A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (24 page)

08/15/ 1336h. I’m on a teetery stool watching the Prairie State Cloggers Competition in a Twilight Ballroom that’s packed with ag-folks and well over 100°. An hour ago I’d nipped in here to get a bottle of soda-pop on my way to the Truck and Tractor Pull. By now the Pull’s got to be nearly over, and in half an hour the big U.S.A.C. dirt-track auto race starts, which I’ve already reserved a ticket for. But I can’t tear myself away from the scene in here. This is far and away the funnest, most emotionally intense thing at the Fair. Run, don’t walk, to your nearest clogging venue.

I’d imagined goony Jed Clampett types in tattered hats and hobnail boots, a-stompin’ and a-whoopin’, etc. Clogging, Scotch-Irish in origin and the dance of choice in Appalachia, I guess did used to involve actual clogs and boots and slow stomps. But clogging has now miscegenated with square dancing and honky-tonk boogie to become a kind of intricately synchronized, absolutely kick-ass country tap dance.

There’s teams from Pekin, Leroy, Rantoul, Cairo, Morton. They each do three numbers. The music is up-tempo country or 4/4 dance-pop. Each team has anywhere from four to ten dancers. They’re 75% women. Few of the women are under 35, fewer still under 175 lbs. They’re country mothers, red-cheeked gals with bad dye jobs and big pretty legs. They wear Westernwear tops and midiskirts with multiple ruffled slips underneath; and every once in a while they’ll grab handfuls of cloth and flip the skirts up like cancan dancers. When they do this they either yip or whoop, as the spirit moves them. The men all have thinning hair and cheesy rural faces, and their skinny legs are rubberized blurs. The men’s Western shirts have piping on the chest and shoulders. The teams are all color-coordinated—blue and white, black and red. The white shoes all the dancers wear look like golf shoes with metal taps clamped on.

Their numbers are to everything from shitkicker Waylon and Tammy to Aretha, Miami Sound Machine, Neil Diamond’s “America.” The routines have some standard tap-dance moves—sweep, flare, chorus-line kicking. But it’s fast and sustained and choreographed down to the last wrist-flick. And square dancing’s genes can be seen in the upright, square-shouldered postures on the floor, a kind of florally enfolding tendency to the choreography, some of which features high-speed promenades. But it’s adrenaline-dancing, meth-paced and exhausting to watch because your own feet move; and it’s erotic in a way that makes MTV look lame. The cloggers’ feet are too fast to be seen, really, but they all tap out the exact same rhythm. A typical routine’s is something like:
ta
tatata
ta
tatata
tatata.
The variations around the basic rhythm are baroque. When they kick or spin, the two-beat absence of tap complexifies the pattern.

The audience is packed in right to the edge of the portable hardwood flooring. The teams are mostly married couples. The men are either rail-thin or have big hanging guts. A couple of the men are great fluid Astaire-like dancers, but mostly it’s the women who compel. The males have constant sunny smiles, but the women look orgasmic; they’re the really serious ones, transported. Their yips and whoops are involuntary, pure exclamation. They are arousing. The audience claps savvily on the backbeat and whoops when the women do. It’s almost all folks from the ag and livestock shows—the flannel shirts, khaki pants, seed caps, and freckles. The spectators are soaked in sweat and extremely happy. I think this is the ag-community’s Special Treat, a chance here to cut loose a little while their animals sleep in the heat. The psychic transactions between cloggers and crowd seem representative of the Fair as a whole: a culture talking to itself, presenting credentials for its own inspection. This is just a smaller and specialized rural Us—bean farmers and herbicide brokers and 4-H sponsors and people who drive pickup trucks because they really need them. They eat non-Fair food from insulated hampers and drink beer and pop and stomp in perfect time and put their hands on neighbors’ shoulders to shout in their ear while the cloggers twirl and fling sweat on the crowd.

There are no black people in the Twilight Ballroom. The looks on the younger ag-kids’ faces have this awakened astonished aspect, like they didn’t realize their own race could dance like this. Three married couples from Rantoul, wearing full Western bodysuits the color of raw coal, weave an incredible filigree of high-speed tap around Aretha’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and there’s no hint of racial irony in the room; the song has been made these people’s own, emphatically. This ’90s version of clogging does have something sort of pugnaciously white about it, a kind of performative nose-thumbing at Jackson and Hammer. There’s an atmosphere in the room—not racist, but aggressively white. It’s hard to describe. The atmosphere’s the same at a lot of rural Midwest public events. It’s not like if a black person came in he’d be ill-treated; it’s more like it would just never occur to a black person to come in here.

I can barely hold the tablet to scribble journalistic impressions, the floor’s rumbling under so many boots and sneakers. The record player’s old-fashioned and the loudspeakers are shitty and it all sounds fantastic. Two little girls are playing jacks under the table I’m next to. Two of the dancing Rantoul wives are fat, but with great legs. Who could practice this kind of dancing as much as they must and stay fat? I think maybe rural Midwestern women are just congenitally big. But these people clogging get
down
. And they do it as a troupe, a collective, with none of the narcissistic look-at-me grandstanding of great dancers in rock clubs. They hold hands and whirl each other around and in and out, tapping like mad, their torsos upright and almost formal, as if only incidentally attached to the blur of legs below. It goes on and on. I’m rooted to my stool. Each team seems the best yet. On the crowd’s other side across the floor I can see the old poultry farmer, he of the carny-hatred and electrified wallet. He’s still got his billed poultry cap on, making a megaphone of his hands to whoop with the women, leaning way forward in his geriatric scooter, body bobbing like he’s stomping in time while his little black boots stay clamped in their stays.

08/15/ 1636h. Trying to hurry to Grandstand; trapped in masses on central path out past FoodaRama. I’m eating a corn dog cooked in 100% soybean oil. I can hear the hornety engines of the U.S.A.C. 100 race, which must have started quite a while ago. Huge plume of track-dust hanging over Grandstand. Distant tinny burble of excited PA announcer. The corn dog tastes strongly of soybean oil, which itself tastes like corn oil that’s been strained through an old gym towel. Tickets for the race are an obscene $13.50. Baton-twirling is
still
under way in the McD.’s tent. A band called Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets is playing at the Lincoln Stage, and as the path’s mass goes by I can see dancers in there. They look jagged and arrhythmic and blank, bored in that hip young East-Coast-taught way, facing in instead of out, not touching their partners. The people not dancing don’t even look at them, and after the clogging the whole thing looks unspeakably lonely and numb.

08/15/ 1645h. The official name of the race is the William “Wild Bill” Oldani Memorial 100 Sprint Car Race of the Valvoline-U.S.A.C. Silver Crown Series’ True Value Championship Circuit. The Grandstand seats 9800 and is packed. The noise is beyond belief. The race is nearly over: the electric sign on the infield says LAP 92. The board says the leader is #26, except his black-and-green SKOAL car’s in the middle of the pack. Apparently he’s lapped people. The crowd’s mostly men, very tan, smoking, mustaches, billed caps with automotive associations. Most of the spectators wear earplugs; the ones in the real know wear those thick airline-worker noise-filter earmuffs. The seventeen-page program is mostly impenetrable. There are either 49 or 50 cars, called either Pro Dirt or Silver Crown cars, and they’re basically go-carts from hell, with a soapbox-derby chassis and huge dragster tires, gleaming tangles of pipes and spoilers jutting out all over, and unabashedly phallic bulges up front, where I suspect the engines are. What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle. The program says these models are what they used to race at Indy in the 1950s. It’s unclear whether that means these specific cars or this genre of car or what. I’m pretty sure “Indy” refers to the Indianapolis 500. The cars’ cockpits are open and webbed in straps and roll bars; the drivers wear helmets the same color as their cars, with white ski-masky things over their faces to keep out the choking dust. The cars come in all hues. Most look to be sponsored by either Skoal or Marlboro. Pit crews in surgical white lean out into the track and flash obscure commands written on little chalkboards. The infield is clotted with trailers and tow trucks and Officials’ stands and electric signs. Women in skimpy tops stand on different trailers, seeming very partisan indeed. It’s all very confusing. Certain facts in the program just don’t add up—like the Winner’s Purse is only $9200, yet each car supposedly represents a six-figure annual investment for various sponsors. Whatever they invest in, it isn’t mufflers. I can barely take my hands off my ears long enough to turn the program’s pages. The cars sound almost like jets—that insectile whine—but with a diesely, lawn-mowerish component you can feel in your skull. Part of the problem is the raw concrete of the Grandstand’s seating; another’s the fact that the seating’s on just one side of the Grandstand, on the straightaway. When the main mass of cars passes it’s unendurable; your very skeleton hurts from the noise, and your ears are still belling when they come around again. The cars go like mad bats on the straightaways and then shift down for the tight turns, their rear tires wobbling in the dirt. Certain cars pass other cars, and some people cheer when they do. Down at the bottom of my section of seats a little boy held up on a cement fence-support by his father is rigid, facing away from the track, his hands clamped over his ears so hard his elbows stick way out, and his face is a rictus of pain as the cars go by. The little boy and I sort of rictus at each other. A fine dirty dust hangs in the air and coats everything, tongues included. Then all of a sudden binoculars come out and everyone stands as there’s some sort of screeching slide and crash on a far turn, all the way across the infield; and firemen in full-length slickers and hats go racing out there in fire trucks, and the PA voice’s pitch goes way up but is still incomprehensible, and a man with those airline earmuffs in the Officials’ stands leans out and flails at the air with a bright-yellow flag, and the go-carts throttle down to autobahn speed, and the Official Pace Car (a Trans Am) comes out and leads them around, and everybody stands up, and I stand too. It’s impossible to see anything but a swizzle stick of smoke above the far turn, and the engine noise is endurable and the PA silent, and the relative quiet hangs there while we all wait for news, and I look around hard at all the faces below the raised binoculars, but it’s not at all clear what sort of news we’re all hoping for.

08/15/1730h. Ten-minute line for an I.D.C. milkshake. Oily blacktop stink on heated paths. I ask a little kid to describe the taste of his Funnel Cake and he runs away. Ears still mossily ringing—everything sounds kind of car-phonish. Display of a 17.6-lb zucchini squash outside the Agri-Industries Pavilion. One big zucchini, all right. Several of the Dessert Tent ladies are at the Tupperware Retrospective (no kidding) right nearby, though, and I make myself scarce in a hurry. In the Coliseum, the only historical evidence of the Tractor Pull is huge ideograms of tire tracks, mounds of scored dirt, dark patches of tobacco juice, smells of burnt rubber and oil. Two buildings over is a curiously non-State-Pride-related exhibit, by the Harley Davidson Corporation, of “Motorcycles Of Distinction.” Also a deltiology exhibit—card after card, some back from the 1940s, mostly of crops, thunderclouds massing at horizons, flat sweeps of very black land. In a broad tent next door’s the “Motorsport Spectacular Exhibition,” which is kind of surreal: a whole lot of really shiny and fast-looking sports cars in utter stasis, just sitting there, hoods up, innards exposed, clusters of older men in berets studying the cars with great intensity, some with white gloves and jeweler’s loupes. Between two minor corporate tents is the serendipitous snout of the “Sertoma Mobile Hearing Test Trailer,” inside which a woman with a receding hairline scores me overdecibeled but aurally hale. Fifteen whole minutes both in- and outside the huge STATE COMPTROLLER ROLAND BURRIS tent foils to uncover the tent’s function. Next door, though, is a bus on display from the city of Peoria’s All-Ethanol Bus System; it is painted to resemble a huge ear of corn. I don’t know whether actual fleets of green-and-yellow corn-buses are deployed in Peoría or whether this is just a stunt.

08/15/ 1800h. Back again at the seemingly inescapable Club Mickey D’s. All signs of baton-twirlers and fallen spectators have been erased. The tent’s now set up for Illinois Golden Gloves Boxing. Out on the floor is a kind of square made up of four boxing rings. The rings are made out of clothesline and poles anchored by cement-filled tires, one ring per age division—Sixteens, Fourteens, Twelves, Tens(!). Here’s another unhyped but riveting spectacle. If you want to see genuine interhuman violence, go check out a Golden Gloves tourney. None of your adult pros’ silky footwork or Rope-a-Dope defenses here. Here asses are thoroughly kicked in what are essentially playground brawls with white-tipped gloves and brain-shaped headguards. The combatants’ tank tops say things like “Rockford Jr. Boxing” and “Elgin Fight Club.” The rings’ corners have stools for the kids to sit on and get worked over by their teams’ coaches. The coaches look like various childhood friends of mine’s abusive fathers—florid, blue-jawed, bull-necked, flinty-eyed, the kind of men who bowl, watch TV in their underwear, and oversee sanctioned brawls. Now a fighter’s mouthguard goes flying out of the Fourteens’ ring, end over end, trailing strings of spit, and the crowd around that ring howls. In the Sixteens’ ring is a Springfield kid, a local hero, one Darrell Hall, against a slim fluid Latino named Sullivano from Joliet. Hall outweighs Sullivano by a good twenty pounds. Hall also looks like just about every kid who ever beat me up in high school, right down to the wispy mustache and upper lip’s cruel twist. The crowd around the Sixteens’ ring is all his friends—guys with muscle shirts and varsity gym shorts and gelled hair, girls in cutoff overalls and complex systems of barrettes and scrunchies. There are repeated shouts of “Kick his
ass
Darrell!” The Latino sticks and moves. Somebody in this tent is smoking a joint, I can smell. The Sixteens can actually box. The ceiling’s lights are bare bulbs in steel cones, hanging cockeyed from a day of batons. Everybody here pours sweat. A few people look askance at the little clicker I carry. The reincarnation of every high school cheerleader I ever pined for is in the Sixteens’ crowd. The girls cry out and sort of frame their face in their hands whenever Darrell Hall gets hit. I do not know why cutoff overall shorts have evaded the East Coast’s fashion ken; they are devastating. The fight in Fourteens is stopped for a moment to let the ref wipe a gout of blood from one kid’s glove. Sullivano glides and jabs, sort of orbiting Hall. Hall is implacable, a hunched and feral fighter, boring in. Air explodes through his nose when he lands a blow. He keeps trying to back the Latino against the clothesline. People fan themselves with wood-handled fans from the Democratic Party. Mosquitoes work the crowd. The refs keep slapping at their necks. The rains have been bad, and the mosquitoes this August are the bad kind, big and vaguely hairy, field-bred, rapacious, the kind that can swarm on a calf overnight and the farmer finds his calf in the morning splay-legged and bled kosher. This actually happens. Mosquitoes are not to be fucked with out here. (East-Coast friends laugh at my dread of mosquitoes, and they make fun of the little battery-powered box I carry whenever I’m outside at night. Even in like NYC or Boston I carry it. It’s from an obscure catalogue and produces a sound like a dragonfly—a.k.a.
odonata anisoptera,
sworn eternal foe to all mosquitoes everywhere—a faint high-speed clicking that sends any right-thinking mosquito out of its mind with fear. On East 55th, carrying the little box is maybe a bit neurotic; here, with me ripe and sweaty and tall in this crowd, the good old trusty clicker saves more than just my ass.) I can also see the Tens from this vantage, a vicious free-for-all between two tiny kids whose headguards make their heads look too big for their bodies. Neither ten-year-old has any interest in defense. Their shoes’ toes touch as they windmill at each other, scoring at will. Scary dads chew gum in their corners. One kid’s mouthguard keeps falling out. Now the Sixteens’ crowd explodes as their loutish Darrell catches Sullivano with an uppercut that puts him on his bottom. Sullivano gamely rises, but his knees wobble and he won’t face the ref. Hall raises both arms and faces the crowd, disclosing a missing incisor. The girls betray their cheerleading backgrounds by clapping and jumping up and down at the same time. Hall shakes his gloves at the ceiling as several girls call his name, and you can feel it in the air’s very ions: Darrell Hall is going to get laid before the night’s over.