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 school 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.