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County Fairs

The Source

I loved it when the freaks came to town. No, not our family reunion, but opening day of the county fair. The fair featured horses but I’d been raised on a horse. It had cattle but I’d grown up trying to convince Angus heifers that it’s natural to be led around the halter in the hands of a 12-year-old wearing cowboy boots and smelling of his father’s Old Spice. Even the annual corndog feast could be replicated if your mother had a deep fat fryer, and the county fair lemonade was always a bit watered down once the traffic on the midway got heavy. But freaks…real, live, authentic, once-in-a-lifetime and gloriously bogus freaks, now that was something that you didn’t see on the streets of everyday Central Illinois. It’s hard to recall what my favorite might have been and of course you never let your parents know that you actually spent money to see some lady with a beard pasted in place with spirit gum or a third leg clumsily attached to the pelvis of an old man. All I knew is that I was given a dollar to spend on the carnival section of the fair and if I had to forego an extra lemon shakeup to see a new batch of freaks, then it was well worth it. Of course it would be more than politically incorrect to label people as such today, and I doubt there was a genuine oddity in the entire odd lot, but when you’re just nudging the bottom rung of adolescence, gory is good. Abnormal was exciting. Freaks were fun. Electro Lady would stand before us holding a fluorescent bulb between her hands and when Dr. Presto placed an electric cord to her shoulder the bulb would light up. Awesome. The Borneo boy sulked in a corner wearing only a loincloth and covered with patches of brownish hair. It always looked like he was shedding. Super Jaw ate broken glass. Forget the fact that the glass shards seem to melt and drip when he bit into them, he was freaky enough for me. Most freak shows consisted of three parts: The Come On, the Featured Display, and The Extra. The Come on was some sort of tattooed lady or strong man who’d be on display outside the tent after a lengthy explanation by the barker. He or she (or some of both) would be free and would appear for only a short time just before the tent opened. The Featured Display was usually some mechanical or electrical slight-of-hand, but after they got you into the tent, it was The Extra that made your slobber for a peek. Two rules: It always had something to do with sex and it always cost extra. The hawker would entice you with exotic tales of what was behind the curtain and for an extra dollar you could look at her. If no one stepped up to view the Extra then the price would drop incrementally every five minutes. If you had the patience to wait him out you could step into the back stall to see “The Amazing Hermaphrodite!” or “The He/She of India!” or “Lola of the Amazon!” for as little as a quarter. I never did. I wasn’t especially moral or skeptical, just Presbyterian. From what I gathered at church, Presbyterians didn’t believe in sex and I was fairly certain that God would strike me dead somewhere between the Tilt-a-Whirl and Uncle Joe’s Hot Dogs if I dared sneak a glance. Besides, I was usually out of money by that time. It was ironic then when years later I got a job through the local Democratic committeeman to work the carnival at the Illinois State Fair. I was 18, they thought I looked 25, and put me on the strip show at the end of Happy Hollow for ten days running. Ten days, usually five shows a day, and six aging, drooping strippers. It was fascinating...not the strippers, but the business. The money-takers wore expensive suits and parked their Cadillacs behind the Burlesque show tent. They told me…and I believed them…that they were paid no salary, but instead made their income by short-changing people. They showed me how they did. It was much more amazing that the sixty-year-old Pickles LaRoo who’d strip five times a day. The burlesque barkers would have a variety of admission signs in their money cages and the admission fee would vary with the amount of traffic on the midway. “The man is in the house!” meant that a state fair official was in the crowd and that the stripping was kept at a level that even a Baptist nun could tolerate. Our group of farm boys whose dads had voted Democratic long enough to get their sons jobs on the state fair carnival were supposed to switch spots every day. The strip boss told them that I was to be permanently assigned to the skin show. He said he liked my attitude. I have no idea what it was in my personality that would appeal to the manager of aging strippers, but I took it as a compliment. I just liked freaks.