Me at the Buffalo County Fair, 1972: “Please can I have some cotton candy?”

Dad: “No.”

“Pleeeeeze? Pleeeaaaauuuuzzzhhh?” As if adding syllables would help.

“No.”

“ I’ll never ask for any…”

“Fine—just shut up. Here’s fifty cents. Get outta here.”

“It costs seventy-five, Dad.”

“What? Seventy-five cents?! For air? For sugar air?”

I shrug. Dad flips me another quarter.

The best part of getting cotton candy is watching them make it. It can’t be concocted in advance—it spoils too fast. They have to summon it like a swami before your very eyes.

First, they heat sugar in the middle of a device that looks like an empty washing machine tub. A needle valve spins, flinging thin strands of sugar-glue into the open drum, whipping the sweet stuff senseless until its natural crystalline structure is beat apart.

Troll-doll pink hairs start appearing, ghost-like along the edges, growing like a fast-motion spiderweb from a Water Willie.

With a few deft twists of the wrist, the vendor whisks a long cardboard toilet paper tube through the air, gathering and cultivating strands on the baton like an orchestral conductor, building to a tippling crescendo: he hands me a teetering pile of Barbie-colored fluff as upswept and sparkling as grandma’s beehive hairdo.

The cotton candy machine debuted to public awe at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Its inventor, William Morrison, was a dentist. Of course. He gave his creation the unappetizing name “fairy floss.”
Cotton candy is 100% sugar. Sugar is hydroscopic: get cotton candy wet and it shrinks immediately

back into crystals like the devil from holy water. I spit onto my cotton candy to watch it retreat in craters, fairy-floss pink collapsing into blood red drops, sticking like flies in a web.

I couldn’t bite into my cotton candy because the cloud of it was bigger than my head. I’d tear furry strips away like corpse skin and stuff them in my mouth.

Nothing there.

I saw it go in. Yet my mouth is empty.

Another wad of a bite. The cotton candy disappears before I can chew it even once, dissolving into wee drops of sugar spit. My teeth turn red. They sting. August flies abandon the blobs of ice cream spilled on the fairway dirt in favor of my sticky face. The giant cloud of pink sugar-air is soon gone, leaving nothing but a sticky cardboard tube, fuzzy-bald as an old man’s head.

There are a thousand ways to disappoint a small boy. This is one.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite nothing. I begin to feel a ringing in my ears and an acute mental clarity. Then, hyper-alertness. I’m extremely focused and energized. In a rush of renewed hyperactivity I head straight for the Zipper.

The Zipper is my favorite amusement park ride. It’s a combination of Ferris Wheel, bulldozer track, blender and shark cage. It is an assault on all your senses as you somersault from 200 feet in the air toward the littered ground, an end-over-end spin that rips coins from your pockets and then pelts you with them as if you were inside a popcorn popper.

Although I’ve eaten seemingly nothing, I barf. Pinwheels of pink gastrointestinal lacquer fling through the cage grate out across the midway. The clanging of loose coins quiets as they begin sticking to the gluey gum that lines the ceiling and floor of my chamber. I watch passively, heavy-lidded, noting that some of the coins and candy wrappers are not mine. I become dimly aware of the collage of matchbook covers and ticket stubs stuck to the periphery of my cage, a scrapbook to be hosed away at closing time.

The ride stops with a yank. The carny unlocks my cage door. My seatbelt raises automatically. My bare white legs make a velcro sound as I peel myself off the black vinyl seat. A dollar’s worth of pennies, nickels and dimes are stuck on me like buttons. Halfheartedly I stoop to pry a few coins from the floor, but the attendant barks at me to move along. I clear out, making room for a pale pink, pimple-faced boy at the front of the line, stoic as a soldier awaiting D-Day. He is tearing at a giant cloud of cotton candy on a stick.

“Next.”

Reprinted from Food & Spirits Magazine