A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (20 page)

“Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit.”

“—whereas on the East Coast, politico-sexual indignation
is
the fun. In New York, a woman who’d been hung upside down and ogled would go get a whole lot of other women together and
there’d be this frenzy of politico-sexual indignation. They’d confront the ogler. File an injunction. Management’d find itself
litigating expensively—violation of a woman’s right to nonharassed fun. I’m telling you. Personal and political fun merge
somewhere just east of Cleveland, for women.”

Native Companion kills a mosquito without looking at it. “And they all take Prozac and stick their finger down their throat
too out there. They might ought to try just climbing on and spinning and ignoring assholes and saying Fuck ‘em. That’s pretty
much all you can do with assholes.”

“This could be integral.”

08/13/1235h. Lunchtime. The Fairgrounds are a St. Vitus’s dance of blacktop footpaths, the axons and dendrites of mass spectation,
connecting buildings and barns and corporate tents. Each path is flanked, pretty much along its whole length, by booths hawking
food. There are tall Kaopectate-colored shacks that sell Illinois Dairy Council milkshakes for an off-the-scale $2.50—though
they’re mindbendingly good milkshakes, silky and so thick they don’t even insult your intelligence with a straw or spoon,
giving you instead a kind of small plastic trowel. There are uncountable pork options: Paulie’s Pork Out, the Pork Patio,
Freshfried Pork Skins, the Pork Street Cafe. The Pork Street Cafe is a “One Hundred Percent All-Pork Establishment,” says
its loudspeaker. “Ever last thing.” I’m praying this doesn’t include the beverages. No way I’m eating any pork after this
morning’s swine stress, anyway. And it’s too hot even to think about the Dessert Competitions. It’s at least 95° in the shade
here due east of Livestock, and the breeze is shall we say fragrant. But food is getting bought and ingested at an incredible
clip all up and down the path. The booths are ubiquitous, and each one has a line in front of it. Everybody’s packed in together,
eating as they walk. A peripatetic feeding frenzy. Native Companion is agitating for pork skins. Zipper or no, she’s “
storvin
’,” she says, “to
daith.
” She likes to put on a parodic hick accent whenever I utter a term like “peripatetic.”

(You do not want details on what pork skins are.)

So along the path there are I.D.C. milkshakes (my lunch), Lemon Shake-Ups, Ice Cold Melon Man booths, Citrus Push-Ups, and
Hawaiian Shaved Ice you can suck the syrup out of and then crunch the ice (my dessert). But a lot of what’s getting bought
and gobbled is to my mind not hot-weather food at all: bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt; onion rings big as leis;
Poco Penos Stuffed Jalapeño Peppers; Zorba’s Gyros; shiny fried chicken; Bert’s Burritos—“BIG AS YOU’RE HEAD” (sic); hot Italian
beef; hot New York City Beef (?); Jojo’s Quick Fried Donuts (the only booth selling coffee, by the way); pizza by the shingle-sized
slice and chitlins and Crab Rangoon and Polish sausage. (Rural Illinois’ complete lack of ethnic identity creates a kind of
postmodern embarrassment of riches—foods of every culture and creed become our own, quick-fried and served on cardboard and
consumed on foot.) There are towering plates of “Curl Fries,” which are pubic-hair-shaped and make people’s fingers shine
in the sun. Cheez-Dip Hot Dogs. Pony Pups. Hot Fritters. Philly Steak. Ribeye BBQ Corral. Joanie’s Original ½-lb Burgers’
booth’s sign says 2 CHOICES—RARE OR MOOIN’. I can’t believe people eat this kind of stuff in this kind of heat. The sky is
cloudless and galvanized; the sun fairly pulses. There’s the green reek of fried tomatoes. (Midwesterners say “tomāto.”) The
sound of myriad deep fryers forms a grisly sound-carpet all up and down the gauntlet of booths. The Original 1-lb Butterfly
Pork Chop booth’s sign says PORK: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT, the only discernible armwave to the health-conscious so far. Non-natives
note, it’s the Midwest: no nachos, no chili, no Evian, nothing Cajun.

But holy mackerel are there sweets: Fried Dough; Black Walnut Taffy; Fiddlesticks; Hot Crackerjack. Caramel apples for a felonious
$1.50. Angel’s Breath, known also as Dentist’s Delight. Vanilla fudge that breaks a kind of weird sweat the minute it leaves
its booth’s freezer. The crowd moves at one slow pace, eating, dense-packed between the rows of booths. No ag-pros in sight.
The crowd’s adults are either pale or with the pink tinge of new burn, thin-haired and big-bellied in tight jeans, some downright
fat and moving by sort of shifting their weight from side to side; boys minus shirts and girls in primary-colored halters;
littler boys and girls in squads; parents with strollers; terribly pale academics in Bermudas and sandals; big women in curlers;
lots of people carrying shopping bags; absurd floppy hats; almost all with ’80s-fashion sunglasses—all seemingly eating, crowded
together, twenty abreast, moving slowly, packed in, sweating, shoulders rubbing, the air deep-fried and spicy with antiperspirant
and Coppertone, jowl to jowl. Picture Tokyo’s rush-hour subway on an epic scale. It’s a rare grand mass of Midwest humanity,
eating and shuffling and rubbing, moving toward the Coliseum and Grandstand and Expo Building and the Livestock shows beyond.
It’s maybe significant that nobody looks like they’re feeling oppressed or claustrophobic or bug-eyed at being airlessly hemmed
in by the endless crowd we’re all part of. Native Companion cusses and laughs when people step on her feet. Something East-Coast
in me prickles at the bovine and herdlike quality of the crowd, though, i.e. us, hundreds of hands rising from paper tray
to mouth as we jostle and press toward our respective attractions. From the air we’d look like some kind of Bataan March of
docile consumption. (Native Companion laughs and says the batons aren’t ever till the second day.) We’re Jr.-Beef-Show-bound.
You do not want to know what appalling combination of high-lipid foods N. Companion lunches on as we’re borne by a living
river toward prizewinning beef. The booths keep rolling past. There’s Ace-High All-Butter Fudge. There are Rice-Krispie-squarish
things called Krakkles. Angel Hair Cotton Candy. There are Funnel Cakes, viz. cake batter quick-fried to a tornadic spiral
and rolled in sugared butter. Eric’s Salt Water Taffy. Something called Zak’s Fried Ice Cream. Another artery-clogger: Elephant
Ears. An Elephant Ear is an album-sized expanse of oil-fried dough slathered with butter and cinnamon-sugar, sort of cinnamon
toast from hell, really and truly shaped like an ear, surprisingly yummy, it turns out, but sickly soft, the texture of adipose
flesh, and undeniably elephant-sized—no one’s in line for Ears except the morbidly obese.

One food venue we fight across the current to check out special is a huge high-tech neonated stand: DIPPIN DOTS—“
Ice Cream Of The Future
.” The countergirl sits on a tall stool shrouded in dry-ice steam and is at most thirteen years old, and my Press Credentials
for the first time make someone’s eyes widen, and we get free samples, little cups of what seem to be tiny little ice-cream
pellets, fluorescent BB’s that are kept, the countergirl swears to
God
, at 55° below 0—Oh
God
she doesn’t
know
whether it’s 0°C or 0°F; that wasn’t in the DIPPIN DOTS training video. The pellets melt in your mouth, after a fashion.
More like evaporate in your mouth. The taste is vivid, but the Dots’ texture’s weird, abstract. Futuristic. The stuff’s intriguing
but just too Jetsonian to really catch on. The countergirl spells her last name for us and wants to say Hey to someone named
Jody in return for the samples.

08/13/ 1310h. “Here we’ve got as balanced in dimension as any heifer you’ll see today. A high-volume heifer but also solid
on mass. Good to look at in terms of rib-length to -depth. Depth of forerib. Notice the depth of flank on the front quarter.
We’d like to see maybe perhaps a little more muscle mass on the rear flank. Still, an outstanding heifer.”

We’re in the Jr. Livestock Center. A lot of cows move in a ring around the perimeter of the dirt circle, each cow led by an
ag-family kid. The “Jr.” pretty clearly refers to the owners, not the animals. Each cow’s kid holds a long poker with a right-angled
tooth at its end. They take turns prodding their cow into the center of the ring to move in a tighter circle while its virtues
and liabilities are assessed. We’re up in the stands. Native Companion is smitten. The Beef Show Official at the microphone
looks uncannily like the actor Ed Harris, blue-eyed and somehow sexily bald. He’s dressed just like the kids in the ring—dark
new stiff jeans, check shirt, bandanna around neck. On him it doesn’t look goofy. Plus he’s got a stunning white cowboy hat.
While Ms. Illinois Beef Queen presides from a dais decked with flowers sent over from the Horticulture Show, the Beef Official
stands in the arena itself, his legs apart and his thumbs in his belt, 100% man, radiating livestock savvy. N.C. seems less
smitten than decapitated, frankly.

“Okay this next heifer, a lot of depth of rib but a little tighter in the foreflank. A bit tighter-flanked, if you will, from
the standpoint of capacity.”

The cows’ owners are farm kids, deep-rural kids from back-of-beyond counties like Piatt, Moultrie, Vermilion, all County Fair
winners. They are earnest, nervous, pride-puffed. Dressed rurally up. Straw-colored crewcuts. High number of freckles per
capita. They’re kids remarkable for a kind of classic Rockwellian U.S. averageness, the products of balanced diets, vigorous
labor, and solid GOP upbringings. The Jr. Livestock Center bleachers are over half-full, and it’s all ag-people, farmers,
parents mostly, many with video cameras. Cowhide vests and ornate dress-boots and simply amazing hats. Illinois farmers are
rural and kind of inarticulate, but they are not poor. Just the amount of revolving credit you need to capitalize a fair-sized
operation—seed and herbicide, heavy equipment, crop insurance—makes a lot of them millionaires on paper. Media dirges notwithstanding,
banks are no more keen to foreclose on Midwestern farmers than they are on Third World nations; they’re in that deeply. Nobody’s
in sunglasses or shorts; everyone’s tanned in an earthtone, all-business way. And if the Fair’s ag-pros are also stout, it’s
in a harder, squarer, somehow more
earned
way than the tourists on the paths outside. The bleachers’ fathers have bushy eyebrows and simply enormous thumbs, I notice.
Native C. keeps making growly throat noises about the Beef Official. The J.L.C. is cool and dim and spicy with livestock.
The atmosphere’s good-natured but serious. Nobody’s eating any booth-food, and nobody’s carrying the Fair’s complimentary
GOVERNOR EDGAR shopping bags.

“An excellent heifer from a profile standpoint.”

“Here we have a low-volume heifer but with exceptional mass in the rear quarter.”

I can’t tell whose cow is winning.

“Certainly the most extreme heifer out here in terms of frame to depth.”

Some of the cows looked drugged. Maybe they’re just superbly trained. You can imagine these farm kids getting up every day
so early they can see their breath and leading their cows in practice circles under the cold stars, then having to do all
their chores. I feel good in here. The cows in the ring all have colored ribbons on their tails. The lows and snorts of other
cows on deck echo under the stands’ bleachers. Sometimes the bleachers shake like something’s butting the struts down there.

There are baroque classifications I can’t start to follow—Breed, Class, Age. A friendly ag-lady with a long tired face beside
us explains the kids’ pokers, though. They’re called Show Sticks, used to arrange the cows’ feet when they’re standing, and
to prod, scratch, swat, or stroke, depending. The lady’s own boy took second in the “Polled Hereford”—that’s him getting congratulated
by Ms. IL Beef Queen for a
Livestock Weekly
photographer. Native Companion isn’t crazy about the smells and bellows in here, but she says if her husband calls me up
next week looking for her it’ll mean she’s decided to “up and follow that Ed Harris fellow home.” This is even after I remark
that he could use a little more depth in the forerib.

The cows are shampooed and mild-eyed and lovely, incontinence notwithstanding. They are also assets. The ag-lady beside us
says her family’s operation will realize maybe like $2,500 for the Hereford in the Winners Auction coming up. Illinois farmers
call their farms “operations,” rarely “farms” and never “spreads.” The lady says $2,500 is “maybe about around half” what
the family’s spent on the heifer’s breeding and upkeep and care. “We do this for pride,” she says. This is more like it. Pride,
care, selfless expense. The little boy’s chest puffs out as the Official tips his blinding hat. Farm spirit. Oneness w/ crop
and stock. I’m making mental notes till my temples throb. N.C. asks about the Official fellow. The ag-lady explains he’s a
beef buyer for a major Peoria packing plant and that the bidders in the upcoming Winners Auction (five brown suits and three
string ties on the dais) are from McDonald’s, Burger King, White Castle, etc. Meaning the mild-eyed winners have been sedulously
judged as meat. The ag-lady has a particular bone to pick with McDonald’s, “that always come in and overbid high on the champions
and don’t care about anything else. Mess up the pricing.” Her husband confirms that they got “screwed back to front” on last
year’s bidding.

We skip the Junior Swine Show.

08/13/1400–1600h. We hurtle here and there, sort of surfing on the paths’ crowds. Paid attendance today is 100,000+. A scum
of clouds has cut the heat, but I’m on my third shirt. Society Horse Show at Coliseum. Wheat-Weaving Demonstration in Hobby,
Arts & Crafts Bldg. Peonies like supernovas in the Horticulture Tent, where some of the older ladies from the Press Tour want
to talk corn chowder recipes with me. We have no time. I’m getting the sort of overload-headache I always get in museums.
Native C. is also stressed. And we’re not the only tourists with that pinched glazed hurry-up look. There are just too many
things to experience. Arm-Wrestling Finals where bald men fart audibly with effort. Assyrian National Council in the Fairgrounds’
Ethnic Village—a riot of gesturing people in sheets. Everyone’s very excited, at everything. Drum and Bugle Competition in
Miller Lite Tent. On the crowded path outside Farm Expo a man engages in blatant frottage. Corn-fed young ladies in overalls
cut off at the pockets. Hideous tottery Ronald McD. working the crowd at Club Mickey D’s’ 3-on-3 Hoops Competition—three of
the six basketball players are black, the first black people I’ve seen here since Mrs. Edgar’s hired kids. Pygmy Goat Show
at Goat Barn. In the Media Guide: WALK ILLINOIS!(?), then Slide Show on Prairie Reclamation back over at Conservation World,
then Open Poultry Judging, which I’ve decided to steel myself to see.