The first couple of months were trying, but she made it through and says she’s off drugs and doesn’t drink on account of a kidney condition. The carnival gave Chelsey a safe place where she wouldn’t be abused and she is grateful for it. She was a member of the family now and secure.
A couple of the older guys treat her like a little sister and the managers have okayed a lock for her private bunk. It’s a better situation than she’s had before and she’s in the middle of the excitement of travelling on a carnival for the summer.
“I don’t really know why, but I’ve always loved the carnival. You’re never stuck in one place too long. I hate being stuck somewhere because it feels like I’m in jail. I like to be free like a bird. Like, I wish to God that I had a pair of wings. I wish to God that I could just fly away.”
She’s planning to complete her GED and eventually would like to go to college or university. During the past winter, she lived in Fredericton with her mother, working at Tim Hortons and cleaning houses. When the spring came, she was itching to get back on the road.
“I love it out here,” she says on the lot in New Minas. “It’s awesome.”
Girls who join the carnival without boyfriends are rare. Even the ones who follow their men out on the road are often ill-prepared for the consequences of life on the lot. They may start the year together, but they won’t end it that way, and the girl will have bounced between a few bunks by October. Typically, a girl will join to be with a guy under the cloudy delusion that it will be a great summer vacation. But by the end of the first month or so the couple will have fought with enough intensity and anger to say things they regret. The female, finding herself stranded in a strange Maritime town in the middle of the night with little money and no means of transportation, will seek out the last male she remembers showing a slight interest in her and shack up with him. This is a matter of survival on the road.
Carnies are not romantic people by nature. And, like Animal’s wife, there are girls in relationships who seek out those guys who have expressed interest while their boyfriends are working a ride.
“You bring your girl out and you’re gonna find out whether she’s a good girl or not,” Verney says in his gritting tone. “Be willing to live with the fact that she might not be a good girl.”
Some carnivals will only permit women to work on the show if they stay together with the guy they came with. If the couple breaks up, the girl will be sent home promptly in order to avoid the violence it always precipitates.
If a guy only joins up to be with a girl, he has a few options. When the girl inevitably hooks up with another guy, he can keep his bunk and continue on or – if he is of the sensitive type – he can clear out his belongings in the middle of the night and escape in the darkness to the nearest bus depot and buy a ticket home. This scenario plays out at least a few times during the run of a season and nobody is surprised when it does.
The first case that week in New Minas occurred when the balloon/dart joint kid’s boyfriend disappeared one night without a trace. I spoke with him briefly the next day and he was upset.
“I don’t know where he went,” he said as his eyes watered up. “I knew he was having money problems, but he just left without saying anything... I hope he’s all right.”
It was unfortunate, but nobody was surprised. The other case involved my bunk buddies Justin and April. One morning I was awakened by their door slamming shut. Justin had come back from somewhere while April was waking up.
“Can I fuck you?” Justin asked and I could sense the rising waves of the Fornicator starting its test spins for the day. I left quickly.
A half-hour later Justin was on the midway, interrupting people with his natural charm. Ian was setting up the colour wheel game and talking to a young man named Jeremy who had just started back up with the show today. Ian introduced him as his “adopted son” and the battery acid gurgled around in his chest. Jeremy explained he was recently fired from McDonald’s and is eagerly anticipating making a few bucks on the road for the rest of the summer.
“You must be some stupid,” Justin blasts out. “Are you retarded or somethin’? How the hell do you get fired from McDonald’s?”
Jeremy looked startled. He couldn’t explain in detail, only to say that he was told by the manager last week that it wasn’t the right line of work for him.
Justin laughed.
“Don’t worry about it, Jeremy,” I said. “I was fired from Wendy’s when I was teenager. It wasn’t the right line of work for me, either.”
Which was true and nobody laughed at me. I’m still not sure of the reasons behind Jeremy’s termination, but my fast-food career ended at the age of eighteen, after being fired for failing to project “the image we would like Wendy’s to have in the community.” I had ordered a few beers to be delivered at a staff meeting at a hotel to break up the monotony of the bullshit they were spreading and they called it drinking on the job.
Jeremy left to find Verney and get settled. Justin and I talked for a bit. I was curious about his relationship with April and where he saw it going. He told me they met in Fredericton where they’re both from, at the acid party three months before where he told her then he wanted to be with her forever. His dull, brown eyes opened widely and he stared at me.
“I’d do anything for her, man. Anything,” he said, taking a step closer to me. He looked deranged and I left it at that.
Later that afternoon, I went to my bunk for my camera and a break when I heard April crying through the thin walls. Justin entered shortly after. It was clear he was a controlling lunatic and had probably caught a glimpse of me heading off to my bunk and with his type of brain, knew I was really on my way to see her. He would not be humiliated.
I heard them talking through the partition and made my way back to the midway. I met up with April later at the Survivor Rope Ladder game. I didn’t ask what she was crying about earlier or that I had even heard her. Her joint was at the end of the lot, a fair distance from Justin’s ride where she and Chelsey were taking turns sneaking over to talk to local boys in the parking lot.
April has striking pale blue eyes, framed with thick, heavily mascaraed eyelashes. Her hair is a dirty-blond colour, which she keeps tied back, a few strands falling down the side. She has a piercing just below the bottom lip and a mouthful of metal on account of her retainer. She says she’s nineteen, but she told a few guys last year she was nineteen, too, when she stopped by their bunks for a visit.
“He doesn’t treat me right,” she said, unprovoked. “My boyfriend from last year will be coming out this week and I’m gonna be with him.”
So Justin’s days on the carnival were numbered. A few days after I left, he gathered his things and slinked off in the middle of the night and again, nobody was surprised. Just another failed loner, a man who couldn’t play the game. Or understand the rules. Most male carnies try to refrain from developing emotional attachments to women on the road. It’s too much trouble in the end and many are content with short-term monogamy. And then there’s always “a woman in every port.”
The small-town attraction to the carnival is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Many women are attracted to the itinerant way of life because it is the exact opposite of what they’re used to and exciting for the same reasons. Some women’s brains are wired to feel sexual arousal to things they fear or can’t understand and a mysterious carnival pulling into town in the dark of night is just the edge of excitement they crave. The fascination with this mechanical Wonderland just happens to express itself outwardly in the form of sexual desire for some women.
“I had a girl pick me up once and she explained it really simple,” Verney says while sitting at a picnic table by the cookhouse one afternoon. “She was a virgin and she didn’t want to be one and she was tired of listening to her friends talk. She didn’t want anyone to know she got lucky. So she went and
picked a guy at the carnival for one reason; she could do anything she wanted and he was gonna leave. He wasn’t gonna hang in town and tell everybody. Nobody was gonna know that she wasn’t a virgin. It would be her little secret. That’s why she picked a guy in the carnival. And she’d probably see him every once in a while, which would be kinda nice.
“That was her reasoning,” he concludes. “They all have their reasons.”
Carnies are good at keeping certain secrets – and that includes sexual ones. Your average carny can probably tell you more about the sexual preferences and fantasies of small-town Maritime women than psychologists or faithful husbands.
Glen McKay, who identifies his position on Maritime Midways as the “Ride God,” says women are attracted by the rides. They’re sexual in some respects: high and strong and firm. In the old days, carnies would advertise the rides as designed to throw guys and girls together through gravity and force. Nature takes over from there. But Glen knows the rides, the big ones anyway, attract girls on their own. It’s the lights and the fury.
“And you’re sitting there and some broad’s looking at you and you’re like, ‘You know what? If I was sitting behind the counter at Hertz-Rent-A-Car, you would not even look at me twice.’ But because I’m sittin’ in this little box here....
“There’s always groupies for this,” he continues. “There’s groupies for anything, they just come with the territory.”
The Amazing Case of the Two-Legged Man
As an extra added attraction the Bill Lynch Shows offer you a close-up view of that strangest of all living creatures – the Two-Legged Man.
----Advertisement in The Daily Gleaner for the Fredericton Exhibition, August 31, 1956
No sooner had the two-legged man been identified than the carnival office trailer was crawling with curious folks after answers from the man at the centre of this hoax. The questions seemed to come at once and in the same tone.
“What the hell is this ‘two-legged man’ stuff about?”
“Is this a joke at our expense?”
“Are we supposed to be the freaks, now?”
Bill Lynch chuckled quietly behind his desk and bit down on his cigar, the way he had developed a knack of doing in certain social situations. How peculiar that these people with regular faculties would compare themselves to spectacular freaks like the Turtle Woman. Where was their sense of humour?
Outside the office, a warm breeze rippled the grass through the Fredericton field that was now home to one unit of the second largest carnival in Canada. Lynch had amassed what many regarded as the finest show on the road by 1956 and that went for the entire continent. The grand showman had pulled into town a few days earlier, towing twenty-seven railway cars of flashy rides, games and performers to amuse and entertain the patrons of the Fredericton Exhibition.
Lynch’s men had worked through the night to secure the rides in prime spots across the grounds. The twin Ferris wheels rose magnificently from the west end of the lot above the entire show. The Chair-O-Plane, the Octopus, the Round-Up, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Merry-Go-Round and nine different kiddie rides were strategically placed at the end of a long row of concession tents and sideshows. Consuela Flores, “the petite Latin American beauty,” was parading her black-maned Nubian Lion to onlookers in one of the tents. Three trick motorcyclists were burning up a large wooden bowl narrowly avoiding one another, monkeys were racing tiny cars up a straight wall and little girls were lining up for pony rides at the far end of the lot.
“By day the midway is a mighty mechanical maze,” an ad in the newspaper had proclaimed, “by night, a fabulous fairyland of fluorescent phantasy.”
The “Freak Animal Show” was a large draw, headlined by the bull with five legs, the two-legged pig, a two-foot-tall cow, a dwarf bull weighing 1,100 pounds and perhaps the most bizarre beast on the carnival that year: a giant double-bodied turkey “born to live with four legs, two bodies, two tails and only one head.”
Back in the office trailer, the joke of the two-legged man was going over a few heads. Lynch laughed reassuringly and invited everyone to relax and enjoy the show. At fifty-three, he was lean and erect and still had a waist around which hung high trousers. His hair had turned grey, but was neatly combed back with every strand stapled into place with precision. His mouth had long ago adapted to having a cigar hanging out of it, which had become another physical trait. When he smiled, his grin resembled a sort of noble clown’s without the makeup. His eyes sparkled with humour.
There were a few things he understood better than most, the least of which was how to have a good time. It was funny, Lynch thought as the cigar smoke swirled around his head, after thirty years in the carnival business, after thousands of appearances in towns big and small throughout Atlantic Canada, that one small ad in a newspaper would cause this kind of response. The days of the human freak shows were winding down and not many had really put up a fuss about the World’s Fattest Couple or Alzoria Watkins – the Turtle Woman – billed in 1934 as “the greatest freak attraction ever seen in Nova Scotia”.
Alzoria had travelled the carnival circuit throughout the United States, making a regular home at Coney Island in New York where she went by different names including “Walrus Girl” and “Pig Woman.” In Nova Scotia she turned a few heads by toddling out on stage with a cigar box full of photo postcards of herself that she would later autograph upon request. The photo was exactly what they were witnessing before them: Alzoria in a white swimsuit stuffed to capacity with her rotund torso. Spilling out of the suit on the bottom were two thigh-like bulges of skin with six toes attached to one and only one toe on the other. She would move by motion of the legs and her deformed arms, which lacked elbows but ended with tiny hands accentuated with six short, stubby fingers on each. She was not much more than a torso, really, which meant she was confined to the ground, in some respects appearing more like an animal than a woman. There was no hard shell, however, just a human back and an average non-disfigured face that shone with easy smiles from a woman who in some other world would be concerned only with making dinner for her family. In fact, her face was so ordinary it could have very easily been one of the hundreds in the crowd looking out at her in astonishment.
Lynch hired a number of top-quality professional acts out of the States over the years, through world-famous booking agents like George A. Hamid, Art Converse and the master sideshow promoter Pete Kortes. Over the years, Lynch’s tents housed widely known freak curiosities like the Half-Man, Seal Boy, the Tattooed Man, the World’s Fattest Couple – Happy Jack and Baby Frances who travelled the circuit in a specially reinforced Cadillac – and Ronnie and Donnie Galyon, the legendary conjoined twins who spent their childhood travelling the world, offering themselves for public scrutiny. Ronnie and Donnie were joined from the sternum to the groin and although they had four legs, they moved in a swift, sideways motion. They are still alive and well in Ohio in a home they bought with their carnival earnings. Lynch was particularly fond of the two brothers whom he saw as being as normal as any other boys, except that they lived their lives facing each other, unable to evade the constant confrontation of who they were.
The Bill Lynch Shows also offered world-class circus-style entertainment, free with ten-cent gate admission. A wide assortment of acrobats, sword-swallowers, giants, midgets, fire-eaters, knife throwers, snake charmers, mentalists, illusionists, magicians and even human projectiles amused Maritimers on stages provided by Lynch over the years.
By the late 1950s, the old freak shows were drying up, not out of a new-found moral sensibility, but for other reasons altogether. Advancements in medical technology made it possible to correct ailments that would have caused disorders in the past, abortion became a safe option after parents discovered their babies would be seriously deformed, and a lot of old carnies across the continent blame the government for sending out disability cheques to physically di
sabled people who could be out turning a buck at the sideshow. And then there’s the hard fact that a lot of the “curiosities” that made the bill at the sideshows of old are simply not that freaky compared to current standards. Anyone who has ever set foot on a fairground in the last thirty years can attest without doubt that they’ve seen the world’s fattest man or some character with tattoos over his entire body, riding the Merry-Go-Round and popping balloons with darts.
But there has always been a natural curiosity for weird things and the freaks of old were supplying it for a fee. Lynch never felt any moral qualms about the sideshows. The performers were well taken care of and many of them made a lot of money from their acts. Over the years, a lot of uptight people have upset performers with their own misdirected sense of high moral authority. The freaks were never looking for saviours – they were happy turning a buck like any other carny. The sideshow was their job and the carnival was their life. All they wanted was an opportunity to feel useful and a part of something.
From their perspective it was an old Twilight Zone episode. Imagine a bunch of freaks telling you that your existence offended them enough that they didn’t want you around. But it was for your own good because these other freaks were exploiting you whether you knew it or not and they simply could not stand for that, being god-fearing freaks and all.
There was never any serious concern about exploitation, despite what some pious individuals may have believed. Consider, for example, Alzoria the Turtle Woman’s act.
Alzoria would spin stories to the crowds about her mother selling her for a quarter to another woman who turned around and traded her to a carnival. Alzoria, a Black twenty-two-year-old, would even put on an over-the-top southern accent to make it all the more believable.
“When ah wuz bigga, dey sold me to a travellin’ show each summah,” she would tell the crowd, as recorded by an old magician by the name of Walt Hudson. “Many times ah wuz molested by boys on dah show, but ah couldn’t do nuthin about it. Ah only went to third grade in school. Nah ah work heah every summah.”
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