Read Online Under the Electric Sky by Christopher A. Walsh - Free Book Online Page A

afford to go to the fair on their own. Alice would take her kids down to the show once during Old Home Week, scrimping and saving to find the ten-cent admission for each child. It would turn out to be money well spent for the family because in addition to providing some amusement for the kids, it also provided dinner for the evening. Once inside the fairgrounds, Alice would meet up with family friends, the Michaels brothers, who owned and operated a hotdog stand, and purchase half a dozen wieners for the family to be cooked later that night at a discounted rate of twenty-five cents. They were selling to the general public for ten-cents a pop, but the Michaels knew the Reids and that’s what friends do in lean times.
    Clarence got his start on the carnival working for the Michaels as a teenager, running errands for them or operating the stand if someone needed a break. It was Clarence’s way of being a part of this other world with its flashy lights and merry times.
    It was Bill Michaels who bestowed on young Clarence the sobriquet that he would come to be known by in all corners of Atlantic Canada. At thirteen, Clarence was muscular and strong, but carrying a little extra flab. So one day Michaels, half kidding, called him “Soggy” and the name stuck. It became the nom-de-guerre , the handle that was pure carnival and would solidify his future career. The odds were out of favour that a man named Soggy was going to attract thousands of patients as a dentist or an optometrist.
    But there was something about the name he liked and he quickly adopted it. The bruiser from east Charlottetown had a handle all his own and it kind of went with the old iron heart. The name was the thing that would separate the life of the everyday world of reality and chores and church into the other – the Carnival. The place that awakened in every small-town lonely soul an opportunity, however brief, to feel life rush through them the way nothing else could. The carnival pulling into town was it . It represented life and adventure outside the quadrant streets that marked their cages. On the carnival, those cages swung in every direction, lit up in the night sky like criminals with the flood light thrown on them as they make the break over the wall. The Ferris Wheel offered the first real glimpse into the distance. The Chair-O-Plane would send you spinning into the summer night sky in orbit, like you could follow the trajectory right out of town and into a cosmically rearranged universe, dripping with possibility.
    It opened the eyes wider, filled the nostrils further, pumped the heart in new rhythms and the hometown people were happy in a way never seen at any other time of year. There was music and the sweet smell of cotton candy lost in the summer air, men with beards shaking hands, caught up in their own affairs. The voices of the megaphones called out into the smoky dusk as children screamed with delight in the distance. An hour of it really did seem to make amends for the mental clutter and monotony of day-to-day life. There are certain breeds of the human creature who, after being shown the bright lights from on high, cannot go back. Everything after just seems dim in comparison.
    Soggy Reid was one of these men and the carnival was his mythic place, his El Dorado, The City of Lights. There would be no going back to the everyday world he had known – not now. So Soggy quit school at the end of grade seven and took a job at the Clark Fruit Company, which permitted him to work the hotdog stand during Old Home Week. After two years of learning the ropes at the Michaels’ hotdog stand, he quit the job at the fruit company, bought the stand, and took it on the road for a season with the Bill Lynch Shows. He soon parlayed that into a cookhouse he operated on the number two unit of the show, under the management of Jack Lynch, Bill’s brother. Jack saw potential in this kid with the pompadour and strong arms, but it was