Carny

I woke up screaming and kicking, catching the ride boy in the ribs with the toe of my boot (which I had not bothered to take off), and when the toe of the boot struck him just below the armpit, he screamed, too, and that caused the lot lady he was rolled in the blanket with to scream--and there the three of us were, thrashing about in my Dodge van, driven stark raving mad on a crash from Biphetamine 20s (a wonderfully deadly little capsule that, taken in sufficient quantities, will make you bigger than anybody you know for at least 96 hours running) and driven mad, too, by the screaming siren that woke us up to start with. It was the middle of the night--or, more accurately, the middle of the morning, about four a.m.--and the electronic system set to catch burglars and tire thieves had tripped, but I--addled and nine tenths stunned from too long on the road with a gambler, chasing carnivals across half a dozen states--I didn't know it was my siren or that I was in my van or who I was with or why I was where I was.

But as soon as I opened the side door and saw the black Ferris wheel and the tents standing outlined against the sky, I calmed down enough to get the keys out of my pocket. I couldn't find the right key to turn off the alarm, though, and all the while the siren was screaming and the ride boy, who was about 50 years old, had come out of the van naked from the waist down with his lot lady, who looked like she might have been 15, hanging on his back.

"What the hell?" the ride boy kept shouting at me. "What the hell?"

"Alarm!" I kept shouting back. "Alarm." It was all I could get my mouth to say as I fought with the keys.

Lights were coming on in trailers all around us and out of the corner of my eye I saw the Fat Lady from the ten-in-one show standing beside the little wheeled box that her manager used to haul her from carnival to carnival behind his old Studebaker. She was so big that her back was at least a foot deep in fat. By the time I got the key in the switch and turned the alarm off, the Midget had appeared, along with several men who had apparently been gambling in the G-top. Unfortunately, the sheriff's deputy, red-faced and pissed off, had arrived, too. He pushed his flat-brimmed hat back on his head and looked at the van and then at the freaks from the ten-in-one show and then at me.

"You want to take you driver's license out of you billfold and show it to me?" he said.

"My what?" I said.

"You want to git on back in there and put you britches on?" he said to the ride boy. The ride boy didn't move, but the lot lady, who was a local and in some danger, maybe, of being recognized by the cop, turned and got into the van.

He had a flashlight on my license now and without looking up, he said, "You want to tell me how come you got that sireen?"

"Look," I said, pointing. "There's a goddamn air jack." The sight of that jack slipped under the front end of my van made me mad enough to eat a rock.

But the deputy sheriff refused to look. He said, "Only you fire, law-enforcement and you rescue veehicles allowed to have a sireen."

The carny people had closed in around us now. The cop flashed his light once a them, but when the light fell upon the illustrated face of the Tattooed Man, he looked immediately back at the license.

"You want to--"

But I cut him off and said that two months earlier some malevolent son of a bitch had jacked up my van and taken the wheels. I'd come out of the house one morning and found it up on concrete blocks. So I had the doors and hood wired and had a mercury tilt switch rigged to the chassis. If anyone tried to jack it up, a siren went off. While I talked about the tilt switch and the rigged hood and doors, his face drew together on itself. He had never heard of such a thing and it obviously upset him.

"You want to come on down to the station with me?" he said.

"But what for?" I was getting a little hysterical now. "What about the jack? What about the fucking jack?"

He glanced briefly at Big Bertha where she loomed enormous in the slanting light from a trailer. "You want to watch you language in front of--"

"Hello, Jackson."

We all turned and there was Charlie Luck, sometimes called Chuck and sometimes Luck and sometimes Chuckaluck and sometimes many other things.

"This man here's got a sireen, Charlie. I think it might be illegal."

Charlie bit his lip shook his head in disgust. "Has he still got that? I told you, boy, to git rid of that goddamn siren." He had, of course, told me no such thing.

Charlie was beautiful in a brown suit and soft brown cap and square-toed brown shoes. There was no flash to him at all. Everything he was wearing was very muted and very expensive. He came over and put his arm on the cop's shoulder. "Officer Jackson," he said in just about the most pleasant voice you've ever heard, "could I talk to you over here for a moment?"

They turned away from us and immediately Big Bertha was struggling up the steps into her little wheeled box. The ride boy got back into the van with his lot lady, mooning us all as he went. The trouble was over. Everybody knew everything was fine, now that Charlie Luck was here. I stood watching, admiring the earnest, head-to-head talk he was having with Officer Jackson, who was nodding now, agreeing for all he was worth with whatever Charlie Luck was saying.

My feeling for Charlie Luck went far beyond admiration. I loved him. He was a hero. Some people have only one or two heroes; I have hundreds. Sometimes I meet six or seven heroes in a single day. Charlie Luck was a great man who just happened to be a gambler, in the same way that Bear Bryant is a great man who just happens to be a football coach. Bryant could have stumbled into a brokerage house when he was 20 and owned Wall Street by now. Instead, he happened into football. Same with Charlie Luck. Somebody showed him a game when he was 16 and he never got over it. He became perfect of his kind. The perfect carny. The perfect hustler.

Charlie Luck has never registered for the draft. He's never paid any income tax. Officially, he does not exit. Or, said another way, he exists in so many different forms, with so many different faces, that there is no way to contain him. He knows a place in Mississippi where he can mail away for an automobile tag that is not registered. If somebody takes his number, it can't be traced. And even if it could be traced, it would be traced to an alias.

To my knowledge, Charlie Luck has six identities, complete with phony Social Security cards and driver's licenses, even passports. He has six and he's contemplating more. He's very imaginative with his life. With his past. Sometimes he's from Texas. Other days, from Maine. I sometimes wonder if he knows where he's from or who he is. He's probably forgotten.

The sheriff's deputy turned and, without looking at me once, walked to his car. Charlie Luck came over to where I was. He watched me for a moment, a little half-smile showing broken teeth.

"A siren?" he said. "Well, what do you know about that? I heard the thing over in the G-top. Thought it was a fire truck. Thought maybe something was burning up."

"What did you say to the cop?"

He shrugged. "One thing and another. I told him I'd shut you down, take your siren away."

"You wouldn't do that."

"Of course not." He pointed to the open door, where the ride boy was locked with the lot lady. His mouth suddenly looked like he tasted something rotten. "I told you about letting those things use your van."

"She came up and he didn't have anyplace. I couldn't think of a way to turn him down."

"You better start finding a way or you'll queer everything." He started to walk away but then stopped. "Hang on to that jack. We'll send it into town sometimes and sell it."

I got back into the van and listened to the snores of the ride boy and the cotton-candy wind-breakings of the lot lady. Charlie Luck was disappointed in me for letting the ride boy sleep in my van, because the workers, the guys who up and down the rides and operate them, are at the very bottom of a well-defined carny social structure. A lot lady is a carnival groupie. She is given to indiscriminately balling the greasy wired men and boys who spend their lives half-buried in machinery. It was definitely uncool of me to associate with them. And inasmuch as I was traveling as Charlie Luck's brothers, it was even worse.

Charlie had been reluctant--very reluctant--to let me in with him to start with. But he owed me. Back in November, I had managed to persuade a cowboy down in a place near Yeehaw Junction, Florida, which is great cattle country and where they have one of the last great cowboy bars, not to clean out one of Charlie Luck's ears with the heel of his boot. Charlie had been grateful ever since. That day in Florida, he bought me a beer after the cowboy left and we went to a back booth, where he watched me drink it and I watched him bleed.

"Name's Floyd Titler," he said. "Friends--and you definitely a friend--friends call me Short Arm."

"Harry Crews is mine." We shook hands across the table.

"Son of a bitch nearly killed me." he said, dabbing at an eye that was rapidly closing with a handkerchief he'd just soaked in a draught.

"I never saw anybody do that," I said, pointing to the handkerchief.

"You just have to be careful none of the alcohol gets in your eyes. Otherwise, it's great for the swelling."

I finally got around to asking what he was doing in Florida, because nobody is from Florida, and he said he wintered down there and worked games in a carnival up North in the summer.

"You work hanky-panks or alibis or flats?" I said.

He stopped with the handkerchief. "You with it?" he said.

"A sort of first-of-May," I said. "I ran with a carnival a little about twenty years ago."

To a carny, you are said to be "with it" if you have been on the road with a carnival for years and run your particular hustle well enough to be successful at it. They call anyone who's been with a carnival for only a short time a first-of-May. I wanted to talk to him about his game. He didn't want to talk. Not about that. But it was easy enough to find out that he ran a flat joint, also called a flat store or sometimes a grind store or simply a flat.

"I've seen most of them," I said.

"Good," he said. "That's good." He went back to working on his eye.

The more I talked with him, the more I wanted to get back with a carnival. I thought if I did it right, I might get him to let me travel with him some the following summer. But I made the mistake of telling him I was a writer. I suppose I would have had to tell him sooner or later, anyway.

(continued on page 195)Carny(continued from page 98)

"That'd burn down my proposition," he said.

Nobody has a job in a carnival; he has a proposition.

"I've never blown anybody's cover. Never."

"It'd be dull, anyway," he said.

"No such thing as a dull subject. Only dull writers. Think about it, will you?"

"I'll think about it."

I figured I might as well remind him he owed me. That's the way I am. "You could still be over there on the floor with that cowboy walking around on your face."

It took a little doing, but he finally let me go with him for a while. I particularly wanted to see the gamblers one more time on the circuit and I knew I had to do it soon or they would be gone forever. Twenty years ago, practically every carnival had flat stores. But the flats are not welcome in very many carnivals today. Of the more than 800 carnivals that work this country, probably fewer than 50 still have flat joints. Ten years from now, I don't believe there will be any at all.

They are condemned because of the heat they generate. If a flat is allowed, as the carnies say, to work strong, there will be fistfights, stabbings and maybe even a shooting or two in a season, all direct results of the flat-store operation. Every carnival has a patch, who does just what the word says. He patches up things. He is the fixer, making right whatever beefs come down. Generally, flats keep the patch very busy.

Perhaps unique in the history of carnivals, Charlie Luck--a flattie himself--was also the patch. He was able to operate as the patch only because he usually did not actively run a joint. Rather, he had two agents who worked for him in flat stores he independently booked with the owner of the carnival. So far, I'd traveled 600 miles with him and I'd seen no real violence in his flats--some very pissed-off people but no violence. And now, this was to be the last weekend before I went back to Florida. We'd just made a circus jump--tearing down and moving and setting up in less than a single day. It took me a long time to get back to sleep, because the ride boy had dropped another capsule, strapped on the lot lady and was noisily working out at the other end of the van.

They did, however, finally rock me to sleep and I didn't wake up until late afternoon. The carnival Charlie Luck was with worked nothing but still dates, which is to say it never joined any fairs where they have contests for the best bull or the best cooking or the biggest pumpkin. Fair dates work all day. Still dates never have much business until late afternoon and night. I changed my clothes in the van and went out onto the midway.

The music on the Ferris wheel and at the Octopus had already cranked up. The smell of popcorn and cotton candy and caramel apples was heavy on the air. A few marks from the town had showed up with their kids. Several fat, clucking mothers were herding a group of retarded children down the midway like so many ducks. I didn't know where Charlie was. He had a trailer, but he usually slept in a motel. I walked over to get a corn dog and while I was waiting for it, I listened to two ride boys, both of them in their early 20s, talk about shooting up. They were as dirty as they could get and as they talked, their teeth showed broken and yellow in their mouths. All the workers on carnivals have European teeth. Anybody with all his teeth is suspect. Several locals were standing about eating corn dogs, but the two ride boys went right ahead discussing needles and the downers they had melted and shot up. They were speaking Carny, a language I can speak imperfectly if I do it very slowly. When I hear it spoken rapidly, I can understand it just well enough to know what the subject of discussion is without knowing exactly what is being said.

The marks stared at the two boys babbling on in this strange language full of Zs and Ss. God knows what the marks thought they were speaking. In Carny, the word beer becomes bee-a-zeer and the sentence Beer is good becomes Bee-a-zeer ee-a-zay gee-a-zood. It is not too difficult as long as you are speaking in mono-syllables. But when you use a polysyllabic word, each syllable becomes a kind of word in itself. The word mention would be spoken mee-a-zen shee-a-zun.

It is a language unique to carnivals, with no roots anywhere else, so far as I know. And it does what it is supposed to do very effectively by creating a barrier between carnies and outsiders. Above everything else, the carny world is a self-contained society with its own social order and its own taboos and morality. At the heart of that morality is the imperative against telling outsiders the secrets of the carnival. Actually, it goes beyond that. There is an imperative against telling outsiders the truth about anything. That was what made being there with Charlie Luck as risky as it was. Either one of us could have been severely spoken to if what we were doing had got out.

I ate my corn dog as I walked down past the Octopus and the Zipper and the Sky Wheel and past the House of Mirrors. I was on my way for a quick look at the ten-in-one, which I had seen every day I'd traveled with Charlie Luck. Ten-in-one is the carny name for a freak show, possibly because there are often ten attractions under one tent. This was a good one but not a great one.

I was especially fond of the Fat Lady and her friends there under the tent. I think I know why, and I know I know when I started loving freaks.

Almost 20 years ago, when I had just gotten out of the Marine Corps, I woke up one day in an Airstream trailer in Atlanta, Georgia. The trailer was owned by a man and his wife. They were freaks. I was a caller for the show. My call was not particularly good, but it was good enough to get the job and to keep it. And that was all it was to me, a job, something to do. The second week I had the job, I was able to rent a place to sleep in the Airstream from the freak man and his freak wife. I woke up that morning in Atlanta looking at both of them where they stood at the other end of the trailer in the kitchen. They stood perfectly still in the dim, yellow light, their backs to each other. I could not see their faces, but I was close enough to hear them clearly when they spoke.

"What's for supper, darling?" he said.

"Franks and beans, with a nice little salad," she said.

"I'll try to be in early," he said.

And then they turned to each other under the yellow light. The lady had a beard not quite as thick as my own but three inches long and very black. The man's face had a harelip. His face, not his mouth. His face was divided so that the top of his nose forked. His eyes were positioned almost on the sides of his head and in the middle was a third eye that was not really an eye at all but a kind of false lid over a round indentation that saw nothing. It was enough, though, to make you taste bile in your throat and cause a cold fear to start in your heart.

They kissed. Their lips brushed briefly and I heard them murmur to each other and he was gone through the door. And I, lying at the back of the trailer, was never the same again.

I have never stopped remembering that, as wondrous and special as those two people were, they were only talking about and looking forward to and needing precisely what all of the rest of us talk about and look forward to and need. He might have been any husband going to any job anywhere. He just happened to have that divided face. That is not a very startling revelation, I know, but it is one most of us resist because we have that word normal and we can say we are normal because a psychological, sexual or even spiritual abnormality can--with a little luck--be safely hidden from the rest of the world. But if you are less than three feet tall, you have to deal with that fact every second of every day of your life. And everyone witnesses your effort. You go into a bar and you can't get up onto a stool. You whistle down a taxi and you can't open the door. If you're a lady with a beard, every face you meet is a mirror to give you back the disgust and horror and unreasonableness of your predicament. No matter which corner you turn on which street in which city of the world, you can expect to meet that mirror.

And I suppose I have never been able to forgive myself the grotesqueries and aberrations I am able to hide with such impunity in my own life.

Inside the tent, the Fat Lady was already up on her platform, ready for the day's business. She had a pasteboard box under her chair. The box was filled with cinnamon buns that her manager bought for her. She could get through about ten pounds of cinnamon buns a day. Her manager said he'd owned her--that was his phrase, owned her--for three years and in that time he had never seen her eat any meat. She stuck, he said, pretty much to pastries.

"How is it today, Bertha?"

She nodded to me, put the last of a cinnamon bun into her mouth and reached for another one. Her little eyes deep in her face were very bright and quick as a bird's.

"You seen Charlie Luck?" I said. I wasn't really looking for him. I just wanted to talk a little to Bertha.

"He was here with one-eyed Petey," she said. "You want one of these?"

"Thanks, but I just had a corn dog."

"Luck's probably back in the G-top, cutting up jack pots."

"Probably," I said.

Cutting up jack pots is what carnies call it when they get together and tell one another about their experiences, mostly lies. The Tattooed Man came in with the Midget and the Midget's mother. The Midget's mother was nearly as tall as I was and very thin. She always looked inexpressibly sad. During the show, she wandered among the marks, selling postcards with a picture of her tiny son on them for a quarter apiece. The Tattooed Man had intricate designs in his ears. Little flowers grew on his nose and disappeared right up his nostrils. He was a miracle of color.

"I surely do admire your illustrations," I said.

"How come I got 'm," he said. He was from Mississippi and had a good grit voice.

"How many dollars' worth you reckon you got?"

"Wouldn't start to know. For years all I'd do was put ever nickel I could lay hand to for pictures."

He had eyelashes and an eyelid tattooed around his asshole. It looked just like a kind of bloodshot eye and he could make it wink. For two dollars over and above the regular price of admission to the ten-in-one show, you could go behind a little curtain and he'd do it for you. Carnies have nothing but a deep, abiding contempt for marks and what they think of as the straight world, and nowhere is that contempt more vividly expressed than in the Tattooed Man's response when I asked him why he had the eye put in there.

"Making them bastards pay two dollars to look up my asshole gives me more real pleasure than anything else I've ever done."

Charlie Luck came in looking for me and handed me five dollars. "I sent the jack into town. That's your half."

"Charlie, that was a fifty-dollar jack."

"The guy took it said he got ten."

"And you believed him?"

He took another five out of his pocket and handed it to me. "What the hell, take it all. He was probably lying and, besides, it was your van. You oughtta have it all."

Charlie dearly loved a hustle, any hustle, on anybody. "Come on out here; I want to see you a minute."

As we were leaving, Bertha called around a mouthful of cinnamon bun, "That's a wonderful siren; I liked it a lot."

"Thank you, Bertha," I said. "That's sweet of you to say."

Out on the midway, Charlie Luck said, "You thought any more about what I asked you?"

"Charlie," I said, "I told you already."

"Look what I'm doing for you and you can't even do this little thing for me."

"It's not a little thing. I'm liable to get my head handed to me."

"You not working the show, you just traveling with me. You don't know anybody on this show. It'll be all right. Nobody's going to mind."

"You don't know that."

"I'm telling you I do know that. It'll be all right. You're leaving tomorrow, anyway. And I gotta know. I gotta have a firsthand, detailed report."

"Report, for Christ's sake!"

"I gotta know."

Charlie Luck's problem was this. He was nailing this lady named Rose who worked in the girlie show. Like the Tattooed Man, Rose had a specialty act that the marks could see by paying extra. Rose also had a husband. A large, mean, greasy husband who worked on the Ferris wheel. Charlie Luck wanted to know what she did in her specialty act. She wouldn't tell him. He couldn't go see for himself, because one of the strongest taboos in the carnival world is against carnies' going to the girlie show. Most of the girls have carnies for husbands and the feeling is that it is all right to show your wife to the marks but fundamentally wrong to show her to another carny, one of your own world.

"Hey, come in here and let me get my fortune told," I said.

We were passing a gypsy fortuneteller and I was reminded of the gypsies and their wagons passing through Georgia when I was a boy. But mostly I was just trying to get Charlie Luck to stop thinking about Rose and her specialty act.

"You let that raghead touch your hand and you never come on to my game again."

"I just wanted my fortune--"

"Ragheads can't tell time, much less fortunes."

Carnies are not the most liberal people in the world. A few blacks are tolerated as laborers, and maybe an occasional gypsy to run a mitt camp, or fortune telling booth, but not too long ago, it wasn't unusual to see advertisements in Amusement Business, the weekly newspaper devoted in part to carnivals, that said plainly No Ragheads.

"Look," said Charlie Luck. "You think you seen my proposition. But you haven't seen me take any real money off anybody. Go bring this thing back for me and I'll run the game tonight. I'll run it strong."

"You don't have to run it strong." I said.

"I will, though, if you'll do this thing."

Charlie got bent bad over women. I found out later that the cowboy was on him in the bar in Yeehaw Junction over a woman, although I never found out precisely what it was about. But Charlie was, to use the kindest word, kinky when it came to ladies. Everybody I talked to said the same thing about him. I don't know why this was true, or how long it had been true of him. and I didn't try to find out. It wasn't any of my business, unless he wanted to tell me, and he didn't seem to. The girlie show had only joined us at the date preceding the circus jump. I was with Charlie Luck the first time he saw Rose in the G-top. He had known her now a total of four days, but he reminded me of the way I'd been when I fell totally and deeply in love the first time, at the age of 13. He'd honed for Rose from the first second he saw her and had managed to nail her two hours later in my van. He'd asked me for the van because he was afraid to take her to his trailer.

She came out of the van first and left. Then he came out--face radiant under his soft brown cap--and kept saying to me, "Did you see her? Did you?"

"I saw her, Charlie."

"Was she beautiful? God, I practically almost never seen anything like her in the world."

"Right," I said.

She looked about 48 years old, thick in thigh and hip, but had slender, almost skinny calves. The left calf was badly varicosed. Her face was a buttery mask of make-up. I couldn't figure what the hell she had done in there to him to string him out so bad. When I finally got into the van to drive to town, it smelled as though most of the salmon of the world had been slowly tortured to death all over my red-and-black carpeting.

"All right," I said finally, as we walked down the midway. "I'll catch Rose's bit for you, if you want me to. But I want you to remember one thing. Afterward, I don't want any conversation about it. You know, they used to cut off the heads of the guys who brought bad news to the king."

"Now, what the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," I said. "It means nothing."

"I'll catch you after the eight-o'clock show," he said. "I gotta go settle a beef about a fifty-cent piece of slum. The shit I put up with."

Slum is what carnies call the cheap merchandise they give out in the little booths that line the midway. For that reason, hanky-panks and alibis are also called slum joints. Hanky-panks are simple games of skill such as throwing darts at balloons. Alibis are games in which the agent is continually making alibis about why you did not win. Also, alibis--unlike hanky-panks--are liable to be gaffed, or rigged, and they are also liable to have a stick who is said to work the gaff. A stick is a guy who pretends to be a mark and by his presence induces the towns-people to play.

I strolled down the midway and watched it all come down. A stick who was working the gaff at a game called six cat was winning tons of slum. Six cat is an alibi in which the object is to knock down two cats at once with a ball. The stick quit playing as soon as he had attracted half a dozen marks. The agent was singing his song, alibiing his ass off:

"Hey, woweee! Look at that! That was just a little too high! A hair! No more 'n a hair an' you woulda won! Too much left. Bring it down, bring it down and win it for the lady."

I watched the mark finally get thrown a piece of plush, in this case a small, slightly soiled cloth giraffe. The poor bastard had paid only $12 for something he could have bought for two and a quarter out in the city. The six cat was gaffed, or fixed, and the agent had done what's called cooling the mark by rewarding him with a prize after he had taken as much money as he thought he could get away with.

Eighty-five million people or thereabouts go to carnivals every year in this country and I do not want to leave the impression that all of them are cheated. Most of them are not. But the particular carnival Charlie Luck was running with is called a rag bag and it means that everything is pretty run-down, greasy and suspect. The man who books the dates and organizes the lot in such an operation will allow anything to come down he thinks the locals will stand for. Few people realize that one person or family almost never owns a carnival. One person will put together a tour--a combination of dates in specific locations--and then invite independent concessionaires to join him. If you look in the publication I mentioned earlier, Amusement Business, a sweet little paper you can subscribe to for $20 a year, you will find such notices as these: "Now booking Bear Pitches, Traveling Duck, can also use Gorilla Show." "Will book two nice Grind Shows. Must be flashy."

The independent concessionaires pay what is known as privilege to work these dates. The privilege is paid to the man responsible for lining up the dates, organizing and dispensing necessary graft and arranging for a patch. It is interesting to notice that the farther South a show goes, the rougher it becomes. There may not be a single girlie show or flat in Pennsylvania, but flatties and girlies both may be playing wide open and woolly in Georgia. Whether it is true or not, it is the consensus among carnies that you can get away with a hell of a lot more in the South than you can in the North.

Carnies can conveniently be divided into front-end people and back-end people. Front-enders are carnies who work games, food and other concessions. The back-enders are concerned with shows: freak shows, gorilla shows, walking-zombie shows and--where I was going now--girlie shows.

The guy out front was making his call, but it wasn't a very good call. His voice was more than tired, it was dead. He rarely looked at the marks who were crowding in front of the raised platform now, and once he stopped in midsentence and picked his nose.

"Come on in, folks. See it all for fifty cents, one half a dollar."

Four middle-aged ladies in spangled briefs and tasseled halters--all of it a little dirty--were working to a Fifties phonograph record about young love. The ladies were very active, jumping about in a sprightly fashion, their eyes glittering from Biphetamine 20s, the speeder far and away the favorite with carnies. From Thursday to Tuesday, whole carny families--men, women and children--ate them like jelly beans. Rose looked right at me but either didn't see me or didn't give a damn, for which I was grateful. I didn't want her paying any attention to me, because I kept thinking of her huge greasy husband out on the Ferris wheel right now splicing cable with his broken teeth.

I paid my half dollar, went inside feeling like a fool and saw the same ladies doing pretty much what they had been doing out front and doing it, if you can believe it, to the same goddamn phonograph record. But before they began, the semicomatose caller pointed out that there would be a second show right after this one to which no one who was female or under 18 would be admitted. Those who were admitted would have to pay three dollars a head. That threw several good old boys into a fit of leg slapping and howling and Hot-damning. They were randy and ready and seemed to know something I did not know. Rose even permitted herself a small smile and a couple of winks to the boys who apparently knew who she was, had maybe seen her show before and were digging hell out of the whole thing.

After the first show was over and they had made us lighter by three dollars, things happened quickly. Peeling the eggs took the longest. But first they added a drummer to the act. Really, a drummer. The ladies had retired behind a rat-colored curtain and out onto the little platform came an old man dressed in an ancient blue suit with a blue cap that at first I thought belonged to the Salvation Army. And it may have. Ligaments stood in his scrawny neck like wire. He sat on a chair and put his bass drum between his legs. The caller started the record we had already heard twice, which, incidentally, was by Frankie Valli, and the old man started pounding on his drum. His false teeth bulged in his old mouth every time he struck it. Never once during the performance did he look up. I know he did not see Rose. I was fascinated that he would not look at her when she came out onto the stage. She was naked except for a halter. I swear. She had her tits cinched up, but there was her old naked beaver and strong, over-the-hill ass. She was carrying six eggs in a little bowl. She carried it just the way a whore would have carried a bowl, except she had eggs in it instead of soap and water. She squatted in front of us--taking us all the way to pink--while she peeled the eggs. When they were peeled, she placed them one by one in her mouth, slobbered on them good and returned them to the dish. Then, still squatting, with Frankie Valli squealing for all he was worth and the old man single-mindedly beating his drum, and several of the good old boys hugging each other, she popped all of the eggs into her pussy and started dancing. She did six high kicks in her dance and each time she kicked, she fired an egg with considerable velocity out into the audience. On a bet with his buddies, a young apprentice madman caught and ate the last two.

I left the tent disappointed, though. I'd seen the act before. Once, many years ago, I knew a lady in New Orleans who could do a dozen. Not a dozen of your grade-A extra-large, to be sure. They were smalls, but a dozen nonetheless.

I found Charlie Luck down in the G-top. A G-top is a tent set up at the back of the lot exclusively for carnival people to socialize with one another. Marks are not allowed there and the carnies' socializing usually comes in the form of gambling games of one kind or another. It is not unusual for a carny to walk into the G-top at the end of the May-to-October season with $20,000 in his pocket and walk out the next morning wondering how he's going to get a dime to call his old mother for a ticket home on the Trailways. Some very heavy cheese changes hands in that tent and I was amazed that the other carnies would sit down to a table with Charlie Luck. He had exceedingly quick hands and more than once he showed me his shortchange proposition. You could open your hand flat and he would count out 90 cents into it. You could watch him do it, but when he finished and you counted your change, you'd be a quarter short. He would press a nickel into your palm and at the same instant take out a quarter he'd just put down. He could count nine one-dollar bills or a five and four ones into your hand and inevitably he would take back over half of it. It's called, among other things, laying the note, and it's a scam usually run off in a department store or a supermarket.

"Down where I come from," I'd said to him once, "we don't sit down to seven card with folks who have fingers like you do."

He looked me dead in the eye and said, "These guys know I would never cheat in the G-top. When we do a little craps or cards back there, they know that's my leisure, my pleasure. Cheating is business. The only place, and I mean the only place I ever steal is when I'm working the joint right out there on the mid-way. I'd be ashamed of myself to do it anywhere else."

Charlie Luck saw me from across the G-top and immediately got up from the table and came to meet me. We walked back out onto the midway. It was dark now and the lot, laid out in a U shape, was jammed with men and women and their children, laughing and eating, their arms loaded with slum. Screaming shouts of pleasure and terror floated down out of the night from the high rides, glittering and spinning there above us.

"Did you see it?" he finally said after we'd walked for a while. "Did you see her do it?"

"Yeah, I saw her do it."

"The specialty act, too?"

"I told you I'd go."

"Then lay it out for me."

I laid it out.

"Eggs? Hard-boiled fucking eggs?"

"Right."

"And she'd kick and fire?" He took out two capsules. "You want one of these?"

"You know I'm a natural wire," I said. "What I need is a drink to calm me down. Let's go by the van before we go to the game."

He swallowed both capsules and made a face, but the face was not from the dope. "Goddamn eggs and goddamn drummer. I'd need a drink, too. I may even have one."

By the time we got to the van, he'd worked himself into a pretty good state over Rose and her specialty act.

"I don't put my dick where hard-boiled eggs've been," he kept saying. "Jesus, a pervert. I'm tainted."

"You ain't tainted man," I said. "You just like you were before. I wish to God somebody could guarantee me my dick wouldn't go nowhere worse than a few boiled eggs. Besides, I don't know what you expected, taking her out of a girlie show."

"How was I to know? I never been in a girlie show once, not once," he said. "Over half my life I'm with a carnival. Never once did I go near a girlie show."

"Didn't you talk to her?" I said. "You should have asked if she ever put anything up in there."

Charlie Luck jerked his cap lower on his ears and stared straight ahead. "You don't ask a lady a thing like that," he said.

He poured a little straight vodka on top of the speed and we walked over to his proposition. The flat was near a punk ride between a glass pitch and a grab joint. The grab joint sold dogs and burgers and a fruit punch called flukum. Charlie Luck let the kid off for the rest of the night and we got behind the counter. Charlie banged things around, positioning his marbles and his board and muttering to himself. He finally quit and stared balefully out at the passing crowd. He made no attempt to draw anybody in. Nobody so much as looked at us.

"You taking it in tomorrow?" he asked.

"I told you," I said. "I got to get back. There's only so much of this that'll do me any good, anyway."

"Maybe I'll go in, too," he said. "There's not but a little more than a week left on the season."

"I've enjoyed it," I said. "We'll cross again. Maybe we can sit in and have a beer with the cowboys."

He smiled. "Maybe." He sighed deeply. Then, "You don't gamble with cripples or ladies or children. I keep them out of my proposition. You beat one of them and you got heat, bad heat. Gamble with a fat guy who looks like he can afford it. The thing you like is if he's dressed up real good, too."

"One thing, Charlie," I said. "I been meaning to say this to you, but I didn't yet. Maybe I shouldn't now. But you don't gamble. You're not a gambler. No offense, Charlie, but you're a thief is what you are."

"Actually," he said, "I'm a gambler who doesn't lose. That's what I like to think I am. I just took the risk out of it."

"No risk, no gamble. No gamble, no gambler. You're a thief."

"Well, sort of. The word doesn't bother me. I only do what they let me do."

The thing you have to know right off is you can't win from a carny gambler unless he wants you to. And he doesn't want you to. Of course, like any other hustler, he may give you a little something so he can take away a lot of something. But that's a long way from winning.

The carny's success in flat joints depends upon having a good call, an expert knowledge of just how far he can push a mark and the certainty that there is larceny in all of us. A good call simply means someone is passing on the midway and you are able to "call" him to you and get him involved with your hustle. A call itself is a hustle. The agent plays the mark off against the clothes he's wearing, or the woman he's with, or his youth, or his old age--in fact, anything that will make him rise to the challenge, which doesn't appear to be much of a challenge to start with. Many times an agent will walk out onto the midway, calling as he goes, and literally grab a mark, take hold of him and lead him over to the proposition. I've known agents who could consistently operate like that and get away with it. Others can't. The moment I touch a guy, he swings on me. He thinks he's being attacked.

Beside me in the store, Charlie Luck had dropped another Biphetamine 20. His eyes were wet as quicksilver and he was mumbling constantly about Rose. Finally, he said to me, "Lay it out for me again. How it was, what she did, the crowd. Six, you said, half a dozen, and none of 'm mashed when she fired 'm out at the marks?"

I laid it out for him again, just as straightforward and with as much detail as I could, even to the smells in the tent, saving nothing.

When I finished, he seemed to think about it for a moment. "All right," he said.

"Don't you think we ought to try to take a little money now, Charlie?"

"OK. Yeah." He turned to watch a middle-aged couple approaching down the midway. He looked back at me. "One thing. Don't call me Charlie Luck anymore."

"What should I call you?"

"Tuna," he said.

"Tuna?"

"Like in fish. Tommy Tuna. A name I always liked. Brings me good things."

"I got it," I said. "OK."

"You got to be careful with names," he said. "Names can be bad for you. Or names can be good for you. You know?"

I didn't know, so I didn't say anything.

"A name can get dirty. Start to rot. Bring you nothing but trouble." He sucked his teeth and sighed. The middle-aged couple had stopped and were looking at us. The lady carried two little pieces of slum, a ceramic duck and a small cloth snake. "I don't think I'll be Charlie Luck anymore."

"You mean for a little while."

"I mean ever."

I loved him for that. He just willed himself to be someone else, submerged as Charlie Luck and came up Tommy Tuna. I knew how easily I did the same thing. My fix is other people's lives. It always has been. As I stood there watching the well-dressed couple, secure in their middle age and permanent in their home, a fantasy started in me, a living thing. I felt my teeth go rotten and broken, my arms fill with badly done, homemade tattoos. I was from some remote place like Alpine. Texas, and I'd joined the carnival when I was 14 and ever since been rootless, no home except the back of a semi carrying a disassembled Octopus, and I lived off people--marks--those two there smiling at me. I suddenly smiled back. They had no way of knowing my secret and utter contempt.

"Tuna," I said quietly, "let me take this."

"Take what?"

"These two here. Let me do it."

"Do it."

"All right, here we go," I called. "Hey! Lookahere! Your game. Yeah! You. Come here. Come here. In here and let me show you the little game. I can tell by the look on you face, big fella. This is your game! A quarter. Nothing but twenty-five cents. Win the little lady this right here. Big panda. Come here! Come on!"

They smile uncertainly at each other. The lady blushes. The guy looks away.

"Hey, you just married? I can see it, I can see how in love you are, how you want this right here for the little lady, right? Come over here."

They've turned now and they're mine. I had thought they might walk on and, in spite of the fact that I've never been a caller who could actually grab anybody, I was ready to vault the counter and take the guy by the arm. The rule is that the mark gets deeper into your hustle with every move he makes toward you. He looks at you. He moves a little nearer. He lets you explain your game. He bets. If you can get him to do that much and don't take everything he's got, or as much of it as you want, you ought to find another business.

"See that bear? See that bear right here? You want it for the lady?" Tommy Tuna keeps his bear nice. An enormous panda under clear cellophane. The bear must be worth $20. "Look, she wants it! Look at her face! A quarter, it's yours for a quarter! OK? Can I show the game to you?"

The lady is blushing and squeezing the guy's arm and pressing into him. And he's already got his quarter out.

"Look, I got marbles and I got a board." I whip the board out and show it to him. The board has little indentations on it. On the bottom of each indentation is a number: a one or a two or a three on up through nine. There's a little chute that leads down to the board. "You need a hundred points to win this game. Right? One hundred points to win that bear. Cost you a quarter. You roll the marbles down the chute, we add up the total. Each total gives a number toward the hundred points you need. Right?"

He's still got his quarter in his hand. Both of them are leaning over the board. He wants to give me the quarter so bad it's hurting him and he's not even heard the game. He just knows he's risking only 25 cents.

"Right? Each total gives a number toward the hundred points you need." I look him in the eye and smile. I take him by the wrist and pull him a little closer. "Here's the kicker. You keep rolling till you get the hundred points you need to win. Without paying another penny." I pause again. He's smiling. She's smiling. I'm smiling. Tommy Tuna's smiling. "Unless . . . unless the total you roll is thirty. If you roll a thirty, the cost of the game doubles, but you keep the points you've earned toward the hundred and roll again."

The lady says, "Do it, honey. Oh, do it."

And here is where much of the carnies' contempt for the mark starts. The guy walks up to my game. He doesn't know the game, has never seen it. He sure as hell doesn't know me. He doesn't see or doesn't care that on the board there are not an equal number of ones, twos, threes, and so on. If he cared to check the board or think about it, he'd see the odds are overwhelming that he'll roll the losing number nearly every time. And each time you roll a 30, though you keep the points you already have, you don't get to count the 30.

He rolls the marbles. As soon as they stop in the slots, I'm taking them out again as fast as I can, palm partially obscuring the board, adding aloud in a stunned, unbelieving voice, "Two and nine, eleven, and six is seventeen and, wow, oh, golly! Nine and nine and nine . . . twenty-seven to the seventeen and . . . that's forty-four big points, almost half of what you need to win that bear for the little lady. This must be your lucky night!"

He had, of course, rolled a 30. He takes the marbles again and I quick-count him to 52. "Hey, this bear's gone tonight. It looks like your night." He's flushed. You'd think he had $5000 on the line. He whips down the marbles, and guess what? He rolled that 30. But he's got 50 cents out almost before I can count the losing number for him. We go again and I take him up to 65. He rolls and loses. The bet's a dollar. Before he knows what's happened, he's looking at an eight-dollar bet and he needs only 22 points to win.

I was just about to give him the marbles and made the mistake of looking at the lady. You'd have thought the guy was losing the mortgage on the house. She was nearly in tears. I hand him the marbles. He rolls a 30, but I count him into 105. Pandemonium. Squeals. Hurrahs. Down comes the bear and off they go. Tommy Tuna took me by the arm and led me to the back of the booth.

"You son of a bitch," he said.

"Yeah, I guess. But don't come down on me too hard. I'll pay you for the bear."

"Not the point. You had the gaff so deep into that fucker, you coulda made him bet his wife."

"It was the lady. Hadn't been for the lady, I could've done it."

"It's all right. You done good, anyway." He smiled toward the front of the booth, where four marks--all men, well fed, well dressed and apparently at the carnival together--were yelling to come on and play the game. They had been drawn to the booth by my loud counting and they'd stayed to see the man easily win the bear.

Tommy Tuna went over to the four marks. He shrugged, looked sadly at his board. "Maybe I'm crazy," he said, "but I feel like a little action." He leaned closer to the marks. "Fuck the bears. Let's bet some money." He went into his pocket and came out with the biggest roll of bills I've ever seen. He showed the roll to the marks. I saw nothing but hundreds. "I'll play you no limit. Just like with the fucking bear, it takes a hundred points to win. The first bet'll cost you a buck. The bets double after that. I'll pay ten to one. Did you get that? Ten to one I'm paying. If you're betting a hundred dollars when you reach the hundred points to win, I'll pay you a thousand."

He said it quickly, in a flat, unemotional voice. They were into it immediately and Tuna quick-counted them to 37 points. There seemed to be no way to lose. All four guys were pooling their money with the intention of splitting the take. But by the time they had accumulated 82 points, they'd lost $255. The next bet was gonna cost them $256. The whole thing had taken about five minutes, but Tuna pointed out they needed only 18 more points to win and, after all, he was giving ten-to-one odds.

"Sumpin' mighty goddamn funny goin' on here," said the biggest and meanest-looking of the four.

"Gee," said Tommy Tuna in a quiet, sad voice. "You fellas do seem to be having a real bad run of luck. I can hardly believe it myself."

They withdrew a few steps to consult and then came back and went for the bet. They rolled a 30. Tommy Tuna scooped up the money. All four of them howled simultaneously as if they'd been stung by wasps. They'd been cleaned out. The big, mean one moved to come over the counter when, as if by magic, Officer Jackson appeared on the midway, only a few feet away.

He came over and said, "You want to tell me why you hollering like this?"

The big one said, "This bastard's running a crooked game, that's why."

"You want to tell me what kind of game?"

He told Officer Jackson what kind of game. He also told him they'd been taken for over $500 in less than ten minutes.

"Gambling?" Officer Jackson could hardly believe it. "That's against the law. It's against the law for everbody here. If it's true, I'll have to lock you up. All of you." Then he turned to the four guys and actually said, "And if I do, and if it's true, he's got your money to bail hisself out with." He paused and looked at each of the four in turn. "You want to tell me what you want to do?"

After the four guys had left, Officer Jackson and Tommy Tuna went over to the corner and had a short, earnest conversation, which I did not hear. Then Officer Jackson left.

Tommy watched the cop disappear down the midway and said in a wondering voice, "You know, I once took twelve thousand dollars off a oilman in Oklahoma. He never said a word about it. A real fine sport."

I said, "Some days chicken salad. Some days chickenshit."