Not fair at the Fair

Last night, against my better judgment, I allowed Lauren to drag me to “Southampton Days” the local county fair, which is finishing up tonight. This was your typical traveling carnival complete with rickety rides that carnies assemble and breakdown in a matter of minutes; games boasting sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, sometimes dishonest odds, all for the chance to win a giant replica of Spongebob Squarepants stuffed with packing peanuts; greasy carnival food that most normal people only ever eat at a fair; greasy fat white trash people who you can tell eat carnival food every day of the year; local businesses giving away balloons, rubber bracelets and other chintzy trinkets to kids in the hopes that their parents will come into their tent and buy anything from blinking neon sunglasses to a new checking account; a little main stage featuring local performers (and sometimes nationally recognized ones depending on how big the fair is) putting on everything from boring puppet shows to lousy multi-instrumented musical revues.

But no fair would be complete without the final element, the one that makes all the other crappy things at the fair worth it. Actually, this final element is the only reason any of us ever put up with all those other crappy fair things: the local high school girls slutted up something fierce, wearing clothes that you’d swear they must have stolen from their older sister’s closet… provided their older sister was only four feet tall and far far skinnier than her younger sibling. I tell you it’s a sight to behold and really quite amazing actually: short shorts, hot pants, tight-fitting low-cut midriff shirts, bellybutton rings, push-up bras, open mesh baby doll t-shirts over bikini tops, not to mention lipstick, blush and eye shadow lathered on streetwalker style. Mind you I’m not judging, nor am I condoning. Just pointing out that it’s enough to bring the statutory rapist out in any man.

Especially at this particular fair. Every fair I can ever remember from my childhood and adulthood involved a much higher percentage of ugly, obese white trash women wearing tight and revealing clothes that they should not have been wearing – with the occasional token hottie sprinkled into the mix here and there just to give us hope. But apparently in Southampton, either the contingent of hot girls is higher, or else the less attractive ones are smart enough to know not to wear the kinds of clothes that make us turn our heads and notice.

So I walked with Lauren around this fair last night, pushing Allison in her stroller, and repeating this mantra to myself: “You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a daughter and a beautiful wife who you love… You have a… DEAR GOD, that twelve-year-old has bigger breasts than Jenna Jameson!”

Now the only reason I spent so long speaking about the slutted-up teenage girl element of state and county fairs (beyond the fact that I’m a sick, perverted F---) is to point out another element of fairs that I found conspicuously missing from the Southampton Days: creepy stalking older guys who prey on said slutted-up teenagers. Now by “older guy” I don’t mean middle-aged men or really old farts. By and large, these guys are in their mid-20’s to early thirties. They’re young-enough-looking that it doesn’t seem overtly weird that they would be hitting on the hot teenage girls. They’re generally relatively good-looking, or at least good-looking enough that the girls they’re preying on aren’t immediately grossed out by them. The way it usually works is they find a group of girls who are clustered together and either ask them if they want to go get high or if they want to go to some party that his friends are (supposedly) throwing. They know that generally only a couple of the girls from the group – usually the ones with low self-esteem, false-high self-esteem, or just with something to prove to nobody in particular – will actually come with them, detaching themselves from their group and effective safety net. In a good scenario, these gazelles cut from the herd are only the victim of quasi date rape. They end up so high and intoxicated that they’re only more than will to do whatever the guy (and possibly his friends) wants.

Worst-case scenarios can go pretty much as far as your grisly imagination can take you. That’s why fairs have always kind of given me the creeps. Not the fairs themselves, with their brightly lit amusements, rides with loud calliope music, and, by and large, families and friends having a few hours of harmless mindless fun. It’s the areas just outside the fairgrounds that make me uneasy. Since these are usually ragtag operations set up on the cheap by traveling companies in towns that don’t want to pay a lot of money, there’s generally no security or cop presence outside of the actual carnival. “Security” pretty much means the local geriatric WalMart greeter who’s directing traffic out of the elementary school parking lot. As soon as you step outside of the brightly lit midway, the surrounding fields are by contrast almost dangerously dark and shadowy. Those lurking shadows are the perfect place for a murderer-rapist to do whatever he wants to a frail slutted-up teenager, trusting that her cries for help will be muted by the speakers on the Tilt-a-Whirl blasting 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready 4 This.”

There’s a reason the vampire movie The Lost Boys was set where it was. The shifty, leathery teenage vampires (of whom Keifer Sutherland was their leader) took most of their victims from the carnival boardwalk or just outside in the parking lot. As a father of a little girl who I can already tell is going to grow up to be a head turner, it scares me to death thinking of letting her and her friends go alone to one of these things, knowing the kinds of people who might be lurking there. But as a parent, you can’t just not let your kids go. You just can’t. They have to be able to do their independent thing, be with their friends and have fun with that feeling that they run their entire universe. Honestly, they need to go out and dress sexy and know that the teenage boys from school (as well as their fathers and grandfathers) are ogling them. After all, as I said, that’s the very nature of the local fair. As a parent I guess you just have to hope to God that you’ve raised your kid the right way to know that she’s going to be responsible and isn’t going to leave her group of friends to go off with any members of the creepy older guy element.

But as I said, that element wasn’t even there last night. At least not that I could detect. Honestly, Lauren and I were the only people our age I saw there last night. Everybody else was either sixteen, forty or sixty. I’ve mentioned before that we live in some kind of generational vortex in eastern Pennsylvania where people somehow just skip their twenties and go straight from high school to middle age. So any guys accompanying a group of teenage girls were likewise either teenagers themselves or their parents. So unless that creepy stalking man presence has just gotten better at concealing itself, it just didn’t exist at this fair. I can’t imagine that though because as a teenager, that element was always very conspicuous, mostly because you couldn’t help but notice that they were stealing all the chicks that you wanted. Who knows, maybe Southampton just isn’t as easy pickings as other places. After all, any area where the ugly girls have the self-esteem to not slut themselves up as much as their much-hotter friends, its obviously an area where the girls are smart enough not to walk off into the shadows with strange guys offering drugs. It gives me hope as a dad.