Pork Chops

 We use to open up every spring in New York at an auditorium on Long Island. No Big Top for two weeks, You'd think that was a plus but the way the contract read was the Circus had to wash down the Arena twice during their stay. It was a cold wet miserable job. The Arena Personell who were there all year NEVER cleaned the place, and to prove it I tested them by putting a circus program in the refrigerater of the hotdog joint and it was still there, all moldy the next year. Nobody liked cleaning the Arena, guess who got that job...the butchers, it would take place on a Friday night after the last show when everybody was tired from working all day. We had to spray all the seats and aisles down with fire hoses and push the water with mops and squeegees toward the drains, we'd finish about three in the morning, exhausted and soaking wet and sometimes it would be snowing outside.
 I had a folding cot that I put in the hotdog stand I was running, I bought a small heater and I'd close the door, it beat sleeping in a frigid sleeper.
I told the strawboss, Tom, " Tom, you know tomorrow is washdown day and last year some of these guys played the duck and didn't show up. The only way to make sure they're here is to lay a serious fine on them".  "Yeah, your right, let's call a meeting tonight".
 During the meeting he told the guys, "Anybody that doesn't show up will have to pay a C note fine or leave the show". There was a lot of grumbling but the decision was made.
 The next night after the last show everybody gathered in the front lobby and we counted heads. The two novelty guys, Chic & Card, didnt show up.
 So we went to work, cussin and fuming, finally finished and went to bed.
 The next day Chic & Card came wandering in, Tommy told them, "You guys owe us a C note each." They started complaining, "That's too much, etc., How about if we give a party for the butchers and supply the booze and the food, instead?" Tommy asked me, What do you think?"
 "If it's equivalent to a couple of Cnotes I guess it's OK", I said.
"What kind of food", I asked.
They said, "How about PorkChops?" You could grilll them in the hotdog joint."
I saw a BBQ grill outside the backdoor, get some charcoal and we'll use that" I told them.
So we decided Sunday after the last show would be a good time to have the cook out and Chic went and bought the Chops, booze and other things and left them in my hotdog joint.
 After the show I got the grill out and started to fire it up when Gypsy, one of the bigtop hands came by and saw the chops and said, "Am I in?". Since Gypsy sometimes helped out on the stands I thought , "Why Not". I handed him the two pronged fork and the matches and told him, "Your in, Gypsy, only one Chop to a person". I thought, its too cold for me to be standibg outside anyway.
I went in and the booze was starting to flow, I got some Vodka and made myself a screwdriver. Gypsy was trying to get the charcoal lit and had the grill on the ground fanning it. Jay the clown came up and got right behind him and started doing a simulated sex act. "Is this the way they do it in the BigHouse?" he jokingly asked him. Gypsy just laughed and kept fanning. He got the coals burning and put on some chops.
Things were starting to get wild, it was a chilly night and I thought, I'd better give Gypsy a drink, so I poured an empty coke cup full of Vodka and took it out to Gypsy. "This is to ward off the cold", I told him and I went back inside.  Some of the guys were eating chops and everyone was drinking. The Concession manager came by and I poured him a drink, we were talking about what kind of season it could be when I heard a sound like a Pop Pop. Then the side door flew open and the helper on the floss joint came in staggering, holding his stomache and blood was trickling between his fingers.
"He said," He shot me" and fell at the feet of the concession manager" Silence engulfed the auditorium  and I heard someone on a phone saying, "Theres been a shooting, you'd better come quick with an ambulance".
I walked out the side door and Gypsy was still cooking chops, he had the two prong fork in one hand and a pistol in the other. "What the hell happened Gypsy," I asked.
He said, " That motherfucker ate a chop and said give me another one and I told him only one per person and he slapped me so I shot his ass".
"Well, somebody's called the fuzz, you better get out of here".
He gave me the fork, put the pistol in his jacket and screwed. Meanwhile bedlam reigned within the Arena, an ambulance came and they were looking at the butcher on the floor. Drunken butchers were falling all over the place. I put out the fire, took the chops and put them in my fridge, locked the door, unfolded my cot and went to bed. I could hear people running up and down the halls, yelling and screaming.  I heard the Cops come in asking questions. About two hours later there was a knock on the door. "Is anyone in there?" It was the fuzz. Yes, I'm here " I said and opened the door. The cop said, there was a shooting did you hear anything?" No officer, I've been asleep, I thought I heard a lot of people yelling but I didnt know what was going on, " I told him.
"Well, ", he said, "They caught the shooter, he was in a trailer in back of the arena, drunk and asleep, but we're looking for the gun, can we look in here?"
"Sure, " I said, "help yourself".
He browsed around and said, "Is there anyone else here you've seen with a gun.?"
 I said, "Come to think of it there's a guy named Hoover (the lion act) that has a pistol, I think he's over where the performers are." I thought , might as well wake that asshole up, he was always complaining about butchers working during his act. They went and woke him up, of course the pistol was a blank gun he used in the act, and he came on like a righteous citizen wanting to help the law.
So later they found the gun, Gypsy had thrown it in the weeds next to the Arena. He was booked and we heard the butcher he shot was in stable condition, it was a 22 pistol, the bullet had hit a rib and deflected out through his stomach. Having an unlicensed gun in New York is an automatic year in jail and attempted murder who knows. It looked like Gypsy would be gone a long time.
Now the cops wanted a witness, there were about 150 people in the Arena at the time and nobody had seen a thing. But the guy with the Snowcone stand (a first of May) came up and told them he had seen the shooting. They told him the trial will come up in about a month and he had to be there. He said OK, he would.  Two days later we were on the road playing around New Jersey and the floss joint helper showed up his chest and belly all patched up. "I'm going to the trial to make sure he does more time", he said.
A lot of people were saying , "Oh the poor guy, etc. Jay jay the clown was worried that the owner might have heard about the simulated sex act" But the floss agent wanted to go back selling floss. But he couldnt do any heavy chinese because of his wounds" Well we more or less figured that and told him OK, just do some light stuff like lay out the safety chains. This was the kind of work we would give to a kid for a free ticket. So this went on for about a week, One day we were setting up the tent and I asked Tommy, "Wheres your helper, to help with the chains?"
"I don't know "he said, He wasn't in his bunk when I got up this morning".
We just about had everything up when I looked down the road and saw the helper coming, he had walked three miles to town and bought a case of beer and was carrying it on his shoulder.
"Thats it ," said Tommy, "Tonight you're back on chairs and bibles".
The guy said, "My wounds".
"Fuck that." said Tommy. "You can carry a case of beer, its back to the chinese are get off the show".
He went to the sleeper, packed his gear and left.
Now the show was heading into North and South Carolina and doubling back into Virginia, the weather was hot and My friend Jack & myself were the only two seat men with the exception of Wino Bob who would only work long enough to get money for a bottle of wine. So we were tearin the seats up.
Tommy the straw boss, asked me one day, "How would you like to have the snow joint?"
I asked, "Why is that first of may leaving?"
"No, but he's been kissing the concession managers ass and he's a stool pigeon, and I think I could run him", he said.
He was right about that, he was a tattler, looking to cause trouble, but I didnt want the Snow joint, I was making as good on seats as with a joint and I could catch a nap between shows. "Not yet," I told him, " wait awhile." Then as we were going into Virginia, they hired a couple of other butchers on seats and the competition got a little tougher. "You ready?" Tommy asked one day. "Yeh I think so, but how are you going to manage to get by the company pet?" I asked.
"Just watch"', he said.
Then he started spreading a rumor that Gypsys brother was coming on the show and he hoped he wouldnt be angry with the snowjoint guy for being a witness at his trial. Actually Gypsy didnt have a family to speak of. But the rumor went around and around and one day the concession manager asked me, "Can you run the snow joint? That first of may blew the show this morning".  No problem boss!!! Boy that was a good year for me.
 The next year in winter quarters as we were going out, Gypsy showed up, he had done a year for illegal gun possession. The trial for the shooting was dismissed because nobody but him was at it. The first of may disappeared and the floss agent didn't show either.
When I saw him I said, "Hey Gypsy, want a pork chop?"
Gypsy said, "that's not funny".

The mail lady

 I'm sure it isn't a surprise that 90% of the clowns on a show are gay. We had one that was the mail lady, He would go to the post office and pick up all the general delivery letters and hand them out, it was considered the correct thing to do by giving him a quarter tip.
 One day we were waiting for the top to go up and him came up with a bunch of letters, he said, "oh, here's one from Columbus, GA., I said," that's probably mine". There was another clown standing nearby and he said, "maybe it's for me". I asked, "You're from Columbus".
"Yes, I was born & raised there, " he said.
"So was I, what, high school did you, go to? I asked.
"Columbus High, 1954." he said.
"Really?, I was there that year, who was your homeroom Teacher?"I asked
"A Mr. Taylor." he said
"That was my home room teacher", so we had to be in the same class, but I don't recall anyone named..
J. JAY". I said. Now this clown had been on the show for over two years but he always had whiteface makeup on, which was one of the reasons I didn't recognize him.
He said, "Thats my Stage name, my real names is J.J. Smith. I thought about that for a few moments, after sifting through some burnt neurons, I recall going into class one morning and everybody was talking to each other excitedly, the teacher was saying, we should all pray for Jay.
I asked a friend who sat in the back of the room with me, "What the hell's going on here?"
He said, "They caught Jay down in the locker room having sex with the football team".
"All of them?" I asked. "Yes," he told me, Jay was suspended from school."
 I thought, " fuckin' Jocks, just as I always suspected, a bunch of perverts running around slapping each other on the ass and pretending they're straight."
 So here was Jay on the same Circus, I recalled him now, he was a chubby roly poly kid who always came to class in a suit and tie. That was enough to make me suspect something was amiss right there.
Now, I'm not saying he was stupid, just sexually dis oriented,but he would come up with some humorous lines sometimes. One day as we were waiting for the top to go up, there were some prop hands standing nearby and one of them said, "Boy, I sure would like some hot pussy right now". Jay was standing nearby and fluttered his eyebrows and said, "Would some warm hemmoroids do?".
 There was another clown on the show named Cleopatra who was from South Carolina and he would tell the other clowns, " I'm not riff raff like you, I'm a refined, genteel southern lady".
One day in the cookhouse he was talking to Frank the swordswallower(who was also gay) must be something psychological about putting on makeup or swallowing swords, and Frank said something about he had been married at one time...Cleo gasped, "You mean you were married to a woman?? "Yes ," said Frank, "and I loved her very much". Cleo moved away to another table and wouldn't talk to Frank for a week.
 One Day a couple of girls came on the show and the Concessions manager hired them on the butchers department. I told him, "You know this isn't going to work". "Well," he said,"I can't turn them down, that's discrimination". "I don't give a damn, as long as they can uphold their end of the work", I said. But I knew, they looked to fragile to be carrying quarter poles and bibles. But we'll see what happens. Chico the strawboss said, "Yeh I know they probably can't hack it, but it may be a chance to get laid". They had a vw van and were staying in it. Miss Emma the Ticket  Office lady got all prudish, "This is awful, it's immoral, who knows whats going on in the Butchers sleeper". Jack heard her and said, "Immoral???" What the hell do you think's been going on in clown alley all these years??"
 As it turned out the girls were lesbians and even though we gave them the lighter work like putting out safety chains and such, they only lasted two weeks.
 Then a couple of kids with guitars came on and Chico hired them, I told him, "Weak sisters Chico". He said, "Yeah I know, but when I saw that guitar I thought , This might be my chance...ever since I saw that movie with Elvis, where he busted a guy over the head with his guitar...I've always wanted to do that." He didn't get to fulfill that dream though, they blew the show a week later.
...There's No Biz like Show Biz !!!

But it's not Pink !!

 My pal Jack the Ripper , (He was called that because he was a rigger and one day he cut his thumb), went to Canada on the Garden Show, He and his partner( who's name I can't remember, maybe someone can enlighten me),  had the floss joint, they opened somewhere near Quebec City. While setting up the joint they discovered that they had forgotten to bring red food coloring, so they went hunting around town for it, to no avail, No one had any, But someone at a grocery store told them that the local meatpacking plant used purple food grade dye to mark inspected meat so they went there and purchased some with the idea that they could say it was grape flavored cotton candy.
 So they mixed some in a  thirty pound can of sugar and started making floss. "Oh no ",said jack," it looks like matress stuffing".It was too strong, so they decided to mix more sugar, it was still very dark, so they put in all the sugar they had. It was still very dark but they decided they would have to do the best they could.
So they made a few boards and waited. The manager came by and told them the matinee and night show will be a light house the first day. So Jacks partner said," How about you take the first show, I'll go catch a nap in the hotel and when I come back you can take the night show off?" Jack said OK and his partner left for the hotel.  The crowd started drifting in and people started buying candy, The show started and just before the finale, people started coming out of the seats and going to the floss stand.  They started screaming at Jack, opening their mouths and pointing at their tongues. Their tongues were a bright purple color. Since they were in Quebec they were all yelling in French. Of course Jack figured out what they were saying more or less and pointed to the rest room saying, you can rinse your mouth out over there. They were coming back and their tongues still looked royally purple. "Use soap" he told them.
Now there was a huge crowd in front of the floss joint when Jacks partner walked up. "What's up? " he asked. Jack took off his change apron and handed it to him and said, "Your turn, see you later", and screwed to the hotel before his partner could say another word.
 Jack was in the hotel room and the door opened about midnight, it was his partner who said,"You no good rotten son of a bitch !" 
 Show biz is full of pitfalls....mon sacre diem!!!

Polish Navy & The trials and tribulations of a candy butcher

My friend Jack was living on a houseboat near Sarasota with a Circus family . One of the brothers in the family got the bright idea one day while watching some neighborhood dogs turn over some trash cans to invent something to stop the dogs from overturning them. He made a circular form and molded some cement rings that the trashcans would fit inside. He had about fifty made and went out to pitch them. Nobody was interested, they were awkward to handle and not very pretty. So after a few months he still had them stacked up in his back yard. One morning at breakfast he was staring out the back window at them and he said, "What can I do with these things?"
 Jack looked at them, they  resembled giant cement doughnuts. He said, " Maybe You could sell them to the Polish Navy as Life Preservers".
 We went out on the Beatty Show and Jack wound up on seats and I got the Snow Joint. My friend Tommy got the Floss stand. We had been on the road a couple of months and were playing in Hempstead, New York. After putting the show up, cleaning up and eating breakfast we started preparing stock for the show. The midway was filling up, I was grinding ice and Tommy started making floss, after a couple of minutes smoke started pouring out of the floss machine. I thought , a short in the floss macines head, this will happen if a piece of metal happens to get into the sugar, or it could be sabotage, someone could've thrown a penny into the head. Tommy stopped the machine and emptied the head, there was nothing in it. He restarted it and smoke poured out. The front doors of the big top opened and the crowd entered our seat agents were waiting for their stock. I gave my boys their snow and they went to work. Tommy went to the Concession truck and pulled out an extra floss machine and replaced the one in the stand, he had 3 machines altogether. He filled up the head  and cut on the machine. Smoke started pouring out of it. Now he was cussing and sweat was  rolling down his brow. His agent was saying "What the hell's wrong?" Webster the Concession Manager came out and said, "I'm I going to have to send you to Cotton Candy School or What?" Pico went and got the last machine, plugged it in and filled it with sugar and cut it on. Smoke started pouring out of it. "Damn it" he said. Sweat was pourig down his face, he was under pressure.  He had floss on his arms that was melting from the humidity, he took his arm and wiped his face and his eyes got as big as saucers, he took a handful of sugar from the sugar cane and tasted it. "No good sonsabitches", he said, "somebody has put salt in the sugar can".  So he threw out all the tainted sugar and replaced it and everything started working fine again. I saw the hot dog man snickering in the corner and believe that he may have been the culprit.
 So it took awhile to solve the problem but Tommy lost about an hour of the first show.
 Jack liked working the seats, He said, "Maybe I get less money but at least I can take a nap between shows, once you get a joint it's like being married, you have no time to rest".
 I worked every stand you can think of on the Circus. I came on the show late one year and couldnt even get on seats, so I wound up as a helper on the Grease Joint for Paul Fisher. They called him the "Rehash King", He told me, "Give me a thousand people in the bigtop and 50 cups for coke and I'll serve all of them and turn in 49 cups at turnin." The managers knew something was going on but couldn't pin him down. They had a choice, Fire him and put some first of may in charge that couldnt handle the TIP or leave Paul in Charge and make three times as much even though he was swindling them. So he stayed in charge.  To try and stop him they had cups with the legend printed on them, "Destroy cup after using".
The town suckers never read that. So they put a sharp spike on the stand with a sign, "Place cups on spike". Paul would take a clean cup and place it over the spike and the suckers would place their cups over it. Paul loved it , it drained them and they were ready to use. Until one day some kid came up with an empty cup and slammed it on the spike and it went through his hand. Lawsuit...that was the end of the spike. Fisher showed me a lot of tricks about running a joint, he said," You have to be like a bartender, always working, if the suckers arent buying, look busy, always wiping the counter. Never sit down, people will think you dont want to wait on them. If you have to sit get a high stool, it looks like your alert and ready to wait on people."
 There was another old butcher on the show named Duncan the Fox, he told me, "People are like mules, first you have to hit them over the head with a two by four to get their attention." He didnt mean literally but he would get right in their face and yell as loud as he could.
As I mentioned, I never said we were angels.

The Real Circus

 People go and see some saccharine filled movie about the Circus and they come out thinking Oh, how romantic. They get the impression that the clowns and the kinkers put the Bigtop up.
I had a kid working for me on the snowjoint and when the season ended he told me, "Before I came here when I heard the word circus, my mind would be filled with visions of clowns and cotton candy and calliope music, now after a year here I think of somebody getting knifed in the back of the bigtop."  Well that may have been exaggerated but the clowns don't put the show up... unless they're getting "cherry pie".
 My pal Chico, told me once, if you hear me going hee-ha-ho (getting smashed that is), you'd better not ride shotgun with me. And sure enough one night I got in the truck cab and looked at him and his eyes looked like two fried eggs, we pulled off the lot and he was starting to rant and I thought, " I need to bail out of here", so after a few blocks we came to a red light and I jumped out and walked back awy from the truck.
I figured, theres gotta be another show truck coming along and sure enough the spool wagon came by, I waved him down and jumped in, Jess the waterman was driving. I looked at him and...damn! he was drunker than Chico.  I jumped out at the next stop light and waited, Ken the grease joint operater came along and he was sober enough I felt we could make it to the lot safely. When we got to the next town Chico came in and said, "Where the hell did you go?".. "Just following your advice pal, just following your advice."
 One day during setup they said "The cookhouse flag is up, you'd better go eat". So we ate and I returned to the longside (grandstand) and sat down waiting for everybody to come back. The Superintendant came by and said, "Where is everybody? Why arent they on bibles?" I told him, "You know John, thats a kind of rhetorical question, if I was really looking for someone to work, the first place I would go would be the "blue room"." 
 The blue room was a small blue tent to the side of the bigtop where they served beer, cigarrettes and two ounce mickey bottles of booze.  Since the super or upper echelons always ran it it was sure not going to get closed down. Also they had a crap table and you could make a bet on any horse at any race track in the country. An old guy named "Banjo", was handling the bets, I heard he had been a made man in the mafia and they retired him but he didnt want to sit around playing checkers in the park so they got him a spot on the show. One day after we had opened in an auditorium for two weeks the Teamsters Union came by and said Youse guys don't have Union Drivers and we're going to see you get closed down.
The management called Banjo & he said I'll take care of this and went into New York for a couple of days and bingo....the teamsters disappeared. Banjo told my pal Chico, I'm not feeling well I want you to drive my camper on jumps at night for a few days... And if you pull any shit with me like drinking or causing problems, I got a guy named Frankenstein who comes by to see me 3 or 4 times a year and I'll have him break your legs. And he wasnt kidding I saw Frankenstein one day and he really looked like Frankenstein.
 Banjo was about 83 or 84 years old. One day he said, I'm having a hard time taking a piss, I think I'll go see a sawbones". He went to see a Doctor in the next town. When he came back I asked him, "What did the Doc tell you Banjo?"
 Banjo said, " He thinks it's my prostate gland's acting up so he gave me an exam, the Sonofabitch stuck his finger up my ass, then he asked me how old I was and when was the last time I'd had sex."
" I told him...just now, with you.  If Frankenstein was here I'd have him break his leg!!!"

The Tramp

The first time I met the Tramp I was in winter Quarters, He had landed a job for the winter driving a delivery truck for a grocery distributing company. He came into winter quarters and told the cook, here's a 50  pound bag of potatoes and 50 pounds of onions, they loaded them on my truck but didnt put them on the invoice and I thought you guys could use them. That was the Tramp, he was a showman from the old school. The Tramp had worked on the Ringling show and he knew where they had stored their canvas, since they were working buildings he figured they didn't need it and he helped several small shows get equipped for the road...at a price of course.
 When he was on the Ringling show they played Madison square and he got to noticing that the clean up crew at night was a bunch of elderly Irish ladies. So he would sneak under the bandstand and cut on the microphone and start singing... Oh, When the Filthy Irish wash their Filthy clothes in the dirty river Shannon... and so forth. These eldery Irish ladies didnt know where the singing was coming from and they would be screaming and cursing..."If I catch the no good son of a bitch singing...I'll cut his balls off" .
The Tramp was to slick to be caught though. What a heat merchant, Always pulling practical jokes.
He was on the Beatty show and there was an old canvas boss named Red who put the sideshow up, as soon as he got it up he would go take a nap. Also on the show was an English chap who was as gay as they come. His routine was to put "Little Bear" canvas glue on his leg , let it dry and crackle on then present himself as Al the Alligator Boy.  His pitch went like this, with an arrogant English accent pretending he was from the elite of society he would say, "Ladies & Gentlemen allow me to present myself and my unusual case, I came from a wealthy family in England and as a young Tyke my  Mother noticed there was something odd about my skin... seven immenent Doctors were rushed in from the Continent and they discovered.... THAT I HAD AN INFIRMITY THAT CAUSED MY EPIDERMIS TO HARDEN LIKE THAT OF A CROCODILE!!! At that point he would show his phony glued leg and sell postcard photos of it for 25 cents.  Pete could imitate this Englishmans accent and tone of voice perfect. So one day between shows he sneaked into the sideshow, got on the mike and started repeating the same spiel  until he got to the part about the immenent physicians then he said... "And thet discovered that I WAS GAY!!! But now I more or less lead a normal life and I'm married to the sideshow canvas Boss...RED!
 The Tramp left the sideshow as if nothing had occurred, but Red, who had been napping half awake heard this banter and jumped out of bed and ran into the sideshow with a pistol in his hand..."Where is that faggot asshole," he said, "I'm gonna give him a pistolwhipping he won't forget".  It took a few minutes for him to realize someone had bamboozled him.  Meanwhile the Tramp and several butchers were at the grease joint snickering.
 I was working a hot dog joint with the Tramp in Alabama when a girl came up to the stand , there was no one around but us, and she said,"Whatcha got for free Mister?"
The Tramp looked at her and looked under the counter and said, "well let's see, What do we have for free... HMMM...we've got hard dick and bubblegum...OOOOPS Sorry, we're all out of bubblegum. She left hurriedly.
 One day the Tramp called up a jewish Novelty company in New York and asked them, "Do you have any Nazi flags? I'm going to make Hitlers birthday celebration in Skokie, Illinois and I could use a couple of gross." The owner was blowing his top, "We don't carry any of that shit" he said angrily. The tramp took it in stride... Well Dicky B. (a concession manager on another show) said he had bought some from you before, sorry, I guess he was mistaken". The Tramp hung up the phone and started laughing. Later on we heard that the Novelty company wouldnt sell Dicky any stock.
One October the Tramp and myself were partners on a balloon joint for Garnett Walker at the Dallas Fair, Garnett was from Canada and got his big break working at Disneyland when it first opened.
 We were working the stand when the weather turned nasty and cold, it even started sleeting. There was no way we could work the balloon stand, we sat in the grease joint drinking coffee hoping it would clear up but it got worse during the day. The only persons on the midway were joint operaters, there were no town suckers at all. As we were sitting in the grease joint the wife of one of the hat joints came in, she was shivering and you could see her breath as she talked. She said, "There's no one buying anything..Why doesnt Garnett close the stands before we all catch Pneumonia?"
The Tramp told her, " He isn't going to close them because he's from Canada...and this is a nice day in Canada."

There's got to be more to it than that !

Waking up on the show could be routine sometimes with variations. Someone would yell, "Four poles" and we knew we had 5 minutes to start spreading canvas. Then a quick run to the cookhouse and back to the bigtop to wait for the trucks to enter so we could unload the Grandstand.
One morning Johnny Walker came by the cookhouse and said," Hurry up boys, it's bible time". He was referring to the hinged planks used in the grandstand. But an elderly lady standing nearby heard him and remarked to her friend, "Oh, isnt that nice, they're going to study the bible".
Then we would go unload the bible truck, sometimes there would be a delay getting the trucks in and we (the butchers) would sit on the rolls of sidewall in front waiting for them.
There was always plenty of intellectual conversation going on while we were waiting. For instance....
Tommy and Jack were having a conversation... Tom said, " There was one hell of a massage parlor in that last town".. Chic broke in," I went to one of those joints a couple of weeks ago in Maryland", he said, " they had a sign inside the front door that said, The Special...$40 bucks..So I whipped out forty bucks and slammed it on the counter and told 'em...Gimme the Special !
"And what did you get for that?", I asked.
"It was a warm buttermilk enema".  "Oh Brother," I thought.
"And it kinda hurt", said Chic.
""You mean to tell me that you let them give it to you?" remarked Jack.
Chic said, "Well hell, I didn't want to blow the $40 bucks".
Then Chick says, " So I thought about that and I thought...They didn't trust me cause they didn't know me, but now that I was a customer they would probably give me a better sex service. So I went back and slapped $40 bucks on the table and told 'em....I want the Special". "And what happened then Chic?", I asked.   He said, "They gave me another warm buttermilk enema."
 Now you'd have to know Chic to get a better understanding of these events, he was a pretty raunchy character, His Partner in the Novelty stand told me, they had gone to a massage parlor and paid ten bucks for a hand job and they told Chic he had to wear a rubber.
Well...we never claimed to be angels.

Accidents will happen

The Backbone of the Circus, The necessary Evil of Circusdom. Thats what they use to call candybutchers on the show. Jealous kinkers!!  Anyway, Honest Jake told me, "When a circus man goes bad, he winds up on the carnival.If you don't believe me look at Camelrider.
 Could be, most Candybutchers, myself included, look for other things to do when the show's not on the road, or if the show runs into bad territory. The bottom line is making money. It doesnt make sense to stick around doing free chinese and getting three bad meals in the cookhouse.
 Honest Jake came by and said, "let's go make the Kentucky Derby and a few other spots". One of his agents, Thomas also went along. So we headed to Louisville, but we had a few days to spare before the event. Jake had a house in Louisville and he had a couple of bunkbeds in the attic for us to use to cut down on expenses. There were boxes of toys and assorted things that Jake had picked up at different auctions and firesales. In the corner was a huge box condoms that Jake had picked up with the intentention of "horsebacking" them at bars around Louisville. He told me he tried hustling them around but got stopped by the fuzz and was told he had to have a special license to sell condoms. So he redlighted that idea and stored them in his attic.
 The next day Thomas spotted the box and said, "Oh yeh, I can use", these and stuffed his jacket pockets.
We made the Derby and had another few days  before the Indy 500 started. Thomas started dating a waitress that he met and things were getting hot and heavy. Indy came up and we made it and the time trials.
We went on the road and started making Fair dates with novelty stands. We had been on the road about 3 months when one night Thomas got a phone call and he turned white, without saying a word he packed his bag and asked Jake to take him to the bus station. When Jake got back I asked him what happened and he said. "That girl Thomas was dating called and said she was pregnant, so he had to get back to Louisville." Jake started laughing, "That'll teach that S.O.B. to keep out of my stock, Hell they've been in that attic for two years in sweltering heat and freezing cold. Probably pretty fragile...Ha! he should've wore 3 at a time."
"Oh yes," said Jake, "There's many a child in this world today that has their Uncle Jake to thank for being here." 

          
Accidents will happen.

cook house

The Dailey Show closed for the winter and my friend Chuck who had the Concessions had a lot of hotdogs left over so he decided to give them to the cook as they were the most perishable items. He said he got to noticing they were having weiners & eggs for breakfast, weiners and beans for dinner, weiners and cabbage for supper. This went on for 4 or 5 days and he got to wondering, "Where are the buns I gave them?"A day are two later here they came...French Toast Hotdog Buns, with strawberry snowcone syrup.
One day on the Beatty Show I went to the cookhouse and each department had their own table, I sat down facing away from the cookhouse and looking towards the Sideshow table where "Princess Margaret Ann aand her mother were sitting. Princess Margaret Ann was billed as the Worlds smallest lady. She was very tiny and her mother chaperoned her everywhere. Now she was no spring chicken she was about 65 and her mother was about 84. As I was about to start eating I noticed that Princess Margaret & her Mom were staring towards the cookhouse with their jaws dropped & their eyes open as big as saucers. I turned and looked at the cookhouse and saw the cooks helper standing in the doorway completely naked with just his socks own, it was obvious he was completely drunk as he staggered to the door and said." I'll bring your plates in just a moment Princess Margaret Ann." The cook grabbed him and said, "get back to your bunk you damn fool".
Later on at the supper meal I heard Princess Margaret & her Mom talking, and her mom said, "Well. at least he wasn't as hairy as Burt Reynolds."