A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (19 page)

Then it occurs to me that I had bacon yesterday and am even now looking forward to my first corn dog of the Fair. I’m standing
here wringing my hands over a distressed swine and then I’m going to go pound down a corn dog. This is connected to my reluctance
to charge over to a swine-pro and demand emergency resuscitative care for this agonized Hampshire. I can sort of picture the
look the farmer would give me.

Not that it’s profound, but I’m struck, amid the pig’s screams and wheezes, by the fact that these agricultural pros do not
see their stock as pets or friends. They are just in the agribusiness of weight and meat. They are unconnected even at the
Fair, this self-consciously Special occasion of connection. And why not, maybe?—even at the Fair, their products continue
to drool and smell and ingest their own excrement and scream, and the work just goes on and on. I can imagine what the ag-pros
must think of us, cooing at the swine: we Fairgoers don’t have to deal with the business of breeding and feeding our meat;
our meat simply materializes at the corn-dog stand, allowing us to separate our healthy appetites from fur and screams and
rolling eyes. We tourists get to indulge our tender Animal Rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon. I don’t know how
keen these sullen farmers’ sense of irony is, but mine’s been honed East-Coast keen, and I feel like a bit of a schmuck in
the Swine Barn.

08/13/ 1150h. Since Native Companion was lured here for the day by the promise of free access to sphincter-loosening high-velocity
rides, we make a quick descent into Happy Hollow. Most of the rides aren’t even twirling hellishly yet. Guys with ratchet
wrenches are still cranking away at the Ring of Fire. The giant Gondola Ferris Wheel is only half-assembled, and its seat-draped
lower half resembles a hideous molary grin. It’s over 100° in the sun, easy.

The Happy Hollow Carnival area’s a kind of rectangular basin that extends east-west from near the Main Gate out to the steep
pathless hillside just below Livestock. The Midway is made of dirt and flanked by carnival-game booths and ticket booths and
rides. There’s a merry-go-round and a couple of sane-paced kids’ rides, but most of the rides down here look like genuine
Near-Death Experiences. On this first morning the Hollow seems to be open only technically, and the ticket booths are unmanned,
though heartbreaking little streams of AC’d air are blowing out through money-slots in the booths’ glass. Attendance is sparse,
and I notice none of the ag-pros or farm people are anywhere in sight down here. What there are are carnies. A lot of them
slouch and slump in awnings’ shade. Every one of them seems to chain-smoke. The Tilt-a-Whirl operator’s got his boots up on
his control panel reading a motorcycle-and-naked-lady magazine while two guys attach enormous rubber hoses to the ride’s guts.
We sidle over for a chat. The operator’s 24 and from Bee Branch Arkansas, and has an earring and a huge tattoo of a motorcycle
w/ naked lady on his triceps. He’s way more interested in chatting with Native Companion than with me. He’s been at this gig
five years, touring with this one here same company here. Couldn’t rightly say if he liked it or not, the gig: like as compared
to what? Broke in the trade on the Toss-a-Quarter-Onto-the-Plates game and got, like, transferred over to the Tilt-a-Whirl
in ’91. He smokes Marlboro 100’s but wears a cap that says WINSTON. He wants to know if Native Companion’d like to take a
quick walk back across the Hollow and see something way out of the usual range of what she’s used to. All around us are booths
for various carny-type games. All the carny-game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying “Testing” and reciting
their pitches’ lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: “You got to get it up to get it
in”; “Take it out and lay’er down, only a dollar”; “Make it stand up. Two dollars five chances. Make it stand up.” In the
booths, rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet like game put out to cure. One barker’s testing his mike by saying “Testes”
instead of “Testing.” It smells like machine grease and hair tonic down here, and there’s already a spoiled, garbagey smell.
My Media Guide says 1993’s Happy Hollow is contracted to “… one of the largest owners of amusement attractions in the country,”
one Blomsness and Thebault All-Star Amusement Enterprises of Crystal Lake IL, up near Chicago. But the carnies themselves
all seem to be from the middle South—Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma. They are visibly unimpressed by the Press Credentials
clipped to my shirt. They tend to look at Native Companion like she’s food, which she ignores. There’s very little of that
childhood sense of all the games and rides being Special and For-Me, I have to say. I promptly lose $4.00 trying to “get it
up and in” by tossing miniature basketballs into angled straw baskets in such a way that they don’t bounce back out. The game’s
barker can toss the balls behind his back and get them to stay in, but he’s right up next to the baskets. My shots carom out
from eight feet away—the straw baskets look soft, but their bottoms make a suspicious steely sound when the balls hit.

It’s so hot that we move in quick staggered vectors between areas of shade. I decline to take my shirt off because there’d
be no way to display my Credentials. We zigzag gradually westward across the Hollow. I am keen to hit the Junior Beef Show
which starts at 1300h. Then there are, of course, the Dessert Competition tents.

One of the fully assembled rides near the Hollow’s west end is something called The Zipper. It’s riderless but in furious
motion, a kind of Ferris Wheel on amphetamines. Individual caged cars are hinged to spin on their own axes as they go around
in a tight vertical ellipse. The machine looks less like a zipper than the head of a chain saw. Its off-white paint is chipped,
and it sounds like a shimmying V-12, and in general it’s something I’d run a mile in tight shoes to avoid riding. But Native
Companion starts clapping and hopping around excitedly as we approach The Zipper. (This is a person who bungee jumps, to give
you an idea.) And the operator at the controls sees her, waves back, and shouts down to Git on over and git some if she’s
a mind to. He claims they want to test The Zipper somehow. He’s up on a kind of steel platform, elbowing a colleague next
to him in a way I don’t much like. We have no tickets, I point out, and none of the cash-for-ticket booths are manned. By
now we’re somehow at the base of the stairway up to the platform and control panel. The operator says without looking at me
that the matter of tickets this early on Opening Day “Ain’t no sweat off my balls.” The operator’s colleague conducts Native
Companion up the waffled-steel steps and straps her into a cage, upping a thumb at the operator, who gives a sort of Rebel
Yell and pulls a lever. Native C.’s cage begins to ascend. Pathetic little fingers appear in the cage’s mesh. The Zipper operator
is ageless and burnt-brown and has a mustache waxed to wicked points like steers’ horns, rolling a Drum cigarette with one
hand as he nudges levers upward and the ellipse speeds up and the individual cages start to spin independently on their hinges.
Native Companion is a blur of color inside her cage, but the operator and colleague (whose jeans have worked down his hips
to the point where the top of his butt-crack is clearly visible) watch studiously as her spinning cage and the clanking empty
cages circle the ellipse approx. once a second. I have a particular longstanding fear of things that spin independently inside
a larger spin. I can barely even watch this. The Zipper is the color of unbrushed teeth, with big scabs of rust. The operator
and colleague sit on a little steel bench before a panel full of black-knobbed levers. Do testicles themselves sweat? They’re
supposed to be very temperature-sensitive. The colleague spits Skoal into a can he holds and tells the operator to “Well then
take her to Eight then you pussy.” The Zipper begins to whine and the thing to spin so fast that a detached car would surely
be hurled into orbit. The colleague has a small American flag folded into a bandanna around his head. The empty cages shudder
and clank as they whirl, spinning independently. One long scream, wobbled by Doppler, is coming from Native C.’s cage, which
is going around and around on its hinges while a shape inside tumbles like stuff in a dryer. My particular neurological makeup
(extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I’m “lifesick”) makes even just watching this an
act of enormous personal courage. The scream goes on and on; it’s nothing like a swine’s. Then the operator stops the ride
abruptly with Native C.’s car at the top, so she’s hanging upside down inside the cage. I call up Is she OK, but the response
is just high-pitched noises. I see the two carnies gazing upward very intently, shading their eyes. The operator’s stroking
his mustache contemplatively. The cage’s inversion has made Native Companion’s dress fall up. They’re ogling her nethers,
obviously. As they laugh, the sound literally sounds like “Tee hee hee hee.” A less sensitive neurological specimen probably
would have stepped in at this point and stopped the whole grotesque exercise. My own makeup leans more toward disassociation
when under stress. A mother in shorts is trying to get a stroller up the steps of the Funhouse. A kid in a
Jurassic Park
T-shirt is licking an enormous flat lollipop with a hypnotic spiral on it. A sign at a gas station we passed on Sangamon
Avenue was hand-lettered and said “BLU-BLOCK SUNGLASSES—
Like Seen On TV.” A
Shell station off I-55 near Elkhart sold cans of snuff out of a vending machine. 15% of the female Fairgoers here have their
hair in curlers. 25% are clinically fat. Midwestern fat people have no compunction about wearing shorts or halter-tops. A
radio reporter had held his recorder’s mike up too close to a speaker during Governor E.’s opening remarks, causing hellacious
feedback. Now the operator’s joggling the choke-lever so The Zipper stutters back and forth, forward and backward, making
N.C.’s top car spin around and around on its hinges. His colleague’s T-shirt has a stoned Ninja Turtle on it, toking on a
joint. There’s a distended A# scream from the whirling cage, as if Native C.’s getting slow-roasted. I summon saliva to step
in and really say something stern, but at this point they start bringing her down. The operator is deft at his panel; the
car’s descent is almost fluffy. His hands on the levers are a kind of parody of tender care. The descent takes forever—ominous
silence from Native Companion’s car. The two carnies are laughing and slapping their knee. I clear my throat twice. There’s
a trundly sound as Native Companion’s car gets locked down at the platform. Jiggles of movement in the cage, and the door’s
latch slowly turns. I expect whatever husk of a human being emerges from the car to be hunched and sheet-white, dribbling
fluids. Instead she sort of bounds out:

“That was fucking
great
. Joo see that? Son bitch spun that car
sixteen times
, joo see it?” This woman is native Midwestern, from my hometown. My prom date a dozen years ago. Now married, with three
children, teaches water-aerobics to the obese and infirm. Her color is high. Her dress looks like the world’s worst case of
static cling. She’s still got her
chewing gum
in, for God’s sake. She turns to the carnies: “You sons bitches that was fucking
great
. Assholes.” The colleague is half-draped over the operator; they’re roaring with laughter. Native Companion has her hands
on her hips sternly, but she’s grinning. Am I the only one who was in touch with the manifestly overt sexual-harassment element
in this whole episode? She takes the steel stairs down three at a time and starts up the hillside toward the food booths.
There is no sanctioned path up the incredibly steep hill on the Hollow’s western side. Behind us the operator calls out: “They
don’t call me King of The Zipper for nuthin’, sweet thang.” She snorts and calls back over her shoulder “Oh you and whose
fucking
platoon?
” and there’s more laughter behind us.

I’m having a hard time keeping up on the slope. “Did you hear that?” I ask her.

“Jesus I thought I bought it for sure at the end that was so great. Fucking cornholers. But’d you
see
that one spin up top at the end, though?”

“Did you hear that Zipper King comment?” I say. She has her hand around my elbow and is helping me up the hillside’s slick
grass. “Did you sense something kind of sexual-harassmentish going on through that whole little sick exercise?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Slug it was
fun
” (Ignore the nickname.) “Son of a bitch spun that car
eighteen times
.”

“They were looking up your
dress
. You couldn’t see them, maybe. They hung you upside down at a great height and made your dress fall up and
ogled
you. They shaded their eyes and made comments to each other. I saw the whole thing.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.”

I slip a little bit and she catches my arm. “So this doesn’t bother you? As a Midwesterner, you’re unbothered? Or did you
just not have an accurate sense of what was going on back there?”

“So if I noticed or I didn’t, why does it have to be
my
deal? What, because there’s assholes in the world I don’t get to ride on The Zipper? I don’t get to ever spin? Maybe I shouldn’t
ever go to the pool or ever get all girled up, just out of fear of assholes?” Her color is still high.

“So I’m curious, then, about what it would have taken back there, say, to have gotten you to lodge some sort of complaint
with the Fair’s management.”

“You’re so fucking
innocent
, Slug,” she says. (The nickname’s a long story; ignore it.) “Assholes are just assholes. What’s getting hot and bothered
going to do about it except keep me from getting to have fun?” She has her hand on my elbow this whole time—the hillside’s
a bitch.

“This is potentially key,” I’m saying. “This may be just the sort of regional politico-sexual contrast the swanky East-Coast
magazine is keen for. The core value informing a kind of willed politico-sexual stoicism on your part is your prototypically
Midwestern appreciation of fun—”