OK but in that malicious little prodigal spiteful ungrateful jab at his delicate client, who he'd finally soothed and signed but couldn't induce to appear, today — was there not maybe a something there? Something true and sad and hubless, that goes on? Does a Funhouse need to be more than Fun? More than New and Improved Fun? Are actual house-considerations at work in this campaign, unseen? For whom is the Funhouse an enclosure, maybe? Does he, J.D., live in anything like a Funhouse? J.D. lives at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex in Collision, 111.; J.D. lives on and manages the few-acre rose farm his own itinerant father had stuck in the lapel of a corn-green state and then plowed himself into; J.D. lives deep inside J.D., marrying images and jingles, poking his sword of a nose out at isolated and alone moments to sniff the winds of fashion, fear, desire — the Trade Winds that blow overhead, moving between Coasts. J.D. has built the second-largest advertising agency in American history from the fringe that is the country's center, from a piss-poor little accidental town, smashed and stuck deep, corn-surrounded, in a flat blanket of soil so verdant and black it is one of only two things he truly fears. J.D. is of Central Illinois. Central Illinois is, by no imaginer's stretch, a Funhouse.
But neither is it enclosed. Enclosed? It's the most disclosed, open place you could ever fear to see.
He remembers the historical graphics Ambrose's agents had produced when they first, '76, ran the franchise idea up J.D.'s pole. Ocean City, off Baltimore, with laureates and tides and fish-stink— one of the last great true undeodorable stinks — the Amusement Park little Ambrose had mooned around in Depression-time and then bronzed in that infuckingsufferable story J.D.'s tried hard to read, to understand the client — that Ocean City Park was enclosed, though. The park was enclosed, and not by mirrors or ticket windows or dj booths. So then well.
But where was his head? The Park had burnt down, he'd traveled to personally research and found it down. Everything, turns out, fried crisp and hollow before the big-deal story even changed hands, back in the '60s, just when J.D. was building Ray Kroc into myth. How must it feel for Ambrose now, looking at it, burnt? Sad. J.D.'s never seen a no-shit fire. J.D.'s never been in a house that is not still a house, as far as he knows. Even his father's farmhouse and greenhouse, his mother's incorporating car, still stand and sit, intact. So is there a whispered worrisome something behind that rattling whined For Whom? Say you're standing by the gutted skeleton of a former Funhouse, with the door's grinning face a ruin, the plastic Fat Lady melted and then frozen lopsided, a blob, maybe supine, her drippy frozen laughing eyes now upward at a dead-white crab-meat sky, the House itself gutted, open, a bunch of black beams crossed and curved and supporting nothing, no roof, say there you are, and say maybe you say, I was in that, once, pointing; were you? If the that's down, burnt open, disclosed, Fat May's legs of plastic hilarity twisted and apart, yes the whole enclosure disclosed, kind of naked? No wonder the poor bastard tried to write the roof back on, put the whole thing erect. But J.D. almost smiles around the wet shaft of a cigar he cannot taste: the Tidewater boy will have his House back, in the West, a thousandfold. All he wants. Every wish come true. Big time.
J.D. stands brooding at the terminal glass. Jesus, Ocean City, in the past: gull sounds, rotty kelp waving like a big head's just underwater, a drowned giant with sluggish hair; and the homes: wharf-colored, pale gray and off-white. Rich dead salt smell. Slow.
Vs. Illinois, in the present, the here and now, looking: black sky; then licorice sky; maybe a crow's caw: dawn. Very little time wasted about dawn in Illinois. It's because it's always been so open. J.D. looks out the terminal window over the tarmac at the LordAloft landing pad, the underwater blue of landing lights in a circle under a by-now licorice sky pricked with fading stars, trillions of them, the corn tallishly black and still, even with wind, and wet with precipitate dew. Facing Eastward like this it's almost hard to even look: flat right to the earth's curve, East: never a hill, no western skyline of Collision's silos and arches and neon; the East from here is one broad sweep — there's nothing to hold your eye, you have to pan back and forth, like a big No, your eyes so relaxed and without object they almost roll. It can be scary.
But this moment, now: he holds, stabs his cigar into an ashtray's fine sand, no For Whom's for now, this one moment. This one instant, no more, each eastern rise: there's a certain pre-dawn fire about everything. The distant commuter planes and refueling trucks, the stars fluttering to stay seen, the shuddering corn, the very oxygen of Illinois seems, in this one moment, to shiver as on the point of combustion. Just one daily moment, like that, the flat East drenched in deregulated gas and somehow. . waiting.
And the fragile pre-ignition shimmer is gone. With nothing vertical between you and the horizon, the sun's just suddenly up. No rosy fingers, just an abrupt red palm; the Reunion day's ignition is spasmically brief: the sun seems to get all of a sudden just sneezed up into the faded sky, the eastern horizon shuddering at what it's expelled. A helicopter appears, one of Jack Lord's slope-head pilots, riding out of the instant sunrise.
J.D. should turn his broad back. To business. The kids are on that thing; they'd promised. The LordAloft 5:10 from O'Hare settles like a great gentle hand, a blur of bubble and blades, and its tornadic wind throws chaff and odd crap and shakes the corn— green, now, dusky, food for animals — and dew glitters, the corn one ocean, check that J.D. one cornfield, one hand passed over, producing one wave. Not sluggish and dead, but gentle and — [keep]
— but this landing and de-ignition gets to him, too, this change in the rate of the blades' spin. J.D. stares, rapt. You stare into a spinning thing, stare hard: you can see something inside the spin sputter, catch, and seem to spin backwards inside the spin, against the spin. Sometimes. Sometimes maybe four different spins, each opposite its own outside. Watching what spins: it's a hobby, but J.D. knows it has to do with desire, so the time spent's not shot. Even though he loves it. Anything with a circular spin and clearly marked axes, speeding or slowing: spoked wheels, helicopter blades (the real reason he's put so much time into LordAloft, admiration for Jack Lord and recognition of a void in the market aside), windmills, fans' spiraled petals. Any wheel without hub or Constance. The best was a liveried carriage's right front wheel, once: a blur of delicately stretched spokes, then a perfect backwards spin, inside the spin, as trot became canter and the thing clopped away on a London street, spinning. On leave from the War. The big one. It was J.D.'s first spin.