A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (21 page)

The afternoon becomes one long frisson of stress. I’m sure we’ll miss something crucial. Native C. has zinc oxide on her nose
and needs to get back home to pick up her kids. Plodding, elbowing. Seas of Fairgoing flesh, all looking, still eating. These
Fairgoers seem to gravitate only to the crowded spots, the ones with long lines already. No one’s playing any East-Coast games
of Beat the Crowd. Midwesterners lack a certain cunning. Under stress they look like lost children. But no one gets impatient.
Something adult and potentially integral strikes me. Why the Fairgoing tourists don’t mind the crowds, lines, noise—and why
I’m getting none of that old special sense of the Fair as uniquely For-Me. The State Fair here is For-
Us
. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You. The Fair’s deliberately
about
the crowds and jostle, the noise and overload of sight and smell and choice and event. It’s Us showing off for Us.

A theory: Megalopolitan East-Coasters’ summer vacations are literally getaways, flights-from—from crowds, noise, heat, dirt,
the neural wear of too many stimuli. Thus ecstatic escapes to mountains, glassy lakes, cabins, hikes in silent woods. Getting
Away From It All. Most East-Coasters see more than enough stimulating people and sights M-F, thank you; they stand in enough
lines, buy enough stuff, elbow enough crowds, see enough spectacles. Neon skylines. Convertibles with 110-watt sound systems.
Grotesques on public transport. Spectacles at every urban corner practically grabbing you by the lapels, commanding attention.
The East-Coast existential treat is thus some escape from confines and stimuli—silence, rustic vistas that hold still, a turning
inward: Away. Not so in the rural Midwest. Here you’re pretty much Away all the time. The land here is big. Pool-table flat.
Horizons in every direction. Even in comparatively citified Springfield, see how much farther apart the homes are, how broad
the yards—compare with Boston or Philly. Here a seat to yourself on all public transport; parks the size of airports; rush
hour a three-beat pause at a stop sign. And the farms themselves are huge, silent, mostly vacant space: you can’t see your
neighbor. Thus the vacation-impulse in rural IL is manifested as a flight-
toward
. Thus the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd. To see something besides land and corn and satellite
TV and your wife’s face. Crowds out here are a kind of adult nightlight. Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public
Event. High school football, church social, Little League, parades, Bingo, market day, State Fair. All very big, very deep
deals. Something in a Mid-westerner sort of
actuates
at a Public Event. You can see it here. The faces in this sea of faces are like the faces of children released from their
rooms. Governor Edgar’s state spirit rhetoric at the Main Gate’s ribbon rings true. The real Spectacle that draws us here
is Us. The proud displays and the paths between them and the special-treat booths along the paths are less important than
the greater-than-sum We that trudge elbow to elbow, pushing strollers and engaging in sensuous trade, expending months of
stored-up attention. A neat inversion of the East-Coast’s summer withdrawal. God only knows what the West Coast’s like.

We’re about 100 yards shy of the Poultry Building when I break down. I’ve been a rock about the prospect of Open Poultry Judging
all day, but now my nerve totally goes. I can’t go in there. Listen to the untold thousands of sharp squawking beaks in there,
I say. Native Companion not unkindly offers to hold my hand, talk me through it. It’s 93° and I have pygmy-goat shit on my
shoe and am almost weeping with fear and embarrassment. I sit down on one of the green pathside benches to collect myself
while N.C. goes to call home about her kids. I’ve never before realized that “cacophony” was onomatopoeic: the noise of the
Poultry Bldg. is cacophonous and scrotum-tightening and totally horrible. I think it’s what insanity must sound like. No wonder
madmen clutch their heads and scream. There’s also a thin stink, and lots of bits of feather are floating all over. And this
is
outside
the Poultry Bldg. I hunch on the bench. When I was eight, at the Champaign County Fair, I was pecked without provocation,
flown at and pecked by a renegade fowl, savagely, just under the right eye, the scar of which looks like a permanent zit.

Except of course one problem with the prenominate theory is that there’s more than one Us, hence more than one State Fair.
Ag-people at the Livestock barns and Farm Expo, non-farm civilians at the food-booths and touristy exhibits and Happy Hollow.
The two groups do not much mix. Neither is the neighbor the other pines for.

Then there are the carnies. The carnies mix with no one, never seem to leave Happy Hollow. Late tonight, I’ll watch them drop
flaps to turn their carnival booths into tents. They’ll smoke cheap dope and drink peppermint schnapps and pee out onto the
Midway’s dirt. I think carnies must be the rural U.S.’s gypsies—itinerant, insular, swarthy, unclean, not to be trusted. You
are in no way drawn to them. They all have the same hard blank eyes as people in bus terminal bathrooms. They want your money
and to look up your skirt; beyond that you’re just blocking the view. Next week they’ll dismantle and pack and haul up to
the Wisconsin State Fair, where they’ll again never set foot off the Midway they pee on.

The State Fair is rural IL’s moment of maximum community, but even at a Fair whose whole raison is For-Us, Us’s entail Thems,
apparently. The carnies make an excellent Them. And the ag-people really hate them, the carnies. While I’m sitting there on
the bench disassociating and waiting for N. Companion to come back, all of a sudden an old withered guy in an Illinois Poultry
Association cap careers past on one of those weird three-wheeled carts, like a turbo-charged wheelchair, and runs neatly over
my sneaker. This ends up being my one unassisted interview of the day, and it’s brief. The old guy keeps revving his cart’s
engine like a biker. “
Traish
” he calls the carnies. “Lowlifes. Wouldn’t let my own kids go off down there on a goddamn bet,” gesturing down the hill at
the twirling rides. He raises pullets down near Olney. He has something in his cheek. “Steal you blind. Drug-addicted and
such. Swindle you nekked, them games. Traish. Me I ever year we drive up, why, I carry my wallet like this here,” pointing
to his hip. His wallet is on a big steel clip attached to a wire on his belt; the whole thing looks vaguely electrified.

Q: “But would they want to? Your kids I mean. Would they want to hit the Hollow, ride the rides, eat all-butter fudge, test
various skills, mingle a little?”

He spits brownly. “
Hail
no. We all come for the shows.” He means the Livestock Competitions. “See some folks, talk stock. Drink a beer. Work all
year round raising ‘em for showbirds. It’s for pride. And to see folks. Shows’re over Tuesday, why, we go on home.” He looks
like a bird himself. His face is mostly nose, his skin loose and pebbly like poultry’s. His eyes are the color of denim. “Rest
of all this here’s for city people.” Spits. He means Springfield, Decatur, Champaign. “Walk around, stand in line, eat junk,
buy soovners. Give their wallet to the traish. Don’t even know there’s folks come here to work up here,” gesturing at the
barns. He spits again, leaning way out to the side of the cart to do it. “We come up to work, see some folks. Drink a beer.
Bring our own goddamn food. Mother packs a hamper. Hail, what they’d want to go on down there?” I think meaning his kids.
“Ain’t no folks they know down there.” He laughs. Asks my name. “It’s good to see folks,” he says. “We all stayin’ up to the
mo
tel. Watch your wallet, boy.” And he asks after my tire-treaded foot, very politely, before peeling out toward the chicken
din.

08/14/ 1015h. Rested, rehydrated. No Native Companion along to ask embarrassing questions about why the reverential treatment;
plenty of time for the
Harper
’s
Bazaar
rumor to metastasize: I am primed to hit the Dessert Competitions.

8/14/1025h. Dessert Competitions.

08/14/1315h. Illinois State Fair Infirmary; then motel; then Springfield Memorial Medical Center Emergency Room for distention
and possible rupture of transverse colon (false alarm); then motel; incapacitated till well after sunset; whole day a washout;
incredibly embarrassing, unprofessional; indescribable. Delete entire day.

08/15/0600h. Upright and moving just outside the Hollow. Still transversely distressed, unrested; shaky but resolute. Sneakers
already soaked. It rained in brutal sheets last night, damaged tents, tore up corn near the motel. Midwestern thunderstorms
are real Old Testament skull-clutchers: Richter-Scale thunder, sideways rain, big zigzags of cartoon lightning. By the time
I tottered back over last night Tammy Wynette had closed early at the Grandstand, but Happy Hollow went till midnight, a whole
lot of neon in the rain.

The dawn is foggy. The sky looks like soap. An enfilade of snores from the booths-turned-tents along the Midway. Happy Hollow
is a bog. Someone behind the lowered flaps of the shoot-2D-ducks-with-an-air-rifle booth is having a wicked coughing fit,
obscenely punctuated. Distant sounds of dumpsters getting emptied. Twitters of various birds. The Blomsness-Thebault management
trailer has a blinky electric burglar alarm on it. The goddamn cocks are at it already up in the Poultry Bldg. Thunder-mutters
sound way off east over Indiana. Trees shudder and shed drops in the breeze. The blacktop paths are empty, eerie, shiny with
rain.

08/15/0620h. Looking at legions of sleeping sheep. Sheep Building. I am the only waking human in here. It’s cool and quiet.
Sheep excrement has an evil vomity edge to it, but olfactorily it’s not too bad in here. One or two sheep are upright but
silent. No fewer than four ag-pros are in the pens sleeping right up next to their sheep, about which the less speculation
the better as far as I’m concerned. The roof in here is leaky and most of the straw is sopped. There are little printed signs
on every pen. In here are Yearling Ewes, Brood Ewes, Ewe Lambs, Fall Lambs. Breedwise we’ve got Corriedales, Hampshires, Dorset
Horns, Columbias. You could get a Ph.D. just in sheep, from the looks of it. Rambouillets, Oxfords, Suffolks, Shropshires,
Cheviots, Southdowns. And these are just like the major classes. I’ve forgotten to say you can’t see the actual sheep. The
actual corporeal sheep themselves are all in tight white bodysuits, cotton maybe, with eye- and mouth-holes. Like Superhero
suits. Sleeping in them. Presumably to keep their wool clean until it’s judged. No fun later when the temperature starts climbing,
though, I bet.

Back outside. Floating protean ghosts of fog and evap on the paths. The Fairgrounds are creepy with everything set up but
no one about. A creepy air of hasty abandonment, a feeling like you run home from kindergarten and the whole family’s up and
moved, left you. Plus nowhere dry to sit down and test out the notebook. (More like a tablet, purchased along w/ Bic ballpoint
last night at the S.M.M.C. Card, Gift & Greeting shop. All they had was a little kid’s tablet with that weird soft gray paper
and some kind of purple brontosaurus-type character named Barney on the cover.

08/15/0730h. Pentacostal Sunday Services in Twilight Ballroom. Services joyless, humorless, worshippers lean and starchy and
dour like characters from Hals portraits. Not one person smiles the whole time, and there’s no little interval where you get
to go around shaking people’s hands and wishing them Peace. It’s already 80° but so damp that people’s breath hangs in front
of their face.

08/15/ 0820h. Press Room, 4th Floor, Illinois Bldg. I’m pretty much the only credentialed Press without a little plywood cubbyhole
for mail and Press Releases. Two guys from an ag-newspaper are trying to hook a fax machine up to a rotary-phone jack. Michael
Jordan’s father’s body has been found, and the wire services are going nuts in one corner. Wire service teletypes really do
sound exactly like the background on old TV newscasts from childhood. Also, the East St. Louis levee’s given way; National
Guardsmen are being mobilized. (East St. Louis needs Guardsmen even when it’s dry, from my experience.) A State Fair PR guy
arrives for the daily Press Briefing. Coffee and unidentifiable muffinish things courtesy of Wal-Mart. I am hunched and pale.
This
P.M.
’s highlights: Midwest Truck and Tractor Pull, the “Bill Oldani 100” U.S.A.C. auto race. Tonight’s Grandstand Show’s to be
the poor old doddering Beach Boys, who I suspect now must make their entire living from State Fairs. The Beach Boys’ “Special
Guest” warm-up is to be America, another poor old doddering band. The PR guy cannot give away all his free Press Passes to
the concert. Plus I learn I missed some law-and-order dramatics yesterday, apparently: two minors from Carbondale arrested
riding The Zipper last night when a vial of cocaine fell out of one of their pockets and direct-hit a state trooper alertly
eating a Lemon Push-Up on the Midway below; a reported rape or date-rape in Parking Lot 6; assorted bunkos and D&D’s. Plus
two separate reporters vomited on from a great height in two separate incidents under two separate Near-Death-Experience rides,
trying to cover the Hollow.

08/15/0840h. A Macy’s-float-sized inflatable Ronald, seated and eerily Buddha-like, presides over the north side of the Club
Mickey D’s tent. A family is having their picture taken in front of the inflatable Ronald, arranging their little kids in
a careful pose. Notebook entry:
Why?

08/15/0842h. Fourth trip to the bathroom in three hours. Elimination can be a dicey undertaking here. The Fair has scores
of Midwest Pottyhouses brand portable toilets at various strategic sites. Midwest Pottyhouses are man-sized plastic huts,
reminiscent of Parisian
pissoirs
but also utilized for
numero deux,
clearly. Each Midwest Pottyhouse has its own undulating shroud of flies, plus your standard heavy-use no-flush outhouse smell,
and I for one would rather succumb to a rupture than use a Pottyhouse, though the lines for them are long and sanguine. The
only real restrooms are in the big exhibit buildings. The Coliseum’s is like a grade school boys’ room, especially the long
communal urinal, a kind of huge porcelain trough. Performance- and other anxieties abound here, with upwards of twenty guys
all flanking and facing each other, each with his unit out. All the mens rooms have hot-air blowers instead of paper towels,
meaning you can’t wash your face, and all have annoying faucet controls you have to keep a grip on to operate, meaning toothbrushing
is a contorted affair. The highlight is watching Midwestern ag-guys struggle with suspenders and overall straps as they exit
the stalls.