Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  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.

  In our talks, you see me always giving the wised-up, padded-shoulder advice. Endorse the check, take the deal, get seconds, put your feet up. This was the payroll doctrine eight years of my life had trained me to spread. David keeps talking about the largest things, I keep countering with the smallest: You’re doing great, don’t over-think, the simple pleasures are a job and your morning coffee. It’s like a younger brother trying to impress an older one with the rough schooling he’s picked up in the lower grades. I think it was on the airplane that I finally relaxed. OK, he was quicker than me—also funnier than me. I could enjoy him and quit trying to match him. I think he did in the car, by the Henry Ford road-trip equation: two men will become comfortable if they have to travel any distance in excess of forty miles.

  Then I had to leave, but when I got home, it turned out I’d wanted to keep a foot in his world. David sent me a giant box a week later. One of my loafers traveled inside, plus a note on Chicago Bears stationery, which he’d signed with a smiley face. “Yours, I presume?” I felt like a barefoot idiot.

  I never, thank God, had to write the piece. I tried to write it, and kept imagining David reading it, and seeing through it, through me, and spotting some questionable stuff on the X-ray. And then Jann changed his mind. I was sent to Seattle to find heroin addicts (who were after all in lots hotter water than I was), and it was much, much easier. I phoned Bonnie Nadell, David’s agent. David had mixed feelings about publicity, and I asked her to pass along the good news. (His sister told me later David had no hard feelings. “He said you were a decent guy—that, for about five years, was his praise word—and that I would have liked you.” Typing this makes my stomach go hollow, it snags at the inside of the chest. He had that casual, urgent social gift: You wanted to be liked by him.) I felt even more barefoot than before.

  In a few years, I’d get my taste of the things I’d wanted—TV, contracts, bestseller list. Then I’d be embarrassed for how much I’d tried to extract my experience of them from David. It seemed hungry and ungenerous. I wrote many e-mails in my head, and one or two on the actual computer, and one I finished and e-mailed to myself to see what it’d read like to open, and decided it looked a little loopy and that I’d been the right person to open it after all. I read him, thought about him, and I never saw him again except on television once.

  About a year before he died, I pulled out the days here and read them again. We were back in his crapped-up living room, in the Pontiac, sitting at Denny’s. One thing kept touching me: We were both so young.

  But here we are. When I think of this trip, I see David and me in the front seat of the car. It’s nighttime. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. (The smell of chewing tobacco is like a muddy lawn you’ve just fed a truckful of cough drops to.) The window is letting in a leak of cold air. R.E.M. is playing. The wheels are making their slightly sleepy sound of tape being stripped cleanly and endlessly off a long wall. On the other hand, we seem not to be moving at all, and the conversation is the best one I’ve ever had. We cover everything. David’s life was harder than I would have guessed. It was smarter. I recognized it, it was different from mine; every area of it was completely occupied by feeling. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go, we’re both trying to decide who we’ll be at various points of arrival. We talk about what matters to any person. What to want, how to be a good person, how to read, how to write, how to think about others. There are things he said to me that shifted my life, that joined my talk show, that are in the list of quotes I recite to myself. Give me twenty-four hours alone, and I can be really, really smart. His moment with Michael Ryan, which is everything about what ambition can do to you. What he guessed about my own personality. What a person has every right to expect from you, what you ought to expect of yourself. David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely. He’d come by this idea talking to Jonathan Franzen. Franzen said a
sad, moving thing to me. He said losing David had been like watching a science fiction movie, when a small figure gets sucked out of the airlock. An abrupt, absolute, quiet disappearance. A little while later he said, “Does it look now like David had all the answers?” I don’t think the fact that David would be dead twelve years later changes what this meant to me. John Updike—and you’re about to watch or have watched already us argue like crazy about John Updike—once wrote that temporariness, the nature of things being provisional, shouldn’t disqualify them. He wrote—another of the lines that’s stuck on shuffle in my brain, and plays at odd, uplifting moments—that “all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.” So I’d say to David, if I could, that living these days again with him was a great pleasure. I’d thank him, I’d say I was grateful for his letting me be there. I’d tell him it reminded me of what life was like, instead of being a relief from it, and I’d say it made me feel much less lonely to read.

  FIRST DAY

  DAVID’S HOUSE

  TUESDAY BEFORE CLASS

  IN THE LIVING ROOM, PLAYING CHESS

  HIS DOGS SLINKING BACK AND FORTH OVER CARPET

  3/5/96

  You were saying about the tour that while we travel, “I need to know that anything that I ask you five minutes later to not put in, you won’t put in.”

  Given my level of fatigue and fuck-up quotient lately, it’s the only way I can see doin’ it and not going crazy.

  [Drone—he’s got two dogs—is chewing on the chair David sits in.

  He now has an unlisted phone number, because of fans.]

  I don’t know if “fan” would be the right word …

  [Looking at bookcases … He had a board out, and is eager to play. So we are playing chess.]

  I think when I was twenty-five this was what I wanted. But … I don’t mind it now. I mean, I’m proud of the book, I’m glad the book is getting attention. Stuff about me is (a) makes me uncomfortable and (b) is bad for me, because it makes me self-conscious when I write. And I do not need to be more self-conscious. Oh, fuck me! It takes a while for me to get in a groove. I honestly don’t know what’s gonna sort of eventuate here. Well, fuck! (Looking at the board)

  Little, Brown bought both the hardcover and the softcover rights at the same time. I think I could make a lot if I took an advance for the next thing, but I can’t do that, so …

  [He’s not interested in money for next novels, which friends have said is the wisest course. I talk about my own friends—people he knows too—who arranged deals while touring for successful books.]

  That’s incredible. I’ve got this thing where I just can’t take money for something till it’s done. So I’m sort of screwed about that stuff. (Slow, Southernish voice) I’ve been burnt on this before, I just can’t do it.

  I had no choice on this book, it was sort of under way. There was so much research I had to do, that I literally could not teach and do it at the same time. So I decided to eat it, and do it. But it would have been a lot more fun if I hadn’t taken any money for it.

  [He’s playing pop radio, the local college station. I haven’t heard this song in so much time: INXS, “It’s the One Thing.” David nods, says he loves their song “Don’t Change.”]

  You know, I went through such a bad time in my twenties. Thinking like, Oh no, I’m this genius writer, everything I do’s gotta be ingenious, blah blah blah blah, and bein’ so shut down and miserable for three or four years. That it’s worth any amount of money to me, not to go there again. And I’m aware that that sounds maybe Pollyannaish or sound-bitish. But it’s actually just the truth.

  I was twenty-eight years old, and that means not taking an advance for stuff before it’s done. And it’s money well spent as far as I’m concerned.

  Aware of your fame here?

  The grad students are vaguely aware I think.

  They must follow it?

  I think kids in the Midwest are different than kids on the East Coast. I think Time and Newsweek are fairly inescapable. So I think they kinda know. I’m sort of so nasty when they start talking about that stuff in class that I think I’ve scared them into just leaving it alone.

  Why?

  Because it’s toxic to them and it’s toxic to me. That class is my uh—I’m there to learn, not to talk about my own stuff. And I’m there … when I’m teaching, I’m there as a reader, not a writer. And the more—it’s extremely unpleasant, the more, uh, the more I’m there in a kind of writerly persona …

  There’s this weird scam in creative writing workshops that somehow the teacher’s gonna teach you how—they’re gonna be able to teach you how to do exactly what it is they do. Which is why these programs try to pack themselves with the best-known and most-respected writers. (“Wraters”) As if how good a writer you are and how good a teacher you are have anything to do with each other. I don’t think so. I know too many really good writers who are shitty teachers, and vice versa, to think that. I think that the teaching … well, the teaching has helped my own writing a lot … So maybe I don’t think that anymore. But the writers are often interested in preserving as much of their own time as they can.

  [Hums while he plays chess: not tremendously good at chess; strong, however, at humming.]

  Well, that really didn’t do a whole heck of a lot for me, did it?

  Shit. All right, we’ve got time for one more move each and then we have to leave. I’ve got to brush my teeth.

  I took the job for the health insurance. [Illinois State University]

  [Bathroom cabinet: lots of tubes of Topol. (He’s a smoker.)

  Dogs: Drone is “A provisional dog, he just showed up once while we were jogging,” they took him on.]

  Some kind of weird, “I’ve made a terrible mistake with my life, I need to be selling insurance in Oshkosh” sort of feeling. [We’re talking about John Barth, and other writers who’ve gotten in trouble. A sudden in-the-wrong-place sense. An anxiety he felt before Infinite Jest.] I think that happens to a lot of writers.

  [Went to Arizona State University. Edward Abbey was there … Robert Boswell helped him more than anybody …]

  I was so in thrall to Barth I just knew it would be sort of a grotesque thing. [Why he couldn’t and didn’t go to Hopkins. He patterned the longest part of his second book after Barth.]

  • • •

  IN CAR, MY RENTED GRAND AM

  EN ROUTE TO CLASS

  This is the thing—you’re gonna have to sit around, you can’t even be in the office, because I’m gonna have to yell at a lot of people. I have to cut it short: just because we’ve gotta get up at five in the morning. This is what’s fucked: it’s that, these poor kids, I haven’t been around for two weeks. And they all are gonna have various deals to discuss. [So sensitive about all performance] I’m usually a much better teacher than this. I swear to God.

  Like doing readings?

  No.

  You were good.

  Thanks. Tower Books—that’s not one I was particularly pleased with. I get so nervous beforehand, and the nervousness is so unpleasant, that that’s what I dislike. And I don’t think my stuff reads out loud very well. And I think I come off looking like a maniac. Mainly I’m doing what they blew up to larger type size. I give like one or two readings in colleges a year. I gave ’em ten things and they blew up five of them.

  I read something (“sumpin’”) different at Tower just because this unbelievably cute girl from Spin magazine was there, and she didn’t want to hear the same thing twice, so I totally trashed the plan. (He laughs.) And I never saw her again.

  [The writer Elizabeth Wurtzel was at David’s KGB reading—a kind of Brezhnev-and-Pravda-themed bar in Lower Manhattan. She was standing right up front. We turn out to both know Elizabeth.]

  I don’t know how Elizabeth—Liz got like the best seat in the house, using skills I think only Elizabeth has. Ah, she’s real nice. She’s a good egg. Good egg.

  When you’
re eighteen, you realize that—there’s also a part of us that wants to be the president. And there’s also a part that wants to fuck every attractive person of the gender of our choice. I mean, you know … Just, I think she’s gotta be more—it’s not an accident that she’s depressed all the time. I don’t know. Maybe I just project all kinds of weird stuff onto her …

  • • •

  DAVID’S CLASS

  CLASS: “ADVANCED PROSE”

  [Doesn’t want a tape. Is comfortable with note-taking.]

  Fluorescents, desks, steel wastepaper cans, boot smell, sweater smell, clock on wall, big table that David doesn’t sit much behind. Fifteen students. Women sit, as at an old-line synagogue, slightly apart from men. David wearing Fryes, blue bandanna. Carrying Diet Pepsi.

  Dave has noticed some surprising student errors this week.

  DAVE: Before we start, let’s do a moment of Grammar Rock.

  They laugh. He’s the ideal, the professor you hope for: lightning writer, modern references, charming and funny and firm.

  The students know another thing: he’s become, their bandanna-wearing teacher, during these past three weeks a suddenly celebrated man. And they want somehow to acknowledge it.