A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (18 page)

The older ladies behind me tell me they’ve bet I’m here to cover either the auto racing or the pop music. They don’t mean it unkindly. I tell them why I’m here, mentioning the magazine’s name. They turn toward each other, faces alight. One (not the Historian) actually claps her hands to her cheeks.

“
Love
the recipes,” she says.

“
Adore
the recipes,” the Unofficial Historian says.

And I’m sort of impelled over to a table of all post-45 females, am introduced as on assignment from
Harper
’s magazine, and everyone looks at one another with star-struck awe and concurs that the recipes really are first-rate, top-hole, the living end. One seminal recipe involving Amaretto and something called “Baker’s chocolate” is being recalled and discussed when a loudspeaker’s feedback brings the Fair’s official Press Welcome & Briefing to order.

The Briefing is dull. We are less addressed than rhetorically bludgeoned by Fair personnel, product spokespeople, and middle-management State politicos. The words
excited, proud
, and
opportunity
are used a total of 76 times before I get distracted off the count. I’ve suddenly figured out that all the older ladies I’m at the table with have confused
Harper’s
with
Harper’s Bazaar
. They think I’m some sort of food writer or recipe scout, here to maybe vault some of the Midwestern food competition winners into the homemaker’s big time. Ms. Illinois State Fair, tiara bolted to the tallest coiffure I’ve ever seen (bun atop bun, multiple layers, a veritable wedding cake of hair), is proudly excited to have the opportunity to present two corporate guys, dead-eyed and sweating freely in suits, who in turn report the excited pride of McDonald’s and Wal-Mart at having the opportunity to be this year’s Fair’s major corporate sponsors. It occurs to me that if I allow the
Harper’s-Bazaar
-food-scout misunderstanding to persist and circulate I can eventually show up at the Dessert Competition tents with my Press Credentials and they’ll feed me free prize-winning desserts until I have to be carried off on a gurney. Older ladies in the Midwest can
bake
.

08/05/0950h. Under way at 4 mph on the Press Tour, on a kind of flatboat with wheels and a lengthwise bench so ridiculously high that everybody’s feet dangle. The tractor pulling us has signs that say ETHANOL and AGRIPOWERED. I’m particularly keen to see the carnies setting up rides in the Fairgrounds’ “Happy Hollow,” but we head first to the corporate and political tents. Most every tent is still setting up. Workmen crawl over structural frames. We wave at them; they wave back; it’s absurd: we’re only going 4 mph. One tent says CORN: TOUCHING OUR LIVES EVERY DAY. There are massive many-hued tents courtesy of McDonald’s, Miller Genuine Draft, Osco, Morton Commercial Structures Corp., the Land of Lincoln Soybean Association (LOOK WHERE SOYBEANS GO! on a half-up display), Pekin Energy Corp. (PROUD OF OUR SOPHISTICATED COMPUTER-CONTROLLED PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY), Illinois Pork Producers, and the John Birch Society (we’ll be checking out that tent for sure). Two tents that say REPUBLICAN and DEMOCRAT. Other smaller tents for various Illinois officeholders. It’s well up in the 90s and the sky is the color of old jeans. Over a system of crests to Farm Expo—twelve acres of wicked-looking needle-teethed harrows, tractors, harvesters and seeders—and then Conservation World, 22 acres I never do get straight on the conserving purpose of.

Then back around the rear of the big permanent structures—Artisans Bldg., Illinois Bldg. Senior Center, Expo Center (it says POULTRY on the tympanum, but it’s the Expo Center)—passing tantalizingly close to Happy Hollow, where half-assembled rides stand in giant arcs and rays and shirtless guys with tattoos and wrenches slouch around them, fairly oozing menace and human interest—and I want a chance to chat with them before the Hollow opens and there’s pressure to actually ride the carnival rides, since I am one of those people who gets sick on Near-Death-Experience carnival rides—but on at a crawl up a blacktop path to the Livestock Buildings on the Fairgrounds’ west (upwind!) side. By this time, most of the Press is off the tram and walking in order to escape the tour’s PA speaker, which is tinny and brutal. Horse Complex. Cattle Complex. Swine Barn. Sheep Barn. Poultry and Goat Barns. These are all long brick barracks open down both sides of their length. Inside some are stalls; others have pens divided into squares with aluminum rails. Inside, they’re gray cement, dim and pungent, huge fans overhead, workers in overalls and waders hosing everything down. No animals yet, but the smells still hang from last year—horses’ odors sharp, cows’ rich, sheep’s oily, swine’s unspeakable. No idea what the Poultry Barn smelled like because I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Traumatically pecked once, as a child, at the Champaign County Fair, I have a longstanding phobic thing about poultry.

The ethanol tractor’s exhaust is literally flatulent-smelling as we crawl out past the Grandstand, where there will apparently be evening concerts and harness- and auto-racing—“WORLD’S FASTEST MILE DIRT TRACK”—and head for something called the Help Me Grow tent to interface with the state’s First Lady, Brenda Edgar. It occurs to me that the 366-acre terrain of the Fairgrounds is awfully hilly for downstate IL; it’s either a geologic anomaly or it’s been man-enhanced. The Help Me Grow tent is on a grassy ridge that overlooks Happy Hollow. I think it’s near where I parked. The dismantled-looking rides out below make the view complex. The Expo Center and Coliseum across the Hollow on an opposite ridge have odd neo-Georgian facades, a lot like the older buildings at the State U. over in Champaign. Nature-wise the view is lovely. The serious flooding’s well to the west of Springfield, but we’ve had the same rains, and the grass here is lush and deep green, the trees’ leaves balloon explosively like trees in Fragonard, and everything smells juicy and highly edible and still growing here in a month when I remember everything as tired and dry. The first sign of the Help Me Grow area is the nauseous bright red of Ronald McDonald’s hair. He’s capering around a small plasticky playground area under candy-stripe tenting. Though the Fair’s ostensibly unopen, troupes of kids mysteriously appear and engage in rather rehearsed-looking play as we approach. Two of the kids are black, the first black people I’ve seen anywhere on the Fairgrounds. No parents in view. Just outside the tent, the Governor’s wife stands surrounded by flinty-eyed aides. Ronald pretends to fall down. The Press forms itself into a kind of ring. There are several state troopers in khaki and tan, streaming sweat under their Nelson Eddy hats. My view isn’t very good. Mrs. Edgar is cool and groomed and pretty in a lacquered way, of the sort of female age that’s always suffixed with “-ish.” Her tragic flaw is her voice, which sounds almost heliated. The Mrs. Edgar/McDonald’s Help Me Grow Program, when you decoct the rhetoric, is basically a statewide crisis line for over-the-edge parents to call and get talked out of beating up their kids. The number of calls Mrs. Edgar says the line’s fielded just this year is both de- and impressive. Shiny pamphlets are distributed. Ronald McDonald, speech slurry and makeup cottage-cheeseish in the heat, cues the kids to come over for some low-rent sleight of hand and Socratic banter. Lacking a real journalist’s killer instinct, I’ve been jostled way to the back of the ring, and my view is obscured by the towering hair of Ms. Illinois State Fair, whose function on the Press Tour remains unclear. I don’t want to asperse, but Ronald McDonald sounds like he’s under the influence of something more than fresh country air. I drift away under the tent, where there’s a metal watercooler. But no cups. It’s hotter under the tent, and there’s a reek of fresh plastic. All the toys and plastic playground equipment have signs that say COURTESY OF and then a corporate name. A lot of the photographers in the ring have on dusty-green safari vests, and they sit cross-legged in the sun, getting low-angle shots of Mrs. Edgar. There are no tough questions from the media. The tram’s tractor is putting out a steady sweatsock-shape of blue-green exhaust. Right at the edge of the tent is where I notice that the grass is different: the grass under the tenting is a different grass, pine-green and prickly-looking, more like the St. Augustine grass of the deep U.S. South. Solid bent-over investigative journalism reveals that in fact it’s artificial grass. A huge mat of plastic artificial grass has been spread over the knoll’s real grass, under the candy-stripe tent. This may have been my only moment of complete East-Coast cynicism the whole day. A quick look under the edge of the fake grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing.

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only
For Me
. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid?—that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow?—that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the
responsibility
it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?

Maybe what I really miss now is the fact that a child’s radical delusive self-centeredness doesn’t cause him conflict or pain. His is the sort of regally innocent solipsism of like Bishop Berkeley’s God: all things are nothing until his sight calls them forth from the void: his stimulation is the world’s very being. And this is maybe why a little kid so fears the dark: it’s not the possible presence of unseen fanged things in the dark, but rather the actual absence of everything his blindness has now erased. For me, at least, pace my folks’ indulgent smiles, this was my true reason for needing a nightlight: it kept the world turning.

Plus maybe this sense of the world as all and only For-Him is why special ritual public occasions drive a kid right out of his mind with excitement. Holidays, parades, summer trips, sporting events. Fairs. Here the child’s manic excitement is really exultation at his own power: the world will now not only exist For-Him but will present itself as
Special
-For-Him. Every hanging banner, balloon, gilded booth, clown-wig, turn of the wrench on a tent’s erection—every bright bit signifies, refers. Counting down to the Special Event, time itself will alter, from a child’s annular system of flashes and sweeps to a more adultish linear chronology—the concept of
looking forward to
—with successive moments ticking off toward a calendar-X’d telos, a new kind of fulfilling and apocalyptic End, the 0-hour of the Special Occasion,
Special
, of the garish and in all ways exceptional
Spectacle
which the child has made be and which is, he intuits at the same inarticulate depth as his need for a nightlight, For-Him alone, unique at the absolute center.

08/13/0925h. Official Opening. Ceremony, introductions, verbiage, bromides, really big brass shears for the ribbon across the Main Gate. It’s cloudless and dry, but forehead-tighteningly hot. Noon will be a kiln. Knit-shirt Press and rabid early Fairgoers are massed from the Gate all the way out to Sangamon Avenue, where homeowners with plastic flags invite you to park on their lawn for $5.00.I gather “Little Jim” Edgar, the Governor, isn’t much respected by the Press, most of whom are whispering about Michael Jordan’s father’s car being found but the father being missing, still. No anthropologist worth his helmet would be without the shrewd counsel of a colorful local, and I’ve brought a Native Companion here for the day (I can get people in free with my Press Credentials), and we’re standing near the back. Governor E. is maybe fifty and greyhound-thin and has steel glasses and hair that looks carved out of feldspar. He radiates sincerity, though, after the hacks who introduced him, and speaks plainly and sanely and I think well—of both the terrible pain of the ’93 Flood and the redemptive joy of seeing the whole state pull together to help one another, and of the special importance of this year’s State Fair as a conscious affirmation of real community, of state solidarity and fellow-feeling and pride. Governor Edgar acknowledges that the state’s really taken it on the chin in the last couple months, but that it’s a state that’s resilient and alive and most of all, he’s reminded looking around himself here today, united,
together
, both in tough times and in happy times, happy times like for instance this very Fair. Edgar invites everybody to get in there and to have a really good time, and to revel in watching everybody else also having a good time, all as a kind of reflective exercise in civics, basically. The Press seem unmoved. I thought his remarks were kind of powerful, though.

And this Fair—the idea and now the reality of it—does seem to have something uniquely to do with state-as-community, a grand-scale togetherness. And it’s not just the claustrophobic mash of people waiting to get inside. I can’t get my finger onto just what’s especially communitarian about an Illinois State Fair as opposed to like a New Jersey State Fair. I’d bought a notebook, but I left the car windows down last night and it got ruined by rain, and Native Companion kept me waiting getting ready to go and there wasn’t time to buy a new notebook. I don’t even have a pen, I realize. Whereas good old Governor Edgar has three different-colored pens in his knit shirt’s breast pocket. This clinches it: you can always trust a man with multiple pens.

The Fair occupies space, and there’s no shortage of space in downstate IL. The Fairgrounds take up 300+ acres on the east side of Springfield, a depressed capital of 109,000 where you can’t spit without hitting some sort of Lincoln-site plaque. The Fair spreads itself out, and visually so. The Main Gate’s on a rise, and through the two sagged halves of cut ribbon you get a great specular vantage on the whole thing—virgin and sun-glittered, even the tents looking fresh-painted. It seems garish and innocent and endless and aggressively Special. Kids are having like little like epileptic fits all around us, frenzied with a need to somehow take in everything at once.