Both Flesh and Not: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  Now a huge roar that makes the whole Stadium’s superstructure wobble signifies that the forces of democracy and human freedom have won the third set.33 It’s quite clear that Sampras has found his cruising altitude and that Philippoussis is going to take the first set he won and treasure it and go home to do more bench-presses in preparation for the ATP’s indoor season.

  I do not know who a certain Ms. or Mr. Feron is, but s/he must be a fearsomely powerful figure in the New York sports-concession industry indeed, because a good 80 percent of all concession booths at the ’95 Open have signs that say FERON’S on them. This goes not only for the edible concessions—whose stands have various names but all of whose workers seem to have pale-blue FERON’S shirts on—but also for the endless rows of souvenir- and tennis-related-product booths that flank whatever of the grounds’ Hellesponts aren’t flanked by food booths already. The really hard-core, big-ticket souvenirs are sold on the Stadium’s E side, in an area between the plunging Infiniti and the IBM Match-In-Progress Board. There’s racketry and footwear and gear bags and warm-ups and T-shirts for sale at separate booths for Yonex, Fila, Nike,34 Head, and William Serbin. There’s a U.S.T.A. booth offering free U.S.T.A. T-shirts with a paid U.S.T.A. membership (which membership is essentially worthless unless you want to play in U.S.T.A.-sanctioned events, in which case you have no choice but to enlist). But any item with a “U.S. OPEN ’95”–mention on it is sold exclusively out of a FERON’S booth. Of these booths there are “0/40 at FERON’S,” “FERON’S U.S. Open Silks,” and “FERON’S U.S. Open Specials.”35 It’s not at all clear what the term “Specials” is meant to signify in terms of price: U.S. Open ’95 T-shirts are $22.00 and $25.00. Tank-tops even more. Visors $18.00 and up. Sweatshirts are $49.00 and $54.00, depending on whether they’re the dusty, acid-washed autumn colors so popular this year.

  It’s also clear that the sea-lanes of trade between FERON’S itself and the good old United States Tennis Association are wide open, because no official FERON’S souvenir says “U.S. Open ’95” without also saying “A U.S.T.A. Event” right underneath.

  The grounds don’t exactly empty out between the end of the afternoon’s slate of matches and the start of the evening’s,36 but the crowds do thin a little. Flushing Meadow gets chilly and pretty as the twilight starts. It’s about 1900h., that time when the sun hasn’t gone down yet but everything seems to be in something else’s shadow. The ticket-takers at the Main Gate’s turnstiles change shifts, and the consumers coming down the promenade are now dressed more in jeans and sweaters than shorts and thongs. Lights over all the N.T.C. courts go on together with an enormous thunk. The courtlight gives the underbelly of the hanging Fuji Blimp a weird ghostly glow. There’s more serious, 5-Food-Group, dinnerish eating now going on at the International Food Village and in the Corporate Hospitality Areas. Sampras and Philippoussis have quit the field in the Stadium, Sampras bearing his shield and the Australian carried out upon his own (as it were). Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Mary Joe Fernandez are now warming up on the Stadium Court while people in the bleachers try to stagger very carefully down the steps to get out, lugging their coolers and cushions, looking simultaneously sunburned and cold. Coming up on the Grandstand Court is a mixed-doubles match I’m looking forward to because one of the teams on the program has the marvelous name “Boogert-Oosting.” Various tangential singles matches are under way on Courts 16–18, and something that’s fun is to go over to these Show Courts and not to go all the way in and sit in the little sets of stands but to stand on the path outside the heavy green windscreens around the Show Courts and watch the little stripe of bare fence near the bottom for the movement of feet and to try to extrapolate from the feet’s movement what’s going on in each point. One unbelievably huge pair of sneakers under the screen on Court 16 turns out—sure enough—to belong to Richard Krajicek, the 6'6" Dutchman who plays like a mad crane. These shoes have to be 16EEEs at least; you wouldn’t believe it. I am holding a $4.00 kraut-dog and sodapop I would very much like to find someplace isolated and quiet to consume.

  It is not at all quiet outside the Main Gate as true evening falls. Not only does the combined em- and immigration of crowds for the different Sessions make the whole promenade from Gate to subway stop and parking lots resemble the fall of Saigon. It’s especially unquiet out here economically. I don’t know whether this magazine will run an aperçu of what all’s going on out here as the sun falls, but I don’t see why not, because it’s not all that surprising. Since the 1995 U.S. Open is primarily—unabashedly—about commerce, and since commerce is by its nature uncontainable, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that the most vigorous crepuscular commerce is taking place out here, outside the tournament’s fence and Gate, in markets of all shade and hue. I have, e.g., in the last twenty minutes received three separate solicitations to buy pot (all wildly overpriced). The sweet burnt-pine smell of reefer is in the air all over out here, and one young guy in oversized fatigue pants is smoking a bone on a bench right next to a very neat and dapper old gentleman who’s sitting with his hands folded primly and not giving any indication he smells anything untoward.37 Scalpers have upped the pressure of their pitches in the lengthening shadows and are practically applying half-nelsons to anybody on the promenade who seems even possibly to be looking for something, even if that something is just a quiet isolated place to eat a kraut-dog.38 As mentioned supra, I’m the proud possessor of a U.S. Open ’95 Media Pass—which consists of a necklace of nylon cord from which hangs a large plastic card w/a direly unflattering little photo of me that hangs against my chest at about the level of a sommelier’s tasting cup—and twice this evening outside the Main Gate I’ve been approached by somebody wanting to borrow the Media Pass and then slip it back to me through the black fence once they’ve strolled inside. One offer was a straight-out bribe, but the other involved a distinguished and corporate-looking gray-haired guy in green golfer’s slacks who had a complex tale of woe about a tubercular niece or something who’d paid a surprise long-distance visit to NYC and whose fondest wish was to get into the U.S. Open and that tickets were sold out, etc.39 I observed at least one turnstile’s ticket-taker (not the flinty-eyed Throgs Neck ticket-taker) receive some sort of subtle maître-d’ish payment for allowing somebody to bring in something spectators were by no stretch of the imagination allowed to bring into the N.T.C.40 If you don’t have a Stadium ticket but have the NYC savvy and financial resources, certain Stadium ushers are said (by two separate reliable sources) to be willing to place you in a vacant seat—sometimes a really up-close and desirable seat—for a sub-rosa fee, and a percentage of this fee is then apparently kicked back to a certain enterprising person or persons in the National Tennis Center who know of seats that for one reason or another aren’t going to be occupied during a certain interval and relay this information to ushers (for a price). Part of the beauty of the tennis here is the way the artistry and energy are bounded by specific lines on court, but the beauty of the commerce is the way it’s un- and never bounded. It’s all sort of hypnotic at night. The plunging Infiniti’s leather interior gets somehow mysteriously illuminated when the sun goes down, so that from a distance the car seems like a beacon. Trash-can fires appear in F.M.C. Park’s distance, and the #7 train’s interior’s also alit as it pulls into the overground Shea stop to the north. At about 2015h. there’s a fracas near the I.F. Village involving some unscrupulous/enterprising employee of whatever company actually makes the “ ’95 Open”–emblazoned T-shirts and hats and c. for the souvenir booths, who’s apparently diverted boxes and boxes of the shirts and stuff and is going around the grounds selling them on the sly at prices way below the booths’ prices,41 and N.T.C. Security’s involved, as well as—incongruously—what look like two Fire Department guys in slickers and fireman hats. It’s on the whole kind of a younger and rowdier and more potentially sinister crowd that’s coming in for the evening session. Their faces are stonier; eye contact seems hazardous the way eye contact on subways c
an be hazardous. The women tend to be dressed in ways that let you know just what they’d look like without any clothes on.

  Plus food: the various extracurricular food scams haven’t yet been mentioned. Imagine the opportunities—not only the overpriced all-cash concession stands but the enormous tented kitchens for the Corporate Hospitality Areas and the “U.S. Open Club” for V.I.P.s and so on, the massive sizzle and clatter of high-volume prep from these kitchens off along the south parts of the Main Gate. Let’s not even get into the little easements behind the strips of food stands, the furtive and on the whole unauthorized-looking deliveries and removals of large boxes, the various transactions and scurryings. Forget examples of that. Here’s a different incident. Let’s close L.D.W. with this:

  Some of the time it’s hard even to know what it is you’re seeing take place. In one of the big communitarian fountainless circles that the promenade opens into as it leads to the Main Gate—the circle closest to the Gate, this one is—one of the circle’s green benches is controlled by gypsy-cab and -limo drivers waiting for anybody exiting who needs a gypsy-type ride back to Rye or Rockaway or wherever. Half a dozen of these guys sit on this bench in their cabbies’ berets, waiting around, smoking cigars, talking shit, etc. I’m on the next bench trying to organize my notes. This is at about 2100h., late. From this circle you can see the rear flaps of some of the tented high-volume kitchens. Through one of these flaps now emerges a stocky young guy in the unmistakable tall hat and whites of a kitchen worker (though on his feet are $200 Air Jordans so new they glow in the N.T.C.’s ambient light, so he looks like he’s floating). The kitchen worker’s carrying a broad low cardboard box through the employee- and Media Pass-entrance in the Gate and down the promenade and across the circle, making for the bench with the cabbies. The cabbies are making gestures like: Finally, Thank God. One of the cabbies rises and moves out and meets the kitchen worker; something subtle occurs between their hands that indicates a transfer of funds; and now the cabbie bears the box back to the bench, where the rest of the drivers circle and grab and reveal that the box is full of supper—burgers, chicken legs, wieners, etc. Vague contented noises from the cabbies on the bench as they dig in.

  “Goddamn rip-off,” says a well-dressed Italian man next to me on my bench.

  I say, “Pardon me?”

  “Ripping the fucking place off,” the well-dressed Italian man says, indicating with a hand gesture the kitchen worker, who’s now making his way quickly back to the kitchen tent, hand in his pocket. The Italian man has a small filtered cigar in his mouth and a disgusted look and is sitting back with his legs crossed and his elbows up on the bench’s back’s top in that insouciant way savvy New Yorkers sit on park benches. He has heavy brows and wingtips and a Eurocut silk pinstripe suit of the type that Cagney-era gangsters wore. You half-expect him to have a white fedora and violin case. But it turns out, when he gives me his card, that he’s a legit businessman, a concessioneer, here to labor instead of recreate/consume; he’s scouting out possibilities for opening a couple of stands here at next year’s Open, when the new Stadium’s up and running and even more vigorous attendance and commerce can be foreseen. The stands he wants to open’ll sell gyros, he says. He’s not Italian after all.

  —1996

  discalced (adj.)—barefoot or wearing sandals… used to characterize certain religious orders discarnate—having no material body or form: “a discarnate spirit” disciform—flat and rounded in shape; a disciform fungus dished—concave; slanting toward one another at the bottom dishing—liquid sloshing back and forth dispraise (v.)—to express displeasure, censure; (n.) disapproval, censure distemper—a kind of paint-job using watered paint dobby (n.)—geometric figure woven into fabric; fabric with such a figure Dobro—referring to stringed instruments like guitars and banjos docent—tour guide in museum or cathedral doss—a crude or homemade bed; dosshouse is cheap flophouse doyen—senior or oldest man in group; the Alpha dragoman—interpreter in Middle East drape—clingy girlfriend dreidel—Jewish top w/square body dressage—equestrian skill: guiding horse through complex maneuvers w/hands on reins and feet in stirrups dudeen—short-stemmed clay pipe, Scottish duff—organic stuff on forest floor; decayed leaves and branches dulcify—to make sweet or agreeable; to mollify durance—confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment dybbuk—Jewish myth: wandering soul of dead person that enters living body and controls the living body’s behavior ecce homo—depiction of Christ with crown of thorns eccentric—deviating from a circular path, as in anelliptical orbit; (n.) a wheel or disc with its axis of revolution displaced from the center so that it imparts reciprocal motion eccrine—relating to sweat or sweat gland ecdysiast—striptease artist ecdysis—shedding of outer skin, molting ecdysone—hormone that regulates molting behavior ecesis—successful establishment of plant or animal species in a region echinate—prickly, covered with spines th with spécorché—anatomical representation w/skin removed ecotone—transitional zone between communities containing the characteristic species of each ecru—grayish yellow effloresce—to bloom or blossom effluent—flowing out or forth electuary—mix of drugs w/sugar or honey to make them ingestible, tasty ell—wing of building at right angle to rest; a right-angled bend in pipe or conduit elute—to extract one material from another, usually with a solvent; (n.) “elution” eluviation/eluviate—sinking of dissolved material in soil when rainfall exceeds evaporation embrocate—to moisten or rub body with liniment or lotion embrown—to darken empery—absolute dominion or sovereignty or jurisdiction endive—two kinds, curly and Belgian, used in salads enuresis—uncontrolled discharge of urine epicritic (adj.)—related to nerves w/ability to discern very slight differences in the intensity of stimuli, especially temperature and touch epigraphy—the study of inscriptions epiphenomenalism—mentalstates are epiphenomena of physical neural processes (“epiphenomenal” means following or consequent to something) epistasis—suppression of bodily discharge (coming?) OR a film that develops over a urine specimen escarpment—a steep slope in front of a fortification; “LA lawns on hillsides form a kind of escarpmentish angle”; a steep slope or long erosion cliff that yields two relatively level plains (bottom and top) of different elevations

  BACK IN NEW FIRE

  YOU KNOW THIS LOVE story. A gallant knight espies a fair maiden in the distant window of a forbidding-type castle. Their eyes meet—smokily—across the withered heath. Instant chemistry. And so good Sir Knight comes tear-assing toward the castle, brandishing his lance. Can he just gallop up and carry the fair maiden off? Not quite. First he’s got to get past the dragon. Right? There’s always a particularly nasty dragon guarding the castle, and the knight’s always got to face and slay the dragon if there’s to be any carrying off. But and so, like any loyal knight in the service of passion, the knight battles the dragon, all for the sake of the fair maiden. “Fair maiden” means “good-looking virgin,” by the way. And so let’s not be naive about what the knight’s really fighting for. You can bet he’s going to expect more than a breathy “My hero” from the maiden once that dragon’s slain. In fact, the way the story always goes, good Sir Knight risks life and lance against the dragon not to “rescue” the good-looking virgin, but to “win” her. And any knight, from any era, can tell you what “win” means here.

  Some of my own knightly friends see the specter of heterosexual AIDS as nothing less than a sexual Armageddon—a violent end to the casual carnalcopia of the last three decades. Some others, grim but more upbeat, regard HIV as a sort of test of our generation’s sexual mettle; these guys now applaud their own casual sport-fucking as a kind of medical daredevilry that affirms the indomitability of the erotic spirit. I cite, e.g., an upbeat friend’s recent letter on AIDS: “… So now nature has invented another impediment to human relations, and yet the romantic urge lives. It defies all efforts—human, moral, and viral—to extinguish it. And that’s a wonderful thing. It is, in fact, possible to be encouraged by the human will to fuck, which persists despite all sorts
of impenceddiments. We shall overcome, so to speak.”