A Tale of the Texas State Fair
By Walter Moore
5 October 2002, about 30 miles outside of College Station, headed towards
Waco, Texas.

PART ONE: ENDURING THE MOCKERY OF STRANGERS

The wind is whapping on the fabric roof of the Geo Tracker making it thump like the sail of a ship at sea. I give up trying to hear the lyrics to my music and punch the radio over to a talk show. It is some home-grown version of "Cah Tawk", this is an humble Texas dude who honestly admits he can't really tell what is wrong with peoples' cars unless he looks at them in person.

I am liking the guy until some fellow calls in who puts lots of miles on his vehicle because he is a sales rep who drives all the way east to Alabama on a regular basis. I tense up, waiting for it.

"You drive to Alabama? Why there?"

"I'm a building-supply salesman, and all the good local routes are taken. So I drive through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, hitting those markets."

"They've got you on the Third World route, huh, buddy?"

"Yep. Reckon they do."

Ignorant Texan blow-hards. You can't even get mad at them, they are brain-washed from birth here. Now, I am not as bad off as my friend Ben who lived in Dallas for a while. Kennedy had a better time in Dallas than Ben did. Or Charley and Don, who won't even talk about the times they worked in Houston. I guess I am one of the rare Old South Bama Boys to move to Texas and actually like the goofy rawness of it. Still, these radio guys started my slow burn with that third world mess. Ever seen the Valley? Glass houses.

Screw it. I slap a tape in.

Now, I could use a Coke, but I am already gonna be 30 minutes late picking up Red in Waco. This day was her idea. I could have been on time, but no point worrying now. Just get there is all, now.

Little towns go zipping past. I take the "Reduced Speed" signs seriously. Small town cops got nothing to do. I already bought at least one pew back in College Station.

PART TWO: OUT OF THE WOODS

The piney woods open up to a sort of prairie, and then I am almost there. I get lost in a maze of deserted industrial zones in East Waco, I always used to come up here straight from Austin on the interstate, not this little side route from the east. But anyway, eventually, I am at Red's house.

She is ready to go, bolting out the door, cap on her head. No way. I've got to piss. She leads me back in. The parents are wary of me now but still shake hands. For a moment I can't remember which way it is to the bathroom. It was only a year ago.

Driving north towards Dallas. "You hungry?" I ask her. "Yeah". We pull over in West, the place where they have one of those Czech-Fests. "All the little Czech Girls in Vest" I remember an old guy singing. Here it is, a bakery. Kolaches, sort of salty rolls stuffed with sausage and cheese. We eat them in the Tracker in the parking lot. Crickets are hiding in the shadows of the cracks in the brick wall in front of us. I go back in and get napkins.

There ain't jack between West and Dallas except low rolling rises. Red's conversational technique is to bombard me with long monologues that do not allow for pauses or interruptions. She says I do the same.

PART THREE: BIG D

Dallas. I do not get this town. Do they make things here? I never figured out why people would move here. But somebody did, and more followed. Off the top of my head I'd say the Dallas-Fort Worth area is the same size as Connecticut. A blob. I personally never lost anything in Dallas that I had to come back looking for. It doesn't offend. It just doesn't attract. Miles and miles of sprawling outer blah, then a condensed downtown of inner blah. Interstates that loop you away from anything original that could be hidden in there. Where am I again?

Red has a map to the fair. We bust off the interstate and find ourselves in Funkytown, lots of railroad tracks, cinder-block liquor stores, used tire places, and a long slow line of cars all going to the fair. I like it.

My allergies kick up again. Sneeze so hard that water comes out of my eyeballs to splatter the inner side of my glasses. Then I sneeze again. Every time I feel it coming I lock my knees under the steering wheel of the creeping Tracker so we don't swerve, and then my head blows again. Red keeps up: "Bless you. Bless you. Bless you." The little red Tracker jerks along in the rhythm of my sneezes like a jalopy in an old cartoon.

A van in front of us has at least 40 psycho-right-wing stickers all over its back, including "Fight Crime, Shoot First", right next to "What would Jesus do". Red is cackling at the thought of the Prince of Peace emptying the clip on an A.K.: "Pull up, Walter, pull up next to em, I gotta see these inbreeds." It is a sullen woman talking on a cell-phone, wearing a fuchsia t-shirt and a black baseball cap. There are five kids in the van with her, also wearing fuchsia t-shirts and black baseball caps. I dread that Red is going to make eye-contact. I pass them so that they in their turn will have the opportunity to decode my Ten Thousand Monkeys bumper sticker.

PART FOUR: WELCOME TO THE FAIR

We park so far from the fair that we have a choice of taking either a tram or a train in to the main grounds. The tram gets to us first. Molded out of yellow plastic. Most Dallasites take to mass-transit the way Henry Ford took to unionization, so Red and I are able to leap in front of the dawdling crowd and grab good seats before the suburbanites realize that their only alternative to this socialist ride is their even greater boogey-man, the Long Walk.

The seats in front of us are taken up by lots of middle-aged black people decked out in hats and shirts with greek letters on them. Shortly I will learn that right in the middle of the State Fair Grounds is the Cotton Bowl stadium, and Grambling and Prairie View are playing at 7.

My money is on Grambling.

We pay at the gate and start on in. Red has an agenda, she grabbed a catalogue to go with the map, she wants to see the auto show, the Chinese acrobats. She is interested in the food stands. She wants to go on the rides and see the midway with all the games.

There is just one thing I want to see, and that is Big Tex.

Inside, it is like a market in a third world country except that everybody is 50 pounds over-fed. We jostle along a long line of grilled whatchamacallit stands, greasy sharp smoke. The walkways are packed, the strollers are the worst.

"I hate these damn strollers. People think if they have a baby, they can just roll the damn thing over your toes."

"Yeah. I say if you can't carry it, you shouldn't bring it to the fair. And that goes for anything, not just babies," Red says, gesturing at someone with one of those abominable airport rolling handbags.

"And canes, what's wrong with a good old fashioned cane?" I ask, as we dodge a lazy-looking woman on a motorized cart.

"Yeah, get your bloat-ass up and walk, wench," says Red.

A one-legged man comes by on another cart. Red stares and says "Who let all these cripples in my damn State Fair?"

It must be the sun beating down. We slide inside some sort of sawdust-smelling enclosure, and find ourselves in the middle of a sheep-herding exhibition. An old man and woman are whistling commands to border collies, who take turns bullying five sheep this way and that. About three thousand spectators watch the collie hunker down like a stalking cat. I am pretty sure the dog would be happier killing those sheep than herding them. It acts like a wolf that has never gotten to play anything but touch football and can't figure out why it has the urge to tackle something.

The shade in here is nice. We see on the map that if we dodge out the other side of this little animal show, we can avoid another 15 minutes' crawl past the fried internal organs stands. We move.

It is a world of great open plazas and cool breezes on the other side. And Arabic music. Sung in Arabic. Where am I again? I figure this I've got to see. I bet none of the locals even know this is Arabic coming over the loud-speakers. They are happily ambling about, having parked all their cars with their "Bomb the Furriners" style bumper-stickers far away.

There are girls dancing in Arabian Nights get-up, they have dragged fair-goers into their midst. Red says "So where are the rest of the 72 virgins?" I do a quick nose-check and estimate about half these women to be the real deal, the rest are noseless and blonde and look like they rilly, rilly, are, like, into belly-dancing? The announcer comes in and says thanks to the Lebanese dancers of St. George's Catholic Church. Ah. That explains why the Righteous allowed them to perform.

We are veering towards the gigantic ferris wheel in the distance when I see him. Big Tex.

Big Tex stands 50 feet tall in his too-tight jeans and his shirt cut from the Texas flag. He has a white cowboy hat on his plastic-looking head. The sky above him is intensely blue with shredded clouds drifting from right to left. He seems to be moving instead of the clouds.

I say to Red, half out of my mind from the allergy: "Look at that. Imagine that that is the first scene of a movie, no lead-in, no explanation."

"You mean some movie with Billy Bob Thornton, of course?"

"Of course."

"Yeah... I can see it..."

Then Big Tex started to talk. His mouth moved, I know not how, and he spoke. I cannot recall the exact words, but the message was clear. I was welcome at his fair. I was a treasured part of his state. All was forgiven. Any petty deeds or comments were just that, too small for Big Tex to concern himself with. His face was sad, a caring sadness, an Abraham Lincoln type of face, one that cracks a joke to keep from weeping over the obvious tragedy of it all.

What it added up to, is, Big Tex loved me and all his other wayward children. For Big Tex has a Big Heart.

"You OK there?" says Red.

"Yeah. Allergy."

PART FIVE: THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN BLASTING MOTLEY CRUE OVER THE SPEAKERS

Down the Midway we go. It looks like a carnival in Marseilles. They have all the garish-colored stands with bright chipped paint. People trying to huckster you into breaking plates, shooting BB machineguns at red stars, knocking over what appear to be solid-lead milkjugs. Plastic rings bounce off Coke bottles, skee-balls thump against back-boards, and the same plastic yellow ducks float around that were floating around when I was four.

You have to buy tickets for the food stands and for the rides, but all the games on the Midway take cash, cold cash.

Like every other guy who has ever walked past the BB machinegun stand, I say "You know, there's an easy trick for shooting out that star."

"So you're gonna do it then?"

"And carry that big dumb stuffed animal all day? No way." I stroll past, the Deadly Machinegunner Who Disdains Stuffed Animals.

I like the area with the rides because they rise up all around you and make you feel like you are in some dream-city from H.G. Wells. Red objects to the family-friendly music being piped out into the crowd, "This is a fair, they should be playing old stuff like Poison or Motley Crue. If you're gonna do it, do it right." At one point I hear Charlie Robison's song "My Home Town", where there is the part where he sings about being a no-account pipe-line bum who quit his job at the end of the week and took his check and "spent it all on pot". I am waiting and waiting for that line, and then it comes out:

"...we rode back home at the end of that week and we spent it all on ...SHOTS."

What? The dub was so bad that you figure Charlie was pissed off he had to do it. I can see the Christian Coalition calling the Clear Channel in protest saying "We can't have him say pipe-line workers smoke pot, no! Replace his song with 'Folsom Prison Blues', that's traditional and wholesome."

So now little kids at the Texas State Fair who would have smoked pot and sat around all lazy talking half-baked philosophy all day will instead go to shot-bars, get drunk and naked with strangers, and then run them over as they drive snockered. No wonder Charlie sounds like he thought it was a dumb replacement.

Red and I get on one of those rides, the mid-level low-rent ones that basically spin around real fast while the bolts creak from metal-fatigue. We shriek like chimps and wish we had poop to throw at the crowd.

There is an Xtreem-type section of the fair where you can get dropped 100 feet into a net, that sort of thing. The rides all cost 10 bucks or more. There is breathing space at this end of things. "High prices keep the trash out", I comment, as a woman wooshes over us on a lanyard, and a girl on a man's shoulders next to us yells, "Mommy!"

PART SIX: THE CAR SHOW

OK, here's the deal: 2003 cars will all look and smell just like 2002 cars. 2004 cars, however, will look like vehicles from "The City of Lost Children", complete with lots of exposed bolts and screws and brasswork, and maybe just maybe Charlie Robison can sing unedited songs over the retro-styled radios. Cool.

The usual assortment of losers was poking around the Hummers. Sad.

I have a couple of left-over food tickets to burn, so I go in the Cars Show commisary and asked for coffee. The woman turns to a pot with an inch of tar steaming in the bottom and starts to pour it in a cup.

"No no no! I don't want THAT coffee!"

People who do not drink coffee should never be in charge of serving it. We leave the Car Show.

PART SEVEN: VIVE L'EMPEREUR

The sun goes down and the heat breaks. We get a place on the side of the boulevard to watch the parade.

The Marine Corps band goes by in orange jackets. They are followed by bagpipers from the North Texas Pipe and Drum Band. Then come lots of stiltwalkers and Mardi Gras-style floats. Mounted cops. Clowns with shovels. Beauty Queens. Then a bunch of French Imperial Guardsmen. A bunch of what? Yes, that's right, and entire band of guys on bearskin hats from the time of Napoleon, preceded by two women dressed as cantinieres holding a banner saying they are from Epinal, France. I almost yell at the women in French "Hey, gimme somethin t'drink outta that canteen!" but I am afraid the bystanders will think I am speaking Arabic.

When they march past you suddenly realize why Big Dumb Hats were fashionable for soldiers in the old days. You were fighting close together, so no point hiding, and a Big Dumb Hat makes even a 5-footer look big and imposing. They didn't have SUV's back then, you know...

PART EIGHT: TORNADO TATERS

Red insists that we search for the stand we had seen earlier. "I will not leave until I get some," she says. "They all call them by different names, but they are the same thing: a potato shaved into pieces no thicker than a potato chip but still all connected together like paper-dolls, then fried.

We find the stand. "Tornado Taters". We have to wait behind a stumbling boy who is moving in slow-motion, a Mexican surfer-bar logo on his light-blue t-shirt. We each get a serving of these things, I shower mine with "Cajun Seasoning".

For the first 5 minutes they are good, hot, and crispy. Then magically, they turn cold, heavy, and slimy with congealing grease. We dump ours in the same garbage can.

PART NINE: SEEN WRITTEN ON THE INSIDE WALL OF A MOORE DISPOSAL PORTABLE TOILET NEXT TO THE STADIUM WHERE GRAMBLING WAS PROCEDING TO BEAT PRAIRIE VIEW:

"If you know a girl
who likes to fight
or will fight a white
girl I know a white
girl who want to kick
that ass! If you don't believe
this and you are a girl
call (name) tonight at
exactly 10:40 pm (phone number).

Don't be scared!

10:40 pm."

PART TEN: NIGHT TRAIN EXPRESS

We catch the train out of the fair-grounds back to the parking lot. As soon as we walk into the passenger car, I don't know what country I am in. The lights inside reflect off the windows and that could be Europe outside for all you can see. One little boy is continously screaming and playing with his new stuffed tiger. I will his parents' heads to explode, and eventually they feel the pressure building and discipline him, causing him to, God forbid, cry for 10 seconds before he calms down and allows the rest of the world some peace.

Next to us is a couple with two even younger children, a boy about 1, and a girl about 2. Their eyes are red but they mostly just look tired now. An aunt in the seat behind us says to the girl "Look! I have BD!" "BD" is the name of a very ragged old red blanket scrap that up til then had been in her purse. The little girl knows BD, and she hunkers up with BD in front of her, clutching it, chewing on it, looking around at all of us before she drops her head back on her mother's arm to sleep.