Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  WITH BETSY AND JULIE

  [About working with photographers] I was hoping that someone would call me “babe,” you know? And someone would say something like, “Work with me, people!”

  [The City Pages guy said he told someone about the book, that he could do a greater service to fiction, if he left off writing entirely and just copied out versions of Infinite Jest longhand, which he could then pass out to his friends. What a strange thing for David to hear. He has an odd expression telling us the story.

  It’s very icy in the car. We’re smoking out the sides, windows cracked, cold air leaking in. David calls it “our hypothermia smoking tour of the Midwest.”]

  • • •

  NEXT MORNING

  WE GO TO RADIO INTERVIEW, MINNEAPOLIS NPR IN THE ESCORT’S CAR

  [Prebreakfast broadcasts are a luxury for him; he doesn’t own a TV] This morning, a simultaneous broadcast of Falcon Crest, Magnum PI, and Charlie’s Angels: an orgy of crap.

  [The escort, who doesn’t seem to approve of what David’s wearing—jeans and turtleneck, his long hair up in a bun—is cooing over John Updike. He wore tweed, a tie, etc.

  This morning’s taping to be locally broadcast in five states as part of All Things Considered.]

  My ambition is to not embarrass myself—which, if you know me, is a pretty serious ambition.

  ESCORT: Believe me, you’ll be fine. If you loosen up.

  The great thing about not owning a TV, is that, when you do have access to one, you can kind of plunge in. An orgy of spectation. Last night I watched the Golf Channel. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus. Old footage, rigid haircuts.

  [We smoke outside. David’s hair is still wet from the shower; it steams in the cold air.]

  • • •

  IN NPR STUDIO

  NPR GUY: TALL, CHRIS ISAAK SIDEBURNS, BLACK CONVERSE HIGH-TOPS. LONG SPIDERY FINGERS. LOOKS LIKE HE MIGHT HAVE PLAYED COLLEGE BASEBALL.

  NPR GUY: We’re gonna record digitally. I hope that’s OK.

  DAVE: So only yes and no answers?

  [A small, brilliant joke. I write it down.]

  [David sees me writing. Turns to me.]

  If you do a really mean job, I have twenty years to get you back.

  [They end up doing a lot of on-air talk about how drugs get named.]

  I’m a hard-core aspirin man from way back. Bayer under the tongue, which is the way my parents taught me.

  [Dave talks about using acupressure for headaches: clamp down on meat between thumb and forefinger. As usual, he does a table-turn, as the interviewer continues to ask about drug names. He smiles.]

  You’re revealing a lot about yourself. You’re very interested in pharmacology. I can get you a PDR guide.

  [The drugs, actually, sound like characters in Tolkien: Talwin, Seldane, Paxil, Haldol. The names of orcs and elves.]

  AS WE LEAVE, NPR GUY: You’re not in town on the twenty-first, are you? We’re having a snowman burning. It’s a Minneapolis tradition. The firemen really like fire.

  • • •

  BACK IN ESCORT’S CAR

  EN ROUTE TO THE WHITNEY

  The problem with these radio guys is they have such beautiful voices, you just want to listen to the voices, and not what they’re askin’ you.

  [Escort, a little hurt, mentions writers who’ve been rude to her. David commiserates, apologizes on their behalf.]

  It’s hard when you’re traveling. I want to be rude and snappish to people who can’t hurt me. What I do is go home and be rude to my dogs.

  [At the hotel, he immediately flips on the TV. Starsky and Hutch. I step into his nice neat hotel bathroom. When I return, TBS or whatever is promo-ing Charlie’s Angels, coming up next.]

  Again? We’d all rush home after football practice for this.

  [The episode is “The Sammy Davis Jr. Kidnap Caper,” with Sammy Davis in a double role: himself and a street hustler. The first scene, he’s arguing with his accountant. “Didn’t I ask you never to talk about taxes during meal time?” Sammy asks on the screen.]

  [We leave the Whitney via its grand spiral staircase. Dave stops midway. I say it’s like Tara, from Gone with the Wind. And again he ups my joke.]

  I always want to have a big, Vivien Leigh gown.

  • • •

  WE DITCH ESCORT

  HEAD TO MALL OF AMERICA

  THEN TO MOVIES: ONE OF DAVID’S KIND, “WITH THINGS THAT BLOW UP”

  A dumb boy movie. A piece of camp art, like the tornado movie.

  [We’re on a balcony at Mall of America, looking down at Camp Snoopy.]

  Humidity is a few points higher in here too. They must mess with the air.

  [To tape] David is talking about the amusement park complex—Camp Snoopy—in Mall of America. The humidity is higher, and the air smells like chlorine.

  [Break]

  [What’s funny is how much of David’s world, of extraneous information, the week is: his five hundred thousand bits of extra information hammering at you. Burning snowmen, mall roller coasters, airline gift catalogs, drug names, TV dialogue.

  We’re looking down at a sort of enclosed grotto. We keep hearing screams from people taking the Camp Snoopy water flume.

  Across the way: a restaurant. Hulk Hogan’s Pastamania.]

  When I think pasta, I think Hulk Hogan.

  [And then, because he’s here—although generally he has a specific mall fear: “one I can’t get in and out of in thirty seconds”—David figures he ought make some use of the place.]

  I actually need to get sneakers, too. This is what happens to me in malls. I want a Vikings T-shirt and also a bathrobe and sneakers. The Vikings shirt’s gotta be just cheesy enough.

  [Dave is now staring down at Legoland.]

  There must be a way to make cheap furniture, where you could use Lego.

  • • •

  TO MOVIE AT MALL OF AMERICA

  BROKEN ARROW

  JOHN TRAVOLTA, CHRISTIAN SLATER

  [In our theater seats, way up front, slammed against screen: David a commenting and empathizing audience. His saying “Oh, boy” when a guy gets thrown out of the train. “Oh jeez” when Christian Slater is going to jump into a railcar. And “Oh boy, oh wow, oh jeez” and then “oh wow” at the end, after Travolta and Slater go hand to hand and Travolta gets speared by a nuclear missile. He winces away from the screen—because he has a slightly soft face, when he winces his cheek kind of folds in. It’s got a lot of lines in it. And then he says, “That was a cool shot at the end when Travolta gets impaled by the thing.” Remember, he likes movies where things blow up.

  I’ve seen the movie already, so I watch Wallace watch. In the end, as the thrill plot kicks in—Christian Slater helicoptering after the train containing John Travolta, Samantha Mathis, and the active nuclear device—he stops making gags. Before that, he’s doing Mystery Science Theater 3000]

  • • •

  THEN, HIS FRIEND JULIE’S HOUSE

  STUDENTISH DIGS: ST. PAUL

  [Potato chips in bowls, pop (Dave’s word for soda), sofa. The TV-watching side of Wallace has clearly been activated: It’s a monster. After the morning’s orgy, and the lunchtime break, and the movie, at his friend’s house we watch an HBO film a classmate of Wallace’s is starring in—The Late Shift, about Letterman versus Leno, the titanic struggle for hosting rights on The Tonight Show.

  And then, as all of us stretch and begin wiggling and yawning away from the TV, Wallace, that trouper, wants to watch more and more.

  He knows the Late Shift’s lead actor, John Michael Higgins, from Amherst. Where Dave disliked him.]

  JULIE: Why?

  He was just very cool and popular and I wasn’t, was the basic offense. To be honest.

  [David is determined. So we watch another movie, a 1963 Bible epic called Sodom and Gomorrah. Which is 154 minutes long.]

  • • •

  NEXT MORNING

  PREPARING TO LEAVE

  [His first morning since starting the b
ook without a specific, Infinite Jest job ahead of him. He seems a touch stunned and lightened. Book finished, published, tour complete.

  David is cleaning up for the chambermaid. Very generous. Didn’t order himself breakfast.]

  [To tape] He doesn’t want to do any more room service because he doesn’t want to be more beholden to Little, Brown to do more press stuff. Turns to me: “Press stuff like this, well, actually.”

  [And on the airplane, he buckles in, then instantly goes down. A heavy sleep. He’s gotten his book out. Softly pouty, butterfly mouth slightly open. Handsome. A little silver in his hair, falling over the ears. A pink smear of sun behind his profile.]

  • • •

  BACK IN CHICAGO

  O’HARE

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  [Through baggage claim, to slushy roadway and wind outside.]

  [After we land, talking about contracts. Doesn’t want contract for a novel, even at five years.] If it was five years, it would just be pain. And I’d be being paid to undergo pain, which I don’t want to do. No one can look after me long term—I’ve learned—except me. I’ve learned no one can look after me long term better than I can. The only way we really learn things is the hard way.

  • • •

  IN CAR WHICH IS FROSTED OVER AS WE ARRIVE

  IT’S SPENT THREE DAYS IN THE COLD

  [The car has grown an ice layer, bumper icicles, and a gray frost beard on the windshield in our absence. It’s a kind of superaging Rip van Winkle we abandoned to the lot. Hardly looks to be the same car.

  Door makes cracking sound as opened: everything left inside the car is frozen. Our Diet Pepsi stock is frozen; my Snapple has snapped its glass bottle, what spilled out is frozen on the rug, a slushy brown square. The pack of cigarettes is cold, like a kind of delicacy pulled from the fridge. It’s freezing in the car; it takes a moment to poke the key through the ice shield over the lock. Glazed. The whole car is encased in a slick ice. It’s been waiting there faithfully for us.]

  [Break]

  It took him a second to ID R.E.M.’s new album.

  This doesn’t sound like them—cool.

  “Strange Currencies” is very sad and sweet.

  [Break]

  [I take his Savarin can—his spittoon—to use as an ashtray, an idea he rejects.]

  Cigarettes, cigarette butts, give you that incredible reek when you learn to spit.

  Dave adds, “Learning to spit is part of the aesthetics of this.”

  (Smiles) Someone repeating my things into the tape is an incredible ego boost. I should hire someone to do it.

  [Break]

  [I talk about the appearance of detail in his work, the introduction of it, how it started in the Harper’s pieces. He says his teacher, MacArthur-winner Brad Leithauser, said the same thing.]

  He said the same thing about not having enough sensory or emotional detail in your sentences?

  No, I remember—I remember the first draft of Broom of the System, that was my thesis. He was in—he was part of the thesis defense, and he talked about how the physical stuff seems very schematic. And he actually brought up—I hadn’t read Pnin yet. [Nabokov novel right before Lolita.] And he brought up a scene from Pnin to talk about what it was he was saying that was missing from mine.

  Did he use that snow scene?

  The what?

  The snow scene when the guy’s walking through the library?

  No, I forget—he may even have brought up the glass bowl scene, I can’t even remember.

  [We’d made a bet to check the detail at the Hungry Mind in St. Paul; but we forgot. He guessed the thing got broken, the sadder ending, I didn’t.]

  We didn’t check the glass bowl. At this point you’ll have to take my word for it.

  I prefer to take your word on the glass bowl. You seem to—your memory for stuff you’ve read I trust. It’s fairly impressive.

  [The “fairly”—I like the exactitude. Not “entirely”: “fairly.”]

  Oh, thanks a lot. I do a lot of rereading too, so …

  No, I believe in Harold Bloom’s theory of misprision. So it may be that my misreading it was actually—

  [I hold off on running “Strange Currencies” for him until we get clear of the O’Hare debris field, the horrible choked jam of an airport, with people driving crazy distracted nervous on the way in, or crazy distracted slow on the way out, talking with someone they’ve retrieved and love. On the road, we can enjoy it with some cigarettes and some speed.]

  You were talking before about your Alanis Morissette obsession?

  (Smiles) The Alanis Morissette obsession followed the Melanie Griffith obsession—a six-year obsession. It was preceded by something that I will tell you that I got teased a lot for, which was a terrible Margaret Thatcher obsession. All through college: posters of Margaret Thatcher, and ruminations on Margaret Thatcher.

  Sexual?

  Unspecifically … sexual. Sensuous perhaps.

  You have to help me remember to bring that up …

  It more involved—like having tea with Margaret Thatcher. Having her really enjoy something I said, lean forward and cover my hand with hers. [I laugh.] Very …

  [We’re shouting over R.E.M.; it’s easy to forget I’m working; it seems more like I’m just driving with a friend. Which is what he wants; he’s a natural, socially. You feel you want to work with him, or for him; you feel enlisted.]

  I mean, I didn’t really go through puberty till I was like nineteen, so things were fairly fuzzy.

  By puberty, you mean, your body getting bigger, ’cause you obviously developed gonads and crap like that, right?

  My voice didn’t change till I was nineteen. I think I had a wet dream when I was like seventeen. I told everybody about it.

  Yeah, I didn’t have a wet dream until I was twenty-two. I tried to swear off masturbating once for about three months. Other than that, I wasn’t going to have one.

  (He corrects me) People have wet dreams, even if they’re masturbating. Otherwise no one would ever have one.

  Well—

  No no no no, but what about your—Mr. Lipsky has said, he finally stopped masturbating in order to have a wet dream. The implications of which will escape no one.

  Hmm. It won’t surprise anyone who knows me.

  [Break]

  [Now we’re driving on I-294. It’s late, empty. He’s holding the tape. It’s very quiet in the car.]

  Your tour’s over. How do you feel?

  I was in a really good mood yesterday. And now today I feel bleak, ’cause I’m aware I have to go home and sort of … feel all this, instead of just sleepwalk through it.

  What do you mean by sleepwalk through it?

  Well, when you’re meeting a whole lot of new people and having to do things, you’re in—I’m in a constant low-level state of anxiety. Which produces adrenaline, and kind of shuts down—there’s a difference between short-term, people-based anxiety. And sort of deep, existential, you know, fear, that you feel kind of all the way down to your butthole. And that, I, that’s … that’s what I’ll have when I’m alone.

  What does that entail, exactly?

  I don’t know. I mean possibly over stuff like this comin’ out and the New York Times Magazine thing coming out. And—I think the big one is, I’ve just, I’ve just … I was talking with Betsy about this at lunch. Is if I, if I fuck up on this, it’s gonna be, that it just goes into my expectation bank. And I’ll think that the next thing that I do has to get this amount of fuss. Or you know, has to have this many people like it.

  And but if I do that, it’s gonna take way longer to do anything. And it’s gonna be really painful, and I’m gonna have to wrestle with burly psychic self-consciousness figures in a way that I—that I sorta hope I’m done with.

  What do you mean: “that you hope you’re done with …” Had you wrestled with them in the past?

  Oh yeah. That was—that was a horrible thing in the late twenties. Just, you know: Is this, sitting down and
having to go, Is this publishable? What will—you know—how will it look typeset? What will people say?

  Which is just—I mean I know it sounds very vapid. And I guess maybe a lot of people learn how to just shut it off right away. But I um … It got especially bad after the second book. Even as bad—I mean the second book didn’t do well. It didn’t sell well. But I still felt like it was really good. And instead of being pleased about that it was really good, it just upped my expectations of myself. In a way that was not … It wasn’t, you know, an affirming, “By gar, we’re going to do better next time.” It was more like, just a paralyzing, lower-lip-trembling way. I now have to—let me just shut this off so I can shake this tobacco out.

  [Break]

  [On what he calls the “spasms of this”] It’s almost impossible not to have these kind of spasms, you just try to have them be as ephemeral as possible.

  You said—how did you feel when the plane touched down? You know, I mean, this tour—was it fun? Was any part of it fun? I mean, was it a kick to be going around? Honestly. I mean, every writer, you’re sitting around your house, you’re writing, and you’re hoping you’ll have the most possible readers. You’re hoping the house will get excited about it and you. You’re hoping, you’re hoping that there will be people like me coming—or else—I mean, you have to be hoping that.