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 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 each end, 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 center. 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 you 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.