Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (3 page)

When it came to work, he was sharp and modest, with a contractor’s strategic sense of what types of projects he could build well. People who set out to be writers are as glutted with careers and lifetime stats as athletes in training or the people who join fantasy baseball leagues. It’s just that the numbers and ballparks are so much more domestic: age at first publication, age at first award, first marriage, first crisis, and sometimes age at first, second, or third divorce. (David will make fun of me for memorizing this stuff. Feel free to join in.) When we met, David had the confidence of having just published
Infinite Jest
, which is the confidence of knowing he’d pushed everything aside and practiced his trade the hardest he could. This is a generous confidence. I kept thinking of what Hemingway wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, before they headed on a train to Rouen to pick up a car. Fitzgerald had just written his best novel:

A few months after his death, David’s sister Amy wrote me. Interviewers were coming, asking what David was like, but the questions always circled back to the same anxious ground. His phobias, low points. “My own anxieties are many,” she wrote. “My brother was a hilarious guy, a quirky, generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and suffer from depression. There was a lot of happiness in his life. He loved to be silly, he made exquisite fun of himself and others. Part of me still expects to wake up from this, but everywhere I turn is proof that he’s really most sincerely dead. Will he be remembered as a real, living person?”

That’s the other thing this book would like to be: a record of what David was like, when he was thirty-four and all his cards had turned over good, every one of his ships had sailed back into harbor.

In February of 1996, I’d been assigned to write about David, I was sitting at a party, when a friend plopped down next to me on the sofa. “Poor David Foster Wallace,” she said. “It’s not his fault, this kind of attention, it’s weird, it can be hard to synthesize unless you’re very strong. Meanwhile, all these relationships are being screwed up by David Foster Wallace.” She flicked her face to people at the compass points of the room. “All these men—because they secretly want to
be
David Foster Wallace—they flip out whenever he’s in the paper.
All the girls are like, ‘David Foster Wallace, he’s really cool.’ So the guys are like, ‘I
hate
David Foster Wallace.’ Every anxious writer I know is obsessed with him, because he did what they wanted to do.” I shrugged and blinked, to say I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. At thirty, you put lots of faith in misunderstanding and the magic of ignorance: it’s as though admitting to gravity means you’re going to fall, or saying the word “tuberculosis” means immediate fever and a cough.

In fact, a personal hardship, my own girlfriend had been reading only him, steadily, languorously. One afternoon, she took a cigarette with her to the kitchen to cool off, and I found this e-mail on her computer. She’d sent questions to an editor friend, who’d written back:

Life is the accumulation of flukes. (A passionate belief in the reverse was what I was abandoning at the time I met David. I believed a really good person could make everything in their lives
on purpose
.) I ended up on this story because Jann Wenner, the vigorous and interesting and fast-acting man who owns the magazine I work for, happened to open
The New York Times
to a photo of David. In early 1996, David’s picture had become an everywhere fact: the tiny box, the tilted head with bandanna, stubble, long hair. “Oh,” Jann said. “He’s one of us. Send Lipsky.”

And here’s me—career and ailments. (It’s not that David was immune to the glossy, braggy parts of a writer’s life; he called them the greasy side and had this fear that he’d end up a party fixture, one of the rotating, nonworking famous who horn in on other writers’ photos. I told this to Mark Costello, who laughed: “Yeah, but by then he was sober, so you know you’re knocking out a whole strut from under the literary engine.” He paused, then deadpanned, “And I also
don’t know to what degree Dave would like to spend time at events where other people were the centers of attention.”) Actually, just to put that off for a second, let me tell you about my tape recorder. The one I placed on the magazines in David’s living room. When you meet someone for the first time, they mostly seem a perfect ambassador for their job. It’s the impossible remarks that carry and strand a person in specificity. David looked like a young writer having a pretty easy ride of it. To him, I was simply a reporter—whatever snazzy cultural box that opened—with expensive props, and he got a kick out of my repeating especially sharp things he said into the tape. I was a wily, seasoned professional, somebody who’d bagged lots of celebrity game, and had crashed into the Illinois wilds on the hunt for one more.

Actually, David was only the third famous person I’d ever interviewed, and the first writer. Buying the tape recorder—it cost $320—had made my palms sweat and sent my heart up to my mouth and throat on a brief walking tour. When I met David, I was only twenty-eight months past an almost perfect financial collapse. That was my ailment. It turned out spending time in college, waking up each morning to statues and gardens, had not been especially good preparation for sidewalks and billing statements. Every week our mailboxes got stuffed with fresh offers for Visa and Discover cards, so I came out of college going great guns in the credit world. A classic romance—flashy courtship, accusatory divorce. I lost credit cards, telephone numbers, basic cable channels, apartments. Depositing money into my pocket was like releasing it into a nuclear whirlpool: I’d reach back a second later, and instant disintegration. I stopped carrying a wallet. It seemed nostalgic. ATM visits turned impossibly dramatic. Cruxes: a man meeting his fate. I became the kind of customer who shies away from his on-screen balance, the way good-hearted drivers will avert their eyes from a wreck. This continued to happen for years, until I lost the bank account too. In 1994, I went to apply for a New York lease. I filled in my social security number. I have no idea what flashers and alarm bells this set off. But when I showed up the next morning, the landlord—a
big Eastern European, a man building a respectable life on a far-off shore—told me he was controlling himself from wanting to kick my butt. He came and stood very close to me. “Do you know what your credit report looks like?” “No,” I said. “Well, I am not going to tell you.”

I’d steered by that movie-ish American idea about ambition and arrival: to get to a place, the best route is to live like you’re there already. It’s a magic idea, and it’s also the way a language lab works. Hear and speak French only, eventually your language improves. (It’s also what college preps you for, the columns and rolling grounds; you’d become an Athenian, or you’ll be loaded.) If you think and speak only novels, eventually the world will bookstore around you. Lowering your sights isn’t sensible—it’s bad luck, an invitation to a more general sinking. I’d lived for seven years only like a fiction writer, published two books, and verified absolutely that this approach doesn’t work.

I got a job at
Rolling Stone
. And suddenly having money was like stepping out of a storm, shaking the damp from your umbrella in a bright quiet auditorium. All at once, no dark, no wet, no noise. The Lewis-and-Clark, the financial explorer’s sense of your early twenties, when every day and billing cycle is a river forded, pasture mapped, a flag planted, I got to relive it in my late twenties. First bank account, first newspaper home delivery, first credit card (secured). People would guess the best part of journalism was the travel. Not the tray meals or the exchange of skylines. The being included, the knowing that somebody had taken the trouble to book a flight, reserve a car and a hotel bed, because in the whole world they needed only you to complete the assignment. Every boarding pass—every flight crew, with the hushed smiles and nighttime lighting—felt like an amazingly tactful compliment.

I recovered from being poor the way you do from a virus: suspiciously, gratefully, not wanting to test my luck. It was such a relief to pay for the bus, to sit down at a restaurant without the menu changing into italics and exclamation points, that for years I didn’t disagree with anything anybody said who could pay me a salary. (Disagreement
might return as a possibility in my thirties. No, the late twenties were going to have to be the compliant years.) I rented part of a giant, dusty apartment—long hallways and barn rooms—across the street from the Museum of Natural History. I had a private entrance, my roommates were an old, not terribly well-matched couple called the Bechsteins. The fights were noisy, endless, wrenching. Anna Bechstein, when she watched TV, wanted to be joined at the set by her husband, Arthur. His wish was even smaller, and easier to grant. He wanted to be left alone. She’d moan, “You knew, you knew, how could you, you
cheated
me of something I could have watched with you. And it was
funny!”
And I’d take notes. During the day, I’d go hang around the desks and windows and blue-ribbon bathrooms and great jackets and buzz of the magazine, everybody cool and the feel of an interesting future tingling over every head like an upstairs party or the runs of excellent weather you get in California. Then I’d go home and listen to the Bechsteins heartbreakingly argue. I liked to try to imagine the two worlds coming into contact. Jann Wenner, all stubble and glamour, dropping by with a folder I’d left at the office. The four of us meeting in the doorway—Jann, me, Arthur, Anna—and me explaining dreamily, “Jann, these are my roommates. The Bechsteins. They’re
married.”

But everything had worked, slow and steady. All you had to do was lower the temperature in your eyes, the heat and the need. All you had to do was be willing to adjust, slightly, what you wanted, tuck your head down and provide the stuff other people asked for on a dependable schedule.

And then David—with stuff he’d only asked himself for—earth-quaked the city. Crowds, applause, a full-on city anxiety attack. His cruise ship piece ran in January of 1996; it cleared the landscape, cut the runway for his novel. People photocopied it, faxed it, read it out loud over the phone. He’d done a thing that was casual and gigantic; he’d captured everybody’s brain voice. The talk show with its solo guest; the yammer while you’re commuting the office halls, kissing, musing in the bathroom. All the different thought categories—books,
Jurassic Park
, weird business terms of art, curses, how
things could suddenly make you depressed or happy for no reason at all—it was the way you flattered yourself your brain really might sound, if you’d just devote the time to shelving and organization. Then the novel arrived. His photo ran in
Time, Newsweek. Esquire
went ahead and called it a work of genius. (That scary, special-case compliment which can excite resistance, since the unspoken second half is: “Not you.”)
New York Magazine
made the tame suggestion that the year’s fiction prizes be escrowed in a safe-deposit box with his name. Even the name—you had to say all three parts—was overflowing. A special case, a burger deluxe: David Foster Wallace. The
Times
rolled the months into a clinical, prescription-pad voice, a resident toting up symptoms. David was “the first young novelist in several years to pique such intense curiosity.”

And then David arrived in the city. February, that handicapped month, with squashed daylight and the sidewalks trickling. There were rumors. Who he was dating, how he’d turned down
Charlie Rose
and the
Today
show (to a city that refines and exports media, this felt misplaced but gallant, like declining a knighthood). His first reading, at the East Village bar KGB, was as crowded as a rush-hour subway. Women in the front rows batted their eyelashes, men at the back huffed, scowled, envied. The second reading, at Tower Books, was publishers’ night, executives who never came out nodding tautly to each other as if from across battlements. Then the thronged book party, with the inevitable people wearing black—it looked like the cheeriest possible wake—and David stood in the hallway near the lavatories, while people with stars in their eyes came to shake his hand, congratulate him, just stand close tilting drinks and
look
at him—he was pumping out glamour like a reactor. I watched him closely. I couldn’t imagine what he felt. This was more than it would ever have occurred to me to ask the world for. No, this was precisely the request I’d trained myself to stop making. He looked abashed and excited and comfortable, like someone on a personal water slide. At intervals, he’d excuse himself to hit the bathroom. I imagined (another mistake you make at thirty: you believe that everyone, beneath the disguises of last name and background, remains basically
you) he was going to consult the bathroom mirror, to remind himself that all this had happened because of him.

Then he left for his book tour. (I identified. I’d gone on book tour myself a few years earlier. I traveled seventy blocks and signed bookstore copies. Then, tour complete, I grabbed a subway home, unpacked, recuperated.) He remained a city microclimate, fogging the reading zones. I told my girlfriend it’d be great if she got the book finished while I was out of town. Then I flew to Chicago and drove to Bloomington. The strange reporter’s experience, dunked into another person’s life. Questions you approach your friends with on tiptoe (romance, parents, money, grudges) it was my salaried duty to plant my feet and ask. To dilute his feeling of being reported on—to make me seem more like an unbelievably inquisitive houseguest—David invited me to sleep in his second bedroom. “My spare blanket is your spare blanket,” he said. I woke up in the middle of the night. One of the dogs on a cycle: howl, pause, repeat. Then I heard David, sleep as the crust in his voice, say, “Jeeves
—enough.”
I felt all the strangeness of it. Two a.m., this person I didn’t know—I was listening to David Wallace in negotiations with his dog.