The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  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 exceptional 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 attenti
on. 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 Midwesterner 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 more 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.

  The State Fair is rural IL’s moment of maximum community, but even at a Fair whose whole raison is For-Us, Us’s entail Thems, apparently. The carnies make an excellent Them. And the ag-people really hate them, the carnies. While I’m sitting there on the bench disassociating and waiting for N. Companion to come back, all of a sudden an old withered guy in an Illinois Poultry Association cap careers past on one of those weird three-wheeled carts, like a turbo-charged wheelchair, and runs neatly over my sneaker. This ends up being my one unassisted interview of the day, and it’s brief. The old guy keeps revving his cart’s engine like a biker. “Traish” he calls the carnies. “Lowlifes. Wouldn’t let my own kids go off down there on a goddamn bet,” gesturing down the hill at the twirling rides. He raises pullets down near Olney. He has something in his cheek. “Steal you blind. Drug-addicted and such. Swindle you nekked, them games. Traish. Me I ever year we drive up, why, I carry my wallet like this here,” pointing to his hip. His wallet is on a big steel clip attached to a wire on his belt; the whole thing looks vaguely electrified.

  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 motel. 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.

  08/14/1025h. 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 h
ere 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. Pentecostal 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.