest members of the Alamo squad, and also one of the most sentimental. He describes, in hushed tones, an experience that occurred just the other week at the Del Mar Fair down in San Diego. It was his birthday, and standing in the sun for hours without any acknowledgement had left him in a rotten mood. Near the end of the day, a group of kids came up, wanting to get on his ride. They only had one ticket among them, but Diers strapped them in anyway. As a token of their appreciation, the kids sang “Happy Birthday” to him for the entire duration of the ride.
“It’s nice to get a ‘thank you’ like that every now and then,” Diers says.
Gratitude is a big thing amongst all the carnies, and the lack of it from the public is probably the most frequent complaint about their occupation—not the meager pay, the extreme hours, the cramped trailers or the backbreaking labor. With the exception of Winky the Whale, few gripe about the actual work. In fact, most have developed a sincere reverence for the business; the guys talk about their rides with an enthusiasm males typically reserve for cars. After all, the carnival is what gave them a sense of purpose, a de facto family and, in some cases, saved their lives.
But to not receive any recognition for providing people with a momentary escape, and to be ridiculed and pigeonholed as dirty, stupid and dangerous, makes their effort seem meaningless. Outwardly, they may not come across as the most self-conscious bunch, but carnies are painfully aware of the public’s perception of them.
“People think we’re scum,” Jansen says.
Michael Wood is taking a proactive approach toward altering that perception. And it begins with matching shirts.
“The primary reason is to have uniformity, so it’s easy to know who’s who,” Wood explains. He’s the only owner on the midway who forces his employees to wear the same sky-blue tops, bearing the Wood Entertainment logo on the front and the phrase SAFETY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE on the back. “And if you take the Harley-Davidson shirts off, it helps dispel the rumor that we’re horrible people.”
It’s now the third afternoon of the pre-fair preparation, and Wood is standing on a patch of grass just inside Seaside Park’s front gate. He’s watching McDaniel, his employee of eight years, turn a few screws on the Super Slide, which is likely the most expository name for any ride on the midway. He’s wearing sunglasses, denim shorts and a black shirt that also has the company logo stitched across the breast. Like most of his peers, Wood is carrying on a family legacy. He’s a third generation amusement contractor, and the sights, sounds and smells of the carnival are practically soaked into his pores. That gives him a vested interest in improving the image of the business he grew up in, which means improving the image of the more visible components of the fair workforce: the carnies.
“They are generally good people, but they’re social misfits,” Wood says. “They’re good people who don’t fit into mainstream society. They want a place where they can belong. We give them a second chance where others won’t.”
There are a few caveats attached to that second chance. Obviously, considering the machinery involved, the first is sobriety: Wood has drug-tested all his employees, as has everyone else out here. Although it is not a statewide requirement of fairs in California, it is the policy of the Ventura County Fairgrounds. The second is grooming. Wood makes sure his workers cut their hair, shave and bathe regularly. It goes along with the whole idea of wearing a uniform and presenting an air of professionalism, he says. The third obligation is to simply be a “good quality person.” Since the required skills in this field “are not much beyond that of driving an automobile,” personality is what determines a decent hire much of the time.
Indeed, Wood’s crew is among the younger and cleaner-looking crews on the midway. As it turns out, a dozen of his employees—about two-thirds of his total staff—are from South Africa. Over the last four or five years, the American outdoor amusement industry has moved in the direction of the hotel and restaurant industries, searching outside the country for able-bodied people willing to do work that citizens here won’t, Wood says. Through an agency based in Johannesburg, he was able to find a group of twenty-something Afrikaners—South Africans of European descent—looking for a cheap way to tour the United States for the summer and earn some cash to bring back home. From their perspective, the carnie community is a subculture that embodies the positive attributes of the country.
“It’s a different side of American culture, one that’s not involved with hypocrisy and greed,” says Mias Vanzyl, 27. A smart, middle-class Afrikaner with a degree in language practice, he answered Wood’s advertisement in a local paper in hopes of taking an extended break from working on his family’s farm. He doesn’t see building a ride as being all that much different from picking grapes in a vineyard. “It’s just more entertaining,” he says.
Although there are no fairs in South Africa, Vanzyl knows the myths about carnies. In the three fairs he’s worked already, he’s certainly met people with problems. But as someone raised on a continent that has seen war, AIDS, apartheid and centuries of vicious exploitation, he doesn’t buy into the demonization of folks who, in the simplest terms, are just trying to earn a living. “I don’t think they’re the scum of the earth,” he says. “It’s not low-grade humanity festering around carnivals. It’s hard-working Americans.”
Later in the day, Vanzyl and other members of the Wood Entertainment team join McDaniel, Diers and the rest of the Alamo crew in helping finish the Monkey Maze. Meanwhile, Terry Grace and his wife are cruising around in a golf cart, monitoring the status of their kingdom. Save for minor adjustments to the floor plan here and there, everything is running smoothly. In a week, the fairgrounds will be flooded with Viking ships, alien spacecraft, hang-gliding simulators and thousands of laughing, screaming and possibly vomiting Venturans; in two weeks, it will be an empty parking lot again. Kids will be back to dreading the end of summer, their parents will be stuffed back into their cubicles, Bob Jansen will be begrudgingly giving Winky the Whale a bath, and Grace will be spraypainting dotted lines on the ground somewhere in St. Paul, Minn.
“This is my life,” Grace says. “I love being out here on the midway, seeing smiles on kids’ faces.” A breeze comes off the ocean and, across the lot, a train whistle blows. “It’s not a bad office to work in.”
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