Interview with a Carny
June 2005 Lafayette, Louisiana
Dege: What inspired you to become a carnival worker?
Carny: I was broke…homeless.
Dege: Where were you living at the time?
Carny: Fort Wayne, Indiana
Dege: You guys are kind of shifty. Do carneys do a lot of drugs?
Carny: I’m not at liberty to say.
Dege: Come on, man.
Carny: Well, some carnys do. Some don’t.
Dege: I’d heard they like crank?
Carny: There’s some of that. You know, weed, coke, crank.
Dege: Give me some carny lingo. Slang. What do ya’ll call each other?
Carny: You’ve got your Ride Jockeys. They run the rides. And you’ve got your Jointees. They operate the games and booths.
Dege: Anything else?
Carny: And you got your Sticks—the guys the walk around, carrying stuff on a stick.
Dege: That guy’s called a “Stick?”
Carny: Yeh.
Dege: I love all that! That’s cool. Each type of work environment has its own slang. What’s a Shark?
Carny: A Shark is a guy who preys on a Mark and runs a rigged game. A Mark is any old town person…or a townie.
Dege: Are all the games rigged?
Carny: No.
Dege: What percentage of the games are rigged?
Carny: Nah, now you see, I can’t talk about all that.
Dege: Come on, man. It’s anonymous. Nobody’s going to come hunt you down. Nobody’s gonna read this shit.
Carny: The Flat Stores are usually the ones that are rigged.
Dege: Which ones are the Flat Stores? What is that?
Carny: The Coke bottle games. And the stuff where you’ve got to throw a football for yards. You cannot win…unless it’s something on the cheap. Under $5. Anything with numbers.
Dege: What about the thing where you shoot the squirt guns in the balloons?
Carny: That’s called a Hanky-Pank. You don’t win much on that…nothing of value.
Dege: You see? Hanky-Pank! You’re holding out on me with these cool slang terms. What about these games where you hook something or stand up a bottle?
Carny: That’s called an Alibi Joint.
Dege: Badass name. What’s it mean?
Carny: That’s where you’ve got to do something just right with all these rules or you don’t win. There’s always an excuse why the customer didn’t win it right…that’s why they call it an Alibi Joint—the Jointee's always got a reason. Hand tossed or whatever, you can’t win.
Dege: What other games are rigged?
Carny: There are no rigged games anymore. State laws. They’ve got people that check all that now.
Dege: Bullshit! Well…let me rephrase. In the old days, what’s some other game-stuff that was rigged?
Carny: Bushel Baskets. Pull-em-Up Coke. Anything with a guy standing in there with nothing in it…just a big old Spoof Doll…anything to win money.
Dege: Bushel Baskets?
Carny: Anything where you put or throw stuff in basket.
Dege: What was the second one?
Carny: Pull-em-Up Coke?
Dege: Yeh, what’s that?
Carny: They’ve got a 6 ½ once Coke bottle, sitting there…and you’ve got to stand it up with a hook.
Dege: That’s rigged?
Carny: Yeh, one side’s heavier than the other. They can push it up all they want, but it’ll never stand up. It’ll always fall to the side.
Dege: Shifty! Very crafty. Are most Carnys pretty shifty in general or is that just a stereotype I’m riffing on?
Carny: In the old days.
Dege: Do they rip each other off and stuff?
Carny: In the old days.
Dege: How old is the “old days?”
Carny: It used to be that the Ride Jockeys wouldn’t get along with the Jointees. They’d have little wars. Fight among each other.
