I have worked and lived with three men who had been carneys. These were all low level employees who often had a contentious relationship with coworkers and management in whatever they did. It was part of their interesting free-minded nature. Unfortunately they were not able to provide much in the way of operational detail concerning the management of such an operation, for which I utilized Joe McKennon’s three volume Pictorial History.

Scully was a coworker of mine in the summer of 1983 who spent a few months working in a food store with me in between carnival gigs as a booth operator. He somehow got stuck in Baltimore waiting for a carnival bound for Florida in September after leaving a northbound carnival in June. He had the curious habit of eating salted raw potatoes and turnips.

Allen was a fellow boxer I worked with in the 1990s who variously found himself employed as an auctioneer, escort, whore house barker, debt collector, retail clerk, carnival booth operator, and water tank comedian. Cunning, hard working and incapable of imagining his own demise, Allen always outsmarted or outtalked his way out of situations that would have left most people questioning the cruelty of Fate. The last time I saw him he was living out of a van and fixing air conditioning units at local motels.

I once watched Allen auction off his entire pay check to two rival drug gangs, standing in the middle of the intersection and holding the bills high, in an effort to get the Jamaican Wolf Street gang and the Patterson Park Boys to part with one more rock of crack than their rivals across the street. I was in awe, as were the drug dealers, who gathered in their runners and muscle to sit for this Friday afternoon ritual.

Allen used to entertain us at break time with his barking skills, delivered with the motor-mouth diction of the auctioneer, which invariably began with, “We got your big-titty bitches downstairs, tight little twats upstairs, your pretty little girls all ‘roun’ en your big butt queens goin’ down…”

At this point the listener became mesmerized as Allen continued breathlessly for minutes, painting a world picture of a parade of tarts that could have filled the gardens of Gomorrah, always finishing with a deep well drawled, “We got it all!”

I could not help but put some of Allen in Whiff Gleason.

Jimbob was my former roommate, and the basis for the Stoner Joe character in the novel Planet Buzzkill. We sat and talked over motor oil quality coffee for a few hours in the winter of 2011 about his life as a Carney. Jimbob alternately ran a booth, operated various games, cooked food for concession stands, and most ably worked as a water tank trash talker, taunting men who tried to dunk him by hitting the target with a thrown baseball.

Arnay is one of the mildest mannered shrewd man I have met. While working as head of security for a large event I tapped into Arnay’s winning personality to calm down both hot heads and crime victims so that I could negotiate with and interview them. When writing Candy Cane in the Sky and realizing the need for a persuasive protagonist with some physical challenges and a good heart, Arnay struck me as fine basis for a composite character.