his life. He went out the window and headed for Cimarron, Kansas, where Uncle Willie’s carnival was playing. He never looked back.
When Uncle Willie asked Jeff why he had run away from home all he would say was, ‘I don’t get along with my stepmother.’
Uncle Willie telephoned Jeff’s father, and after a long conversation, it was decided that the boy should remain with the carnival. ‘He’ll get a better education here than any school could ever give him,’ Uncle Willie promised.
The carnival was a world unto itself. ‘We don’t run a Sunday school show,’ Uncle Willie explained to Jeff. ‘We’re flimflam artists. But remember, sonny, you can’t con people unless they’re greedy to begin with. W. C. Fields had it right. You can’t cheat an honest man.’
The carnies became Jeff’s friends. There were the ‘front-end’ men, who had the concessions, and the ‘back-end’ people, who ran shows like the fat woman and the tattoed lady, and the flatstore operators, who operated the games. The carnival had its share of nubile girls, and they were attracted to the young boy. Jeff had inherited his mother’s sensitivity and his father’s dark, good looks, and the ladies fought over who was going to relieve Jeff of his virginity. His first sexual experience was with a pretty contortionist, and for years she was the high-water mark that other women had to live up to.
Uncle Willie arranged for Jeff to work at various jobs around the carnival.
‘Someday all this will be yours,’ Uncle Willie told the boy, ‘and the only way you’re gonna hang on to it is to know more about it than anybody else does.’
Jeff started out with the six-cat ‘hanky-pank’, a scam where customers paid to throw balls to try to knock six cats made out of canvas with a wood-base bottom into a net. The operator running the joint would demonstrate how easy it was to knock them over, but when the customer tried it, a ‘gunner’ hiding in the back of the canvas lifted a rod to keep the wooden base on the cats steady. Not even Sandy Koufax could have downed the cats.
‘Hey, you hit it too low,’ the operator would say. ‘All you have to do is hit it nice and easy.’
Nice and easy was the password, and the moment the operator said it, the hidden gunner would drop the rod, and the operator would knock the cat off the board. He would then say, ‘See what I mean?’ and that was the gunner’s signal to put up the rod again. There was always another rube who wanted to show off his pitching arm to his giggling girl friend.
Jeff worked the ‘count stores’, where clothespins were arranged in a line. The customer would pay to throw rubber rings over the clothespins, which were numbered, and if the total added up to twenty-nine, he would win an expensive toy. What the sucker did not know was that the clothespins had different numbers at both ends, so that the man running the count store could conceal the number that would add up to twenty-nine and make sure the mark never won.
One day Uncle Willie said to Jeff, ‘You’re doin’ real good, kid, and I’m proud of you. You’re ready to move up to the skillo.’
The skillo operators were the crème de la crème, and all the other carnies looked up to them. They made more money than anyone else in the carnival, stayed at the best hotels, and drove flashy cars. The skillo game consisted of a flat wheel with an arrow balanced very carefully on glass with a thin piece of paper in the centre. Each section was numbered, and when the customer spun the wheel and it stopped on a number, that number would be blocked off. The customer would pay again for another spin of the wheel, and another space would be blocked off. The skillo operator explained that when all the spaces were blocked off, the customer would win a large sum of money. As the customer got closer to filling in all the spaces, the skillo operator would encourage him to increase his bets. The operator would look around nervously and whisper, ‘I don’t own this game, but I’d like to win. If you do, maybe you’ll give me a small piece.’
The operator would slip the customer five or ten dollars and say, ‘Bet this for me, will you? You can’t lose now.’ And the mark would feel as though he had a confederate. Jeff became an expert at milking the customers. As the open spaces on the board became smaller and the odds of winning grew greater, the excitement would intensify.
‘You can’t miss now!’ Jeff would exclaim, and the player would eagerly put up more money. Finally, when there was only one tiny space left to fill, the excitement would peak. The mark would put up all the money he had, and often hurry home to get more. The customer never won, however, because the operator or his shill would give the table an imperceptible nudge, and the arrow would invariably land at the wrong place.
Jeff quickly learned all the carnie terms: The ‘gaff’ was a term for fixing the games so that the marks could not win. The men who stood in front of a sideshow making their spiel were called ‘barkers’ by outsiders, but the carnie people called them ‘talkers’. The talker got 10 percent of the take for building the tip – the ‘tip’ being a crowd. ‘Slum’ was the prize given away. The ‘postman’ was a cop who had to be paid off.
Jeff became an expert at the ‘blow-off’. When customers paid to see a sideshow exhibition, Jeff would make his spiel: ‘Ladies and gentlemen: everything that’s pictured, painted and advertised outside, you will see within the walls of this tent for the price of your general admission. However, immediately after the young lady in the electric chair gets finished being tortured, her poor body racked by fifty thousand watts of electricity, we have an extra added attraction that has absolutely nothing to do with the show and is not advertised outside. Behind this enclosure you are going to see something so truly remarkable, so chilling and hair-raising, that we dare not portray it outside, because it might come under the eyes of innocent children or susceptible women.’
And after the suckers had paid an extra dollar Jeff would usher them inside to see a girl with no middle, or a two-headed baby, and of course it was all done with mirrors.
One of the most profitable carnival games was the ‘mouse running’. A live mouse was put in the centre of a table and a bowl was placed over it. The rim of the table had ten holes around its perimeter into any one of which the mouse could run when the bowl was lifted. Each patron bet on a numbered hole. Whoever selected the hole into which the mouse would run won the prize.
‘How do you gaff a thing like that?’ Jeff asked Uncle Willie. ‘Do you use trained mice?’
Uncle Willie roared with laughter. ‘Who the hell’s got time to train mice? No, no. It’s simple. The operator sees which number no one has bet on, and he puts a little vinegar on his finger and touches the edge of the hole he wants the mouse to run into. The mouse will head for that hole every time.’
Karen, an attractive belly dancer, introduced Jeff to the ‘key’ game.
‘When you’ve made your spiel on Saturday night,’ Karen told him, ‘call some of the men customers aside, one at a time, and sell them a key to my trailer.’
The keys cost five dollars. By midnight, a dozen or more men would find themselves milling around outside her trailer. Karen, by that time, was at a hotel in town, spending the night with Jeff. When the marks came back to the carnival the following morning to get their revenge, the show was long gone.
During the next four years Jeff learned a great deal about human nature. He found out how easy it was to arouse greed, and how gullible people could be. They believed incredible tales because their greed made them want to believe. At eighteen, Jeff was strikingly handsome. Even the most casual woman observer would instantly note and approve his grey, well-spaced eyes, tall build, and curly dark hair. Men enjoyed his wit and air of easy good humour. Even
