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

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.

It seems journalistically irresponsible to describe the Hollow’s rides without experiencing at least one of them firsthand. The Kiddie Kopter is a carousel of miniature Sikorsky prototypes rotating at a sane and dignified clip. The propellers on each helicopter rotate as well. My copter is admittedly a bit snug, even with my knees drawn up to my chest. I get kicked off the ride when the whole machine’s radical tilt reveals that I weigh quite a bit more than the maximum 100 pounds, and I have to say that both the carny in charge and the other kids on the ride were unnecessarily snide about the whole thing. Each ride has its own PA speaker with its own charge of adrenalizing rock; the Kiddie Kopter’s speaker is playing George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” as the little bastards go around. The late-day Hollow itself is an enormous sonic mash from which different sounds take turns protruding — mostly whistles, sirens, calliopes, mechanized clown-cackles, heavy-metal tunes, human screams hard to distinguish from recorded screams.

It isn’t Alan Thicke, on closer inspection.

Both the Thunderboltz and the Octopus hurl free-spinning modular cars around a topologically complex plane. The Thunderboltz’s north side and entrance ramp show still more evidence of gastric distress. Then there’s the Gravitron, an enclosed, top-shaped structure inside which is a rubberized chamber that spins so fast you’re mashed against the wall like a fly on a windshield. It’s basically a centrifuge for the centrifugal separation of people’s brains from those brains’ blood supply. Watching people come out of the Gravitron is not a pleasant experience at all, and you do not want to know what the ground around the exit looks like. A small boy stands on one foot tugging the operator’s khaki sleeve, crying that he lost a shoe in there. The best description of the carnies’ tan is that they’re somehow sinisterly tan. I notice that many of them have the low brow and prognathous jaw typically associated with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The carny operating the Scooter — bumper cars, fast, savage, underinsulated, a sure trip to the chiropractor — has been slumped in the same position in the same chair every time I’ve seen him, staring past the frantic cars and tearing up used ride-tickets with the vacant intensity of someone on a Locked Ward. I lean casually against his platform’s railing so that my Credentials dangle prominently and ask him in a neighborly way how he keeps from going out of his freaking mind with the boredom of his job. He turns his head very slowly, revealing a severe facial tic: “The fuck you talking bout.”

The same two carnies as before are at The Zipper’s controls, in the exact same clothes, looking up into the full cars and elbowing each other. The Midway smells of machine oil and fried food, smoke and Cutter repellent and mall-bought adolescent perfume and ripe trash in the bee-swarmed cans. The very Nearest-to-Death ride looks to be the Kamikaze, way down at the western end near the Zyklon roller coaster. Its neon sign has a grinning skull with a headband and says simply KAMIKAZE. It’s a 70-foot pillar of white-painted iron with two 50-foot hammer-shaped arms hanging down, one on either side. The cars are at the end of these arms, twelve-seaters enclosed in clear plastic. The two arms swing ferociously around, as in 360°, vertically, and in opposite directions, so that at the top and bottom of every rotation it looks like your car is going to get smashed up against the other car and you can see faces in the other car hurtling toward you, gray with fright and squishy with G’s. An eight-ticket, four-dollar waking nightmare.