“Yeah. What about letting them off?”
“Exactly the same. Super-slow, stop. Super-slow, stop. Always line up the yellow stripe with the Happy Hound, and you’ll always have a car right at the ramp. You should be able to get ten spins an hour. If the wheel’s loaded each time, that’s over seven hundred customers, which comes to almost a d-note.”
“Which is what, in English?”
“Five hundred.”
I looked at him uncertainly. “I won’t really have to do this, will I? I mean, it’s your ride.”
“It’s Brad Easterbrook’s ride, kiddo. They all are. I’m just another employee, although I’ve been here a few years. I’ll run the hoister most of the time, but not all of the time. And hey, stop sweating. There are carnies where half-drunk bikers covered with tattoos do this, and if they can, you can.”
“If you say so.”
Lane pointed. “Gates’re open and here come the conies, rolling down Joyland Avenue. You’re going to stick with me for the first three rides. Later on you teach the rest of your team, and that includes your Hollywood Girl. Okay?”
It wasn’t even close to okay—I was supposed to send people a hundred and seventy feet in the air after a five-minute tutorial? It was insane.
He gripped my shoulder. “You can do this, Jonesy. So never mind ‘if you say so.’ Tell me it’s okay.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Good boy.” He turned on his radio, now hooked to a speaker high on the Spin’s frame. The Hollies began to sing “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” as Lane took a pair of rawhide gloves from the back pocket of his jeans. “And get you a pair of these—you’re going to need them. Also, you better start learning how to pitch.” He bent down, grabbed a hand-held mike from the ever-present orange crate, put one foot up, and began to work the crowd.
“Hey folks welcome in, time to take a little spin, hurry hurry, summer won’t last forever, take a ride upstairs where the air is rare, this is where the fun begins, step over here and ride the Spin.”
He lowered the mike and gave me a wink. “That’s my pitch, more or less; give me a drink or three and it gets a lot better. You work out your own.”
The first time I ran the Spin by myself, my hands were shaking with terror, but by the end of that first week I was running it like a pro (although Lane said my pitch needed a lot of work). I was also capable of running the Whirly Cups and the Devil Wagons… although ride-jocking the latter came down to little more than pushing the green START button, the red STOP button, and getting the cars untangled when the rubes got them stuck together against the rubber bumpers, which was at least four times during each four-minute ride. Only when you were running the Devil Wagons, you didn’t call them rides; each run was a spree.
I learned the Talk; I learned the geography, both above and below ground; I learned how to run a joint, take over a shy, and award plushies to good-looking points. It took a week or so to get most of it down, and it was two weeks before I started getting comfortable. Wearing the fur, however, I understood by twelve-thirty on my first day, and it was just my luck—good or bad—that Bradley Easterbrook happened to be in Wiggle-Waggle Village at the time, sitting on a bench and eating his usual lunch of bean sprouts and tofu—hardly amusement park chow, but let’s keep in mind that the man’s food-processing system hadn’t been new since the days of bathtub gin and flappers.
After my first impromptu performance as Howie the Happy Hound, I wore the fur a lot. Because I was good at it, you see. And Mr. Easterbrook knew I was good at it. I was wearing it a month or so later, when I met the little girl in the red hat on Joyland Avenue.
That first day was a madhouse, all right. I ran the Carolina Spin with Lane until ten o’clock, then alone for the next ninety minutes while he rushed around the park putting out opening day fires. By then I no longer believed the wheel was going to malfunction and start running out of control, like the merry-go-round in that old Alfred Hitchcock movie. The most terrifying thing was how trusting people were. Not a single dad with kids in tow detoured to my pitch to ask if I knew what I was doing. I didn’t get as many spins as I should have—I was concentrating so hard on that damn yellow stripe that I gave myself a headache—but every spin I did get was tipsed.
Erin came by once, pretty as a picture in her green Hollywood Girl dress, and took pictures of some of the family groups waiting to get on. She took one of me, too—I still have it somewhere. When the wheel was turning again, she gripped me by the arm, little beads of sweat standing out on her forehead, her lips parted in a smile, her eyes shining.
“Is this great, or what?” she asked.
“As long as I don’t kill anybody, yeah,” I said.
“If some little kid falls out of a car, just make sure you catch him.” Then, having given me something new to obsess about, she jogged off in search of new photo subjects. There was no shortage of people willing to pose for a gorgeous redhead on a summer morning. And she was right, actually. It was pretty great.
Around eleven-thirty, Lane came back. By that point, I was comfortable enough ride-jocking the Spin to turn the rudimentary controls over to him with some reluctance.
“Who’s your team leader, Jonesy? Gary Allen?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, go on over to his bang-shy and see what he’s got for you. If you’re lucky, he’ll send you down to the boneyard for lunch.”
“What’s the boneyard?”
“Where the help goes when they’ve got time off. Most carnies, it’s the parking lot or out behind the trucks, but Joyland’s lux. There’s a nice break-room where the Boulevard and Hound Dog Under connect. Take the stairs between the balloon-pitch and the knife-show. You’ll like it, but you only eat if Pop says it’s okay. I ain’t getting in dutch with that old bastard. His team is his team; I got my own. You got a dinner bucket?”
“Didn’t know I was supposed to bring one.”
He grinned. “You’ll learn. For today, stop at Ernie’s joint—the fried chicken place with the big plastic rooster on top. Show him your Joyland ID card and he’ll give you the company discount.”
I did end up eating fried chicken at Ernie’s, but not until two that afternoon. Pop had other plans for me. “Go by the costume shop—its the trailer between Park Services and the carpentry shop. Tell Dottie Lassen I sent you. Damn woman’s busting her girdle.”
“Want me to help you reload first?” The Shootin’ Gallery was also tipsed, the counter crowded with high school kids anxious to win those elusive plushies. More rubes (so I was already thinking of them) were lined up three deep behind the current shooters. Pop Allen’s hands never stopped moving as he talked to me.
“What I want is for you to get on your pony and ride. I was doin this shit long before you were born. Which one are you, anyway, Jonesy or Kennedy? I know you’re not the dingbat in the college-boy hat, but beyond that I can’t remember.”
“I’m Jonesy.”
“Well, Jonesy, you’re going to spend an edifying hour in the Wiggle-Waggle. It’ll be edifying for the kiddies, anyhow. For you, maybe not so much.” He bared his yellow fangs in a trademark Pop Allen grin, the one that made him look like an elderly shark. “Enjoy that fur suit.”
The costume shop was also a madhouse, filled with women running every whichway. Dottie Lassen, a skinny lady who needed a girdle like I needed elevator shoes, fell on me the second I walked through the door. She hooked her long-nailed fingers into my armpit and dragged me past clown costumes, cowboy costumes, a huge Uncle Sam suit (with stilts leaning beside it against the wall), a couple of princess outfits, a rack of Hollywood Girl dresses, and a rack of old-fashioned Gay Nineties bathing suits… which, I found out, we were condemned to wear when on lifeguard duty. At the very back of her crowded little empire were a dozen deflated dogs. Howies, in fact, complete with the Happy Hound’s delighted stupid-and-loving-it grin, his big blue eyes, and his fuzzy cocked ears. Zippers ran down the backs of the suits from the neck to the base of the tail.