This Day Will Never End

Jump from Edmonton to Regina

Finally came the time for Edmonton to be torn down.  The excitement of tear-down never goes away.  Closing everything down, cleaning up, and leaving THIS lousy spot to go on to the next BETTER spot makes everyone giddy (even though the next spot always ends up becoming THIS lousy spot when it’s time to move on to the next BETTER spot). 

The jump between Edmonton and Regina is the killer of the year.  Edmonton shuts down Sunday night (Monday morning), and Regina opens Tuesday morning.  No problem for us concession folks: we tore down, slept, drove all day and into the night on Monday, slept, put the joints on location, opened for business, and did the rest of our set up/clean up while we were open.  But for the Ride Jocks, it’s rough.  Most rides take at least eight hours to set up or tear down, so they were looking at working in Edmonton all day, tearing down, driving to Regina, setting up and working all day Tuesday.  They worked straight through for about sixty hours.  And people think carnies look that way because they’re on drugs. Well, that probably has a little to do with it too.

Regina Buffalo Days

Regina was one of my least favorite spots.  It just seemed kind of dirty and scummy.  The first day there I saw a grubby young woman who had an obvious shampoo-bottle hickie (a self-inflicted hickie administered with a shampoo bottle), and things didn’t really improve from there. 

When I first started with the corndogs, I had tried to keep track of who approached the joint and in what order so that I could be sure to serve everyone in order.  Terry had no such propriety and I soon learned that for the sake of expediency and my own sanity, his way of simply yelling “Who’s next?” and serving the first person to speak up, was the best method.  My way just slowed everything down as people have a tendency to take their time when they know you’re committed to them, and they would hem and haw and ask silly questions, and confer with their companions… and then they would hem and haw some more… until finally they’d make a decision (or not).  It was pure self-defense, I say, to turn away at the first hem or haw and serve the next customer who was standing there bouncing in anticipation of their turn to place their order. 

In the slow times, Terry would sometimes try to call people in.  One of his things was to look for someone with their name on the arm of their jacket (a common practice then).  He’d yell out the person’s name and they’d look over, expecting to see someone they knew, and getting accosted by the corndog guy instead.  Sometimes it worked.

My crew had told me that sometimes we got asked outrageously stupid questions.  Some of them I didn’t believe until they happened to me.  My favorite one actually happened to me about ten times over the summer.  The Mark would approach our joint and inspect the menu, which reads: SUPER CORN DOGS $3.50, REGULAR CORN DOGS $2.00.  Then they’d inspect the display of long and short corn dogs we had in the window. Another glance at the menu, another glance at the dogs, and then… “Which one’s two dollars?”.  My second favorite was a woman I watched come in the gate (about 500 feet from our joint).  She  looked around,  made a bee-line straight for us, looking at the corn dogs in the window, and asked “Do you guys sell corn dogs?”  (no, we sell ice cream; you have to go down to the Ice Cream Wagon to get a corn dog).

Dealing with Mental Exhaustion

Although we got the best ones possible, we never had set breaks.  When (read: if) things were slow enough, Terry would come by the joint and tell one of us to take a break, and for how long we could go. 

The Giant Wheel

We also didn’t have set close times at the end of a day.  We just stayed open until there were no more Marks around to whom we could possibly pedal a corndog.  The fair would officially close when the lights were turned off on the Giant Wheel (our ferris wheel), but that didn’t mean we instantly shut down. Terry would monitor the crowd and make the call.  Somehow I got assigned the job of cleaning the windows each night, and the best part of every day for me was when Terry would finally say, “Rhonda, go clean the windows”, because that was always my last task of the day before I was allowed to leave.  He taught me to use a cup of soapy water with a toothbrush to clean any grit out of the window tracks.  Our company consistently won awards for cleanest concession, which was a point of pride for Terry, and I was more than happy to help out in that regard.  In fact, I didn’t even hate it.  I preferred cleaning the window tracks with a toothbrush over cleaning up the inside of the joint. 

I coped with not knowing when each day would end by flat out denying that it ever would.  I told myself every time I walked into that joined that I was going to be there forever;  the break or the day’s end would never come; and somehow I BELIEVED myself.  Then, when the break or the end would actually come, it was such a wonderful surprise. 

Terry always said that the hardest part of every day was getting up and going to work, so once you’d achieved that, the rest was easy, and once he’d done that, that day no longer counted.  So, for example, if it was Tuesday morning, and we were playing through Sunday, he would say we had five days left (Wednesday through Sunday).

Prince Albert

Regina ended.  Normally, the Toronto CNE is the next spot, with lots of time in between, meaning about a week off for everyone.  1987 was the year Frank Conklin decided to stick another spot in between the two.  So, half the midway went to Prince Albert and the other half went to Thunder Bay.  We were all really disappointed to miss out on that week off.

One of the few things John and I disagreed was about seeing the country.  When we were on the jump he said one of the things he liked about traveling was that you got to see so much of Canada.  I immediately disagreed.  As a carnie, you don’t get to see much of Canada at all.  All you see is the highway and carnival lots.  That’s it. 

PA is a small fair on a dirt lot.  A real different experience from the bigger cities we’d played.  Business boomed the first day, but then the novelty of a new midway ended, and we coasted through the rest of our time there.  Except for Midnight Madness.  Small towns have them; big fairs don’t.  Both Brandon and Prince Albert had them, and on Midnight Madness days we ended up being open until about 4:00AM, and then starting again at 9:00AM.  

The worst thing about Prince Albert, though, was that our haven, the cookhouse, was taken away from us.  Frank Conklin decided to make the staff cookhouse open to the public since they had only half the regular carnie business as usual.  Normally the cookhouse was nestled among all the rigs off the midway and was for carnies only.  It was our only place to get a decent meal, and was also a quiet, peaceful gathering spot for the carnies.  We couldn’t even sit down and have some peace while we had our meals anymore – the place was crawling with Marks.  I missed the sanctuary of the cookhouse even moreso when I discovered that I couldn’t even escape the Marks at my room.  I’d go home on my breaks, and there would be a crowd of people on my “stairs” (ladder), eating, visiting, drinking, smoking up, or even taking a piss.