Make Bozo Splash

...and other midway attractions at the strobing, strident hallucination of history called the Gwinnett County Fair

HEY Fatboy!" Bozo calls out from his plank bench inside the dunking booth, picking a victim out of the crowd drifting along the midway at the Gwinnett County Fair. "Hey greaseball! Hey Fatboy! I bet Dunkin Donuts locks the doors when they see you coming. High and dry! Dunkin Donuts! Donuts is all you're gonna be dunkin. High and dry! Dunkin Donuts. Jelly donuts. Jelly roll. All that jelly. Must be jelly cause jam don't shake. Yeaaaa, Fatboy!"

Bozo pulls the microphone to his mouth and expels a murderous coughing laugh, high pitched like the shriek of an overstretched screen-door spring. The object of Bozo's taunting takes the bait and steps up into the light from the sign above the booth, where, spelled in garish light bulbs, is the invitation "Make Bozo Splash!" Fatboy hefts a ball and hurls it toward the howling clown.

He misses.

"Come on! What was that? Throwing jelly donuts! High and dry! Greaseball! Fatboy!" Finally a ball bangs the lever and Bozo goes into the drink. The people gathered in the lip of light clap and laugh, and Fatboy feels redeemed. The crowd wilts off into the blinking, strobing blanks of darkness, and Bozo begins again with his crosscut squawk, conjuring a spell of anger and embarrassment to sucker the cash from the wandering citizens who've come to the fair: "High and dry! You, Tex, in the cowboy hat! Who's that you're herding?"

Bozo was working an ancient nerve. Ridicule, humiliation and teasing are as much a part of strolling the midway at the fair as losing quarters to the crud-caked barkers. His jabbering mockery of passers-by was just one vestige of the venerable carnival history that can be experienced, in however attenuated a form, at the Gwinnett County Fair, which runs until Sept. 25.

In an age where the Information Superhighway gets all the press, county fairs seem like relics from another time. And they are. Part carnival, part livestock show, part hootchy coochy clip joint, county fairs at the end of the millennium are strobing, strident hallucinations of history and spectacles of broken ritual, habits of celebration as old as the English language. And like the language, the fair is a scrapbook of meaningful traces.

UNDER the livestock shed at the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds, just on the edge of Lawrenceville, massive, smooth-chocolate brown Santa Gertrudis bulls, all as tall as trucks, are tethered along a showcase wall. Their flanks are scarred with hieroglyphs; some have rows of numbers branded on their hides. Their massive, football-sized testicles hang heavily, promising a bountiful harvest of high-priced, blue-ribbon semen.

The livestock shed is a relic of the county fair's most immediate ancestor -- the agricultural fair. There have always been market fairs, where people brought their livestock and produce to trade, but the practice of holding fairs intentionally designed to foster improved agriculture only began in earnest in the 19th century. The move toward scientific agriculture hit full steam after the Civil War, and by the turn of the century local ag fairs were a major source of new information and technology for farmers and country folk. By the 1930s, however, the ag fairs had served their purpose only too well -- the crisis of over-production helped lead agriculture into the Great Depression.

The county fair still holds ritual competitions -- in a small corner of a building on the fairgrounds you can find the red, white and blue-ribbon winners of craft and canning contests -- but with the death of the small farmer and the conquest of agribusiness, the tradition of the agricultural fair has shrunk to a token commemoration of a long-lost rural life-way. And that past role of the fair as educator is remembered at the 4-H Petting Zoo, where magic markered poster board hung above the fluffy bunnies declare: "Mama is a doe. Daddy is a buck. We give fur and meat."

TODAY'S county fair is policed and fenced, regulated and inspected, patrolled, surveilled and monitored. But the old European market fairs, the distant ancestors of both the agricultural fair and the county fair, were heavily contested, politically charged places. They were big annual events which sometimes lasted for weeks, where traders came to hawk their goods and peddle inventions, bolts of silk, seeds and roots and magic unguents, seditious documents and foreign erotica. The fairs were places for fools, clowns, venereal harlequins and subversive revolutionaries.

The old fairs were so vital to cultural progress that it was at such a marketplace that Isaac Newton bought his first book on astronomy. Today, however, the fair is not the place you'll go and hear the news of the new cosmologies, but in an exhibit shed on the fairgrounds is the faint echo of the fair's one-time significance: In booths marked off with pipe and drape, peddlers still peddle their schemes and scams. There's the Giddeons giving away free New Testaments; news of new pest control systems, baby shoe bronzing, western wear and cattle feed. There's the Libertarians, Confederate remembrance groups, and a lady giving psychic readings. There's Voice in the Wind: Stories of the American Indian; the pinko cult of Mary Kay cosmetics sales people; and the plastic cross-sections of an impregnated uterus set in a row on the table of the Gwinnett chapter of Right to Life, right next to a booth selling lawnmowers.

THE essence of the fair is the midway at night. That's where the fair expresses its most ancient carnivalesque soul. Back past the ag fairs and the market fairs, back into humanity's deep prehistory, is the wellspring of all celebratory urges -- humankind's need for irrational psychic derangement.

The fair is a place beyond place, a time out of time, a ground and range of impulses and impressions. It is a time when the kids are turned loose to roam the strident darkness in packs, smoking cigarettes and strutting taut and sexual through the gravel and sawdust. The midway is a place of visceral sensation and screwed logic. The attractions are portable erector-set spectacles, trucked down, unfolded, plugged in and lighted up. The din of dumb rock blares from every speaker. Things don't happen like you expect them to: you ought to be able to sink that basketball at the booth "Hoop, There it is," but for some reason it keeps bouncing away. You ought to be able to sink four pool balls in a row, but aren't those pockets a little too small? The loop doesn't ring the duck's neck. Two hundred BB's just aren't enough to blast out the little red star.

The county fair's midway is a parable of city life. It's an introduction to a fractured modernist aesthetic of technological reconciliation. The Kamikaze, the Wave Swinger, Gravitron, they're screeching, clanking gizmos that shake the ground beneath your feet, turn you inside out and set you down safely in the end.

The county fair is a simulated Manhattan; and the defining sound of the midway is a high-pitched scream. Only when you hear the pealing wail of children facing certain death do you know you're having fun at the fair. There are more sensational rides at, say, Six Flags; but there are none more scary than those at the county fair, as these rides work by creating in you the fear of the mysterious clank; fear of the sudden clunk, the broken bolt, the snapped chain, the over-stressed metal ripping away, the cage come loose, and you and your body hurled out into the black night sky which is blinking epileptic with blue and yellow and red lights.

The world of the county fair is one of unsure footing and a Peter Frampton soundtrack, where the sweetness of spun sugar mingles with the sharp tang of bull urine; where relics of our cultural history are shook up and wired together and set out in a field for us to visit and remember; where the howling japes of a demonic clown draw us out of ourselves and into the altered carnival world that is lighted by the yellow bulbs spelling out the eternal, irresistible command to Make Bozo Splash.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 24, 1994