The boy just stood there transfixed, watching.  The little monkey danced up and down, moving gracefully back and forth along the smooth wooden railing.  The monkey gave a little hop, then sort of a pirouette.  Then he skipped back to the far edge of the counter from where he had started.  The boy followed his every move.  The monkey spun around, paused for a second to look at the boy, and he jumped and seemed to cock his head a little to one side. Then he started the whole choreographed routine all over again. With his tiny red vest, green and white striped pants and tasseled fez he seemed like he might actually start chattering in conversation with the boy at any moment.

“Come on kid, take me home” the monkey said, “You know you want to”.   The boy was mesmerized by the monkey’s gaze,  looking RIGHT at him.  Only the monkey’s words weren’t meant as friendly conversation. They were taunting, a challenge to the boy’s willpower.  “Take me home.  Bet you can’t!  Just TRY to take me home.  Bet you can’t!  I could dance for you at home!   Take me home, if you can!”

The monkey wasn’t REALLY saying anything of course.  He wasn’t even actually looking at the boy. He wasn’t looking at anything.  I know that for a fact.

I know it because it wasn’t even a real monkey.

And I know it because the boy was me.

It was just a small stuffed toy monkey with a plastic face.  About eight inches tall.  A toy monkey with an elastic string holding him to a thin bamboo stick about two and a half feet long.

A monkey on a stick.

And I wanted it.  Bad.

The bamboo stick was in the hand of the carnival midway ring-toss barker.  He’d twitch and flick that bamboo, masterfully making the toy monkey dance like it really was alive.

“Come on folks, step right up!  Ring the bottle and win a prize!”

The barker’s words, combined with the monkey’s imagined taunts were getting to me. I did want to take him home.  I was beginning to want to take him home more than I’d ever wanted anything before.    I was probably about 8 or 9 years old.  It was the Audrain County Fair in Mexico, Missouri, and my home town.   Family, friends, and pretty much everyone in town simply referred to it as “The Fair”.

As I write these words, it’s a hot, sticky, and humid August night in 2013, decades removed from my experiences at “The Fair”, but a night so similar to what those nights were like back then.  The poster for the 1954 fair states that it was the 65th Audrain County Fair.  Presumably they’d been holding the fair since the late 1880’s.    But times change, and the Audrain County Fair is no more.  The old fairgrounds of my youth are long gone.  I have to admit the fact that the fairgrounds and grandstand, and “The Fair” itself  are gone, makes me a bit sad now as I look back on those memories.   But back then, the Audrain County Fair was an annual late-summer ritual, and very few people in our town didn’t attend at least one night of the fair.   A last hurrah in August, before the kids all headed back to school a few weeks later.

It was a big deal.  A very, very big deal indeed.  It was always such a great bunch of fun, and though my memory may be wrong, it seemed like it went on for a whole week.  It was several consecutive nights anyway.  I got to go every single night, because my dad was always there helping with the lights, sound, and all the electric service to the whole fairgrounds.  Because Mexico Missouri was known as “The Saddle Horse Capitol of the World”, the horse shows and harness races were always a central part of what we watched from the grandstand. And what a grand old place too, the grandstand. To a child like me, it seemed absolutely huge, like it must have held thousands upon thousands of fair-goers. In reality this was unlikely, as the whole town’s population was about eleven thousand, give or take a little.  The old grandstand was partially made up of box seats which sat under the night sky, and partially comprised of bleachers that extended back and up under a broad, high roof.

Even though the horse events were central to the whole fair experience, my favorite of the main events were the nights that Aut Swensen’s Thrillcade of stunt drivers and roaring new Ford cars would come to the fair.  Up they’d go, on two wheels, or jumping ramps, or skidding to a sliding sideways stop right in front of the crowd.  DANG!  All the while, my heart was pounding; mind racing wondering if there was going to be an unexpected rollover.  All leading up to the big finale, when the grandstand lights would dim a bit, and an old car with all windows busted out would speed around the track at a breakneck speed with engine roaring loud, as the announcer asked people to PLEASE REMAIN SILENT for the sake of the driver … (but actually just for dramatic effect of course), and eventually that old car would hit the ramp and sail into the night, passing through a hoop of fire as the whole grandstand would rise as one to their feet, as the old car would “T-Bone” into a pile of other old cars they’d lined up some hundred yards away.  Ok, so it was probably more like 50 feet, but it SEEMED like a hundred yards. Then moments after the old car crashed, all the other Swensen support staff would come racing out to the crash site to see if the driver was ok. There would be a moment’s hesitation …. The announcer would ask, “Is he OK boys?  Is he ok???  Everyone please remain where you are!”  and you thought maybe, just maybe TONIGHT it had all gone horribly wrong and the driver was seriously hurt… maybe even dead!   But then, he’d come sliding out of the car’s side window, leap up with arms raised to a thunderous ovation.  DANG!  It was all as much showmanship as skilled precision driving, but I loved the stunt show most of all. And I would replay that final T-Bone jump thousands of times in the days immediately after the fair with my matchbox cars, with my imaginary driver ALWAYS escaping unharmed.   What I wouldn’t give to be there again, smelling the gasoline and oil, the burning rubber, the cigarette smoke in the grandstands, and hearing the roar of the engines AND the crowd, watching those amazing ramp jumps, and wondering if the driver was safe.

But the fair was much more than just the main grandstand headline events. There were the arts & crafts under the grandstand, quilts and paintings and of course the homemade jams, jellies, and preserves.  Then there was a full array of concessions with the sno-cones, the sodas, the corn-dogs, cotton candy, the peanuts in the shell, popcorn… etc.  Cotton Candy was always a sticky disappointment. Peanuts in the shell … eh, so what?  Not a big fan of the sno-cones, they always ended up melting and dripping all over me.  I might get a little daring and sample a few of those things, but mostly I was a corn-dog man. Still am.   (Ok, side note.  True Mexicoans know that the corn-dog at the fair was only a sad, sad imitation of the Kwiki from the Dairy Pride.  This is a post for another day, but here just let me point out that to say a Kwiki is just a Corn Dog is to say the Sistine Chapel ceiling is just a “mural”)

At the east end of the grandstand, there was a beer concession.  I think it was run by the Lion’s Club.  I loved hanging out around there where the older guys would stand around and drink beer in longneck bottles, shooting the breeze with one another, laughing loud at the latest story or dirty joke that someone had to tell.  And that SMELL….the smell of beer soaked wet sawdust on the ground.   I can remember exactly what it smelled like even today, almost five decades later.

Even though I was a “townie”, and was never in 4-H or any agriculture activities, I had friends and relatives who were farmers, so it was always a big deal to go back behind the grandstand to the livestock tents and pens to see the prize cows, hogs, sheep, etc…    There was a smell there too, mostly manure and urine-soaked straw, but believe it or not, I remember that smell fondly as well.

Then there was the Carnival.  Of course it had the usual rides:  the Octopus (which I had regular nightmares about along with the evil teacher that made us ride it to our deaths, but that’s also story for another day), the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Merry-go-round with music blaring, the Ferris wheel.  My favorite, though, was always the Scrambler.  And I could ride that one until I myself was quite scrambled. There were the sideshows with “Freda the Frog Girl” and so many more.  Of course there was the “fun house” with its mild frights, crooked floors, wavy mirrors and flashing lights.  And finally, the games of “skill”…  heavy bottles you could try to knock over with baseballs, dart-throw to pop balloons, the shooting gallery, the cranes with which you would turn a hand crank to attempt to snag “fabulous prizes”, and the floating ducks to grab that had numbers printed on the bottom which corresponded to some unnecessary and highly disposable plastic prize.   And then, rounding it all out, complete with that taunting monkey on a stick, there was ring toss.

Here’s the deal.  There were Coke bottles with brightly painted necks on a tiered platform in the center of the tent, which was open to the public (except for that railing) on three sides.  The worker behind the rail would give you your small plastic rings, 3 for a quarter, 7 for fifty cents, or 15 for a dollar.  All you had to do was throw a ring over the neck of the bottle, and you were a winner.  Sounds easy.  The ring *did* fit over the bottle neck, but only just.

Along the back wall was an array of prizes you could choose from, based on the color of the bottle you’d ringed, ranging from trinkets (small prize) up to transistor radios (large prize!).   Somewhere in the middle of the “spectrum” of potential prizes was my monkey on a stick.

And I wanted one.  Bad.

At that age, my money came from dad just handing me over a few bucks to spend that night on rides, food, and the games.

I don’t know how many bucks I spent to win that monkey, but it might have involved additional trips back to dad to scrounge another buck or so.  It might have involved multiple nights of attempting to ring the right bottle.  Multiple nights, which just caused my Monkey Lust to grow even stronger and more all-consuming.

Eventually I won the monkey.  I rushed to find my parents back in the grandstand to make the big revelation of my heroics, but for some reason they weren’t nearly as impressed as I thought they should be.  “Mom, dad!  I won the monkey!!”  Mom probably smiled, and Dad probably said something like, “Hey, that’s keen!”  But I knew they were just patronizing me. Still, I was undaunted.  I knew this was no small accomplishment.  So I sat there beside them for the rest of the night, bouncing that monkey up and down on its elastic string while they watched the night’s horse events.  In my hands, the monkey didn’t actually “dance” so much as just spring up and down.  Not as lifelike as it had seemed while taunting me earlier in the evening.  Even after I took it home and tried to make it dance over the next few days, it still never really looked life-like at all.  And it had completely given up on taunting me.  Instead, pretty quickly it began to look like exactly what it was.  A stupid plastic-faced  monkey on a stupid elastic string stapled to a stupid bamboo stick.

Somehow it never occurred to me that the carnival barker had been bouncing that monkey up and down on that string every night of each summer in towns all throughout the Midwest.  Maybe for years. He had undoubtedly logged hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS of hours of Monkey Bouncing.  No wonder he’d made it seem so easy.

He was an expert monkey-bouncer, and I wasn’t ever going to be as good at it as he was.

Pretty soon the elastic string broke.  The monkey got relegated to the bottom of the toy-box and mostly just forgotten.    I took the bamboo stick outside, and used it to whack plastic army men off their feet during “explosions” in the heat of battle against an unseen enemy.   Before long, the bamboo stick splintered, and it got thrown away.

That was almost fifty years ago.

But I’ve had lots of monkeys taunt me the through the years.

I find that despite my best intentions, and all my “grown-up” wisdom and the sage advice I’m capable of imparting to my kids, I still occasionally find myself lusting after some new monkey on stick.  Through the years, those monkeys on sticks take the form of maybe a faster more powerful computer.  Or a new iPad.  Or a mountain bike.  Or a new set of golf-clubs, or a new guitar or ….. well, you know.   Despite how all that might read,  I’m not really a particularly materialistic person.  Really, I’m not.    However, sometimes that little boy in me raises his head and starts to look around when he starts to hear the sounds of some new monkey dancing.  (A Tesla!!  Hey!!  I need a new Tesla!!)   I know in my head that  just like that first monkey on a stick, the having never equals the wanting.    But the heart is not the head.

Some kids never learn.

But here’s the thing.  I can close my eyes and before you know it, I’m back at the fair.  The Audrain County Fair.  The sounds, the smells, the tastes, the flashing lights, the ramp-jumping cars, the feel of the wooden seats in the Grandstand, worn-down smooth by years and years of crowds watching the Saddle-Horse events.  The dancing monkeys.   I’m nine years old again, and there’s no place else that I’d rather be on this hot and sticky August night.

Love,
John

I knew if I had my chance
I could make that monkey dance
And maybe I’d be happy for a while.
But not really.
(with apologies to Don McLean)