Stepping Right Up

I never understood why they called it the "fair"-- given that the milk bottles had thick lead bottoms and you couldn't knock them over with a house trailer--let alone a baseball made out of cork. The banners proclaimed it as the Greater East Texas Fair and Livestock Exposition. It was the most important thing in our town since Marshall, Texas spent six weeks as the Capital of Missouri during the Civil War. Our fair was a big one as fairs went, and lasted two full weeks. The air around the West Side of town was a combination of French fries, cotton candy, and cow manure--a smorgasbord of smells. The night sky was so lit up from all the temporary lights it seemed like the moon had a bridge to it--and I was invited to walk across. I rushed to the ticket booth because the offer might be withdrawn.

I had my favorites at the fair. I liked the animal barns and the show-horse competition, but mostly I liked the glittering rides and side shows. A couple of times I met my girlfriend there. Her parents brought her to the main entrance and we went in together. It seemed like a date because I had to buy her ticket--but it wasn't romantic or expensive enough to earn me a goodnight kiss. So in one sense, it wasn't a date--just a way to blow money trying to win teddy bears and chalk poodles. Going to the fair with a girl was not only a waste of allowance, but way too much of a compromise. I had to act interested in the home demonstration exhibits, the embroidered aprons, and the sweet pickle judging. Worse, I always had to coo over the baby lambs. So for those reasons I preferred to go with my friends Larry and Dave.

A shower of noise mingled with the fairground smells. Sounds from all around were captured, mixed in a blender, and then released together in a collage. I heard carnival barkers calling to the crowd, laughter falling from the top of the Ferris wheel, calliope music, and cows bellowing their boredom. Adding to the mix were shrieks from the terrorized riders on the Tarantula.

The Tarantula was an eight-legged machine that replicated a sensation I figured was similar to riding the spin cycle of a commercial washing machine. I saw many of my brave friends hurl their semi-digested hot dogs into the center hub that housed all the gears.

The only tame ride at the fair was the merry-go-round. Its riders were calm and sedate--grandmothers, kids, and guys with dates. If we saw any guys we knew we hooted and pointed at them on every revolution--knowing they would just hunt us down at school on Monday.

With the distraction of all the din and glitter, safety was never considered. We trusted that the crack technicians in the carnival had assembled and disassembled those rides so many times they could do it in their sleep. Ignorance was bliss. How many stripped bolts were forced into place by part-time cotton-candy mechanics? How secure were those rocking buckets--held in place by two pins worn thin from a lack of grease? I guess we didn't care--we never counted on the possibility it might be one of our buckets that finally rusted through.

Larry, Dave, and I usually split up after a while. Dave loved the Ferris wheel and Larry liked the tilt-a-whirl and the bumper cars. He drove those cars for hours. Bumper car drivers displayed the early symptoms of road rage--but more sugar-coated. It was a rare opportunity--crashing into total strangers at full speed, trying to detach various body parts. Revenge was meted out with fury until the twenty-five cent fare expired. But most of the riders stayed on for another round--there was still some whiplash to repay.

The prize? On Monday the survivors were fitted for little plastic horse collars and excused from gym class for a couple of weeks. I noticed when Larry emerged from the bumper car ride he walked with a swagger--like my uncle S.B. did after sessions with his bourbon. I think it was caused by the swaying of his brain in its cranial fluid--wobbling like a hula doll in the back window of a Pontiac. Larry actually paid good money to ride bumper cars and inflict pain on himself, but I had it all figured out.

The carnival took his money but secretly performed a no-seat-belt experiment on him for the government. I told Larry there was an easier way to get that same sensation.

"Hey--Troy Vanderliss got his head mashed lopsided for free--the time that log truck ran over him," I said.

I hated the Ferris wheel but it was Dave's favorite. It was one of those rides where the palms of my hands stayed constantly wet. I was always the unlucky one in the top bucket when the thing stopped. My bucket always creaked and groaned as it swung and I had visions of being found in a salmon-colored mush on the Guess-Your-Weight platform below. "Local Youth Dies in Freak Carnival Mishap--Cotton-Candy-Mechanic Blamed," the headlines would say.

Dave would ride the Ferris wheel every day if he could. He didn't even get off between rides--he just tossed out more money and remained firmly implanted. I wondered if he was too scared to climb out--having noted his death grip on the lap bar. Dave just circled and circled with no expression on his face--like a bedside clock. The ride seemed endless. At least once during the night the attendant should've shaken Dave to see if he was still alive--or at least check to see if Dave was a double-amputee and couldn't get off without help.

Sideshow barkers fascinated me. They pulled me like a magnet to their stands to see their freaks and mutations. Their convincing pitches yielded many disappointments before I learned it was mostly a hoax. The murals outside the stands looked realistic but were just deceitful exaggerations of what was inside. Still, I had to see for myself. Once I looked past the sequins and the smile, I saw a quarter-inch of grime--both on their costumes and on their character. But in the end, the odd and the unseen always lured me in--their exaggerated depictions hanging before me in billowy canvas tapestries. There were clues that told me everything was not on the up and up. "The Eight-Foot Neanderthal Man from Siberia" looked amazingly similar to the guy who took my ticket at the bottle toss the day before. I couldn't tell how tall he actually was. I didn't know how long the stilts were.

I thought the "The 900-Pound Lady" might be stuffed with sofa cushions because her middle looked lumpy--like a bag of cottonseed. They wouldn't let me poke her belly to tell for sure, and they moved me past her pretty quick. Some guy behind me remarked that she looked like she might go 400 pounds--because his wife weighed pretty close to that. But 900 pounds or not--it was worth a quarter to see somebody that big in a bathing suit, lying on a pile of hay in a cattle trailer.

"Al Capone's Getaway Car" might have been just anybody's 1928 Ford. Al's photos were all over the walls, There were photos all over the walls of Al, his molls, and his Tommy-Gun henchmen. There were pictures of dead people he had assassinated and left in gutters. Al Capone must have stayed really mad at folks most of the time--judging from the carnage. It reminded me of a red wasp or a fire ant. I never saw a single one of those insects have a good day. Anyway, I doubted the story about the car. It seemed to me Al didn't have time to ride around in a car--he stayed too busy making illegal whiskey and killing the people who didn't buy it.

If it was a trick, I never figured out how the carnival people did the "Two-Headed Calf" thing. Both heads looked like they were attached permanently and naturally, but it was hard to tell with the calf bottled up in that big jar of formaldehyde. I bet some rancher somewhere made a million dollars from one lucky calf drop. The prospect of such wealth caused me to actually consider joining a 4-H Club to raise a Siamese-twin calf of my own. The thought of joining 4-H or Future Farmers could only come to me in a weak moment. None of those boys owned cars or hung out, and my friend Spencer Grays said they were all weird. He said the only fun 4-H'ers had was squeezing those milking teats. Thankfully the 4-H idea passed quickly.

I found myself standing between "The Blood-Sweating Hippopotamus" and the "Cannibal from the Jungles of New Guinea"--without enough money left for them both. It was a pretty easy decision. I chose the hippo, fearing that the Cannibal would just be somebody in disguise. I bet it was the guy who ran the smoked turkey-leg concession.

© 2001 Lad Moore