Carnie Knowledge

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Standing in front of the “Sky Ring” this Sunday, I explained to a couple of acquaintances I was doing a story on the carnival.

“Oh great!, did you talk to any carnies?” one man asked.

He laughed boisterously at my affirmation: “I can’t wait to read that,” he said, in a tone you would expect from a kid anxious to hear a pirate story.
“Do they smell like cabbage?” the girl next to him asked, repeating a joke from a Simpson’s episode.

“No,” I said flatly, and walked away.

There’s no telling why “carnies” have a reputation for being peculiar. Some workers said their rep comes from the old days when nomadic bands of tricksters and freaks traipsed around the country under a shroud of mystery. Others suggested the bad rep was spread as recently as 20 years ago, when carnies would sleep on their rides or under their game tent; days when hygiene went by the wayside. Some complain that a few bad apples – who go out looking to fight or cause trouble – continue to give them a bad name.

 “A lot of times people think of carnies or carnival workers as dirty and grotesque, with no teeth and bad attitudes trying to cheat you out of your money the entire time,” Amber Sutherland, a pretty, put together “agent” said. “But it’s not like that, were actually normal people who choose this lifestyle. Like rainbows choose their lifestyle… or anybody else chooses a lifestyle.”

Carnies now call themselve agents. They wear uniforms. They live in trailers with showers, a travelling preschool accompanies them. They submit to drug tests, and say they don’t drink on the job.

But despite that carnivals are now corporate-run entities, some things about carnival lifestyle are still true. Frazier Shows hasn’t got a mayor, town council or police, but they are nonetheless a nomadic community.

Overnight, or whenever they arrive, the citizens set up the neighborhood in the same pattern they were in the last town. Some live in trailers with 12 bedrooms each, while others who have pets or a family have to use their own housing. They set up a place to do business with the local community – offering fun for money, erecting a village of adventures and curiosities in an atmosphere with alluring scents of fat and sugar, and sights of spinning, blinking colored lights.

The “ride jocks” set up giant machines while the gamers pop up a tent and get some sleep.

These five stories offer a glimpse  into a lifestyle that is often misunderstood.
As one woman said, the the carnie culture descends from the oldest gang in the world, but now they wear uniforms, and make safety their priority. Most folks I interviewed said the same thing: “It’s just a job, man.”

The new guy
Michael O’Leary reaches for a pod to the Zipper, a carnival ride that spins riders to the point of vomitting. His forearm reveals a history – shrapnel scars from an improvised explosive device bite into a United States Marine Corps tattoo.
He unlatches the pod and laughing riders spill like crabs from a pot, stumbling on the solid ground.

O’Leary, who said he isn’t a people person, hasn’t figured out yet why he likes his job on the Zipper, but he knows he does.

“Since I got out of the Marine Corps, I’ve had a problem with settling too much in one place for too long,” O’Leary said. “With this job here I’m not stationed in one place for more than a week or two.”

After a year of school at Oklahoma University, O’Leary was visiting friends who had been sending him care packages in Iraq and then Frazier rolled through town. He went out to help them set up, met friends and made a good impression, and was hired on to travel for the season. The Teton County Fair was his first week on the Zipper.

In three days, he’s already learned the main occupational hazard.
“Dealing with the vomit all the time, that sucks man,” O’Leary said. “You just take a bucket of water and throw it inside to get all the puke out of it and not let anybody sit in it for a few spins and let it air dry.”

That happened three times last Saturday night, but he’s not going to let it deter him. He’s gonna stick it out, and hopefully get his medical examiners licence.
 “I’m probably going to finish up this season and with the money I get when the season is over with I’ll probably buy a laptop, and then get myself some online classes and do it that way.”

He usually watches movies or plays on his X-Box during his down time, but this week a girl in the Carnival had a friend in Jackson who took some of them to the “Snake River or whatever it’s called.

“Fifty degrees man, I was freezing my ass off,” he said. “But I had a good time.”

THE ACTRESS
Amber Sutherland admits that she’s a little spoiled on Frazier Shows.
Her boss, sitting nearby, teased her that she gets special treatment because she has all of her teeth.

“You can’t talk about how I’m intelligent or anything, can you?” she retorted.
Sutherland wants to be an actress, but will settle for a career in public relations – after she’s done with the carnival.

“You get to see new places, and meet all kinds of people,” she said. “I’m 19, and I want to have fun. The carnival is a good way to do it.”

Born in South Africa to two circus parents, Sutherland traveled with Ringling brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus as a child, when her mother had a “thing” with famous tiger trainer Gunther Gable Williams.

“I’m not gonna sugar coat it. It wasn’t a blast, and I didn’t have fun all the time,” she said. “There were some abusive situations and some bad situations, but that comes with life … hanging out with baby tigers was kinda cool, though.”
She said people have told her she looks like Drew Barrymore, a role model of hers, since she was a kid. Her looks resemble the actress, and her voice is an almost exact match.

Sutherland is charming.

“I am a goldfish gaming agent,” she said. “The kids love it, and I’ve found a way to get adults into it too.”

She started on the carnival when she turned 18, about a year and a half ago.
“It was a nerve racking decision, actually, because you’re going somewhere you don’t know anybody,” she said. “But it’s something you always want to do as a kid; just run away with the carnival. I grew up in the circus, and ran away with the carnival.”

For now, she will stay. Like most of the other agents I spoke with, the lifestyle is nice but the money keeps her around.

“It’s about the money, I’m not going to lie, it is about the money,” she said. “But it’s also about providing good entertainment and safe entertainment to the towns we go to. And our show is really big on family fun and safety.”

Her knack for public relations shines through at times. Though the circuit with Frazier takes her through five states, she hopes her skills at PR can help with her bigger aspirations.

“I’ve been traveling since I was a little kid but there’s a lot more to go … there are continents I haven’t been to yet.”

THE  VETERAN                                                                                                                    
James MacDonald is a realist.

“Its all about the benjamins, buddy,” MacDonald said. “It’s all about the almighty dollar out here.”

Twenty-five years ago he saw some carnies with fat wads of cash, and decided that’s what he wanted to do. After high school he ran away with the circus, and wound up in carnivals ever since. Despite what he was led to believe in his youth, he said it's hard work.

“You know the first couple of years, it was all about the party, party, party; tasting girls, getting drunk,” MacDonald said. “The last 20 years have been nothing but … it’s a job, it’s a lifestyle, but it’s a job.”

In the old days, there were coolers of beers in the “joints” (games) and the occasional gamer who might have been a bit dishonest to score an extra few bucks.
“I been out here all my adult life, and I’ve watched it go from the days of beard and dirty clothes and sleeping under rides to uniforms and clean shaven, polite to the people,” Macdonald said. “If you’re a jerk, nobody wants to give you their dollars.”

MacDonald says it’s a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry, and standards have changed, but the carnie lifestyle is very much about being a family.
“We watch out for each other," he said. "It’s a lifestyle, its not just a job. Some people can do it and some peope can’t, you know…

“We are the world’s greatest equal opportunity employer. We hire anybody,” he said about the carnival industry. “Now whether you can cut it or not after the first couple of days or a week … there’s a lot of people that come out here and they’ll work two or three weeks, and the perception is it's all about partying and you have a pocket full of money, and they find out real quick that it’s not like that, man,” MacDonald said. “It’s just a job. The only way you make it out here is you make it on your own. The boss might walk up and say, oh it was a bad day yesterday, here’s 50 bucks.”

Still, he and some friends found time to meet Ukrainian Jackson residents the night before.

“I was like, are all the women in the Ukraine as beautiful as y’all?” he said. “We went to the bar and partied for a little while.”    

THE CLIMBER
Ande Gibney has bleached blond hair, a lot of tattoos and a friendly demeanor.
“I like learnin’ new people, I guess,” he said.

When he was 12, he spent a few years with his father traveling for a carnival around Arkansas, Texas and California with nine people and their gear in a 13-passenger station wagon, he said.

“I had it in my blood, I guess, forever,” he said.

Gibney, now 27, has three kids in Arizona and one in New Mexico where a fifth child is on the way.

He’s been in the carnival business for about six years, since he was hired away from a stucco and plaster gig to go climb the “giant wheel” for Butler, based in Beaverton, Oregon.

He talked a little about what it takes to be a carnie.

“If you can’t be open-minded it’s not for you,” he said. “It’s actually just a person that’s just, you know, can be himself and doesn’t complain and gripe all the time. This right here is a travelling community, if everybody doesn’t get along, if there’s an outsider, he’s gotta go. If he doesn’t click with certain people, he’s got to go.”
Almost everyone gets along, he said, so there is very little bad blood aside from the rare late night fight between workers who have had too much to drink.

It is safe to say that Gibney is a happy man.

“If you can actually just free yourself from a lot of things and just go, it feels good,” he said. 

THE GRANDMOTHER  
Barbara Sloan-Lacey wears lime green nail polish, a bushy ponytail and a toothy smile; all of which make her attractive to newspaper photographers.
But no one has ever interviewed her before.

“People don’t like us because we’re free out here,” Sloan-Lacey said. “We have no constraints of a per se society but we have a neighborhood just like anybody, our houses just get up and move every week, but I have the same neighbors every week on both side of me.”

Sloan-Lacey has spent 11 years on the road, but she acts as a spokesperson for carnies everywhere. “We’re all nice people, you know,” she said.
She feels lucky that she chanced in to a life with the carnival.

 “I was working in Sierra Vista, Ariz. with the police department as an animal control officer, and I couldn’t make the killings stop. So I got disappointed after 10 years. My husband was looking for something to do other than be assistant fire chief out there. So he came out to the carnival and stayed in the beginning of the season while I was still working at home. He called me one day and said, 'It’s lonely out here; if you don’t come, I can’t guarantee I can stay faithful to you.’ So we gave up about $130,000 a year to come out here and be together.”
It’s been a wild ride, I wouldn’t trade it for a million dollars. I’ve seen Old Faithful; I’ve seen the Grand Canyon; I’ve bungee jumped. I’ve done things people only dream of and are afraid to try.”

Sloan-Lacey said she wanted to paint the mountains in her free time in Jackson this year.

She’s home-schooled her grandson on the road since he was seven. He’s now 17, and has been accepted to study with Sartori, who makes carnival rides in Italy, she said. The schooling includes an engineering degree, so he can learn the specifications and design techniques of the rides.

“I couldn’t be more prouder of him if I tried,” she said. "You never know, he might design the rides of your future, or your children’s future.”
She said the one-on-one attention did him, who has ADHD, a world of good, but that it wouldn’t have been possible without the entire community of nomads, which she also referred to as the world’s oldest gang.      

Courtesy photoby Zachary S. Allen
Barbara Sloan-Lacey

PERMALINK:
Carnie Knowledge | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

Leave a Comment