More Thoughts in a Wallace Vein.

My DFW Story:

Did I ever tell you my DFW* {follow link for footnotes} story? I honestly can’t remember. I’ve told it a number of times to a number of people, and I can remember having written it down at least once, for The Moth, but then I told that one, too. (Didn’t score that well. You’ll see why.) Anyway, I’m going to tell my DFW story:

I went to Pomona College. You probably haven’t heard of it; it’s a small school on the eastern fringe of Los Angeles County, right at the base of Mt Baldy. It gets blisteringly hot there in the summer, and smog, which collects around the edges of the great basin that forms most of the LA metro area, smears the sky many an afternoon. There was a rumor, unsubstantiated, ubiquitous,** that living in Claremont (where Pomona is situated) had a similar effect on one’s lungs to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Anyway, our claims to fame in those days were the following:

(A) We were the alma mommy of country singer/actor/general paragon of masculinity Kris Kristofferson, author of the profound/insipid Janis Joplin hit “Me & Bobby McGee”, as well as several Pomona College athletic records; and

(B) we had, at one point, one of largest endowments-per-student of any college in the country: doing a bit a rough math, $3 billion / 1400 = $2142857.14286, or enough that we could all have been millionaires had we just shut the place down and looted the coffers (ignoring debts, etc).

That changed the year after I graduated, when the fabulously wealthy Roy E Disney, doppelganger nephew of none other than Walt Disney Himself, endowed a chair in creative writing*** with some fabulous amount of money that is not readily available (read: on the first page of a Google search) online. The upshot was that, my senior year there, when I was the hero-in-my-own-mind of the Pomona College English Dept, a parade of reasonably well-known writers came through to audition for the job, and my friend K & I were tasked to show them around campus.†

The best-known of these was none other than DFW, the Personal Jesus of so many atheistical-academic-lefty-guilt-machines (it is my opinion — possibly my thesis here, though I haven’t decided yet — that DFW was, himself, basically a conservative) who taught at/studied in/generally haunted the hallways of the Pomona College English Dept. Here’s a secret — one I kept lightly guarded in those days: I WAS NOT AMONG THEM. I, in fact, did not like DFW even a little bit. I had attempted to read Infinite Jest at some point in the then-recent past (this would have been winter 2001 or spring 2002, can’t remember with any accuracy) and found it putrid, self-impressed, borderline meaningless.††

Now. Let’s be generous to me and assume that this was, say, November or December of 2001. Let me, given this assumption, list the DFW bibliography as it then stood:

—- Fiction —-

The Broom of the System

The Girl with Curious Hair

Infinite Jest

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

—- Nonfiction —-

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (btw: WTF?)

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Up, Simba!

Ahem. I assume you’re seeing the same problem I am: it is a wee bit premature to deem someone “putrid” based on a cursory reading of the first 100-odd pages of 1 of their, um … looks like 7 or so books. (Up, Simba was simply the long-form version of an epochal article on the John McCain 2000 campaign, written for Rolling Stone, which would later appear in Consider the Lobster. I have some problems with it [qv].) Don’t worry, I’m aware of that now. The problem is that then I was 21 years old and fairly certain I was one of the ~5 smartest people on the planet, which of course is a good way to end up, as a reasonably smart person, behaving in stupid ways, viz, to dismiss the entire ouvre of a great writer on the basis of less than 5% of that writer’s output.

DFW flew into Ontario International Airport, persumably out of Chicago, though I don’t really remember. I do remember that my friend K (female, if you’re interested, which I suppose you are, since I’m always telling my students that people are interested in specifics) & I were tasked to drive the 15 or so miles out there to fetch him, and that in that every-recently-post-9/11world there was a great deal of paranoia and upset even around suburban airports & we were definitely, absolutely, and without exception not allowed to violate security and go down to the gates ourselves, which, well — if you’re not old enough to remember what plane flight was like pre-9/11, one of the great rituals of American travel, with all its poignancies and anticipations and connotations, was to go down to the gate and meet an arrival, be he an old lover, a son gone off to college, a spouse away on a trip, or (as was our case) an EXTREMELY FAMOUS WRITER of whom one ought to be in awe/afraid. So we stood outside the wildly disorganized security, waiting, K holding a sign before her chest that read in her weird boyish handwriting “DAVID FOSTER WALLACE”. I think this made us both feel simultaneously badass and kind of sheepish. Anyway we stood there, K rocking up on her toes and me trying to decide exactly how hostile I was going to be to him, and I think we were both distracted because he kind of snuck up us and announced himself by saying, “Usually they just use your last name.”

NOW. Now now now now now. Before I get to the next part of this story, I need extensively to caveat it with things I subsequently heard from younger friends:ª that DFW was a deeply committed teacher (AHEM AHEM AHEM — more later on THIS), that DFW was a sweet and humane person, that DFW was concerned more than anything with the well-being of his students, that DFW was not prone to any sort of prima donna antics that they ever witnessed. I have neither read nor heard an account that paints DFW as anything other than the most generous and loving of souls, and though he was obviously deeply fucked up on a personal level — who isn’t? — I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence for the idea that he was broadly or even narrowly considered to be what I eventually decided he was: an asshole.

To return to my DFW anecdote: We found him in a state that I would broadly call dishabille. This was the first thing that turned me off: he was wearing a ratty old t-shirt and a pair of aqua-colored sweatpants, one leg of which was hiked up partway on a surprisingly shapely calf. (I had, at this point, no inkling of DFW’s past as a “near-great” athlete.) He wasn’t wearing the headband at first, but as we walked out to K’s car he fished around in a pocket of his bag and drew it out and wrapped it over his brow. [PLEASE READ THIS INTERPOLATION ON THE SUBJECT OF DFW’S HEADBAND, IF YOU SO WISH.]

K had read somewhere that DFW liked the odious quasi-Xian rock band Creed, and had run out to a local record shop to buy one of their albums on tape, a gesture that I of course ridiculed, because I knew everything about everything in those days, but especially about music, and especially about music I hated, of which Creed was perhaps the leading example.{7} But once we were in that car, I had never, ever been happier to hear Creed, because the levels of awkwardness that can be reached between three writers of differing ages, all suffering to varying degrees from depression and social anxiety, can border on the nuclear. We almost created a supernova of uncomfortable silence in that car, until K put on that Creed tape. I sat in the back seat, stared out the window, and wondered what I had got myself into.

I had got myself into an oddysey of being provoked and pushed at by a famous writer. There was something — I don’t know what — about our shared traits (chiefly arrogance, to a lesser degree intelligence) that turned our chemistry caustic, toxic. As I recall, it began as K & I were preparing to show him into a classroom where he would teach a “sample” creative writing class, and I called him “dude”. I don’t remember what I was talking about, but I believe the sentence began with the word, as in, “Dude, it’s like 100 degrees outside!”, but, you know, more relevant to the task at hand. Anyway, he turned his eyes on me with scorn and said, “Dude?” As though he were the President and I was some lowly staffer calling him “Dude”. Or something. Anyway, he was appalled. I, on the other hand, was genuinely surprised. I was a college kid, living most of my life under the sway of The Big Lebowski and a bong called The Operation. I called everybody “Dude”. For whatever reason, DFW took exception.

This began a pattern of retaliation. In the sample class, DFW was careful to ignore anything I had to say, which was a lot, because I talk all the time in class even now and did so more in those days. Sometimes, when someone else was talking, he would cut his eyes at me and fix me with a glare of scorn that far outweighed whatever offenses I might have committed, as far as I was concerned. When the class was over, I was careful to call him “Dude” a few more times. That was when he began to call me names, and criticize my mode of dress.{8} He felt that I wore my pants hanging too far down on my ass. (Possibly true.) He either detected, or weaseled out of me, the fact that I smoked a lot of pot, and concocted a series of epithets for me, the one I really remember being “Prefect Pothead”, probably occasioned by the fact that I was also pretty proud of my grades and prone to talking about how good they were at the drop of a hat. Things spiralled down, down, down, so that by the time came for him to read from Infinite Jest, in the largest classroom the English Dept had (not very large — maybe 50 seats), we pretty well despised one another.

A distinguished and respectable professor whose name I have since forgotten introduced him. She very nearly wept with excitement. He read for a while, and what I heard confirmed my sense that Infinite Jest was nonsense. The Q&A section was full of obsequeous piffle (“Do you still play a lot of tennis?”), and when time came to show DFW to his hotel room, I demurred, and let K drive him. I went home, got stoned, and fired up my email: I was going to tell everybody just what I thought about their hero. I composed a several-thousand-word email to the head of the Dept, my advisor, and, as I recall, some random dean whose name I remembered. I detailed DFW’s pretentions, his drama-queenliness, his million-tongued bitchery. I thought I was pretty eloquent about it. I sent it, and went to bed.

The problem with my DFW story: it has no ending. I graduated; DFW was hired despite my best efforts; no one ever got in trouble or even, as I recall, ever mentioned the email to me again. Life, unfortunately, is unweildy, and does not usually — or even often — melt evenly into the moulds of art. It goes on, until it doesn’t.

But this does get me to part two of this monstrous blog post, which I think I shall segregate out and post later.