A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (25 page)

Nor, I have to say, do I understand why some people will pay money to be careened and suspended and dropped and whipped back
and forth at high speeds and hung upside down until they vomit. It seems to me like paying to be in a traffic accident. I
do not get it; never have. It’s not a regional or cultural thing. I think it’s a matter of basic neurological makeup. I think
the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find
terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror
as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system
that’s extremely easy to terrify. I’m pretty sure I’m more frightened looking up at the Ring of Fire than the patrons are
riding it.

Happy Hollow has not one but two Tilt-a-Whirls. An experience called Wipe Out straps customers into fixed seats on a big lit
disc that spins with a wobble like a coin that won t quite lie down. The infamous Pirate Ship puts forty folks in a plastic
galley and swings it in a pendulous arc until they’re facing straight up and then down. There’s vomit on the sides of the
Pirate Ship, too. The carny operating the P. Ship is made to wear an eyepatch and parrot and hook, on the tip of which hook
burns an impaled Marlboro.

The operator of the Funhouse is slumped in a plastic control booth that reeks of sinsemilla.

The 104-foot Giant Gondola Wheel is a staid old Ferris wheel that puts you facing your seatmate in a kind of steel teacup.
Its rotation is stately, but the cars at the top look like little lit thimbles, and you can hear thin female screams from
up there as their dates grab the teacups’ sides and joggle.

The lines are the longest for the really serious Near-Death Experiences: Ring of Fire, The Zipper, Hi Roller—which latter
runs a highspeed train around the inside of an ellipse that is itself spinning at right angles to the train’s motion. The
crowds are dense and reek of repellent. Boys in fishnet shirts clutch their dates as they walk. There’s something intensely
public
about young Midwestern couples. The girls have tall teased hair and bee-stung lips, and their eye makeup runs in the heat
and gives them a vampirish aspect. The overt sexuality of modern high school girls is not just a Coastal thing. There’s a
Midwestern term, “drape,” for the kind of girl who hangs onto her boyfriend in public like he’s a tree in a hurricane. A lot
of the girls on the Midway are drapes. I swing my trusty dragonfly-clicker before me in broad censerish arcs as I jog. I’m
on a strict and compressed timetable. The Amour Express sends another little train at 60+ mph around a topologically deformed
ring, half of which is enclosed in a fiberglass tunnel with neon hearts and arrows. Bug zappers up on the lightpoles are doing
a brisk business. A fallen packet of Trojans lies near the row of Lucite cubes in which slack-jawed cranes try to pick up
jewelry. The Hollow’s basically an east-west vector, but I jog in rough figure-eights, passing certain venues several times.
The Funhouse operator’s sneakers are sticking out of his booth; the rest of him is out of view. Kids are running into the
Funhouse for free. For a moment I’m convinced I’ve spotted Alan Thicke, of all celebrities, shooting an air rifle at a row
of 2-D cardboard Iraqis for a
Jurassic Park
stuffed animal.

It seems journalistically irresponsible to describe the Hollow’s rides without experiencing at least one of them firsthand.
The Kiddie Kopter is a carousel of miniature Sikorsky prototypes rotating at a sane and dignified clip. The propellers on
each helicopter rotate as well. My copter is admittedly a bit snug, even with my knees drawn up to my chest. I get kicked
off the ride when the whole machine’s radical tilt reveals that I weigh quite a bit more than the maximum 100 pounds, and
I have to say that both the carny in charge and the other kids on the ride were unnecessarily snide about the whole thing.
Each ride has its own PA speaker with its own charge of adrenalizing rock; the Kiddie Kopter’s speaker is playing George Michael’s
“I Want Your Sex” as the little bastards go around. The late-day Hollow itself is an enormous sonic mash from which different
sounds take turns protruding—mostly whistles, sirens, calliopes, mechanized clown-cackles, heavy-metal tunes, human screams
hard to distinguish from recorded screams.

It isn’t Alan Thicke, on closer inspection.

Both the Thunderboltz and the Octopus hurl free-spinning modular cars around a topologically complex plane. The Thunderboltz’s
north side and entrance ramp show still more evidence of gastric distress. Then there’s the Gravitron, an enclosed, top-shaped
structure inside which is a rubberized chamber that spins so fast you’re mashed against the wall like a fly on a windshield.
It’s basically a centrifuge for the centrifugal separation of people’s brains from those brains’ blood supply. Watching people
come out of the Gravitron is not a pleasant experience at all, and you do not want to know what the ground around the exit
looks like. A small boy stands on one foot tugging the operator’s khaki sleeve, crying that he lost a shoe in there. The best
description of the carnies’ tan is that they’re somehow
sinisterly
tan. I notice that many of them have the low brow and prognathous jaw typically associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The
carny operating the Scooter—bumper cars, fast, savage, underinsulated, a sure trip to the chiropractor—has been slumped in
the same position in the same chair every time I’ve seen him, staring past the frantic cars and tearing up used ride-tickets
with the vacant intensity of someone on a Locked Ward. I lean casually against his platform’s railing so that my Credentials
dangle prominently and ask him in a neighborly way how he keeps from going out of his freaking mind with the boredom of his
job. He turns his head very slowly, revealing a severe facial tic: “The fuck you talking bout.”

The same two carnies as before are at The Zipper’s controls, in the exact same clothes, looking up into the full cars and
elbowing each other. The Midway smells of machine oil and fried food, smoke and Cutter repellent and mall-bought adolescent
perfume and ripe trash in the bee-swarmed cans. The very Nearest-to-Death ride looks to be the Kamikaze, way down at the western
end near the Zyklon roller coaster. Its neon sign has a grinning skull with a headband and says simply KAMIKAZE. It’s a 70-foot
pillar of white-painted iron with two 50-foot hammer-shaped arms hanging down, one on either side. The cars are at the end
of these arms, twelve-seaters enclosed in clear plastic. The two arms swing ferociously around, as in 360°, vertically, and
in opposite directions, so that at the top and bottom of every rotation it looks like your car is going to get smashed up
against the other car and you can see faces in the other car hurtling toward you, gray with fright and squishy with G’s. An
eight-ticket, four-dollar waking nightmare.

No. Now I’ve found the worst one. It wasn’t even here yesterday. It must have been brought in special. It may not even be
part of the carnival proper. It’s the SKY COASTER. The SKY COASTER stands regally aloof at the Hollow’s far western edge,
just past the Uphill-Bowling-for-Dinnerware game, in a kind of grotto formed by Blomsness-Thebault trailers and dismantled
machinery. At first all you can see is the very-yellow of some piece of heavy construction equipment, then after a second
there’s some other, high-overhead stuff that from the east is just a tangle of Expressionist shadows against the setting sun.
A small but steady stream of Fairgoers leads into the SKY COASTER grotto.

It’s a 175-foot construction crane, a BRH-200, one of the really big mothers, with a tank’s traction belts instead of wheels,
a canary-yellow cab, and a long proboscis of black steel, 200 feet long, canted upward at maybe 70°. This is half of the SKY
COASTER. The other half is a 100-foot + tower assembly of cross-hatched iron that’s been erected a couple hundred yards north
of the crane. There’s a folding table in front of the clothesline cordoning off the crane, and there’s a line of people at
the table. The woman taking their money is fiftyish and a compelling advertisement for sunscreen. Behind her on a vivid blue
tarp are two meaty blond guys in SKY COASTER T-shirts helping the next customer strap himself into what looks like a combination
straitjacket and utility belt, bristling with hooks and clips. It’s not yet entirely clear what’s going on. From here the
noise of the Hollow behind is both deafening and muffled, like high tide behind a dike. My Media Guide, sweated into the shape
of a buttock from my pocket, says: “If you thought bungee jumping was a thrill, wait until you soar high above the Fairgrounds
on SKY COASTER. The rider is fastened securely into a full-body harness that hoists them [sic, hopefully] onto a tower and
releases them to swing in a pendulum-like motion while taking in a spectacular view of the Fairgrounds below.” The hand-printed
signs at the folding table are more telling: “$40.00. AMEX Visa MC. NO REFUNDS. NO STOPPING HALF WAY UP. “ The two guys are
leading the customer up the stairs of a construction platform maybe ten feet high. One guy’s at each elbow, and I realize
they’re helping hold the customer up. Who would pay $40.00 for an experience you have to be held up even to walk toward? Why
pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive? I simply do not get it. Plus there’s also something
slightly off about this customer, odd. For one thing, he’s wearing tinted aviator glasses. No one in the rural Midwest wears
aviator glasses, tinted or otherwise. Then I see what it really is. He’s wearing $400 Banfi loafers. Without socks. This guy,
now lying prone on the platform below the crane, is
from the East Coast
. He’s a
ringer
. I almost want to shout it. A woman’s on the blue tarp, already in harness, rubber-kneed, waiting her turn. A steel cable
descends from the tip of the crane’s proboscis, on its end a fist-sized clip. Another cable leads from the crane’s cab along
the ground to the tower, up through ring-tipped pitons all up the tower’s side, and over a pulley right at the top, another
big clip on the end. One of the blond guys waves the tower’s cable down and brings it over to the platform. Both the crane’s
and tower’s cables’ clips are attached to the back of the East-Coast man’s harness, fastened and locked. The man’s trying
to look around behind him to see what-all’s attached to him as the two big blonds leave the platform. Yet another blond man
in the crane’s cab throws a lever, and the tower’s cable pulls tight in the grass and up the tower’s side and down. The crane’s
cable stays slack as the man is lifted into the air by the tower’s cable. The harness covers his shorts and shirt, so he looks
babe-naked as he rises. The one cable sings with tension as the East-Coaster is pulled slowly to the top of the tower. He’s
still stomach-down, limbs wriggling. At a certain height he starts to look like livestock in a sling. You can tell he’s trying
to swallow until his face gets too small to see. Finally he’s all the way up at the top of the tower, his ass against the
cable’s pulley, trying not to writhe. I can barely take notes. They cruelly leave him up there awhile, slung, a smile of slack
cable between him and the crane’s tip. The grotto’s crowd mutters and points, shading eyes against the red sun. One teenage
boy describes the sight to another teenage boy as “Harsh.” I myself am constructing a mental list of the violations I would
undergo before I’d let anyone haul me ass-first to a great height and swing me like high-altitude beef. One of the blond guys
has a bullhorn and is playing to the crowd’s suspense, calling up to the slung East-Coaster: “Are. You. Ready.” The East-Coaster’s
response-noises are more bovine than human. His tinted aviator glasses hang askew from just one ear; he doesn’t bother to
fix them. I can see what’s going to happen. They’re going to throw a lever and detach the tower-cable’s clip, and the man
in sockless Banfis will free-fall for what’ll seem forever, until the crane’s cable’s slack is taken up and the line takes
his weight and goes tight behind him and swings him way out over the grounds to the south, his arc’s upward half almost as
high as the tower was, and then he’ll fall all over again, back, and get caught and swung the other way, back and forth, the
man prone at the arc’s trough and seeming to stand at either apex, swinging back and forth and erect and prone against a rare-meat
sunset. And just as the crane’s cab’s blond reaches for his lever and the crowd mightily inhales, just then, I lose my nerve,
in my very last moment at the Fair—I recall my childhood’s serial nightmare of being swung or whipped in an arc that threatens
to come full circle—and I decline to be part of this, even as witness—and I find, again, in extremis, access to childhood’s
other worst nightmare, the only sure way to obliterate all; and the sun and sky and plummeting Yuppie go out like a light.

1993

In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions
their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing
theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics. Whether you’re a fan of Barthes, Foucault, de Man,
and Derrida or not, you at least have to credit them with this fertile miscegenation of criticism and philosophy: critical
theory is now a bona fide area of study for young American philosophers interested in both Continental poetics and Anglo-American
analytic practice. H. L. Hix is one of these young (judging by his author photo, about twelve) U.S. philosophers, and I’m
pretty sure that his 1992
Morte d’ Author: An Autopsy
is a Ph.D. dissertation that was more than good enough to see print as part of Temple University Press’s “The Arts and Their
Philosophies” series.

One of the wickedly fun things about following literary theory in the 1990s is going to be watching young critics/philosophers
now come along and attack their poststructuralist teachers by criticizing assumptions those teachers have held as self-evident.
This is just what Professor Hix is doing with one of the true clarion-calls that marked the shift from New Criticism and structuralism
to deconstruction, Roland Barthes’ 1968 announcement of “The Death of the Author.” Barthes’ seminal essay has prompted twenty-three
years of vigorous interjournal debate among European theorists (pro-death) and U.S. philosophers (anti-death, mostly), a debate
that Hix has impressively compiled and arranged between two covers, and a debate that he has, rather less impressively, sought
to resolve by accusing all parties of not being nearly complicated enough in their understanding of the term “author” ’s in-
and extensions.