A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  08/15/ 1636h. Trying to hurry to Grandstand; trapped in masses on central path out past FoodaRama. I’m eating a corn dog cooked in 100% soybean oil. I can hear the hornety engines of the U.S.A.C. 100 race, which must have started quite a while ago. Huge plume of track-dust hanging over Grandstand. Distant tinny burble of excited PA announcer. The corn dog tastes strongly of soybean oil, which itself tastes like corn oil that’s been strained through an old gym towel. Tickets for the race are an obscene $13.50. Baton-twirling is still under way in the McD.’s tent. A band called Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets is playing at the Lincoln Stage, and as the path’s mass goes by I can see dancers in there. They look jagged and arrhythmic and blank, bored in that hip young East-Coast-taught way, facing in instead of out, not touching their partners. The people not dancing don’t even look at them, and after the clogging the whole thing looks unspeakably lonely and numb.

  08/15/ 1645h. The official name of the race is the William “Wild Bill” Oldani Memorial 100 Sprint Car Race of the Valvoline-U.S.A.C. Silver Crown Series’ True Value Championship Circuit. The Grandstand seats 9800 and is packed. The noise is beyond belief. The race is nearly over: the electric sign on the infield says LAP 92. The board says the leader is #26, except his black-and-green SKOAL car’s in the middle of the pack. Apparently he’s lapped people. The crowd’s mostly men, very tan, smoking, mustaches, billed caps with automotive associations. Most of the spectators wear earplugs; the ones in the real know wear those thick airline-worker noise-filter earmuffs. The seventeen-page program is mostly impenetrable. There are either 49 or 50 cars, called either Pro Dirt or Silver Crown cars, and they’re basically go-carts from hell, with a soapbox-derby chassis and huge dragster tires, gleaming tangles of pipes and spoilers jutting out all over, and unabashedly phallic bulges up front, where I suspect the engines are. What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle. The program says these models are what they used to race at Indy in the 1950s. It’s unclear whether that means these specific cars or this genre of car or what. I’m pretty sure “Indy” refers to the Indianapolis 500. The cars’ cockpits are open and webbed in straps and roll bars; the drivers wear helmets the same color as their cars, with white ski-masky things over their faces to keep out the choking dust. The cars come in all hues. Most look to be sponsored by either Skoal or Marlboro. Pit crews in surgical white lean out into the track and flash obscure commands written on little chalkboards. The infield is clotted with trailers and tow trucks and Officials’ stands and electric signs. Women in skimpy tops stand on different trailers, seeming very partisan indeed. It’s all very confusing. Certain facts in the program just don’t add up—like the Winner’s Purse is only $9200, yet each car supposedly represents a six-figure annual investment for various sponsors. Whatever they invest in, it isn’t mufflers. I can barely take my hands off my ears long enough to turn the program’s pages. The cars sound almost like jets—that insectile whine—but with a diesely, lawn-mowerish component you can feel in your skull. Part of the problem is the raw concrete of the Grandstand’s seating; another’s the fact that the seating’s on just one side of the Grandstand, on the straightaway. When the main mass of cars passes it’s unendurable; your very skeleton hurts from the noise, and your ears are still belling when they come around again. The cars go like mad bats on the straightaways and then shift down for the tight turns, their rear tires wobbling in the dirt. Certain cars pass other cars, and some people cheer when they do. Down at the bottom of my section of seats a little boy held up on a cement fence-support by his father is rigid, facing away from the track, his hands clamped over his ears so hard his elbows stick way out, and his face is a rictus of pain as the cars go by. The little boy and I sort of rictus at each other. A fine dirty dust hangs in the air and coats everything, tongues included. Then all of a sudden binoculars come out and everyone stands as there’s some sort of screeching slide and crash on a far turn, all the way across the infield; and firemen in full-length slickers and hats go racing out there in fire trucks, and the PA voice’s pitch goes way up but is still incomprehensible, and a man with those airline earmuffs in the Officials’ stands leans out and flails at the air with a bright-yellow flag, and the go-carts throttle down to autobahn speed, and the Official Pace Car (a Trans Am) comes out and leads them around, and everybody stands up, and I stand too. It’s impossible to see anything but a swizzle stick of smoke above the far turn, and the engine noise is endurable and the PA silent, and the relative quiet hangs there while we all wait for news, and I look around hard at all the faces below the raised binoculars, but it’s not at all clear what sort of news we’re all hoping for.

  08/15/1730h. Ten-minute line for an I.D.C. milkshake. Oily blacktop stink on heated paths. I ask a little kid to describe the taste of his Funnel Cake and he runs away. Ears still mossily ringing—everything sounds kind of car-phonish. Display of a 17.6-lb zucchini squash outside the Agri-Industries Pavilion. One big zucchini, all right. Several of the Dessert Tent ladies are at the Tupperware Retrospective (no kidding) right nearby, though, and I make myself scarce in a hurry. In the Coliseum, the only historical evidence of the Tractor Pull is huge ideograms of tire tracks, mounds of scored dirt, dark patches of tobacco juice, smells of burnt rubber and oil. Two buildings over is a curiously non-State-Pride-related exhibit, by the Harley Davidson Corporation, of “Motorcycles Of Distinction.” Also a deltiology exhibit—card after card, some back from the 1940s, mostly of crops, thunderclouds massing at horizons, flat sweeps of very black land. In a broad tent next door’s the “Motorsport Spectacular Exhibition,” which is kind of surreal: a whole lot of really shiny and fast-looking sports cars in utter stasis, just sitting there, hoods up, innards exposed, clusters of older men in berets studying the cars with great intensity, some with white gloves and jeweler’s loupes. Between two minor corporate tents is the serendipitous snout of the “Sertoma Mobile Hearing Test Trailer,” inside which a woman with a receding hairline scores me overdecibeled but aurally hale. Fifteen whole minutes both in- and outside the huge STATE COMPTROLLER ROLAND BURRIS tent foils to uncover the tent’s function. Next door, though, is a bus on display from the city of Peoria’s All-Ethanol Bus System; it is painted to resemble a huge ear of corn. I don’t know whether actual fleets of green-and-yellow corn-buses are deployed in Peoría or whether this is just a stunt.

  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 sy
stems 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 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.

  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 highspeed 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 lightpoles 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.