The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  08/15/0840h. A Macy’s-float-sized inflatable Ronald, seated and eerily Buddha-like, presides over the north side of the Club Mickey D’s tent. A family is having their picture taken in front of the inflatable Ronald, arranging their little kids in a careful pose. Notebook entry: Why?

  08/15/0842h. Fourth trip to the bathroom in three hours. Elimination can be a dicey undertaking here. The Fair has scores of Midwest Pottyhouses brand portable toilets at various strategic sites. Midwest Pottyhouses are man-sized plastic huts, reminiscent of Parisian pissoirs but also utilized for numero deux, clearly. Each Midwest Pottyhouse has its own undulating shroud of flies, plus your standard heavy-use no-flush outhouse smell, and I for one would rather succumb to a rupture than use a Pottyhouse, though the lines for them are long and sanguine. The only real restrooms are in the big exhibit buildings. The Coliseum’s is like a grade school boys’ room, especially the long communal urinal, a kind of huge porcelain trough. Performance- and other anxieties abound here, with upwards of twenty guys all flanking and facing each other, each with his unit out. All the men’s rooms have hot-air blowers instead of paper towels, meaning you can’t wash your face, and all have annoying faucet controls you have to keep a grip on to operate, meaning toothbrushing is a contorted affair. The highlight is watching Midwestern ag-guys struggle with suspenders and overall straps as they exit the stalls.

  08/15/0847h. A quick scan of the Draft Horse Show. The Coliseum’s interior is the size of a blimp hangar, with an elliptical dirt arena. The stands are permanent and set in cement and go on and up forever. The stands are maybe 5% full. Echoes are creepy, but the smell of the arena’s moist earth is lush and nice. The draft horses themselves are enormous, eight feet high and steroidically muscled. I think they were originally bred to pull things; God only knows their function now. There are two- and three-year-old Belgian Stallions, Percherons, and the Bud-famous Clydesdales with their bellbottoms of hair. The Belgians are particularly thick through the chest and rear quarter (I’m starting to develop an eye for livestock). Again, the Official wears a simply bitching white cowboy hat and stands at ease, legs well apart. This one has a weak chin and something wrong with one of his eyelids, though, at least. All the competitors are again shampooed and combed, black and gunpowder-gray and the dull white of sea-foam, their tails cropped and the stumps decorated with girlish bows that look obscene against all this muscle. The horses’ heads bob when they walk, rather like pigeons’ heads. They’re led in the now familiar concentric circles by their owners, big-bellied men in brown suits and string ties. At obscure PA commands, the owners break their animals into thundering canter, holding their bridles and running just under the head, stomachs bouncing around (the men’s). The horses’ hoofs throw up big clods of earth as they run, so that it sort of rains dirt for several yards behind them. They look mythic when they run. Their giant hoofs are black and have shiny age-striations like a tree-stump’s rings.

  It’s something of a relief to see no fast-food buyers on the dais awaiting Auction. As with Beef, though, a young beauty queen in a tiara presides from a flower-decked throne. It’s unclear just who she is: “Ms. Illinois Horseflesh” sounds unlikely, as does “Ms. Illinois Draft Horse.” (Though there is a 1993 Illinois Pork Queen, over in Swine.)

  08/15/0930h. Sun erumpent, mid-90s, puddles and mud trying to evaporate into air that’s already waterlogged. Every smell just hangs there. The general sensation is that of being in the middle of an armpit. I’m once again at the capacious McDonald’s tent, at the edge, the titanic inflatable clown presiding. (Why is there no Wal-Mart tent?) There’s a fair-sized crowd in the basketball bleachers at one side and rows of folding chairs at the other. It’s the Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals. A metal loudspeaker begins to emit disco, and little girls pour into the tent from all directions, twirling and gamboling in vivid costume. There’s a symphony of zippers from the seats and stands as video cameras come out by the score, and I can tell it’s pretty much just me and a thousand parents.

  The baroque classes and divisions, both team and solo, go from age three (!) to sixteen, with epithetic signifiers—e.g. the four-year-olds compose the Sugar ’N’ Spice division, and so on. I’m in a chair right up front (but in the sun) behind the competition’s judges, introduced as “Varsity Twirlers from the [why?] University of Kansas.” They are four frosted blondes who smile a lot and blow huge grape bubbles.

  The twirler squads are all from different towns. Mount Vernon and Kankakee seem especially rich in twirlers. The twirlers’ spandex costumes, differently colored for each team, are paint-tight and really brief in the legs. The coaches are grim, tan, lithe-looking women, clearly twirlers once, on the far side of their glory now and very serious-looking, each with a clipboard and whistle. It’s all a little like figure skating. The teams go into choreographed routines, each routine with a title and a designated disco or show tune, full of compulsory baton-twirling maneuvers with highly technical names. A mom next to me is tracking scores on what looks almost like an astrology chart, and is in no mood to explain anything to a novice baton-watcher. The routines are wildly complex, and the loudspeaker’s play-by-play is mostly in code. All I can determine for sure is that I’ve bumbled into what has to be the single most spectator-hazardous event at the Fair. Missed batons go all over, whistling wickedly. The three-, four-, and five-year-olds aren’t that dangerous, though they do spend most of their time picking up dropped batons and trying to hustle back into place—the parents of especially fumble-prone twirlers howl in fury from the stands while the coaches chew gum grimly—but the littler girls don’t have the arm-strength to really endanger anybody, although one of the judges does take a Sugar ’N’ Spice’s baton across the bridge of the nose and has to be helped from the tent.

  But when the seven- and eight-year-olds hit the floor for a series of “Armed Service Medleys” (spandex with epaulets and officers’ caps and batons over shoulders like M-16s), errant batons start pinwheeling into the tent’s ceiling, sides, and crowd with real force. I myself duck several times. A man just down the row takes one in the plexus and falls over in his metal chair with a horrid crash. The batons (one stray I picked up had REGULATION LENGTH embossed down the shaft) have white rubber stoppers on each end, but it’s that dry hard kind of rubber, and the batons themselves are not light. I don’t think it’s an accident that police nightsticks are also called service batons.

  Physically, even within same-age teams, there are marked incongruities in size and development. One nine-year-old is several heads taller than another, and they’re trying to do an involved back-and-forth duet thing with just one baton, which ends up taking out a bulb in one of the tent’s steel hanging lamps and showering part of the stands with glass. A lot of the younger twirlers look either anorexic or gravely ill. There are no fat baton-twirlers. The enforcement of this no-endomorph rule is probably internal: a fat person’d have to get exactly one look at herself in tight sequinned spandex to abandon all twirling ambitions for all time.

  Ironically, it’s the botched maneuvers that allow one to see how baton-twirling (which to me had always seemed sleight-of-handish and occult) works in terms of mechanics. It seems to consist not in twirling so much as sort of spinning the baton on your knuckle while the fingers underneath work and writhe furiously for some reason, maybe supplying torque. Some serious kinetic force is coming from somewhere, clearly. A sort of attempted sidearm-twirl sends a baton Xing out and hitting a big woman’s kneecap with a ringing clang, and her husband puts his hand on her shoulder as she sits up very rigid and white, pop-eyed, her mouth a little bloodless hyphen. I miss good old Native Companion, who’s the sort of person who can elicit conversation even from the recently baton-struck.

  A team of ten-year-olds from the Gingersnap class have little cotton bunnytails on their costumes’ bottoms and rigid papier-mâché ears, and they can do some serious twirling. A squad of eleven-year-olds from Towanda does an involved routine in tribute to Operation Desert Storm. T
o most of the acts there’s either a cutesy ultrafeminine aspect or a stern butch military one; there’s little in between. Starting with the twelve-year-olds—one team in black spandex that looks like cheesecake leotards—there is, I’m afraid, a frank sexuality that begins to get uncomfortable. You can already see some of the sixteen-year-olds out under the basketball hoop doing little warm-up twirls and splits, and they’re disturbing enough to make me wish there was a copy of the state’s criminal statutes handy and prominent. Also disturbing is that in an empty seat next to me is a gun, a rifle, real-looking, with a white wood stock, which who knows whether it’s really real or part of an upcoming martial routine or what, that’s been sitting here ownerless ever since the competition started.

  Oddly, it’s the cutesy feminine routines that result in the really serious casualties. A dad standing up near the stands’ top with a Toshiba viewfinder to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls forward onto somebody eating a Funnel Cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them, and there’s an extended halt to the action, during which I decamp—steering way clear of the sixteen-year-olds on the basketball court—and as I clear the last row yet another baton comes wharp-wharping cruelly right over my shoulder, caroming viciously off big R.’s inflated thigh.

  08/15/1105h. A certain swanky East-Coast organ is unfortunately denied journalistic impressions of the Illinois Snakes Seminar, the Midwestern Birds of Prey Demonstration, the Husband-Calling Contest, and something the Media Guide calls “The Celebrity ‘Moo-Moo’ Classic”—all of these clearly must-sees—because they’re all also in venues right near the Food and Dessert Tent Grotto, which even the abstract thought of another proffered wedge of Chocolate Silk Triple-Layer Cake in the shape of Lincoln’s profile produces a pulsing ache in the bulge I’ve still got on the left side of my abdomen. So right now I’m five acres and six hundred food-booths away from midday’s must-see events, in the slow stream of people entering the Expo Bldg.

  I’d planned on skipping the Expo Bldg., figuring it was full of like home-furniture-refinishing demos and futuristic mockups of Peoria’s skyline. I’d had no idea it was… air-conditioned. Nor that it comprises a whole additional different IL State Fair with its own separate pros and patrons. It’s not just that there are no carnies or ag-people in here. The place is jammed with people I’ve seen literally nowhere else on the Fairgrounds. It’s a world and gala unto itself, self-sufficient: the fourth Us of the Fair.

  The Expo Bldg.’s a huge enclosed mallish thing, AC’d down to 80°, with a cement floor and a hardwood mezzanine overhead. Every interior inch here is given over to adversion and commerce of a very special and lurid sort. Just inside the big east entrance a man with a headset mike is slicing up a block of wood and then a tomato, standing on a box in a booth that says SharpKut, hawking these spinoffs of Ginsu knives, “AS SEEN ON TV.” Next door is a booth offering personalized pet-I.D. tags. Another’s got the infamous mail-order-advertised Clapper, which turns on appliances automatically at the sound of two hands clapping (but also at the sound of a cough, sneeze, or sniff, I discover—caveat emp.). There’s booth after booth, each with an audience whose credulity is heartrending. The noise in the Expo Bldg. is apocalyptic and complexly echoed, sound-carpeted by crying children and ceiling-fans’ roar. A large percentage of the booths show signs of hasty assembly and say AS SEEN ON TV in bright brave colors. The booths’ salesmen all stand raised to a slight height; all have headset microphones and speakers with built-in amps and rich neutral media voices.

  It turns out these franchised Expo vendors, not unlike the Blomsness carnies (any comparison to whom makes the vendors show canine teeth, though), go from State Fair to State Fair all summer. One young man demonstrating QUICK ’N’ BRITE—“A WHOLE NEW CONCEPT IN CLEANING”—was under the persistent impression that he was in Iowa.

  There’s a neon-bordered booth for something called a RAINBOW-VAC, a vacuum cleaner whose angle is that it uses water in its canister instead of a bag, and the canister is clear Lucite, so you get a graphic look at just how much dirt it’s getting out of a carpet sample. People in polyester slacks and/or orthopedic shoes are clustered three-deep around this booth, greatly moved, but all I can think of is that the thing looks like the world’s biggest heavy-use bong, right down to the water’s color. There’s a predictably strong odor surrounding the Southwestern Leatherworx booth. Likewise at Distressed Leather Luggage (missing hyphen? misplaced mod?). I’m not even halfway down one side of the Expo’s main floor, list-wise. The mezzanine has still more booths. There’s a booth that offers clock-faces superimposed on varnished photorealist paintings of Christ, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe. There’s a Computerized Posture Evaluation booth. A lot of the headsetted vendors are about my age or younger. Something ever so slightly over-groomed about them suggests a Bible-college background. It’s just cool enough in here for a sweat-soaked shirt to get clammy. One vendor recites a pitch for Ms. Suzanne Somers’s THIGHMASTER while a lady in a leotard lies on her side on the fiberboard counter and demonstrates the product. I’m in the Expo Bldg. almost two hours, and every time I look up the poor lady’s still at it with the THIGHMASTER. Most of the Expo vendors won’t answer questions and give me beady looks when I stand there making notes in the Barney tablet. But the THIGHMASTER lady—friendly, garrulous, violently cross-eyed, in (understandably) phenomenal physical condition—informs me she gets an hour off for lunch at 1400 but is back on her side all the way to closing at 2300. I remark that her thighs must be pretty well Mastered by now, and her leg sounds like a bannister when she raps her knuckle against it, and we have a good laugh together until her vendor finally makes her ask me to scram.

  The Copper Kettle All-Butter Fudge booth does brisk air-conditioned business. There’s something called a Full Immersion Body Fat Analysis for $8.50. A certain CompuVac Inc. offers a $1.50 Computerized Personality Analysis. Its booth’s computer panel’s tall and full of blinking lights and reel-to-reel tapes, like an old bad sci-fi-film computer. My own Personality Analysis, a slip of paper that protrudes like a tongue from a red-lit slot, says “Your Boldness of Nature is Ofset With The Fear Of Taking Risk” (sic2). My suspicion that there’s a guy hunched behind the blinking panel feeding its slot recycled fortune-cookie slips is overwhelming but unverifiable.

  Booth after booth. A Xanadu of chintzola. Obscure non-stick cookware. “EYE GLASSES CLEANED FREE.” A booth with anti-cellulite sponges. More DIPPIN DOTS futuristic ice cream. A woman with Velcro straps on her shoes gets fountain-pen ink out of a linen tablecloth with a Chapsticky-looking spot remover whose banner says “AS SEEN ON ‘AMAZING DISCOVERIES,’ ” a wee-hour infomercial I’m kind of a fan of. A plywood booth that for $9.95 will take a photo and superimpose your face on either an FBI Wanted poster or a Penthouse cover. An MIA—BRING THEM HOME! booth staffed by women playing Go Fish. An anti-abortion booth called LIFESAVERS that lures you over with free candy. Sand Art. Shredded-Ribbon Art. Therm-L-Seal Double Pane Windows. An indescribable booth for “LATEST ADVANCE ROTARY NOSE HAIR CLIPPERS” whose other sign reads (I kid you not) “Do Not Pull Hair From Nose, May Cause Fatal Infection.” Two different booths for collectible sports cards, “Top Ranked Investment Of The Nineties.” And tucked way back on one curve of the mezzanine’s ellipse: yes: black velvet paintings, including several of Elvis in pensive poses.

  And people are buying this stuff. The Expo’s unique products are targeted at a certain type of Midwestern person I’d all but forgotten. I’d somehow not noticed these persons’ absence from the paths and exhibits. This is going to sound not just East-Coastish but elitist and snotty. But facts are facts. The special community of shoppers in the Expo Bldg. are a Midwestern subphylum commonly if unkindly known as Kmart People. Farther south they’d be a certain fringe-type of White Trash. Kmart People tend to be overweight, polyestered, grim-faced, toting glazed unhappy children. Toupees are the movingly obvious shiny square-cut kind, and the women’s makeup is garish and often asymme
trically applied, giving many of the female faces a kind of demented look. They are sharp-voiced and snap at their families. They’re the type you see slapping their kids in supermarket checkouts. They are people who work at like Champaign’s Kraft and Decatur’s A. E. Staley and think pro wrestling is real. I’m sorry, but this is all true. I went to high school with Kmart People. I know them. They own firearms and do not hunt. They aspire to own mobile homes. They read the Star without even a pretense of contempt and have toilet paper with little off-color jokes printed on it. A few of these folks might check out the Tractor Pull or U.S.A.C. race, but most are in the Expo to stay. This is what they’ve come for. They couldn’t give one fat damn about ethanol exhibits or carnival rides whose seats are hard to squeeze into. Agriculture shmagriculture. And Gov. Edgar’s a closet pinko: they heard it on Rush. They plod up and down, looking put out and intensely puzzled, as if they’re sure what they’ve come for’s got to be here someplace. I wish Native C. were here; she’s highly quotable on the subject of Kmart People. One big girl with tattoos and a heavy-diapered infant wears a T-shirt that says “WARNING: I GO FROM 0 TO HORNEY IN 2.5 BEERS.”