A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  (You do not want details on what pork skins are.)

  So along the path there are I.D.C. milkshakes (my lunch), Lemon Shake-Ups, Ice Cold Melon Man booths, Citrus Push-Ups, and Hawaiian Shaved Ice you can suck the syrup out of and then crunch the ice (my dessert). But a lot of what’s getting bought and gobbled is to my mind not hot-weather food at all: bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt; onion rings big as leis; Poco Penos Stuffed Jalapeño Peppers; Zorba’s Gyros; shiny fried chicken; Bert’s Burritos—“BIG AS YOU’RE HEAD” (sic); hot Italian beef; hot New York City Beef (?); Jojo’s Quick Fried Donuts (the only booth selling coffee, by the way); pizza by the shingle-sized slice and chitlins and Crab Rangoon and Polish sausage. (Rural Illinois’ complete lack of ethnic identity creates a kind of postmodern embarrassment of riches—foods of every culture and creed become our own, quick-fried and served on cardboard and consumed on foot.) There are towering plates of “Curl Fries,” which are pubic-hair-shaped and make people’s fingers shine in the sun. Cheez-Dip Hot Dogs. Pony Pups. Hot Fritters. Philly Steak. Ribeye BBQ Corral. Joanie’s Original ½-lb Burgers’ booth’s sign says 2 CHOICES—RARE OR MOOIN’. I can’t believe people eat this kind of stuff in this kind of heat. The sky is cloudless and galvanized; the sun fairly pulses. There’s the green reek of fried tomatoes. (Midwesterners say “tomāto.”) The sound of myriad deep fryers forms a grisly sound-carpet all up and down the gauntlet of booths. The Original 1-lb Butterfly Pork Chop booth’s sign says PORK: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT, the only discernible armwave to the health-conscious so far. Non-natives note, it’s the Midwest: no nachos, no chili, no Evian, nothing Cajun.

  But holy mackerel are there sweets: Fried Dough; Black Walnut Taffy; Fiddlesticks; Hot Crackerjack. Caramel apples for a felonious $1.50. Angel’s Breath, known also as Dentist’s Delight. Vanilla fudge that breaks a kind of weird sweat the minute it leaves its booth’s freezer. The crowd moves at one slow pace, eating, dense-packed between the rows of booths. No ag-pros in sight. The crowd’s adults are either pale or with the pink tinge of new burn, thin-haired and big-bellied in tight jeans, some downright fat and moving by sort of shifting their weight from side to side; boys minus shirts and girls in primary-colored halters; littler boys and girls in squads; parents with strollers; terribly pale academics in Bermudas and sandals; big women in curlers; lots of people carrying shopping bags; absurd floppy hats; almost all with ’80s-fashion sunglasses—all seemingly eating, crowded together, twenty abreast, moving slowly, packed in, sweating, shoulders rubbing, the air deep-fried and spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone, jowl to jowl. Picture Tokyo’s rush-hour subway on an epic scale. It’s a rare grand mass of Midwest humanity, eating and shuffling and rubbing, moving toward the Coliseum and Grandstand and Expo Building and the Livestock shows beyond. It’s maybe significant that nobody looks like they’re feeling oppressed or claustrophobic or bug-eyed at being airlessly hemmed in by the endless crowd we’re all part of. Native Companion cusses and laughs when people step on her feet. Something East-Coast in me prickles at the bovine and herdlike quality of the crowd, though, i.e. us, hundreds of hands rising from paper tray to mouth as we jostle and press toward our respective attractions. From the air we’d look like some kind of Bataan March of docile consumption. (Native Companion laughs and says the batons aren’t ever till the second day.) We’re Jr.-Beef-Show-bound. You do not want to know what appalling combination of high-lipid foods N. Companion lunches on as we’re borne by a living river toward prizewinning beef. The booths keep rolling past. There’s Ace-High All-Butter Fudge. There are Rice-Krispie-squarish things called Krakkles. Angel Hair Cotton Candy. There are Funnel Cakes, viz. cake batter quick-fried to a tornadic spiral and rolled in sugared butter. Eric’s Salt Water Taffy. Something called Zak’s Fried Ice Cream. Another artery-clogger: Elephant Ears. An Elephant Ear is an album-sized expanse of oil-fried dough slathered with butter and cinnamon-sugar, sort of cinnamon toast from hell, really and truly shaped like an ear, surprisingly yummy, it turns out, but sickly soft, the texture of adipose flesh, and undeniably elephant-sized—no one’s in line for Ears except the morbidly obese.

  One food venue we fight across the current to check out special is a huge high-tech neonated stand: DIPPIN DOTS—“Ice Cream Of The Future.” The countergirl sits on a tall stool shrouded in dry-ice steam and is at most thirteen years old, and my Press Credentials for the first time make someone’s eyes widen, and we get free samples, little cups of what seem to be tiny little ice-cream pellets, fluorescent BB’s that are kept, the countergirl swears to God, at 55° below 0—Oh God she doesn’t know whether it’s 0°C or 0°F; that wasn’t in the DIPPIN DOTS training video. The pellets melt in your mouth, after a fashion. More like evaporate in your mouth. The taste is vivid, but the Dots’ texture’s weird, abstract. Futuristic. The stuff’s intriguing but just too Jetsonian to really catch on. The countergirl spells her last name for us and wants to say Hey to someone named Jody in return for the samples.

  08/13/ 1310h. “Here we’ve got as balanced in dimension as any heifer you’ll see today. A high-volume heifer but also solid on mass. Good to look at in terms of rib-length to -depth. Depth of forerib. Notice the depth of flank on the front quarter. We’d like to see maybe perhaps a little more muscle mass on the rear flank. Still, an outstanding heifer.”

  We’re in the Jr. Livestock Center. A lot of cows move in a ring around the perimeter of the dirt circle, each cow led by an ag-family kid. The “Jr.” pretty clearly refers to the owners, not the animals. Each cow’s kid holds a long poker with a right-angled tooth at its end. They take turns prodding their cow into the center of the ring to move in a tighter circle while its virtues and liabilities are assessed. We’re up in the stands. Native Companion is smitten. The Beef Show Official at the microphone looks uncannily like the actor Ed Harris, blue-eyed and somehow sexily bald. He’s dressed just like the kids in the ring—dark new stiff jeans, check shirt, bandanna around neck. On him it doesn’t look goofy. Plus he’s got a stunning white cowboy hat. While Ms. Illinois Beef Queen presides from a dais decked with flowers sent over from the Horticulture Show, the Beef Official stands in the arena itself, his legs apart and his thumbs in his belt, 100% man, radiating livestock savvy. N.C. seems less smitten than decapitated, frankly.

  “Okay this next heifer, a lot of depth of rib but a little tighter in the foreflank. A bit tighter-flanked, if you will, from the standpoint of capacity.”

  The cows’ owners are farm kids, deep-rural kids from back-of-beyond counties like Piatt, Moultrie, Vermilion, all County Fair winners. They are earnest, nervous, pride-puffed. Dressed rurally up. Straw-colored crewcuts. High number of freckles per capita. They’re kids remarkable for a kind of classic Rockwellian U.S. averageness, the products of balanced diets, vigorous labor, and solid GOP upbringings. The Jr. Livestock Center bleachers are over half-full, and it’s all ag-people, farmers, parents mostly, many with video cameras. Cowhide vests and ornate dress-boots and simply amazing hats. Illinois farmers are rural and kind of inarticulate, but they are not poor. Just the amount of revolving credit you need to capitalize a fair-sized operation—seed and herbicide, heavy equipment, crop insurance—makes a lot of them millionaires on paper. Media dirges notwithstanding, banks are no more keen to foreclose on Midwestern farmers than they are on Third World nations; they’re in that deeply. Nobody’s in sunglasses or shorts; everyone’s tanned in an earthtone, all-business way. And if the Fair’s ag-pros are also stout, it’s in a harder, squarer, somehow more earned way than the tourists on the paths outside. The bleachers’ fathers have bushy eyebrows and simply enormous thumbs, I notice. Native C. keeps making growly throat noises about the Beef Official. The J.L.C. is cool and dim and spicy with livestock. The atmosphere’s good-natured but serious. Nobody’s eating any booth-food, and nobody’s carrying the Fair’s complimentary GOVERNOR EDGAR shopping bags.

  “An excellent heifer from a profile standpoint.”

  “Here we have a low-volume heifer but with exc
eptional mass in the rear quarter.”

  I can’t tell whose cow is winning.

  “Certainly the most extreme heifer out here in terms of frame to depth.”

  Some of the cows looked drugged. Maybe they’re just superbly trained. You can imagine these farm kids getting up every day so early they can see their breath and leading their cows in practice circles under the cold stars, then having to do all their chores. I feel good in here. The cows in the ring all have colored ribbons on their tails. The lows and snorts of other cows on deck echo under the stands’ bleachers. Sometimes the bleachers shake like something’s butting the struts down there.

  There are baroque classifications I can’t start to follow—Breed, Class, Age. A friendly ag-lady with a long tired face beside us explains the kids’ pokers, though. They’re called Show Sticks, used to arrange the cows’ feet when they’re standing, and to prod, scratch, swat, or stroke, depending. The lady’s own boy took second in the “Polled Hereford”—that’s him getting congratulated by Ms. IL Beef Queen for a Livestock Weekly photographer. Native Companion isn’t crazy about the smells and bellows in here, but she says if her husband calls me up next week looking for her it’ll mean she’s decided to “up and follow that Ed Harris fellow home.” This is even after I remark that he could use a little more depth in the forerib.

  The cows are shampooed and mild-eyed and lovely, incontinence notwithstanding. They are also assets. The ag-lady beside us says her family’s operation will realize maybe like $2,500 for the Hereford in the Winners Auction coming up. Illinois farmers call their farms “operations,” rarely “farms” and never “spreads.” The lady says $2,500 is “maybe about around half” what the family’s spent on the heifer’s breeding and upkeep and care. “We do this for pride,” she says. This is more like it. Pride, care, selfless expense. The little boy’s chest puffs out as the Official tips his blinding hat. Farm spirit. Oneness w/ crop and stock. I’m making mental notes till my temples throb. N.C. asks about the Official fellow. The ag-lady explains he’s a beef buyer for a major Peoria packing plant and that the bidders in the upcoming Winners Auction (five brown suits and three string ties on the dais) are from McDonald’s, Burger King, White Castle, etc. Meaning the mild-eyed winners have been sedulously judged as meat. The ag-lady has a particular bone to pick with McDonald’s, “that always come in and overbid high on the champions and don’t care about anything else. Mess up the pricing.” Her husband confirms that they got “screwed back to front” on last year’s bidding.

  We skip the Junior Swine Show.

  08/13/1400–1600h. We hurtle here and there, sort of surfing on the paths’ crowds. Paid attendance today is 100,000+. A scum of clouds has cut the heat, but I’m on my third shirt. Society Horse Show at Coliseum. Wheat-Weaving Demonstration in Hobby, Arts & Crafts Bldg. Peonies like supernovas in the Horticulture Tent, where some of the older ladies from the Press Tour want to talk corn chowder recipes with me. We have no time. I’m getting the sort of overload-headache I always get in museums. Native C. is also stressed. And we’re not the only tourists with that pinched glazed hurry-up look. There are just too many things to experience. Arm-Wrestling Finals where bald men fart audibly with effort. Assyrian National Council in the Fairgrounds’ Ethnic Village—a riot of gesturing people in sheets. Everyone’s very excited, at everything. Drum and Bugle Competition in Miller Lite Tent. On the crowded path outside Farm Expo a man engages in blatant frottage. Corn-fed young ladies in overalls cut off at the pockets. Hideous tottery Ronald McD. working the crowd at Club Mickey D’s’ 3-on-3 Hoops Competition—three of the six basketball players are black, the first black people I’ve seen here since Mrs. Edgar’s hired kids. Pygmy Goat Show at Goat Barn. In the Media Guide: WALK ILLINOIS!(?), then Slide Show on Prairie Reclamation back over at Conservation World, then Open Poultry Judging, which I’ve decided to steel myself to see.

  The afternoon becomes one long frisson of stress. I’m sure we’ll miss something crucial. Native C. has zinc oxide on her nose and needs to get back home to pick up her kids. Plodding, elbowing. Seas of Fairgoing flesh, all looking, still eating. These Fairgoers seem to gravitate only to the crowded spots, the ones with long lines already. No one’s playing any East-Coast games of Beat the Crowd. Midwesterners lack a certain cunning. Under stress they look like lost children. But no one gets impatient. Something adult and potentially integral strikes me. Why the Fairgoing tourists don’t mind the crowds, lines, noise—and why I’m getting none of that old special sense of the Fair as uniquely For-Me. The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You. The Fair’s deliberately about the crowds and jostle, the noise and overload of sight and smell and choice and event. It’s Us showing off for Us.

  A theory: Megalopolitan East-Coasters’ summer vacations are literally getaways, flights-from—from crowds, noise, heat, dirt, the neural wear of too many stimuli. Thus ecstatic escapes to mountains, glassy lakes, cabins, hikes in silent woods. Getting Away From It All. Most East-Coasters see more than enough stimulating people and sights M-F, thank you; they stand in enough lines, buy enough stuff, elbow enough crowds, see enough spectacles. Neon skylines. Convertibles with 110-watt sound systems. Grotesques on public transport. Spectacles at every urban corner practically grabbing you by the lapels, commanding attention. The East-Coast existential treat is thus some escape from confines and stimuli—silence, rustic vistas that hold still, a turning inward: Away. Not so in the rural Midwest. Here you’re pretty much Away all the time. The land here is big. Pool-table flat. Horizons in every direction. Even in comparatively citified Springfield, see how much farther apart the homes are, how broad the yards—compare with Boston or Philly. Here a seat to yourself on all public transport; parks the size of airports; rush hour a three-beat pause at a stop sign. And the farms themselves are huge, silent, mostly vacant space: you can’t see your neighbor. Thus the vacation-impulse in rural IL is manifested as a flight- toward. Thus the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd. To see something besides land and corn and satellite TV and your wife’s face. Crowds out here are a kind of adult nightlight. Hence the sacredness out here of Spectacle, Public Event. High school football, church social, Little League, parades, Bingo, market day, State Fair. All very big, very deep deals. Something in a Mid-westerner sort of actuates at a Public Event. You can see it here. The faces in this sea of faces are like the faces of children released from their rooms. Governor Edgar’s state spirit rhetoric at the Main Gate’s ribbon rings true. The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us. The proud displays and the paths between them and the special-treat booths along the paths are less important than the greater-than-sum We that trudge elbow to elbow, pushing strollers and engaging in sensuous trade, expending months of stored-up attention. A neat inversion of the East-Coast’s summer withdrawal. God only knows what the West Coast’s like.

  We’re about 100 yards shy of the Poultry Building when I break down. I’ve been a rock about the prospect of Open Poultry Judging all day, but now my nerve totally goes. I can’t go in there. Listen to the untold thousands of sharp squawking beaks in there, I say. Native Companion not unkindly offers to hold my hand, talk me through it. It’s 93° and I have pygmy-goat shit on my shoe and am almost weeping with fear and embarrassment. I sit down on one of the green pathside benches to collect myself while N.C. goes to call home about her kids. I’ve never before realized that “cacophony” was onomatopoeic: the noise of the Poultry Bldg. is cacophonous and scrotum-tightening and totally horrible. I think it’s what insanity must sound like. No wonder madmen clutch their heads and scream. There’s also a thin stink, and lots of bits of feather are floating all over. And this is outside the Poultry Bldg. I hunch on the bench. When I was eight, at the Champaign County Fair, I was pecked without provocation, flown at and pecked by a renegade fowl, savagely, just under the right eye, the scar of which looks like a permanent zit.

  Except of course one problem with the prenominate theory is that there’s mo
re than one Us, hence more than one State Fair. Ag-people at the Livestock barns and Farm Expo, non-farm civilians at the food-booths and touristy exhibits and Happy Hollow. The two groups do not much mix. Neither is the neighbor the other pines for.

  Then there are the carnies. The carnies mix with no one, never seem to leave Happy Hollow. Late tonight, I’ll watch them drop flaps to turn their carnival booths into tents. They’ll smoke cheap dope and drink peppermint schnapps and pee out onto the Midway’s dirt. I think carnies must be the rural U.S.’s gypsies—itinerant, insular, swarthy, unclean, not to be trusted. You are in no way drawn to them. They all have the same hard blank eyes as people in bus terminal bathrooms. They want your money and to look up your skirt; beyond that you’re just blocking the view. Next week they’ll dismantle and pack and haul up to the Wisconsin State Fair, where they’ll again never set foot off the Midway they pee on.