Mole-dy Oldies: "The Man Who Loves to be Hated"

Okay, look: I don't particularly like what Dennis Miller has become. If I had been granted more than 20 minutes for this interview, I would have challenged him on several of the points he brings up toward the end. He strikes me today as one of the blindest of Bush's many apologists. I don't know if he believes half the things he says anymore; he'd rather have history prove him wrong than be labeled a flip-flopper. He has already flip-flopped enough in his career.

But, there was a time, in those formative years before I discovered Bill Maher and before Jon Stewart became politicized, that I loved Dennis Miller. I didn't understand half his jokes, of course, but there was something about him and his HBO show that seemed so irreverent, so iconoclastic, that I just knew it had to funny. I watched every week. Then I stopped, and Miller seemingly went off into the wilderness, reappearing later as this arch neo-con, Bizarro World version of his former self. So when the opportunity came to profile him, the Old Me was excited, even as the Current Me thought the guy was a bit of a jagoff.

However, I'm not lying when I say he was nice and gracious and all that. And I think this was a fair profile -- best quotes ever, too.

Published in the VC Reporter, 6/22/06:

The man who loves to be hated
GOP golden boy and #Saturday Night Live# alum Dennis Miller on his monkey trick, the war in Iraq and why he won’t make fun of the president

by Matthew Singer

Dennis Miller isn’t what you might call a “national treasure.” He’s not one of those comedians blessed with the capacity to reach across a broad spectrum of people and weave himself into the cultural fabric, a la Johnny Carson or David Letterman or, hell, even Richard Pryor. His gift is for polarization — the ability to tell a joke that’ll leave half the audience in tears and the other half leaning over to the person next to them and asking, “Who’s Rudolf Nureyev?” To some, he’s a thinking-man’s comic, a beacon of intelligence and true wit in an era when morons barreling down hills in shopping carts pass for humor. Others just think he’s a pretentious asshole. And that’s basically how the opinions split. There’s little middle ground when it comes to Dennis Miller. And that’s how it was #before# he became a GOP golden boy.

So how does Miller feel about being a flashpoint for division in a country that is already deeply divided over #everything#? He’s totally fine with it.

“If you think you’re going to please the masses at some point with what I do, you’ve missed the point,” the 52-year-old admits from his home in Santa Barbara. “You got to be smart enough to see where your niche is and cultivate it. And my niche has never been mass appeal. Then again, I don’t want to turn into one of those angry comics who says, ‘I don’t give a shit who likes me.’ So if I can keep it at 50 percent, I’m happy. That means, out of two people I see in the street, one wants to shake my hand and one wants to punch me. I’m comfy there.”

Of course, Miller has reason to feel comfortable straddling the mean line. After all, it hasn’t kept him from getting work. High-profile work, too. In fact, since first entering public consciousness some 20 years ago, Miller has quietly assembled one of the most stacked résumés of any modern comedian: He has been a featured player on two iconic television shows; hosted HBO’s first standout original series; emceed multiple award shows; published four best-selling books; acted in feature films alongside Diane Lane, Michael Douglas and, in his turn as a leading man, the Crypt Keeper; been a sports analyst, a political pundit and an advertising spokesman; #and# he married a model. No matter the situation, Miller’s shtick has remained the same: obscure non sequiturs and grandiose verbiage wrapped around ridiculously complex metaphors and similes, punctuated by ’50s hepcat lingo (“babe,” “man,” “cha-cha”) and the occasional, strategically placed “fuck.” It’s a double-edged talent. Depending on the setting, he can come off as either wry and irreverent or smug and condescending — hence the alienating persona. But Miller says it’s not something he can turn off and on at will.

“You get your deal of the cards and you play it. I don’t manufacture that. There are things I’m as dense as you can be on. The one thing I got is a reasonably deep reference drawer and a pretty quick retrieval system. That’s the same humor I’ve done all these years. If I see something, there’s sort of a bing-bang in my head, and I guess people have found that kind of funny to them. You know, ‘Look at that: When they’re talking about a Randy Moss play, he’s talking about #The Jetsons#’ robot maid. How the hell did that happen?’ ”

“I do think it’s a bit Balkanizing. But what are you gonna do?” he continues. “That’s what I got. Jay [Leno] got the ability to get everybody to laugh. I got this.”

Having a conversation with Dennis Miller is an intimidating proposition. It’s nerve-racking in the same way being a contestant on #Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?# is nerve-racking: You can never be completely prepared. But it’s not just the idea of facing off with that vaunted reference drawer that’s frightening. This is a guy who can spew bile with the best of them. Should the interview inadvertently spin off into a debate, he could probably eviscerate your argument and your self-confidence with a single densely worded sentence involving Gumby and the Treaty of Versailles. Then he’d cap it with his catchphrase — “That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong” — and slam the phone down, leaving you to wonder what the hell happened.

Well, that’s what it seems it would be like, anyway.

In reality, Miller isn’t nearly as confrontational — or pompous — as his reputation implies. Which isn’t to say the person he is on TV and onstage is at all a fabrication. When he speaks, you can almost hear that internal Rolodex spinning as he formulates a response. During the course of our chat, he does casually mention Arthur C. Clarke, Harry Carey, the Grateful Dead and Clement Attlee — Winston Churchill’s little-remembered successor — but he’s not trying to be esoteric. That’s really how he communicates.

But when he’s reminded of how far he has managed to stretch out his life as a performer, Miller’s circuitous speech gives way to blunt modesty.

“I don’t want to sound too evangelical about it, but I really do hit my knees and thank the powers that be that I’ve been allowed to do it so long,” he says. “It’s a lucky break. You’re in essence going into the marketplace with a monkey trick and trying to interest people in it. If you can get them to be interested for two decades, you just have to go, how unbelievably lucky did I get?”

As durable as that “monkey trick” has proven to be, it wasn’t particularly easy for Miller to find. Inspired by Bob Woodward — or, at least, Robert Redford’s portrayal of him in #All the President’s Men# — Miller initially majored in journalism at Point Park College in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He stayed with it long enough to earn his degree, but that’s pretty much as far as he went in the world of legitimate news reporting. “I remember the first job I went into, the guy said, ‘We’re going to pay you by the column inch.’ I remember thinking, ‘Jack, I gotta get out of here.’ I’m not going to get paid by the column inch. I gotta sit there with a fucking ruler to figure my check out?” Years later, Miller would make a living doing #illegitimate# news reporting, as anchor of “Weekend Update” on #Saturday Night Live#. But that’s the only connection Miller draws between his schooling and his future career. “Journalism is the who, what, where, why and when, if I remember from my classes,” he states correctly. “Comedy is everything else.”

Miller’s transition from half-hearted aspiring journalist to full-time comic did not follow a linear path. For a while after graduating from college, he meandered through a series of dead-end jobs — janitor, ice cream scooper — before building up the courage to give standup a try. That’s when it finally clicked. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s and hit the club circuit, eventually landing his first national television appearance on #Star Search#. There, he also encountered his first taste of the divisiveness his style of humor causes, as he lost to his direct comedic antithesis, the more family-friendly Sinbad.

Despite the embarrassment of losing to a guy in parachute pants, 1985 turned out to be Miller’s breakout year. While performing at the Comedy Store in Hollywood, he caught the eye of #Saturday Night Live# creator Lorne Michaels, who’d just been rehired as the show’s producer. Michaels snagged him to be part of the program’s third generation, and in its tenth season Miller made his debut, sporting a smart-ass grin, a charming high-pitched titter and a haircut that haunts him to this day. (“Occasionally, I’ll be sitting there, my kids’ll be watching something and I’ll be reading, and I look up peripherally and go, ‘Christ, is that me in a bad mullet?’ ”) He rarely appeared in sketches, but for the entirety of his six seasons, Miller #owned# “Weekend Update.” His cerebral approach reinvigorated the segment, which had been floundering since the breakup of the Dan Aykroyd-Jane Curtin tandem seven years earlier, and, in a way, presaged not only his own subsequent ventures but the current crop of TV satirists blurring the lines between comedy and journalism. Up until recently, Miller was the Cal Ripken of the mock news desk, holding the record for longest tenure in the position — 111 straight shows — before it was broken by current co-anchor Tina Fey.

Newly famous, Miller left the halls of NBC Studios in 1992 in search of greener pastures. Unlike most #SNL# alumni, he did not attempt to transition into a film career. Instead, he gravitated toward a field he seemed more qualified for: late night talk show host. His first foray into the medium, the syndicated #Dennis Miller Show#, had an edgier feel than its big-time counterparts, with weightier content and more offbeat guests. Naturally, it was yanked off the air within months.

Not surprisingly, Miller found greater success when he translated the format to cable. #Dennis Miller Live# premiered on HBO in 1994, and it was an immediate revelation. Unleashed from the restraints of network television, Miller was free to explore whatever topic rattled him and travel whatever roads his hyperactive synapses happened to lead him down. And he could swear. That creative autonomy allowed Miller to do his thing without having to worry about pandering to the mainstream and let the people who “got it” come to #him#. It also helped him create what would become his trademark, The Rant, a pointed, free-flowing diatribe that set the theme of each episode. Thanks largely to that part of the program, the show developed a sizable cult following and contributed to HBO establishing itself as an artistic powerhouse, winning the network its first Emmy; the show would take home five in all by the end of its nine-year run.

At the height of #Live#’s popularity, Miller suddenly became a hot show business commodity. MTV recruited him to preside over its Video Music Awards two years in a row; Internet services, telephone companies and M&Ms hired him as their pitchman. He published four collections of his Rants, released a comedy album and did two standup specials. He even made inroads as an actor, most, er, “memorably” as the wisecracking, vampire-slaying hero in the uber-campy #Tales from the Crypt presents Bordello of Blood#. “A week out from the beginning of general filming, one of the minor Baldwins fell out of that role,” he explains. “Sylvester Stallone was dating the female lead, Angie Everhart, and I made him laugh. So when [director] Joel Silver said, ‘I’m screwed, I’ve lost my minor Baldwin,’ I think Sly said, ‘Hey, Dennis Miller makes me laugh, put him in.’”

Even more bizarre than that, in 2000 Miller scored one of the most coveted gigs in broadcasting: color commentator on #Monday Night Football#. To say the reaction to him was mixed would be an understatement. Miller did display a remarkably deep well of knowledge about the game; unfortunately, he also displayed his previously noted deep well of knowledge about everything else as well. For more open-minded viewers, he was a breath of fresh air. But most NFL fans did not appreciate having their brains overloaded with references to #A Tale of Two Cities#, Italian nuclear physicists and Boutrous-Boutrous Ghali while watching a halfback option play, and ABC canned him after two seasons.

Miller’s short-lived turn as a sportscaster is probably the most glaring example of his knack for drawing in one side of a crowd while turning away the other. But even in that case, Miller didn’t really fit the description of a “lightning rod.” For the majority of his career, whether or not you liked Dennis Miller came down to a matter of taste. Now, however, it has more to do with which box is checked on your voter registration card.

Although Miller always gave off the vibe of being a hip cynic who didn’t subscribe to any political party, his snarky attitude suggested that he was, for the most part, a liberal. During the Clinton years, for example, while he didn’t spare the president much ridicule, he saved his harshest words for Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, comparing his rise to power to that of the Nazis. And when the current regime first took over, his criticism was just as sharp. So after September 11, 2001, when he began talking like a card-carrying Republican — lambasting wimpy Democrats, defending the war in Iraq and unabashedly praising George W. Bush — his fans assumed he’d gone and lost his damn mind. But Miller insists he always had a visible conservative streak in him; the attack on the World Trade Center merely amplified it. He says he still tilts left on many social issues, like abortion and gay marriage. When it comes to defense, however, Miller makes it clear that he stands on the right side of the aisle.

“It’s the same stuff I tell my kid about a bully on the playground,” he says. “If my kid got punched out by a bully or hassled for his money, the first day I’d say, ‘Walk away from bullies. It’s a no-win.’ Then the second day — I’d probably go up to the third or fourth — I’d say, ‘Son, it’s just not worth your time. Sticks and stones, just spin and get out of there.’ You get up around the fifth time you hear about it, you probably have to say, ‘You know, you might have to kick him in the balls.’ ”

Indications of Miller’s ideological shift began surfacing during the final months of #Dennis Miller Live#, when his opening monologues changed from stinging indictments of American greed and hypocrisy to fiercely nationalistic stump-speeches calling for the government to rip the head off the Islamic world. After the show’s cancellation in 2002, practically all of Miller’s media appearances cemented his newfound conservatism. He appeared on #The Tonight Show# in February 2003 and delivered a tirade against France and their opposition to the Bush administration’s military operations in the Middle East. “I would call the French scumbags,” he snapped, “but that, of course, would be a disservice to bags filled with scum.” That same year, he penned an op-ed piece for #The Wall Street Journal# blasting Norman Mailer for criticizing the invasion of Iraq, declared Michael Moore to be “everything I detest in a human being” and, at a charity event in Las Vegas, jostled with Elton John, who cited Miller as an example of why the world hates the United States.

By that point, Miller had ascended to the top of the GOP’s thin celebrity A-list. He became a star attraction at Republican fundraisers and was even invited for a ride in Air Force One. Some even encouraged him to run for the senate in California, a notion he (mostly) laughed off.

Then, in perhaps the coup de grace, he joined the Fox News Channel as a commentator on #Hannity & Colmes#. Not that it had anything to do with his political views. “That whole thing about Fox having an agenda that they delineate to you everyday, as a former employee, I couldn’t get through to [Fox News Channel CEO] Roger Ailes to get my daily thing if I had told him I had discovered the secret to immortality. It doesn’t work that way. I was getting no memos. Nobody told me what to say.” On the contrary, Miller contends his decision to slide under Rupert Murdoch’s umbrella was practical, not political. “Fox is the state of the art right now, whether you want to say it or not. They beat everybody’s brains in in the one thing that matters, and that’s the amount of people who want to cue up each night and watch them. It’s a brilliant organization.”

Alas, Miller’s stint at Fox was brief. In 2004, he was offered the chance to once again host his own show — on CNBC, a station known more for its around-the-clock financial reports than its entertainment programming. He leapt at the opportunity, but not without a tinge of skepticism. “When they came up to me and said, ‘We want you to do a comedy-variety show on the stock market channel,’ I remember thinking, ‘Well, this could end up as bloody wreckage on the carrier deck, but I’ll give it a try,’ ” Miller says. “I’m kind of a pragmatist about show biz — I need gigs.” On the surface, the format sounded not incredibly dissimilar from #Dennis Miller Live#: Each episode would feature a topical rant, interviews and a dissection of the daily news. (And a monkey sidekick.) But when the plainly titled #Dennis Miller# premiered that January, viewers discovered an attitude different from the take-no-prisoners HBO days. This was, after all, the “new” Dennis Miller. His humor was still as barbed and arcane as ever, but it now came with a caveat: No Bush jokes. “I’m going to give him a pass,” he told the Associated Press at the time. “I take care of my friends.”

While the show didn’t exactly crash and burn the minute it left the runway, Miller admits he did get off to a slow start. By the time he found his footing, though, it was too late, and CNBC pulled the plug after a year and a half due to low ratings. It’s hard to determine if Miller’s freshly minted neo-con image cost him much of his built-in audience, or if the marketplace in general had finally just tired of his “monkey trick.” Regardless, in May 2005, Miller found himself on an extended leave from television, something he hadn’t really experienced since Lorne Michaels plucked him out of the Comedy Store two decades earlier. But despite the relative failure of #Dennis Miller#, its namesake has been around the block enough times to not get too screwed up about it. “Listen, the top rung of show biz pain is not even within light years of the bottom rung of real-life pain. It’s show biz. Nobody’s got a gun to your head.”

Since Miller last had a regular platform to comment from, a lot has happened: Republicans have been besieged with scandals, the Iraq War has continued to spiral out of control and the inept response to Hurricane Katrina permanently damaged what credibility the administration had left. As a result, the Bush bandwagon has largely emptied. But Miller indicates he is still onboard. He disagrees with the president’s wishy-washy stance on immigration (“I don’t think it makes you racist to say, ‘Hey, can we maybe put a checkpoint in here and there, just to check who’s coming in?’ What kind of country do you have if you never check anything?”) and confesses he sometimes finds his stubbornness in certain areas to be a bit off-putting. But in regards to the war on terror, Miller remains firmly behind his “friend.”

“In a world of conjecture,” he explains, “there’s only one true litmus test for me to say if our approach to the last five years is a reasonable one. I’m not saying perfect, I’m saying a reasonable one. And that is: Have we had another event on domestic soil? And we haven’t. Some people are never going to give that up to Bush. They just hate Bush’s guts. But I can tell you, if John Kerry was my president and nothing was happening, if Al Gore was my president now and nothing was happening at home, I’d give kudos to the guy. And George Bush #is# my president and nothing is happening at home … That’s a pretty surprising thing, and I gotta give him credit for it. He’s in charge.”

Today, Miller is, ostensibly, unemployed. He can still sell out theaters throughout the country with his standup, and that’s primarily what he’s been doing for the past year. But for a comedian accustomed to speaking from a national stage, being without a steady, large-scale forum is a killer. If his personal history is any indication, it won’t be much longer before Miller concludes his vacation from the airwaves. He’s certainly working on it: In a few weeks, he’s going to lunch with Roger Ailes to discuss possibly getting another shot at Fox News, hopefully something more long-term this time around. It definitely wouldn’t help win back whatever percentage of his fan base he lost once he embraced the right wing, but it could energize those who stuck with him — and maybe those who’ve come around since.

“I know some people hate it and think it’s the dark empire, but I don’t think that way,” he says of the infamous news channel. “I look at [Bill] O’Reilly, and there are nights where I just shake my head up and down and say, ‘God, that is so spot-on.’ Then there are other nights where I watch and I go, ‘Not quite in conjunction with that.’ But I don’t get off at the end of the show and think he’s evil or that he’s great. I think the world takes all this shit a little [too] seriously now.”

Of course, the perception of being evil is not altogether bad for business. Fox doesn’t dominate the Nielsens just because its viewers appreciate their “unique” way of distributing information. A lot of it has to do with the fact that a large chunk of the population absolutely #detests# them — and watches because of it. Humans are attracted to that which they despise as strongly as that which they claim to love. Miller knows this. It is probably the key to his entire career. Indifference is a death sentence; hatred is a fountain of youth. And if Miller has proven adept at anything in the last 20 years, it’s getting people to hate him.

And he’s more than fine with that.

“When I know somebody has to watch me and they hate my guts, I feel like I’ve won on about five levels,” he reveals. “When you think about a guy sitting at home who thinks you’re a punk and he’s steaming, yet he can’t turn you off — can you imagine what a victory that is?” He laughs in that famous high-pitched giggle. “I mean, fans are nice, but to know you have somebody who consistently has to watch you because he hates your guts … that’s beautiful.”

Mole-dy Oldies: "How to Assemble Winky the Whale"

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.”

Mole-dy Oldies: "'Tis the Season of Giving -- to Me"

Published in the VC Reporter, 12/14/06:

’Tis the season of giving — to me

by Matthew Singer

It is better to give than to receive? We should all be mature enough by now to realize how much crap is loaded into that crusty old axiom — not necessarily because the opposite is true (and it is) but because the sentiment behind it is false. It implies the joy someone else derives from having been given a gift is powerful enough to satisfy the needs of the giver. But seeing somebody happy is not the pull of gift-giving. If people actually enjoy the act of giving, it’s because they like how it reflects on them. It makes them look good, and the appreciation of the receiver validates their self-worth. In reality, giving is as much an egocentric action as stretching your arms out and screaming, “Gimme gimme gimme!” — except these serial givers are paying for the validation. It’s good-cheer prostitution.

So stop all this cloying, disingenuous rhetoric and admit it: receiving is better than giving. I should know. With the exception of the Christmas of my first paying job, I have never bought anything for anyone. And that one time I did, I did not feel measurably better than any of the other years when I only received presents. In fact, I felt slightly worse.

And let’s face it: Receiving gifts is pretty much all Christmas is about. There’s no religiosity left in it, unless you’re like my former neighbor who used to put a huge banner on her garage every December reading “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” And spending time with loved ones? That’s just the mile of broken glass you must crawl through to get to the presents.

As shallow and materialistic as this all sounds, at least I can say I’m better than my cousins. These two mooks, with whom I spent practically every Christmas growing up, would literally shred into their presents at the word go, ponder the gift for about three seconds, then toss it aside and continue throwing up a hailstorm of wrapping paper and packing peanuts. This drove our aunt insane. She would constantly try to orchestrate the present-opening in some orderly fashion so all would get their proper due, and my cousins would leap onto their piles like a pack of wolverines slaughtering a moose and be in the kitchen cramming pastries down their throats within five minutes, leaving nothing but bows and empty boxes in their wake. (What’s more, their parents always had to buy them pairs of everything because one would inevitably covet whatever the other got, leading to a whole lot of fighting and crying by the afternoon. This continued up until the last holiday I spent with them, which was three years ago.)

I, however, was willing to be patient, even though I hated the tortured process of the gift-opening ceremony: holding the item up, going “Ooooh,” making some comment about how great a gift it was and thanking whatever relative bought it for me. Of course, this calmer, more civilized method always took two hours, since our Christmases usually involved 10 to 12 people (and if there was a kid under the age of 10 there, forget it). But I preferred to draw it out, because once the excitement of the opening is gone, what’s left to do? Talk to the family? Watch my cousins play their new video game, waiting in vain for them to hand over the controller? If these are my options, I’ll let my 3-year-old cousin attempt to tear the wrapping off a doll house all day.

One year, though, I allowed my hunger for presents to overcome my better judgment. My sister and I woke up at 5 a.m., ran upstairs and ripped into our gifts, before our parents were awake. I got a CD player, the first (and only, shockingly) I’ve ever owned. Naturally, mother and father were not pleased. My dad is kind of an emotional guy — and by emotional I mean he is prone to yelling. He is one of those weirdos who wants to witness his children’s immediate reaction to opening something he gave them, and he laid down the hammer of the gods that day. I felt guilty — for a moment. Then I went down to my room, ate candy canes and listened to Nirvana.

That CD player itself is notable because it might be the only gift I’ve ever received that I was still using by the time the next Christmas rolled around. Looking back, as much as I loved receiving presents, I apparently found them utterly disposable. Every time the latest video game platform came out, for instance, I’d beg and plead for it, then once I had it, I’d beat the shitty games that came packaged with it and, since I had no income to buy more, the thing would be gathering dust atop my television set by March. When I was 12 I got an acoustic guitar, which I never learned to play. I haven’t even gotten all the way through last year’s Alfred Hitchcock DVD boxed set. Come to think of it, the only other thing that lasted as long as the CD player was a belt one of my uncles gave me — which is ironic, because this particular uncle just mails us cheap identical presents that are obviously picked out by his wife, which we’ve made a tradition of opening simultaneously and making fun of (worst one: three ridiculously oversized electric-blue Adidas T-shirts). Normally, they end up rotting in our closets, but I recall wearing that belt for a while, before the buckle inevitably fell off.

Reflecting on all this makes me lament the fact that I’m at an age where I have to accept only practical gifts, like bathmats and TV trays. Yeah, it’s stuff I can use, seeing as I’m finally living on my own, and it’s definitely better than paying for those things myself, but without the excitement of receiving cool shit, what is there left to enjoy about Christmas? Hmm, looks like I may have to start giving after all.