Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

  Q.

  ‘A large outdoor concert-dash-performance-art community festival thing in a park downtown where—it was a pickup, plain and simple. I will not try to represent it as anything nicer than that, or more fated. And I’m going to admit at the risk of appearing mercenary that her proto-typical Cruncher morphology was evident right at first sight, from clear on the other side of the bandstand, and dictated the terms of the approach and the tactics of the pickup itself and made the whole thing almost criminally easy. Half the women—it is a less uncommon typology among educated girls out here than one might think. You don’t want to know what kind of festival or why the three of us were there, trust me. I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective, and that my interest in her was almost entirely due to the fact that she was pretty. Sexually attractive, sexy. She had a phenomenal body, even under the poncho. It was her body that attracted me. Her face was a bit strange. Not homely but eccentric. Tad’s assessment was that she looked like a really sexy duck. Nevertheless nolo to the charge that I spotted her on the blanket at the concert and sauntered carnivorously over with an overtly one-night objective. And, having had some prior dealings with the Cruncher genus prior to this, that the one-night proviso was due mostly to the grim unimaginability of having to talk with a New Age brigadier for more than one night. Whether or not you approve I think we can assume you understand.’

  Q.

  ‘That essential at-center-life-is-just-a-cute-pet-bunny fluffiness about them that makes it so exceedingly hard to take them seriously or not to end up feeling as if you’re exploiting them in some way.’

  Q.

  ‘Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naiveté. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don’t worry I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you’re forming from the way I’m characterizing what drew me to her but if I’m really to explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudo-sensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible. I’m going to pay you the compliment of not pretending to worry whether you understand what I’m referring to about the difficulty of not feeling impatience and even contempt—the hypocrisy, the blatant self-contradiction, the way you know from the outset that there will be the requisite enthusiasms for the rain forest and spotted owl, creative meditation, feel-good psychology, macrobiosis, rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes. As someone who worked himself through both college and two years now of postgraduate school I have to confess to an almost blanket—these rich kids in torn jeans whose way of protesting apartheid was to boycott South African pot. Silverglade called them the Inward Bound. The smug naiveté, the condescension in the quote compassion they feel for those quote unquote trapped or imprisoned in orthodox American lifestyle choices. So on and so forth. The fact that the Inward Bound never consider that it’s the probity and thrift of the re—to occur to them that they themselves have themselves become the distillate of everything about the culture they deride and define themselves as opposing, the narcissism, the materialism and complacency and unexamined conformity—nor the irony that the blithe teleology of this quote impending New Age is exactly the same cultural permission-slip that Manifest Destiny was, or the Reich or the dialectic of the proletariat or the Cultural Revolution—all the same. And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.’

  Q.

  ‘You would be surprised.’

  Q.

  ‘All right and the near-contempt here specifically in the way you can saunter casually over and bend down next to her blanket to initiate conversation and idly play with the blanket’s fringe and easily create the sense of affinity and connection that will allow you to pick her up and somehow almost resent that it’s so goddamn easy to make the conversation flow toward a sense of connection, how exploitative you feel when it is so easy to get this type to regard you as a kindred soul—you almost know what’s going to be said next without her having even to open her pretty mouth. Tad said she was like some kind of smooth blank perfect piece of pseudo-art you want to buy so you can take it home and sm—’

  Q.

  ‘No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor. The moment enough of a mood of conversational intimacy had been established to make a quote confession seem even remotely plausible I deployed a sensitive-slash-pained expression and quote confessed that I’d in fact not just been passing her blanket and had even though we didn’t know one another felt a mysterious but overwhelming urge just to lean down and say Hi but no something about her that made it somehow impossible to deploy anything less than total honesty now forced me to confess that I had in fact deliberately approached her blanket and initiated conversation because I had seen her from across the bandstand and had felt some mysterious but overwhelmingly sensual energy seeming to emanate from her very being and had been helplessly drawn to it and had leaned down and introduced myself and started a conversation with her because I wanted to connect and make mutually nurturing and exquisite love with her, and had been ashamed of admitting this natural desire and so had fibbed at first in explaining my approach of her, though now some mysterious gentleness and generosity of soul I could intuit about her was now allowing me to feel serene enough to confess that I had, formerly, fibbed. Note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy and serene. This is the lingua franca of the Inward Bound. I actually truly did like her, I found, as an individual—she had an amused expression during the whole conversation that made it hard not to smile in return, and an involuntary need to smile is one of the best feelings available, no? A refill? It’s refill time, yes?’

  Q….

  ‘Yes and that prior experience has taught that the female Granola Cruncher tends to define herself in opposition to what she sees as the unconsidered and hypocrisy-bound attitudes of quote bourgeois women and is thus essentially unoffendable, rejects the whole concept of propriety and offense, views so-called honesty of even the most brutal or repellent sort as evidence of sincerity and respect, getting quote real, the impression that you respect her personhood too much to ply her with implausible fictions and leave very basic natural energies and desires uncommunicated. Not to mention—to render your own indignation and distaste complete, I’m sure—that extremely, off-the-charts pretty women of almost every type have, from my experience, tend all to have a uniform obsession with this idea of respect, and will do almost anything anywhere for any fellow who affords her a sufficient sense of being deeply and profoundly respected. I doubt I need to point out that this is nothing but a particular female variant of the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings. I can tell by your expression what you think of brutal candor. The fact is that she had a body that my body found sexually attractive and wanted to have intercourse with and it was not really any more noble or complicated than that. And she did indeed turn out to be straight out of Central Granola-Cruncher Casting, I should insert. She had some kind of monomaniacal hatred for the American timber industry, and professed membership in one of those apostrophe-heavy near-Eastern religions that I would defy anyone to pronounce correctly, and believed strongly in the superior value of vitamins and minerals in colloidal suspension
rather than tablet form, et cetera, and then, when one thing had been led stolidly by me to another and there she was in my apartment and we had done what I had wanted to do with her and had exchanged the standard horizontal compliments and assurances, she was going on about her obscure Levantine denomination’s views vis-à-vis energy fields and souls and connections between souls via what she kept calling quote focus, and using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or even any evident awareness that the word has through tactical overdeployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least, and I suppose I should tell you that I was planning right from the outset to give her the special false number when we exchanged numbers in the morning, which all but a very small and cynical minority always want to. Exchange numbers. A fellow in Tad’s torts study group’s great-uncle or grandparents or something have a vacation home just outside Milford and are never there, with a phone but no machine or service, so when someone you’ve given the special number calls the special number it simply rings and rings, so for a few days it’s usually not evident to the girl that what you’ve given her isn’t your true number and for a few days allows her to imagine that perhaps you’ve just been extremely busy and scarce and that this is also perhaps why you haven’t called her either. Which obviates the chance of hurt feelings and is therefore, I submit, good, though I can well im—’

  Q.

  ‘The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.’

  Q….

  ‘Yes and so in the anecdote there she is, blithely hitchhiking along the interstate, and on this particular day the fellow in the car that stops almost the moment she puts her thumb out happens to—she said she knew she’d made a mistake the moment she got in. The car. Just from what she called the energy field inside the car, she said, and that fear gripped her soul the moment she got in. And sure enough, the fellow in the car soon exits the highway and exits off into some kind of secluded area, which seems to be what psychotic sex criminals always do, you’re always reading secluded area in all the accounts of quote brutal sex slayings and grisly discoveries of unidentified remains by a scout troop or amateur botanist, et cetera, common knowledge which you can be sure she was reviewing, horror-stricken, as the fellow began acting more and more creepy and psychotic even on the interstate and then soon exited into the first available secluded area.’

  Q.

  ‘Her explanation was that she did not in fact feel the psychotic energy field until she had shut the car’s door and they were moving, at which time it was too late. She was not melodramatic about it but described herself as literally paralyzed with terror. Though you might be wondering as I did when one hears about cases like this as to why the victim doesn’t simply bail out of the car the minute the fellow begins grinning maniacally or acting erratic or casually discussing how much he loathes his mother and dreams of raping her with her LPGA-endorsed sand wedge and then stabbing her 106 times, et cetera. But here she did point out that the prospect of bailing out of a rapidly moving car and hitting the macadam at sixty miles an—at the very least you break a leg or something, and then as you’re trying to drag yourself off the road into the underbrush of course what’s to keep the fellow from turning around to come back for you, which in addition let’s keep in mind that he’s now going to be additionally aggrieved about the rejection implicit in your preferring to hit the macadam at 60 m.p.h. rather than remain in his company, given that psychotic sex offenders have a notoriously low tolerance for rejection, and so forth.’

  Q.

  ‘Something about his aspect, eyes, the quote energy field in the car—she said she instantly knew in the depths of her soul that the fellow’s intention was to brutally rape, torture, and kill her, she said. And I believed her here, that one can intuitively pick up on the epiphenomena of danger, sense psychosis in someone’s aspect—you needn’t buy into energy fields or ESP to accept mortal intuition. Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she’s telling the story, reliving it, she’s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they’re full of additives and unsafe—unsafe as she’s sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn’t even bring—yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window—all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged. And long hair spilling all over, more than—beautiful lustrous hair that makes you understand why women use conditioner. Tad’s boon companion Silverglade telling me she looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around and asking how long estrus lasts in her species and droll ho ho. My memory is more verbal than visual, I’m afraid. It’s on the sixth floor and my bedroom gets stuffy, she treated the fan like cold water and closed her eyes when it hit her. And by the time the psychotic fellow in question exits into the secluded area and finally comes straight out and indicates what his true intentions are—apparently detailing certain specific plans and procedures and implements—she’s not the least bit surprised, she said she’d known the kind of hideously twisted soul-energy she’d gotten into the car into, the kind of pitiless and unappeasable psychotic he was and what sort of interaction they were headed for in this secluded area, and concluding that she was going to become just another grisly discovery for some amateur botanist a few days hence unless she could focus her way into the sort of profound soul-connection that would make it difficult for the fellow to murder her. These were her words, this was the sort of pseudo-abstract terminology she—and yet at the same time I was now captivated enough by the anecdote to simply accept the terminology as a kind of foreign language without trying to judge it or press for clarification, I just decided to presume that focus was her obscure denomination’s euphemism for prayer, and that in a desperate situation like this who really was in any position to judge what would be a sound response to the sort of shock and terror she must be feeling, who could say with any certainty whether prayer wouldn’t be appropriate. Foxholes and atheists and so on. What I remember best is that by this time it was, for the first time, taking much less effort to listen to her—she had an unexpected ability to recount it in such a way as to deflect attention from herself and displace maximum attention onto the anecdote itself. I have to confess that it was the first time I did not find her one bit dull. Care for another?’

  Q.

  ‘That she was not melodramatic about it, the anecdote, telling me, nor affecting an unnatural calm the way some people affect an unnatural nonchalance about narrating an incident that is meant to heighten their story’s drama and/or make them appear nonchalant and sophisticated, one or the other of which is often the most annoying part of listening to certain types of beautiful women structure a story or anecdote—that they are used to high levels of people’s attention, and need to feel that they control it, always trying to control the precise type and degree of your attention instead of simply trusting that you are paying the appropriate degree of attention. I’m sure you yourself have noticed this in very attractive women, that paying attention to them makes them immediately begin to pose, even if their pose is the affected nonchalance they affect to portray themselves as unposed. It becomes dull very quickly. But she was, or seemed, oddly unposed for someone this attractive and with this dramatic a story to tell. It struck me, listening. She seemed truly poseless in relating it, open to attention but not solicitous—nor contemptuous of the attention, or affecting disdain or contempt, which I hate. Some beautiful women, something wrong with their voice, some squeakiness or lack of inflection or a laugh like a machine gun
and you flee in horror. Her speaking voice is a neutral alto without squeak or that long drawled O or vague air of nasal complaint that—also mercifully light on the likes and you knows that can make you chew the inside of your cheek with this type. Nor did she giggle. Her laugh was fully adult, full, good to hear. And that this was my first hint of sadness or melancholy, as I listened with increasing attention to the anecdote, that the qualities I found myself admiring in her narration of the anecdote were some of the same qualities about her I’d been contemptuous of when I’d first picked her up in the park.’

  Q.

  ‘Chief among them—and I mean this without irony—that she seemed, quote, sincere in a way that may in fact have been smug naiveté but was nevertheless attractive and very powerful in the context of listening to her encounter with the psychopath, in that I found it helped me focus almost entirely on the anecdote itself and thus helped me imagine in an almost terrifyingly vividly realistic way just what it must have felt like for her, for anyone, finding yourself through nothing but coincidence heading into a secluded woody area in the company of a dark man in a dungaree vest who says he is your own death incarnate and who is alternately smiling with psychotic cheer and ranting and apparently gets his first wave of jollies by singing creepily about the various sharp implements he has in the Cutlass’s trunk and detailing what he’s used them to do to others and now plans in exquisite detail to do to you. It was tribute to the—her odd affectless sincerity that I found myself hearing expressions like fear gripping her soul, unquote, as less as televisual clichés or melodrama but as sincere if not particularly artful attempts simply to describe what it must have felt like, the feelings of shock and unreality alternating with waves of pure terror, the sheer emotional violence of this magnitude of fear, the temptation to retreat into catatonia or shock or the delusion—yield to the seduction of the idea, riding deeper into the secluded area, that there must be some sort of mistake, that something as simple and random as getting into a 1987 maroon Cutlass with a bad muffler that just happened to be the first car to pull over to the side of a random interstate could not possibly result in the death not of some abstract other person but your own personal death, and at the hands of someone whose reasons have absolutely nothing to do with you or the content of your character, as if everything you’d ever been told about the relationship between character and intention and outcome had been a rank fiction from start to—’