A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (22 page)

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.

08/15/0847h. A quick scan of the Draft Horse Show. The Coliseum’s interior is the size of a blimp hangar, with an elliptical dirt arena. The stands are permanent and set in cement and go on and up forever. The stands are maybe 5% full. Echoes are creepy, but the smell of the arena’s moist earth is lush and nice. The draft horses themselves are enormous, eight feet high and steroidically muscled. I think they were originally bred to pull things; God only knows their function now. There are two- and three-year-old Belgian Stallions, Percherons, and the Bud-famous Clydesdales with their bellbottoms of hair. The Belgians are particularly thick through the chest and rear quarter (I’m starting to develop an eye for livestock). Again, the Official wears a simply bitching white cowboy hat and stands at ease, legs well apart. This one has a weak chin and something wrong with one of his eyelids, though, at least. All the competitors are again shampooed and combed, black and gunpowder-gray and the dull white of sea-foam, their tails cropped and the stumps decorated with girlish bows that look obscene against all this muscle. The horses’ heads bob when they walk, rather like pigeons’ heads. They’re led in the now familiar concentric circles by their owners, big-bellied men in brown suits and string ties. At obscure PA commands, the owners break their animals into thundering canter, holding their bridles and running just under the head, stomachs bouncing around (the men’s). The horses’ hoofs throw up big clods of earth as they run, so that it sort of rains dirt for several yards behind them. They look mythic when they run. Their giant hoofs are black and have shiny age-striations like a tree-stump’s rings.

It’s something of a relief to see no fast-food buyers on the dais awaiting Auction. As with Beef, though, a young beauty queen in a tiara presides from a flower-decked throne. It’s unclear just who she is: “Ms. Illinois Horseflesh” sounds unlikely, as does “Ms. Illinois Draft Horse.” (Though there is a 1993 Illinois Pork Queen, over in Swine.)

08/15/ 0930h. Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit. I’m once again at the capacious McDonald’s tent, at the edge, the titanic inflatable clown presiding. (Why is there no Wal-Mart tent?) There’s a fair-sized crowd in the basketball bleachers at one side and rows of folding chairs at the other. It’s the Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals. A metal loudspeaker begins to emit disco, and little girls pour into the tent from all directions, twirling and gamboling in vivid costume. There’s a symphony of zippers from the seats and stands as video cameras come out by the score, and I can tell it’s pretty much just me and a thousand parents.

The baroque classes and divisions, both team and solo, go from age three (!) to sixteen, with epithetic signifiers—e.g. the four-year-olds compose the Sugar ‘N’ Spice division, and so on. I’m in a chair right up front (but in the sun) behind the competition’s judges, introduced as “Varsity Twirlers from the [why?] University of Kansas.” They are four frosted blondes who smile a lot and blow huge grape bubbles.

The twirler squads are all from different towns. Mount Vernon and Kankakee seem especially rich in twirlers. The twirlers’ spandex costumes, differently colored for each team, are paint-tight and really brief in the legs. The coaches are grim, tan, lithe-looking women, clearly twirlers once, on the far side of their glory now and very serious-looking, each with a clipboard and whistle. It’s all a little like figure skating. The teams go into choreographed routines, each routine with a title and a designated disco or show tune, full of compulsory baton-twirling maneuvers with highly technical names. A mom next to me is tracking scores on what looks almost like an astrology chart, and is in no mood to explain anything to a novice baton-watcher. The routines are wildly complex, and the loudspeaker’s play-by-play is mostly in code. All I can determine for sure is that I’ve bumbled into what has to be the single most spectator-hazardous event at the Fair. Missed batons go all over, whistling wickedly. The three-, four-, and five-year-olds aren’t that dangerous, though they do spend most of their time picking up dropped batons and trying to hustle back into place—the parents of especially fumble-prone twirlers howl in fury from the stands while the coaches chew gum grimly—but the littler girls don’t have the arm-strength to really endanger anybody, although one of the judges does take a Sugar ‘N’ Spice’s baton across the bridge of the nose and has to be helped from the tent.

But when the seven- and eight-year-olds hit the floor for a series of “Armed Service Medleys” (spandex with epaulets and officers’ caps and batons over shoulders like M-16s), errant batons start pinwheeling into the tent’s ceiling, sides, and crowd with real force. I myself duck several times. A man just down the row takes one in the plexus and falls over in his metal chair with a horrid crash. The batons (one stray I picked up had REGULATION LENGTH embossed down the shaft) have white rubber stoppers on each end, but it’s that dry hard kind of rubber, and the batons themselves are not light. I don’t think it’s an accident that police nightsticks are also called service batons.

Physically, even within same-age teams, there are marked incongruities in size and development. One nine-year-old is several heads taller than another, and they’re trying to do an involved back-and-forth duet thing with just one baton, which ends up taking out a bulb in one of the tent’s steel hanging lamps and showering part of the stands with glass. A lot of the younger twirlers look either anorexic or gravely ill. There are no fat baton-twirlers. The enforcement of this no-endomorph rule is probably internal: a fat person’d have to get exactly one look at herself in tight sequinned spandex to abandon all twirling ambitions for all time.

Ironically, it’s the botched maneuvers that allow one to see how baton-twirling (which to me had always seemed sleight-of-handish and occult) works in terms of mechanics. It seems to consist not in twirling so much as sort of spinning the baton on your knuckle while the fingers underneath work and writhe furiously for some reason, maybe supplying torque. Some serious kinetic force is coming from somewhere, clearly. A sort of attempted sidearm-twirl sends a baton Xing out and hitting a big woman’s kneecap with a ringing clang, and her husband puts his hand on her shoulder as she sits up very rigid and white, pop-eyed, her mouth a little bloodless hyphen. I miss good old Native Companion, who’s the sort of person who can elicit conversation even from the recently baton-struck.