David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

I can barely hold the tablet to scribble journalistic impressions, the floor’s rumbling under so many boots and sneakers. The record player’s old-fashioned and the loudspeakers are shitty and it all sounds fantastic. Two little girls are playing jacks under the table I’m next to. Two of the dancing Rantoul wives are fat, but with great legs. Who could practice this kind of dancing as much as they must and stay fat? I think maybe rural Midwestern women are just congenitally big. But these people clogging get down . And they do it as a troupe, a collective, with none of the narcissistic look-at-me grandstanding of great dancers in rock clubs. They hold hands and whirl each other around and in and out, tapping like mad, their torsos upright and almost formal, as if only incidentally attached to the blur of legs below. It goes on and on. I’m rooted to my stool. Each team seems the best yet. On the crowd’s other side across the floor I can see the old poultry farmer, he of the carny-hatred and electrified wallet. He’s still got his billed poultry cap on, making a megaphone of his hands to whoop with the women, leaning way forward in his geriatric scooter, body bobbing like he’s stomping in time while his little black boots stay clamped in their stays.

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.