It’s stencharama, man. The bass-baritone stink of somnolent livestock; fried dough and jelly apples gone rotten, sick sweetness enough to send diabetics into coma on the inhale. For 15 minutes my wife and her incontinent three-year-old get locked in a dark Port-O-San. They come out shaken and blinking, bent into arthritic postures: like an iron maiden, my wife reports. Yet, just across the midway, a gorgeous beige cow is being drip-dried,’ lathery and svelte as a film starlet in some DeMille bathtub scene. Her mistress is eight or nine: blond, pert, built for cowscrubbing; she could make cameo appearances on a box of Swiss chocolate. The Orange County Fair thrives; for nine days twice the size of Coney Island. It’s America sober and America drunk. The same soil-knuckled guy on a bender until milking time tomorrow.
The burlesque show didn’t make it this year: editorial pressure from a killjoy local newspaper. No big city women, jaded and body-toneless as the broads in a. 5¢ peep show—shove your nickel down the slot and even their film images protest, hauling sciatic hips through a pre-World War II grind. But the shill-skill games are there, forty or fifty of them. Not rigged exactly, but anyone who can put three basketballs through a volleyball sized hoop goes from Middletown, New York to the Vatican, no bush league stops in between. Posters for the gorilla girl, who will transmute herself into an ape “before your very eyes,” very being the comparative or superlative of vision. And the various giants: steer, alligator, horse. We visit the steer. Samson is lying down, dewlap deep in bass-baritone odors, just our luck. “Waal, we’re gonna poke him up in an hour.” We get stamped: free readmission to the grand levee. Four days later and my wrist still says STEER.
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