The ad read “Golden Wheel Amusements will be hiring Game Operators and Food Servers. Come to the Tanana Valley State Fairgrounds at Noon Monday. Bring a driver’s license.” It sounded good. Eight days of work, plenty of overtime, free admission to the state fair; so I was there, standing in the sawdust, a few minutes after noon on Monday. The applicants formed a crowd around the water races booth where a man and a woman stood sizing us up. The man was short, and because of his wad of chew, he moved only one side of his mouth as he talked. He talked only to her. The woman’s brown permed hair was pulled into a ponytail. Everything about her seemed normal, until she opened her mouth. Her voice, like a badly played trumpet, carried all the way across the midway. Their eyes searched the crowd. The woman would lean down; the man would mumble something. Then she would point to one of us, say “You,” signifying that person was chosen. The chosen formed another group in front of the dart game. “You.” The booth looked old without its under-inflated balloons tacked to the back wall, as if someone had stolen its soul. “You.” “You.” She picked them like flies out of pudding.
She finished without pointing to me. They told us to line up and leave our names and phone numbers. We would be alternates. If I didn’t get the job, I wouldn’t have money for food. I had to think of something. I listened to the people ahead of me. I watched the woman’s fingers as her pen scratched the names into the pages of a dirty notepad. I watched the man watch her. She asked each person, “Name?” Some mumbling in response. “Number?” More mumbling. I decided not mumbling was my only chance. When I got to the front I said, “Nicole,” before she could ask. She leaned to the crooked mouthed man and whispered something. They looked at me again. More whispering. I heard, “. . . this one’s very enigmatic.” I think she meant charismatic. The man nodded. She said, “You, go stand over there.” I joined the chosen at the dart booth.
They finished with the unlucky alternates and came to the booth. Standing on the carpeted counter, The man pulled out boxes of T-shirts and threw two overused pilly red ones at each of us while the woman talked. The woman told us these were our uniforms and that the cost would be taken out of our paychecks if we didn’t return them. They issued us short aprons to hold money and change. The woman tied one around her waist. Each one had three pockets stitched on the front. She slapped her hand on the pocket on the left side. “This pocket’s for change.” Then the right. “This one’s for bills” Then the middle. “This one’s for your stuff–lipstick, crap like that. Don’t keep that in your pants pocket. If I see you reach into your pants pocket while you’re on shift, you’re fired.” The man walked away as she talked, his feet kicking up tiny clouds of sawdust. He spit as he turned the corner around one of the trailers.
The woman’s name was Jackie, the man Pete, a husband and wife team running the games. Pete never spoke directly to us, so Jackie gave us the dress code. “Shorts are OK as long as I don’t see no crack or no ass. Anything but crack and ass. Wear your T-shirt every day you work and don’t come here stinking.” Pete returned with a group of men. They looked us over and assigned us each to different games. Each one of them was the supervisor at one booth. I was taken by the Rainbow Coin Toss. Mike was in charge. He was tall and skinny, with a ponytail tied at the back of his neck. “This will be easy,” he said, “Being a carney is the best job.” He had been traveling with the carnival as it moved around the state and intended to go to the big fair in Palmer. “Palmer’s where the money is.” He told me to come back early on Friday, opening day.
*****
Rainbow Coin Toss stood in the center of the games midway. Part tent, part plywood. Its thick green dust-coated vinyl roof looked like the cap of a mushroom. The game worked this way: customers approached; I changed their sweaty dollars into quarters; they threw the quarters onto a board in the center, trying to make them land on one of the colors on the small painted rainbows; if they were lucky, they won a prize. When we started there were four game operators, one for each corner of the booth. We moved through the narrow aisle between the game board and the low countertops that kept the customers from getting too close as they threw money. In the center of the booth was the highly polished table. We kept it waxed with Pledge, so the money would slide easily into the slots on the sides. When that table was too packed with quarters, we would sweep them into these gaps. They were gone then, protected by the padlocks on each corner, waiting for the big boss to count them with her greasy fingers in the trailer at night.
My first day Jackie gave me some instructions, using a passing customer as an example. “Come on, mamm, give it a try. You could win. If you don’t try, you won’t know.” Her voice was girlish and pleading. Her eyes were big, as if a parade of hundred dollar bills was passing by. Mike took a quarter out of his apron and put it on the blue ring of the rainbow. He had me look. It did fit, but so tightly, you had to squint to make sure your eyes weren’t fooling you. He told me never to show a customer this. They might become too discouraged. Mike told me Jackie’s mother owned the fair. She was an obese mean looking woman who rarely left the trailer that served as an office. She sat behind plexi-glass in the sun and counted out cash when we came for our paychecks at the end of the week. Only once during my time there did I see her walk through the midway. Operators warned each other as she made her way across. “The big boss is coming.” Jackie and Pete walked beside her nervously. “The big boss, look out.” We all called out to customers whether they were around or not. The midway wasn’t quiet until they turned the corner by the “Guesser’s” booth.
Mike told me that Jackie and Pete were experts at running the games. Pete could win at any game on the midway. He could hook a plastic circle around the top of a coke bottle and stand it upright on a sloped wood base. He could get the softballs to stay in the baskets, despite the springs mounted underneath the bottoms. He could pop and under inflated balloon with a dull dart. Pete was good. He would stop at the booths when there was a crowd around and win. Pete made it look easy. Mike explained that the money these people lost didn’t matter to them. Our clientele’s average age was eight. He told me that little kids cared the least, and that I should try to clean them out, so they didn’t spend it all on candy and puke later. Playing our game never made anyone sick.
*****
Each Rainbow was a half-circle and had four colored stripes separated by thick black lines, each color corresponding to a different size of prize. Red, the outer part of the curve, was the widest band. Hitting it you won a cheap mouse. Hitting yellow, you got a fluorescent butterfly, or, as I was forced to call it by the management, a flutterby. If your quarter landed on green, you got a blue dog with tufts of polyester fur on its ankles and head. If you hit the blue spot, without touching any of the black lines around it–scarcely enough room for a quarter–you won the “choice” prize, a big shaggy white teddy bear with the kind of acrylic fur that would leave it bald in a few months. The bear’s front paws were sewn to either side of a metallic pink heart, holding it as if he had ripped from his chest, and was offering it to the potential winners as they passed by. With the exception of the paltry little mice, which we kept hidden under the counter, the prizes swung about five feet above the table on an inverted series of tiers. They hung like obscene bananas, tacked up with curtain hooks. Mike told me, “Be careful to take out the hooks. We don’t want to get sued.”
*****
During the slow mornings, before the afternoon kids, the evening couples on dates, followed by the late night drunks, circled our game in a screaming, quarter-chucking frenzy, Mike and I had time to talk. He gave me reviews, mostly favorable, of novels in which carneys appear as characters. He admired Steinbeck’s portrayal the most. He told me about his summers on the road and the winters he spent in Barrow. He complained about the 95 degree heat, unusual the week of the fair in Fairbanks. He asked me if I was going to write anything about being a carney. “I’ll review it for you once you do.” As the day progressed, we got too busy to talk, and the sun slanted into the games.
Fortunately, we were protected by our tent roof and our location, but the operators in the booths across the midway came in a shade redder in the face each morning from the previous days sunburns. They looked like they were in a perpetual agitated drunken state, stumbling around behind their counters, calling fairgoers in. Occasionally, the operator of the water races sprayed one of the others with one of the water guns attached to his counter. He sprayed women at random, and men only when asked. We hear him all afternoon, “WATER-WATER-WATER-RACES!”
When It was busy, I ran along the lengths of the booth picking up dollars and slapping down quarters. I would press the quarters into the green Astroturf on the counter and move on to the next person waving a dollar. In the morning, my apron hung lopsided around my waist. Fifty dollars in quarters weighed heavily to the left. As I changed money it lightened and my left pocket swelled with bills. After I ran through fifty, I counted the money and gave it to Mike, and he gave me another bag of change. My goal was to shift money from the left to the right as quickly as possible. My commissions were based only on the money I changed; not on the money that landed on the table. I came to resent people who pulled their own quarters out of their pockets, and I asked a friend to come in and get money for her laundry from me.
*****
After two days I learned to see the money through people’s pockets. I learned to yell, “One Hundred Rainbows; four hundred ways to win,” to make my voice charm quarters. Our regulars became apparent. Two little girls, about twelve and eight came by five or six times a day. The older one talked. She told me that their parents stayed in the beer tent and all they had to do was go yell near the fence to get more money. These girls were lucky. They won prizes all the time. They walked around with fuzzy bears, with dogs, and with pocketfuls of little mice. They advertised for us. When they won, the other kids saw and dragged their parents and their parents’ money over to our booth. Mike especially liked the winning girls. He said they were good for business. I liked them because they were friendly and always would spend. When they approached the booth we would bicker over who got to change their money, or we’d try to get them in our corner before the others saw them. When they came up and handed me a ten to turn into quarters, the older one would say, “Hi, remember me,” in a voice far too soft for the fair. I remembered her.
*****
During a rush on the third day, Mike became frantic. We ran out of white bears. Pete rolled his eyes as he dragged a carton of ugly pink elephants toward our booth. Mike started sticking hooks in them and hanging them on the top tier of the display. “You’re giving away too many prizes. Those should’ve lasted the whole fair,” Jackie screamed in Mike’s face. She pointed at the rest of us, “From now on none of you are allowed to judge big winners. Put a shot glass over the quarter; make everyone else stop throwing and call me or Pete. We’ll judge for you.” Mike shifted his feet in the sawdust. Jackie threatened to shut down the booth and fire us all. Mike pulled a shot glass out of the money box and set it underneath one of the counters. When a quarter landed in the blue we called Pete, who lurked nearby. He climbed on the table, leaned directly above the quarter and squinted. He shook his head. The customers were angry. Pete walked away and left Mike to explain that you had to be able to see blue all the way around the quarter, that it couldn’t touch the black lines at all. I moved to the other side of the booth to get away.
*****
The next morning Mike wasn’t there. Jackie was waiting for me to open the booth. She told me. It’s just you and Mike now. The others won’t be back. I sent Mike off this morning because he stunk. He’ll be back after he gets a shower.” I was alone, but it was slow. I stood on the shady side of the booth and waited. The fifty dollars in quarters pulled my apron. If Mike did stink, it was because he had been working from 9 am – 2 am. It was because he had been sleeping in a tent in the woods near the midway and didn’t know where someone from out of town could get a shower in Fairbanks. I wanted to tell Jackie this, but she wouldn’t care. I made change and waited for Mike to come back.
When he did he seemed happy. With only two of us in the booth there would be more commission for both of us. He was glad to have the morning off. He hadn’t been getting much sleep the few hours he spent in his tent each night. He tried, but Father Jim, who operator the ring toss, was next to him. Father Jim was tall, bald, and skinny. He claimed to be a Catholic priest. “I’ve never seen a priest that swore and drank so much,” Mike told me. Father Jim was good. His game made more money than any other. In it, customers had to throw small plastic rings onto a field of tightly packed soda bottles. The rings hardly fit around the bottles and the usually bounced off into the sawdust. Pete would come over and make a ring or two stick when Father Jim’s customers got discouraged. Apparently Father Jim was up all night drunk ranting at no one. Mike hadn’t been able to sleep.
We waited for the afternoon, for hands to throw money. When it got busy we rushed from corner to corner making change. We went through more bags of money than we ever had before. The lower the sun fell, the blacker my fingers became. After twelve hours, they shone with a thick layer of grime, so black, it looked silver. At 1 am, when I left Mike tying down the vinyl sides of the booth, I stopped in the bathroom to wash my hands. With two of us there was no time for breaks for cleaning up or eating. The soap left gray streaks in the basin.
*****
On the fourth day my voice, notorious for its frequent laryngitis, faded in my throat. Jackie gave me shit about not yelling enough, but she couldn’t complain too much; after the first three days, when the totals were added, it was clear that I was changing more money than anyone else in the booth. I was their top seller, so she held her reprimand at a tease. She stood outside the booth with a plate of curly fries in her left hand, catsup piled on the side, and explained why I wasn’t getting as many breaks as Mike. I was making a lot of money for them. “You’re commission is going to be big,” she said, “Keep talking. Drink some water.” She shoved a curly fry into her mouth, and then offered me one. Looking down at my filthy hands, I declined. The next morning I came in with my two shirts folded over my arm and quit. I whispered a good-bye to Mike from the outside of the counter. He understood and didn’t seem too sad to see me go. I imagine he was thinking of quarters.
A slightly altered version of this essay appeared in We Alaskans, the now disappeared Anchorage Daily News Sunday supplement.
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