Sex on Sawdust

The biggest money-makers on any carnival midway are the Sex Shows. It's pretty hard to beat sex as an attraction, and most carnies don't even try. Concessionaires have spent more time figuring out different ways of presenting sex than scientists have in developing satellites. It pays better, too.

The most successful Sex Show concessionaire I ever met was a guy by the name of Ben. Ben was an oily, thickset individual who somewhat resembled a large beetle. Ben was a snappy dresser, partial to double-breasted suits, ruby cuff buttons, red suspenders, and generally wore a shirt with a striking polka-dot pattern. However, in his show he wore the white operating coat of a surgeon to give the performance more class.

Ben's method of collecting an audience was to rush up on the bally platform outside his tent and start taking off his pants. When a crowd began to collect, Ben would stop and glare at them wildly.

"No, I gotta control myself, friends!" he'd shout. "It's that hot, spicy show inside here that drives me into a frenzy. Within this tent, there's an educational exhibit on sex no one oughta miss. You know the biggest factor in divorce today? It's the ignorance of young men about women. I've been sent out by the Medical Society of America to correct this terrible state of affairs."

Ben would then lean over the platform and assume a confidential tone. "Inside this tent, I've got a group of beautiful living models that illustrate my talk on sex. Last week when this show played a backwoods community like Jonesville Crossings, we didn't dare to present these models completely nude. But here in a cosmopolitan center like Polecat Junction, we can shoot the works. Now these models are not pictures, they are not behind a veil or screen of any kind. And I will give you a dollar for every thread of clothing you can find on them!"

That usually started a stampede into the tent. It was only later that the crowd discovered that the models were live guinea pigs in cages. But before anyone had a chance to protest, Ben would announce, "Folks, I just got you in here so we'd be off the midway where cops might interfere. Now I've got some genuine French postcards ... the kind you often hear about but seldom see. The set sells for a dollar but please don't take them out of the envelope or pass them around among your friends until you're well away from my concession. Once you see the nature of these pictures, you'll understand the reason for my request."

The pictures were French postcards all right. They showed views of the Eiffel Tower, Versailles and other famous monuments.

At that time, I was working with the side show, and as Ben's little outfit was usually sandwiched in between our large top and the Broadway Follies Show, I got to know Ben quite well. One day I asked him why he didn't use real girls in his concession. Girls were easy enough to get. The usual procedure was to run a notice in some theatrical journal reading: "Wanted. Girls for Modeling. No Experience Necessary." A lot of girls who'd failed as models in New York or had been hanging around studios in Hollywood would answer the ad. The concessionaire would write back telling them to join the show at Bear Creek, Arkansas, or wherever the carny was playing. After the girls got there and found out what they were supposed to do, most of them would go back again. But there was always a certain percentage who'd arrive broke and decide to stay.

"You don't need women for a sex show," Ben assured me earnestly. "Women cost a lot to feed and are very unreliable. You'll notice I just use half-a-dozen banners outside with life-sized pictures of naked girls on them. I don't claim to have girls on the inside and if people jump to conclusions, that's their own fault."

"Don't you ever have trouble with the crowd?" I asked.

"Well, I'm thinking of giving the suckers a little talk on How a Baby Is Born or maybe The Dangers of Venereal Disease, illustrated by line drawings on a large blackboard. That ought to satisfy anybody."

"Suppose it doesn't?"

"In that case, I'll hire a couple of tough canvasmen with iron tent stakes to hang around. Tent stakes are wonderful things. They're light enough to handle easily and strong enough to smash a packing case. For my kind of work, they're invaluable."

As Ben freely admitted, he was a far better salesman than a showman. He didn't need nor want a show; all he wanted was some pretext to lure people off the midway into his tent where he could work on them. The French postcards weren't the only items he carried. He had a dozen or more. One of these novelties was a sheet of paper covered with apparently meaningless dots and dashes. When the paper was folded in a certain way and held against the light, the lines formed an indecent picture. By twisting the paper back and forth, the figures could be made to move. He also sold a special pair of dice ("Just put the sixes together and hold them up to the light") and a little cardboard box with a couple of mirrors fitted into it. Ben claimed that when this box was put against a keyhole it enabled you to see the whole inside of the room and also protected you from having a long pin jabbed in your eye. "This little device is used by the FBI for detective work," Ben explained to the crowd. "I sell it with the strict understanding that it is to be used only for the detection of crime and not for any immoral purpose." There must have been a lot of detectives in Ben's audiences for the boxes were always in great demand.

Ben was a curious guy in many ways and I would have liked to have gotten a blueprint of his conscience. Although he was as big a phony as one of his own postcards, he worked harder than anyone else on the lot. He set up and tore down his own concession himself whereas most concessionaires had at least a couple of canvasmen. As soon as the lot marker had gone through the grounds putting in pegs to show where the different concessionaires were, to set up their tents, Ben was hard at work unloading his canvas and framing his entrance. Carny folks naturally wore old clothes while setting up a tent but I've seen Ben out driving stakes in his polka-dot shirt and blue serge trousers. When the crowds began to drift in, Ben would drop his sledge, pull on his white surgeon's coat and start his first spiel without drawing breath. As the other outfits usually stopped to change clothes and have a smoke after setting up, Ben beat them all to the punch.

Although Ben seemed to have no morals whatsoever, he was always honestly indignant when anyone registered a kick. One of his items was little squares of cardboard with suggestive verses and crude line drawings which he generally sold to kids. The verses were innocent in themselves but were carefully worded to have a double meaning. In case you didn't get it, the pictures made the double meaning clear, although there wasn't anything you could actually point out as a dirty word or drawing.

One afternoon while I was passing Ben's tent, I heard the little concessionaire screaming his head off. I dropped in to see what was the matter. Ben was surrounded by some ladies from the local Purity League and a clergyman. They'd brought a cop with them. Some kids had been caught with Ben's cards and their mothers had put in a squawk to the cops. Ben was waving his hands and howling that he was being unjustly persecuted.

"I love kiddies," Ben was telling the puzzled clergyman as I came in. "Let me tell you, it makes me pretty damn sore to think you'd accuse me of corrupting children. Why, I got a couple of kids of my own. Do you think I'd ever be able to face my children again if I went around selling dirty cards to other kids? What do you think I am?"

The clergyman was holding one of Ben's cards and looking at it in a confused way. The cop cleared his throat and said:

"Well, some of these cards are pretty bad. Now take this one. It starts out 'The woodpecker pecked 'til his pecker was sore.' Do you think you ought to be passing something like that out among kids?"

Ben snatched the card out of his hand indignantly. "Why, this card is nothing but a lesson in natural history to develop a child's love for his feathered friends. You gotta get the picture, folks. Here's this poor little woodpecker pecking away all day with his pecker ... that's his bill, you know ... trying to make a hole in some tree where his wife and babies can live. Jeez, it brings tears to my eyes just to think of that good little bird working so hard. Do you think any kid would pot a woodpecker with a slingshot after reading this card? Certainly not. That's the purpose of these cards ... to teach kids some facts about the animal kingdom."

Ben eventually talked himself out of the rap but he wasn't allowed to sell any more of his cards to children in that town. Later, I met Ben at the cookshack. He was burned up about the Purity League. He claimed the clergyman and the ladies had very dirty minds. I listened to him rave for a while and then said, "Look, Ben, you don't have to put on an act with me. Do you seriously mean you don't see anything wrong with those cards?"

Ben looked at me in astonishment. "Look, they don't put people in jail for writing books about Peter Rabbit, do they? Peter Rabbit, get it? Everybody who writes for kids uses the same approach so why should they pick on me?"

I think Ben honestly believed that he was telling the truth.

When we hit the Middle West, Ben came up with a new "aftercatch," as the stuff sold after the show is called. He hired some kids to get him a boxful of big blister beetles, an inch long and bluish-green in color. When disturbed, they excrete an acid-like fluid as a protection against birds and small animals. The fluid is strong enough to make your finger burn. Ben put the beetles in a milk bottle, shook them up, and then poured off the fluid and mixed it with alcohol. He sold it as Spanish Fly.

When he was making his pitch, he'd tell the crowd, "I can only sell this potent substance to married men who wish to overcome frigidity in their wives. I positively refuse to allow anyone to purchase it for the purpose of seducing innocent girls because once a girl gets a dose of this substance, she is completely unable to control herself."

I once took a shot of Ben's Spanish Fly myself to see what would happen. Ben was right when he said the stuff made you lose all control. If burning out a girl's insides with acid makes her passionate, then Ben's concoction was highly effective. When I complained to Ben, he was shocked to hear that I'd taken the dose.

"Jeez, you're not supposed to drink it yourself!" he lamented. "You're supposed to give it to a girl."

"All that stuff would do is drive her nuts," I argued.

"That's the beauty of it. After a dose, a girl goes sort of crazy and doesn't care what happens to her."

Ben eventually ran into so much trouble with his aftercatch that the carny management told him that he had to (continued on page 28)Sex on Sawdust(continued from page 18) put on some sort of a show in his tent. Ben bitterly complained to everyone over this injustice but there was nothing he could do. Ben finally decided to feature the swordbox, mainly because he was able to get one cheap. The swordbox is a long, rectangular affair shaped like a coffin. There are slits in the sides and top through which swords can be passed. A girl gets inside the box, the lid is fitted into place, and a dozen swords are run through the holes until the box looks like a giant pincushion. It seems incredible that the girl isn't impaled by the sharp points but the slits are made at such angles that by twisting her body in a certain pattern, the girl can avoid the sharp points.

Ben borrowed a girl from the Follies and introduced a little innovation into the swordbox routine that livened it up considerably. After showing the box to the crowd, he'd call to the girl who was hidden from the audience in a booth. The girl would answer, "I didn't know you were ready for me yet. I haven't any clothes on."

"Oh, that's OK," Ben would answer easily. "Just throw on a wrapper and come on. It'll only take a minute."

The girl would mince out, clutching her robe around her and looking very nervous. The crowd got a glimpse of her long, slender legs as she stepped into the box and part of the robe generally slipped about then, giving them a flash of her bare shoulder. When the girl was inside, Ben would slam the swords into place and explain that anyone who wanted to pay a quarter could look into the box and see how the trick was done.

Then Ben would wink at the crowd. "And just to make sure you get an eyeful, boys, let's play a joke on the little lady." He would quickly reach through a hole he'd cut in the top and jerk out the girl's wrapper.

The girl would scream and start pleading, "Now you give me back my robel Don't you go letting people look in this here box! I ain't dressed, don't you understand? Let me out o' here!"

The girl's cries acted on the men in the crowd like catnip on a cat. They came pouring up to look in the box while Ben collected their quarters. There wasn't much to see as the girl had on a very modest bathing suit but if anyone complained, Ben would retort virtuously, "Do I look like the kind of man who'd put on an immoral show? Besides, you got to see how the swordbox works which is very interesting to anyone with a mechanical frame of mind."

As the girl had to run back and forth between Ben's concession and the Follies show, the arrangement wasn't satisfactory for either outfit; so Ben decided to get his own girl even though it was against his principles. He picked up a young girl in a small town and persuaded her to join the carny. The girl told me later that Ben had represented himself as a prominent Hollywood producer who was scouring the country for talent and had promised to train her as an actress.

Our jump the next day was over 200 miles and that night Ben undertook to "initiate" the girl into show business as he put it. I saw Ben the next morning and he sadly admitted that the initiation hadn't gone over as planned.

"I did everything for that girl a woman could expect," he told me while we were drinking coffee at the cook-shack. "I even got a hotel room for us ... a sort of honeymoon suite. Then she tried to keep me out of it and use it for herself."

I agreed that the girl had been very unreasonable.

"Well, I finally talked her out of that crazy idea," Ben went on morosely. "Then she wouldn't let me touch her. She kept saying 'What are you trying to do to me?' That's a hell of a question under the circumstances, wasn't it? Finally I decided to get her drunk. I went out to get some whiskey and when I got back she had the door locked and wouldn't let me in. When I tried to kick it down, she called the hotel dick."

"Why didn't you give her some of that Spanish Fly?" I asked.

"With my personality, I didn't think it was necessary," Ben told me sadly.

Within a few days, Ben and the girl were reconciled and in addition to the swordbox, he used her for another routine. The last night that the carnival played near the outskirts of a big city, Ben would go down to the main stem about one or two o'clock in the morning after the carny had closed. He'd way-lay some lone man, preferably someone who'd had too much to drink, and tell him, "Look, buddy, I'm with a carnival near here that's had bad luck and is about ready to fold. One of the show girls wants to pick up a little loose change so she can blow town. She don't do this kind of thing regular, you understand, but this is an emergency. She asked me to pick up a high type of man because she won't lower herself to fool around with some ordinary mug. But I can guarantee she'll show you the time of your life because this girl is used to nothing but the best."

If the sucker was interested, Ben would take him to the lot. A little table was set up in the tent and the tough canvasmen served as waiters. Ben made a great ceremony of seating the guy at the table and then the girl would come in dressed up in her wrapper. She sat down with the sucker and the canvasmen served them beer. Ben played an old phonograph with cracked records for them.

After a while the sucker would get tired of this business and ask the girl if there wasn't somewhere they could go and be alone. Instantly the girl got very indignant. "What do you think I am, anyhow?" she'd demand. "Some chippie?" Ben and the two "waiters" would also get mad, crowding around the sucker and asking him what sort of a joint he thought they were running. "You've insulted this young girl!" Ben would bellow. "I ought to beat you up!" After a few minutes, all the sucker wanted to do was get out of the place, so Ben would charge whatever he could for the "entertainment" and let him escape.

Whenever he could, Ben tried to pick a young college boy or a respectable-looking married man, reasoning that neither type would dare to put up much of a squawk.

Toward the end of the season, the Follies show was taken over by a big bull of a man named Frisco. Frisco must have weighed nearly 250 pounds and stood well over six feet. In spite of his heavy jowls and big belly, Frisco was a powerful man. In some towns, a bunch of local sports in the audience would start making trouble and Frisco would spot the head sport and start moving in on him, at the same time talking quietly, his voice hardly above a whisper. When he got close enough, the big man would suddenly unleash a terrific punch and the sport would drop as though pole-axed. That usually stopped the trouble. In the rare cases when Frisco missed, he made no attempt to follow up the attack, knowing a younger, lighter man could keep out of his way. He'd motion for the canvasmen to move in with their stakes and that was that.

To Ben's dismay, Frisco turned the Follies into a straight strip-tease show and Ben, with his single girl, couldn't possibly compete with it. Worse yet, Frisco was one of the best outside talkers ever seen. The first night that the new show opened, Ben and I went over to watch the routine. Frisco had the girls lined up on the bally platform outside the tent, the girls wearing long red cloaks called "bally capes" which covered them to their knees. When the crowd began to collect, Frisco would address them in low, confidential tones carefully pitched so you could hear him a hundred feet away.

"Now, boys, this show is being presented for educational purposes only. I don't want any of you to think that (continued on page 64)Sex on Sawdust(continued from page 28) what we got here is the old type hoochy-coochy. We are giving here a demonstration of Oriental Muscle Dancing. Not only is this exhibition for strictly cultural purposes only, but also it begins where the old hoochy-coochy leaves off. Every muscle ... every fiber ... of those beautiful bodies you see before you is kept in constant motion. These girls learned this dance in the Orient and after watching them do it, you'll understand what killed the Sultan." Here Frisco pulled one of the girls forward. "They brought in this little girl and got her to do the dance around his body. When the old boy didn't get up, they knew he was dead. We also have here a little Indian girl. When you see her on the inside, you'll know what made the old chiefs start beating on their tom-toms! Boys, please don't see this show if you've got weak hearts. Last night an old man dropped dead and a little boy grew up in three minutes. We've got an exhibition on the inside that'll make your shirt roll up your back like a window shade."

The ticket seller would start a phonograph playing some oriental music, the girls would throw open their cloaks to give the crowd a quick flash, yell, and walk into the tent "fish-tailing" (wriggling their hips) as they went. Frisco was shouting through the hand-mike, "They shiver, they shake, they show you everything they've got. It makes the old feel young and the young feel worried. Watch the girls do the dance that broke the Sultan's thermometer!"

Beside me, Ben muttered, "It ain't got the educational appeal of my outfit," but he knew he was licked and so did I. We followed the crowd in. The girls worked behind a veil that was almost opaque but the crowd could just make out the forms of the semi-nude girls moving behind it. Frisco switched off the tent lights and put on the stage lights. This made the veil completely transparent and you could clearly see the girls, naked except for their G-strings, doing their bumps and grinds.

Now came the real money-maker, known as the "blowoff." Anybody in the crowd who cared to contribute a dollar was taken around behind the stage to a raised dais. Meanwhile, most of the girls had put on their cloaks again and gone out in front to the bally platform to get a fresh crowd but two or three remained behind on the dais and did a few grinds completely in the nude. The blowoff alone netted Frisco $50 and there was a show every 10 minutes.

Ben and I returned to his little tent and his girl made us some coffee. After the big Follies show with its expensive drapes, lighted stage and eight girls, Ben's concession was pitiable. His tent was not only tiny but old and stained. His only props were a rickety catwalk and the swordbox, as he'd disposed of the guinea pigs early in the season. We drank our coffee in silence while the girl tried to cheer us up.

"I guess they've got a big show, but Ben has got brains," she said, looking at the little man proudly. "He'll find some way out of it, I know he will."

Ben shook his head slowly. "Honey, there's just so many things you can do with a naked woman and Frisco's doing them all."

"Are you going to fold?" I asked.

Ben raised his head proudly. "I ain't licked yet."

During the next couple of weeks, Ben pulled every trick he knew to get a crowd. His girl stuck with him nobly and Ben tried presenting her as "The Girl in the Bath of Fire!" in which strips of orange tissue paper were blown across her naked body by an electric fan and as "Estelle in the Well" where the girl lay naked at the bottom of a shallow plank "well" and for 25¢ anyone could touch her "to make sure she was real." But they couldn't compete with the Follies show. By the end of the month, Ben and the girl were reduced to eating popcorn and then gulping down large quantities of water to make the popcorn swell and give the effect of a full meal. Every time we opened on a new lot, it was a surprise to see Ben putting up his ragged canvas and still driving stakes, in his polka-dot shirt and ruby cuff links.

Then Ben came through with one of those inspirations that mark genius.

In one of the towns we played, Ben met a young individual whom I'll call Paul. Paul wore his hair long, walked with a mincing gait, and talked in a high falsetto voice. Ben decided to bill him as "Nature's Mistake ... World's Only Genuine Hermaphrodite."

According to Ben's spiel, Paul was half man, half woman ... one side of him being male and the other side female. As a side-show hermaphrodite has to do a strip to be convincing and Paul was technically a man, this would seem to offer quite a problem; but Ben solved it in his usual ingenious fashion.

Ben got a rubber ball and cut it in half. Then he turned one of the halves inside out. There's a little indentation at one end of a rubber ball that, when reversed, closely resembles a nipple. Ben glued this half of the ball to Paul's left side with collodion and touched up the job with grease paint. From a little distance, Paul appeared to have a woman's breast. Paul never appeared completely nude but always worked with a semi-transparent veil draped around him. In the dim light of the tent, the effect was very confusing.

Frisco dropped around to see Paul on opening night. The big man stood leaning on his silver-headed cane, slowly revolving a cigar in his mouth while Paul explained to the crowd that he had been married twice, once to a man and once to a woman. "In my role of a man, I fathered a little son and I have also given birth to a baby girl," Paul explained in his lisping voice. "I have been examined by doctors in both Europe and America and they have been completely baffled by my strange condition."

After the show, I asked Frisco how he liked Paul. Frisco revolved his cigar several times before answering.

"I ain't got much respect for the standards of the public, but they're never going to stand for it," was his verdict.

But Frisco was wrong. Paul was an enormous success. Before the season was over, Frisco tried to hire Paul to join his Follies but Paul refused. "I positively won't leave Ben," he lisped indignantly. "It was Ben who gave me the chance to make something of myself."

Ben's girl still continued to work the swordbox although she was a secondary attraction compared to Paul. Ben made up a new aftercatch ... a photograph of the girl fully clothed and smiling sweetly. It wasn't until you looked twice at the picture that you suddenly realized that she had her skirts pulled up above her waist and was wearing no underwear.

When the show closed in the autumn, I lost track of Ben and we didn't meet for several years. Then I ran into him on Broadway. Ben had become a theatrical producer and was doing very well. He'd married the girl in the swordbox and Ben showed me a picture of their little girl, a pretty child of five or six.

I nearly fell flat on the sidewalk when I saw the picture. The child had her skirt hitched up in exactly the pose of her mother on the aftercatch.

"Good Lord, you don't sell this, do you?" I demanded.

"Oh no!" said Ben, looking at the picture affectionately. "Her ma and me had it made to remind us of the good old days when we was working under canvas and I got my start in show business."