Booth after booth. A Xanadu of chintzola. Obscure non-stick cook-ware. “EYE GLASSES CLEANED FREE.” A booth with anti-cellulite sponges. More DIPPIN DOTS futuristic ice cream. A woman with Velero 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 asymmetrically 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.”
Have you ever wondered where these particular types of unfunny T-shirts come from? the ones that say things like “HORNEY IN 2.5” or “Impeach President Clinton… AND HER HUSBAND TOO!!”? Mystery solved. They come from State Fair Expos. Right here on the main floor’s a monster-sized booth, more like an open bodega, with shirts and laminated buttons and license-plate borders, all of which, for this subphylum, Testify. This booth seems integral, somehow. The seamiest fold of the Midwestern underbelly. The Lascaux Caves of a certain rural mentality. “40 Isn’t Old… IF YOU’RE A TREE” and “The More Hair I Lose, The More Head I Get” and “Retired: No Worries, No Paycheck” and “I Fight Poverty… I WORK!!” As with New Yorker cartoons, there’s an elusive sameness about the shirts’ messages. A lot serve to I.D. the wearer as part of a certain group and then congratulate that group for its sexual dynamism—“Coon Hunters Do It All Night” and “Hairdressers Tease It Till It Stands Up” and “Save A Horse: Ride A Cowboy.” Some presume a weird kind of aggressive relation between the shirt’s wearer and its reader—“We’d Get Along Better… If You Were A BEER” and “Lead Me Not Into Temptation, I Know The Way MYSELF” and “What Part Of NO Don’t You Understand?” There’s something complex and compelling about the fact that these messages are not just uttered but worn, like they’re a badge or credential. The message compliments the wearer somehow, and the wearer in turn endorses the message by spreading it across his chest, which fact is then in further turn supposed to endorse the wearer as a person of plucky or risqué wit. It’s also meant to cast the wearer as an Individual, the sort of person who not only makes but wears a Personal Statement. What’s depressing is that the T-shirts’ statements are not only preprinted and mass-produced, but so dumbly unfunny that they serve to place the wearer squarely in that large and unfortunate group of people who think such messages not only Individual but funny. It all gets tremendously complex and depressing. The lady running the booth’s register is dressed like a ’68 Yippie but has a hard carny face and wants to know why I’m standing here memorizing T-shirts. All I can manage to tell her is that the “HORNEY” on these “2.5 BEERS”-shirts is misspelled; and now I really feel like an East-Coast snob, laying judgments and semiotic theories on these people who ask of life only a Republican in the White House and a black velvet Elvis on the wood-grain mantel of their mobile home. They’re not hurting anybody. A good third of the people I went to high school with now probably wear these T-shirts, and proudly.
And I’m forgetting to mention the Expo Bldg.’s other nexus of commerce — church booths. The populist evangelism of the rural Midwest. An economy of spirit. It’s not your cash they want. A Church of God booth offers a Computerized Bible Quiz. Its computer is CompuVacish in appearance. I go eighteen for twenty on the Quiz and am invited behind a chamois curtain for a “person-to-person faith exploration,” which thanks anyway. The conventional vendors get along fine with the Baptists and Jews for Jesus who operate booths right near them. They all laugh and banter back and forth. The SharpKut guy sends all the vegetables he’s microsliced over to the LIFESAVERS booth, where they put them out with the candy. The scariest spiritual booth is right up near the west exit, where something called Covenant Faith Triumphant Church has a big hanging banner that asks “WHAT IS THE ONE MAN MADE THING IN HEAVEN?” and I stop to ponder, which with charismatics is instant death, because a breastless bushy-browed woman is out around the booth’s counter like a shot and in my personal space. She says “Give up? Give up do you?” I tell her I’ll go ahead and bite. She’s looking at me very intensely, but there’s something off about her gaze: it’s like she’s looking at my eyes rather than into them. What one man-made thing, I ask. She puts her finger to her palm and makes screwing motions. Signifying coitus? (I don’t say “coitus” out loud, though.) “Not but one thing,” she says. “The holes in Christ’s palms,” screwing her finger in. It’s scary. Except isn’t it pretty well known that Roman crucifees were nailed at the wrists, since palm-flesh won’t support weight? So but now I’ve been drawn into an actual dialogue, going so far as to let the lady take my arm and pull me toward the booth’s counter. “Lookee here for a second now,” she says. She has both hands around my arm. I feel a sinking in my gut; I’m programmed from childhood to know that I’ve made a serious error. A Midwestern child of academics gets trained early on to avoid these weird-eyed eager rural Christians who accost your space, to say Not Interested at the front door and No Thanks to mimeoed leaflets, to look right through streetcorner missionaries as if they were NYC panhandlers. I have erred. The woman more or less throws me up against the Covenant Faith counter, on which counter is a fine oak box, yay big, with a propped sign: “Where Will YOU Be When YOU Look Like THIS?” “Take you a look-see in here.” The box has a hole in the top. Inside the box is a human skull. I’m pretty sure it’s plastic. The interior lighting’s tricky. But I’m pretty sure the skull isn’t genuine. I haven’t inhaled for over a minute now. The woman is looking at the side of my face. “Are you sure is the question,” she says. I manage to make my straightening-up motion lead right into a backing-away motion. “Are you a hundred percent surer.” Overhead, on the mezzanine, the THIGHMASTER lady’s still at it, on her side, head on her arm, smiling cross-eyed into space.