The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  08/15/1800h. Back again at the seemingly inescapable Club Mickey D’s. All signs of baton-twirlers and fallen spectators have been erased. The tent’s now set up for Illinois Golden Gloves Boxing. Out on the floor is a kind of square made up of four boxing rings. The rings are made out of clothesline and poles anchored by cement-filled tires, one ring per age division—Sixteens, Fourteens, Twelves, Tens(!). Here’s another unhyped but riveting spectacle. If you want to see genuine interhuman violence, go check out a Golden Gloves tourney. None of your adult pros’ silky footwork or Rope-a-Dope defenses here. Here asses are thoroughly kicked in what are essentially playground brawls with white-tipped gloves and brain-shaped headguards. The combatants’ tank tops say things like “Rockford Jr. Boxing” and “Elgin Fight Club.” The rings’ corners have stools for the kids to sit on and get worked over by their teams’ coaches. The coaches look like various childhood friends of mine’s abusive fathers—florid, blue-jawed, bull-necked, flinty-eyed, the kind of men who bowl, watch TV in their underwear, and oversee sanctioned brawls. Now a fighter’s mouthguard goes flying out of the Fourteens’ ring, end over end, trailing strings of spit, and the crowd around that ring howls. In the Sixteens’ ring is a Springfield kid, a local hero, one Darrell Hall, against a slim fluid Latino named Sullivano from Joliet. Hall outweighs Sullivano by a good twenty pounds. Hall also looks like just about every kid who ever beat me up in high school, right down to the wispy mustache and upper lip’s cruel twist. The crowd around the Sixteens’ ring is all his friends—guys with muscle shirts and varsity gym shorts and gelled hair, girls in cutoff overalls and complex systems of barrettes and scrunchies. There are repeated shouts of “Kick his ass Darrell!” The Latino sticks and moves. Somebody in this tent is smoking a joint, I can smell. The Sixteens can actually box. The ceiling’s lights are bare bulbs in steel cones, hanging cockeyed from a day of batons. Everybody here pours sweat. A few people look askance at the little clicker I carry. The reincarnation of every high school cheerleader I ever pined for is in the Sixteens’ crowd. The girls cry out and sort of frame their face in their hands whenever Darrell Hall gets hit. I do not know why cutoff overall shorts have evaded the East Coast’s fashion ken; they are devastating. The fight in Fourteens is stopped for a moment to let the ref wipe a gout of blood from one kid’s glove. Sullivano glides and jabs, sort of orbiting Hall. Hall is implacable, a hunched and feral fighter, boring in. Air explodes through his nose when he lands a blow. He keeps trying to back the Latino against the clothesline. People fan themselves with wood-handled fans from the Democratic Party. Mosquitoes work the crowd. The refs keep slapping at their necks. The rains have been bad, and the mosquitoes this August are the bad kind, big and vaguely hairy, field-bred, rapacious, the kind that can swarm on a calf overnight and the farmer finds his calf in the morning splay-legged and bled kosher. This actually happens. Mosquitoes are not to be fucked with out here. (East-Coast friends laugh at my dread of mosquitoes, and they make fun of the little battery-powered box I carry whenever I’m outside at night. Even in like NYC or Boston I carry it. It’s from an obscure catalogue and produces a sound like a dragonfly—a.k.a. odonata anisoptera, sworn eternal foe to all mosquitoes everywhere—a faint high-speed clicking that sends any right-thinking mosquito out of its mind with fear. On East 55th, carrying the little box is maybe a bit neurotic; here, with me ripe and sweaty and tall in this crowd, the good old trusty clicker saves more than just my ass.) I can also see the Tens from this vantage, a vicious free-for-all between two tiny kids whose headguards make their heads look too big for their bodies. Neither ten-year-old has any interest in defense. Their shoes’ toes touch as they windmill at each other, scoring at will. Scary dads chew gum in their corners. One kid’s mouthguard keeps falling out. Now the Sixteens’ crowd explodes as their loutish Darrell catches Sullivano with an uppercut that puts him on his bottom. Sullivano gamely rises, but his knees wobble and he won’t face the ref. Hall raises both arms and faces the crowd, disclosing a missing incisor. The girls betray their cheerleading backgrounds by clapping and jumping up and down at the same time. Hall shakes his gloves at the ceiling as several girls call his name, and you can feel it in the air’s very ions: Darrell Hall is going to get laid before the night’s over.

  The digital thermometer in the Ronald-god’s big left hand reads 93° at 1815h. Behind him, big ominous scoop-of-coffee-ice-cream clouds are piling up at the sky’s western reef, but the sun’s still above them and very much a force. People’s shadows on the paths are getting pointy. It’s the part of the day when little kids go into jagged crying fits from what their parents naïvely call exhaustion. Cicadas chirr in the grass by the tent. The ten-year-olds stand literally toe to toe and whale the living shit out of each other. It’s the sort of implausibly savage mutual beating you see in fight-movies. Their ring now has the largest crowd. The fight’ll be all but impossible to score. But then it’s over in an instant at the second intermission when one of the little boys, sitting on his stool, being whispered to by a coach with tattooed forearms, suddenly throws up. Prodigiously. For no apparent reason. It’s kind of surreal. Vomit flies all over. Kids in the crowd go “Eeeyuuu.” Several partially digested food-booth items are identifiable—maybe that’s the apparent reason. The sick fighter starts to cry. His scary coach and the ref wipe him down and help him from the ring, not ungently. His opponent tentatively puts up his arms.

  08/15/1930h. And there is, in this state with its origin and reason in food, a strong digestive subtheme running all through the ’93 Fair. In a way, we’re all here to be swallowed up. The Main Gate’s maw admits us, slow tight-packed masses move peristaltically along complex systems of branching paths, engage in complex cash-and-energy transfers at the villi alongside the paths, and are finally—both filled and depleted—expelled out of exits designed for heavy flow. And there are the exhibits of food and of the production of food, the unending food-booths and the peripatetic consumption of food. The public Potties and communal urinals. The moist body-temp heat of the Fairgrounds. The livestock judged and applauded as future food while the animals stand in their own manure, chewing cuds.

  Plus there are those great literalizers of all metaphor, little kids—boxers and fudge-gluttons, sunstroke-casualties, those who overflow just from the adrenaline of the Specialness of it all—the rural Midwesterners of tomorrow, all throwing up.

  And so the old heavo-ho is the last thing I see at Golden Gloves Boxing and then the first thing I see at Happy Hollow, right at sunset. Standing with stupid Barney tablet on the Midway, looking up at the Ring of Fire—a set of flame-colored train cars sent around and around the inside of a 100-foot neon hoop, the operator stalling the train at the top and hanging the patrons upside down, jackknifed over their seatbelts, with loose change and eyeglasses raining down—looking up, I witness a single thick coil of vomit arc from a car; it describes a 100-foot spiral and lands with a meaty splat between two young girls whose T-shirts say something about volleyball and who look from the ground to each other with expressions of slapstick horror. And when the flame-train finally brakes at the ramp, a mortified-looking little kid totters off, damp and green, staggering over toward a Lemon Shake-Up stand.

  I am basically scribbling impressions as I jog. I’ve put off a real survey of the Near-Death Experiences until my last hour, and I want to get everything catalogued before the sun sets. I’ve had some distant looks at the nighttime Hollow from up on the Press Lot’s ridge and have an idea that being down here in the dark, amid all this rotating neon and the mechanical clowns and plunging machinery’s roar and piercing screams and barkers’ amplified pitches and high-volume rock, would be like every bad Sixties movie’s depiction of a bum acid trip. It strikes me hardest in the Hollow that I am not spiritually Midwestern anymore, and no longer young—I do not like crowds, screams, loud noise, or heat. I’ll endure these things if I have to, but they’re no longer my idea of a Special Treat or sacred Community-interval. The crowds in the Hollow—mostly high sch
ool couples, local toughs, and kids in single-sex packs, as the demographics of the Fair shift to prime time—seem radically gratified, vivid, actuated, sponges for sensuous data, feeding on it all somehow. It’s the first time I’ve felt truly lonely at the Fair.

  Nor, I have to say, do I understand why some people will pay money to be careened and suspended and dropped and whipped back and forth at high speeds and hung upside down until they vomit. It seems to me like paying to be in a traffic accident. I do not get it; never have. It’s not a regional or cultural thing. I think it’s a matter of basic neurological makeup. I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify. I’m pretty sure I’m more frightened looking up at the Ring of Fire than the patrons are riding it.

  Happy Hollow has not one but two Tilt-a-Whirls. An experience called Wipe Out straps customers into fixed seats on a big lit disc that spins with a wobble like a coin that won’t quite lie down. The infamous Pirate Ship puts forty folks in a plastic galley and swings it in a pendulous arc until they’re facing straight up and then down. There’s vomit on the sides of the Pirate Ship, too. The carny operating the P. Ship is made to wear an eyepatch and parrot and hook, on the tip of which hook burns an impaled Marlboro.

  The operator of the Funhouse is slumped in a plastic control booth that reeks of sinsemilla.

  The 104-foot Giant Gondola Wheel is a staid old Ferris wheel that puts you facing your seatmate in a kind of steel teacup. Its rotation is stately, but the cars at the top look like little lit thimbles, and you can hear thin female screams from up there as their dates grab the teacups’ sides and joggle.

  The lines are the longest for the really serious Near-Death Experiences: Ring of Fire, The Zipper, Hi Roller—which latter runs a high-speed train around the inside of an ellipse that is itself spinning at right angles to the train’s motion. The crowds are dense and reek of repellent. Boys in fishnet shirts clutch their dates as they walk. There’s something intensely public about young Midwestern couples. The girls have tall teased hair and bee-stung lips, and their eye makeup runs in the heat and gives them a vampirish aspect. The overt sexuality of modern high school girls is not just a Coastal thing. There’s a Midwestern term, “drape,” for the kind of girl who hangs onto her boyfriend in public like he’s a tree in a hurricane. A lot of the girls on the Midway are drapes. I swing my trusty dragonfly-clicker before me in broad censerish arcs as I jog. I’m on a strict and compressed timetable. The Amour Express sends another little train at 60+ mph around a topologically deformed ring, half of which is enclosed in a fiberglass tunnel with neon hearts and arrows. Bug zappers up on the light-poles are doing a brisk business. A fallen packet of Trojans lies near the row of Lucite cubes in which slack-jawed cranes try to pick up jewelry. The Hollow’s basically an east-west vector, but I jog in rough figure-eights, passing certain venues several times. The Funhouse operator’s sneakers are sticking out of his booth; the rest of him is out of view. Kids are running into the Funhouse for free. For a moment I’m convinced I’ve spotted Alan Thicke, of all celebrities, shooting an air rifle at a row of 2-D cardboard Iraqis for a Jurassic Park stuffed animal.

  It seems journalistically irresponsible to describe the Hollow’s rides without experiencing at least one of them firsthand. The Kiddie Kopter is a carousel of miniature Sikorsky prototypes rotating at a sane and dignified clip. The propellers on each helicopter rotate as well. My copter is admittedly a bit snug, even with my knees drawn up to my chest. I get kicked off the ride when the whole machine’s radical tilt reveals that I weigh quite a bit more than the maximum 100 pounds, and I have to say that both the carny in charge and the other kids on the ride were unnecessarily snide about the whole thing. Each ride has its own PA speaker with its own charge of adrenalizing rock; the Kiddie Kopter’s speaker is playing George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” as the little bastards go around. The late-day Hollow itself is an enormous sonic mash from which different sounds take turns protruding—mostly whistles, sirens, calliopes, mechanized clown-cackles, heavy-metal tunes, human screams hard to distinguish from recorded screams.

  It isn’t Alan Thicke, on closer inspection.

  Both the Thunderboltz and the Octopus hurl free-spinning modular cars around a topologically complex plane. The Thunderboltz’s north side and entrance ramp show still more evidence of gastric distress. Then there’s the Gravitron, an enclosed, top-shaped structure inside which is a rubberized chamber that spins so fast you’re mashed against the wall like a fly on a windshield. It’s basically a centrifuge for the centrifugal separation of people’s brains from those brains’ blood supply. Watching people come out of the Gravitron is not a pleasant experience at all, and you do not want to know what the ground around the exit looks like. A small boy stands on one foot tugging the operator’s khaki sleeve, crying that he lost a shoe in there. The best description of the carnies’ tan is that they’re somehow sinisterly tan. I notice that many of them have the low brow and prognathous jaw typically associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The carny operating the Scooter—bumper cars, fast, savage, underinsulated, a sure trip to the chiropractor—has been slumped in the same position in the same chair every time I’ve seen him, staring past the frantic cars and tearing up used ride-tickets with the vacant intensity of someone on a Locked Ward. I lean casually against his platform’s railing so that my Credentials dangle prominently and ask him in a neighborly way how he keeps from going out of his freaking mind with the boredom of his job. He turns his head very slowly, revealing a severe facial tic: “The fuck you talking bout.”

  The same two carnies as before are at The Zipper’s controls, in the exact same clothes, looking up into the full cars and elbowing each other. The Midway smells of machine oil and fried food, smoke and Cutter repellent and mall-bought adolescent perfume and ripe trash in the bee-swarmed cans. The very Nearest-to-Death ride looks to be the Kamikaze, way down at the western end near the Zyklon roller coaster. Its neon sign has a grinning skull with a headband and says simply KAMIKAZE. It’s a 70-foot pillar of white-painted iron with two 50-foot hammer-shaped arms hanging down, one on either side. The cars are at the end of these arms, twelve-seaters enclosed in clear plastic. The two arms swing ferociously around, as in 360°, vertically, and in opposite directions, so that at the top and bottom of every rotation it looks like your car is going to get smashed up against the other car and you can see faces in the other car hurtling toward you, gray with fright and squishy with G’s. An eight-ticket, four-dollar waking nightmare.

  No. Now I’ve found the worst one. It wasn’t even here yesterday. It must have been brought in special. It may not even be part of the carnival proper. It’s the SKY COASTER. The SKY COASTER stands regally aloof at the Hollow’s far western edge, just past the Uphill-Bowling-for-Dinnerware game, in a kind of grotto formed by Blomsness-Thebault trailers and dismantled machinery. At first all you can see is the very-yellow of some piece of heavy construction equipment, then after a second there’s some other, high-overhead stuff that from the east is just a tangle of Expressionist shadows against the setting sun. A small but steady stream of Fairgoers leads into the SKY COASTER grotto.

  It’s a 175-foot construction crane, a BRH-200, one of the really big mothers, with a tank’s traction belts instead of wheels, a canary-yellow cab, and a long proboscis of black steel, 200 feet long, canted upward at maybe 70°. This is half of the SKY COASTER. The other half is a 100-foot+ tower assembly of cross-hatched iron that’s been erected a couple hundred yards north of the crane. There’s a folding table in front of the clothesline cordoning off the crane, and there’s a line of people at the table. The woman taking their money is fiftyish and a compelling advertisement fo
r sunscreen. Behind her on a vivid blue tarp are two meaty blond guys in SKY COASTER T-shirts helping the next customer strap himself into what looks like a combination straitjacket and utility belt, bristling with hooks and clips. It’s not yet entirely clear what’s going on. From here the noise of the Hollow behind is both deafening and muffled, like high tide behind a dike. My Media Guide, sweated into the shape of a buttock from my pocket, says: “If you thought bungee jumping was a thrill, wait until you soar high above the Fairgrounds on SKY COASTER. The rider is fastened securely into a full-body harness that hoists them [sic, hopefully] onto a tower and releases them to swing in a pendulum-like motion while taking in a spectacular view of the Fairgrounds below.” The hand-printed signs at the folding table are more telling: “$40.00. AMEX Visa MC. NO REFUNDS. NO STOPPING HALF WAY UP.” The two guys are leading the customer up the stairs of a construction platform maybe ten feet high. One guy’s at each elbow, and I realize they’re helping hold the customer up. Who would pay $40.00 for an experience you have to be held up even to walk toward? Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive? I simply do not get it. Plus there’s also something slightly off about this customer, odd. For one thing, he’s wearing tinted aviator glasses. No one in the rural Midwest wears aviator glasses, tinted or otherwise. Then I see what it really is. He’s wearing $400 Banfi loafers. Without socks. This guy, now lying prone on the platform below the crane, is from the East Coast. He’s a ringer. I almost want to shout it. A woman’s on the blue tarp, already in harness, rubber-kneed, waiting her turn. A steel cable descends from the tip of the crane’s proboscis, on its end a fist-sized clip. Another cable leads from the crane’s cab along the ground to the tower, up through ring-tipped pitons all up the tower’s side, and over a pulley right at the top, another big clip on the end. One of the blond guys waves the tower’s cable down and brings it over to the platform. Both the crane’s and tower’s cables’ clips are attached to the back of the East-Coast man’s harness, fastened and locked. The man’s trying to look around behind him to see what-all’s attached to him as the two big blonds leave the platform. Yet another blond man in the crane’s cab throws a lever, and the tower’s cable pulls tight in the grass and up the tower’s side and down. The crane’s cable stays slack as the man is lifted into the air by the tower’s cable. The harness covers his shorts and shirt, so he looks babe-naked as he rises. The one cable sings with tension as the East-Coaster is pulled slowly to the top of the tower. He’s still stomach-down, limbs wriggling. At a certain height he starts to look like livestock in a sling. You can tell he’s trying to swallow until his face gets too small to see. Finally he’s all the way up at the top of the tower, his ass against the cable’s pulley, trying not to writhe. I can barely take notes. They cruelly leave him up there awhile, slung, a smile of slack cable between him and the crane’s tip. The grotto’s crowd mutters and points, shading eyes against the red sun. One teenage boy describes the sight to another teenage boy as “Harsh.” I myself am constructing a mental list of the violations I would undergo before I’d let anyone haul me ass-first to a great height and swing me like high-altitude beef. One of the blond guys has a bullhorn and is playing to the crowd’s suspense, calling up to the slung East-Coaster: “Are. You. Ready.” The East-Coaster’s response-noises are more bovine than human. His tinted aviator glasses hang askew from just one ear; he doesn’t bother to fix them. I can see what’s going to happen. They’re going to throw a lever and detach the tower-cable’s clip, and the man in sockless Banfis will free-fall for what’ll seem forever, until the crane’s cable’s slack is taken up and the line takes his weight and goes tight behind him and swings him way out over the grounds to the south, his arc’s upward half almost as high as the tower was, and then he’ll fall all over again, back, and get caught and swung the other way, back and forth, the man prone at the arc’s trough and seeming to stand at either apex, swinging back and forth and erect and prone against a rare-meat sunset. And just as the crane’s cab’s blond reaches for his lever and the crowd mightily inhales, just then, I lose my nerve, in my very last moment at the Fair—I recall my childhood’s serial nightmare of being swung or whipped in an arc that threatens to come full circle—and I decline to be part of this, even as witness—and I find, again, in extremis, access to childhood’s other worst nightmare, the only sure way to obliterate all; and the sun and sky and plummeting Yuppie go out like a light.