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Whatever their rank, all carnies stick to certain norms of behavior. The prime rule, Truzzi says, is that "you don't talk to the marks." Townspeople are chased away if they try to penetrate the off-midway areas where the carnies live in trailers and socialize in a tent usually called the G-top (because it is often used for gambling). Carnie youngsters are told to play with each other rather than with outsiders, and while unmarried carnie women are no longer forbidden to go into town without a male carnie escort, they are discouraged from getting to know anyone in the towns they visit. Carnie protectiveness toward women can take some odd forms: Although male carnies permit their wives to perform as strippers, they are unwilling to let other carnie men ogle them; thus girlie shows are off limits to carnival men.
The Stick. Truzzi and his colleagues have also studied the relationship between customers and concessionaires, including dishonest ones. With the public's growing sophistication, carnivals have had to cut down on cheating. But Truzzi identifies two shady specialists who still inhabit the carnival world. One is the carnie who "works the gaff," a hidden device to keep customers from winning games touted as tests of skill. The other is the "stick," a carnie who passes himself off as a customer to lure marks into playing gaffed games.
Dembroski describes a still more colorful character, the "alibi agent," a concessionaire who specializes in usually rigged games called alibis. That name comes from the agent's ready explanation for the mark's inevitable failures. "You threw that one too high," he may say, thus persuading the mark that he can easily do better if he keeps playing. (One example of an alibi is the six-cat, in which a mark tries to knock a row of canvas cats off a shelf with a baseball—but fails because a mechanical device keeps the cats in place.) According to Dembroski, "Show owners almost always set a limit on the amount out of which any one mark can be beat." Once that limit (perhaps $10 or $15) has been reached, the agent rewards the mark with a shoddy prize.
That generally mollifies the mark —which confirms what was said many years ago by another behavioral expert, P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute."