Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  And so in the early Great Depression era, during which Central Illinois’ soil got not one bit dusty, the corn no less verdant, there was an unmarked intersected collision between a wealthy Chicago woman on her way South in a big touring car and a farmer on a small tractor who was crossing the road East to West to get to his other field. The car won the day. The farmer was thrown ass over teakettle into his field, where, hidden by corn, he expired. Loudly. The woman couldn’t get to him because her car had knocked him so far into the green, and the humus-clotted soil made the woman’s high-heeled shoes just impossible. The woman, who had a cut on her forehead and had killed somebody by knocking him way farther than any person was meant to fly, was traumatized beyond belief or reason. But she had will; and she vowed, right then and there, according to J.D., never to travel again. Ever.

  Her vow, plus strength of character, yielded certain implications. Her slightly dented touring car stayed right where it had stalled, and the woman lived in it. Pretty big car. Farmer Kroc’s family, across the field, was rather honked off, at first, about the collision and death and disappearance (utter) of their breadwinner’s body; but the woman, out of guilt, paid them more than the farmer himself would have brought in in a lifetime; and not only was there no litigation, but the woman became almost an extended Kroc-family member, from her home in the motionless car. Various farm kids, at first out of minimal bare human charity, brought her food and basic essentials, appearing from the walls of corn as out of nowhere with the things she needed to live.

  And but in return, plus out of gratitude and guilt, she reimbursed them, for these essentials. In fact she paid anybody who brought her anything she wanted. Inevitably, given the way the world wags, a kind of market was quickly established: here was this urban person in this big car at an intersection equidistantly central to rurally Depressed Champaign, Rantoul, and Urbana, who wanted things, and would exchange money for the things. The area was substantially transfigured. Misery, guilt and charity became prosperity, redemption, market. Itinerant Depressed poor, but with things, and entrepreneurial drive, flocked to the intersection where her tractor-smacked car sat inert, she inside. The redeemed poor built lean-to’s, which became perma-tents, which became shanties, thence a kind of nouveaux-bourgeois Rooseveltville, clustered around the site of the collision.

  A handsome scimitar-nosed itinerant peddler, bicycling through from back East, where things were just not in good shape at all, bearing East-Coast flora he’d purloined from the lavish funeral of a recently suicided banker, was the one who got in on the ground floor, so to speak. He saw the woman, in the car, and in that kind of ingenious marketing epiphany from which American legend grows, insisted on selling the woman his very top-of-the-line tea-rose bulb. At cost. The bulb was planted in the world’s second-richest soil and in no time at all begat a bush. The bush begat countless other bushes, through fertilization, and an irruption of Valentine red began to impose its beauty on the green utterness of the farmerless field’s own beauty.

  In a parallel development, the destitute itinerant peddler and the wealthy inert woman fell in love with each other, in the big car, eventually begat a child, and then moved out of the car (a car being no place for a child) into a sprawling farmhouse the peddler designed and the woman underwrote, a house from which they never budged again, sustained by those in the surrounding shanties whose origin and reason was sustaining the guilty wealthy woman. The irruption of rose bushes became an actual tea-rose farm, a central dot of red on the state’s black-and-green, camouflaged face, and Jack and Mrs. Jack Steelritter raised their well-fed children on the sheltered intersection Jack had discovered between beauty, desire, and discount.

  Across the cornfield-turned-rose-farm, the Ray Kroc, Sr., farm family, minus a patriarch, but plus a settlement way beyond legal, and with a son who, once out from under his hardworking father’s shadow, discovered he had vision, began to engineer a rotation, shifting the emphasis of their labor and capital in the direction of cattle, potatoes, and sugar. And it became good.

  For whom is the Funhouse a house? Maybe for liars, creative types, campaigners, tree surgeons having at the great Saxonic tree. For Tom Sternberg, the Funhouse is less a place of fear and confusion than (grimace) an idea, an ever-distant telos his arrival at which will represent the revelated transformation of a present we stomach by looking beyond. A present comprised by fear of confusion.

  OK true, Funhouse 1, like all the foreseen and planned national chain of Funhouse franchises, is, in reality, just a discotheque. A watering hole and meat market and gathering place where the spotlights tell us where and how to swing to the beat. One big enclosed anarchic revel—a Party: where we, via Party rule, gather and pretend with grim Puritan fortitude that we’re having just way more fun than anybody could really be having.

  OK now but the Funhouse also represents, to Sternberg—as hero, as Protagoras—the Funhouse represents the future. As of right now, the prediction here is that Sternberg will arrive, through the inexorable internal logic of his choice and circumstance, at Collision’s Funhouse, as a tagged and registered part of the foretold and long-awaited Reunion of Everyone Who’s Ever Represented the Product in a McDonald’s Commercial; will unite and interact with the crowd of actors there; will have numerous insights, revelations and epiphanies; and will, ultimately, at the end of the time, confront his future. An implication will be that Sternberg, as an emblem—or synecdochical appendage—of his generation, will countenance, in his future, The Future.

  All this is being made explicit both to avoid any possible appearance of Symbolist/New Realist coyness, and also because the true tension of any record of Reunion day just doesn’t rely on this stuff, and so hopefully isn’t compromised or tranquilized by being made, as Dr. Ambrose told the workshop just before Memorial Day, “desuppressed, anti-replenished, exhausted, in full view.”

  He’d tell us yes friends and neighborhood association the textual tension and payoff here lies in the exact sort of late-twentieth-century Future this introverted aspiring product-representative will confront. Ambrose explained—and it’s all in Mark Nechtr’s notes, in a precise crabbed hand—Ambrose held that there are numerous types of potential futures flapping and honking in man’s conceptual pond. Specifically that there’s differences between the trinity of: a future within time (history & prophecy); a future beyond time (resurrection & eternity); and a future that ends time (eschaton & apocalypse). Which did we find most attractive? he’d asked rhetorically, finally wiping the nastily critical poem off his green blackboard.

  Three other things Dr. Ambrose told the workshop (that Mark Nechtr doesn’t have in his tiny crabbed notes because his attention had strayed to the loveless pathos of the postmodern Drew-Lynn Eberhardt and the thing she’d scrawled before blowing off class):

  “The subject of a story is what it’s about; the object of a story is where it’s going”;

  “Do not confuse sympathy for the subject and empathy with it—one of the two is bad.”

  “Yes, he, Ambrose, the author, is a character in and the object of the seminal Lost in the Funhouse; but he is not the main character, the hero or subject, since fictionists who tell the truth aren’t able to use real names.”

  Since and as J.D. and DeHaven Steelritter are still arguing about whether it’s more efficient to shut off DeHaven’s growling car, out there in the pay lot, and since no one connected to today is in sight in the terminal or rest room (Mark went in and checked for collegiate cuffs and footwear under the stall doors) to guide them, still, the trio of Mark and D.L. and Sternberg are to be seen making their way toward the arrowed signs for Ground Transportation, their object being to rent a Datsun, Mark carrying both his light bag and D.L.’s bag, a stabbing sensation in his thorax which full hands prevent him from verifying as his special Dexter target arrow, which he’s attached to, and hid from the LordAloft 7:10 pilot in his shirt, and is still carrying there, D.L. walking with arms crossed over a lime-green-jacket-enclosed chest whose dimens
ions remain, to Sternberg, disappointingly vague, her pelvis preceding her by at least a couple steps. Sternberg is lugging the bag his parents bought him, casting his castable eye this way and that for anyone with a gold parabolic nametag, an expectant expression, a clown’s face—eye casting over a Semitically modest set of cheekbones but a rather snoutish Gentilic nose, a full if somewhat ill-defined mouth, his face itself unfortunately one big chaos of poison-sumac cysts, infections and scars, dimpled as a metal roof post-hailstorm; and of course a pleasant blue forward-looking eye and an unnatural dead-white backward-looking eye. Ironically, a good part of his anticorporeal stance (it was his idea to call having a body Corporeal Punishment) derives from his nonfatal flaw, the skin trouble, the skin trouble itself deriving from a weekend years past, just before a cattle call for a Wisk spot he didn’t get, a weekend of solo camping and getting-into-collar-soiled-character, alone, with a tent, in the Berkshires, West of Boston, during which he’d contracted a mild spatter of poison sumac, and had purchased a discount generic brand of poison-sumac medicine he curses now and forever (like most terse-labeled generics the product was untrustworthy, turned out in fact to be medicine for the sumac, not the sufferer therefrom, but if the label says MEDICINE FOR POISON SUMAC what the fuck are you going to think, standing there?) that had set his face, neck, chest and back aflame: pulsing, cystic, volcanic, allergic, clotted, almost sacredly scarred. The sumac is so bad it hurts—which of course is a constant reminder that it’s there, on his body—and it won’t go away, no sooner healed by brand-name antitoxin than reinfected. The whole thing’s just pretty loathsome, and you can bet Sternberg loathes it. He’s unhappy, but in that comparatively neat and easy way of those who are at least pretty sure they know why they’re unhappy, and what to curse, now and forever.

  They walk, with luggage, Mark bobbing slightly, D.L. loin-led and probably pregnant, Sternberg trailing and casting. Onto the escalator’s shaver-head steps, down. Here’s that Oriental again, with the tattered black bangs, ascending at them. The Oriental’s still alone. Sternberg ponders: how often do you see just one Oriental anyplace? They tend to move in packs. The sun is early-to-mid-morning. Lots of Eastward windows glide diagonally up as they deescalate. The sunlight is both glaring and impure. Dew-turned-humidity rises as one slow body from the green sweep of corn, the mist breaking Swiss-cheesily into patches as it heats and ascends to mess with the purity of the light. Mark could tell Sternberg how most Occidentals don’t realize that Orientals do often appear in transit alone, do often pronounce liquid consonants at least as well as your average airport P.A. announcer. That their eyes aren’t any smaller or wickedly slanted than our own: they just have a type of uncircumcised eyelid that reveals slightly less total eye. The eyes in Mark’s healthy face appear vaguely oriental; they have that boxer-in-the-late-rounds puffiness, especially when he hasn’t slept. But he’s occidental as they come. He’s a third-generation-German Baltimore WASP, though lately converted, D.L. wrote Sternberg, by an insidious pedagogical Mesmer of an archery coach, from an ambivalent parental Catholicism to Trinitarianism, known also as Mathurinism or Redemptionism. D.L., who is postmodern, and so atheist, wrote bitterly to Sternberg during her then-just-friend’s formal conversion: the whole thing was savage, medieval, cannibalistic, lust-ridden, “This bread is my body” transformed into factitive verbs and epithetic nouns, a linguistic bewitchment, a leximancical fraud: how can three things be both one thing and three things? They just can’t be, is all. But Sternberg thinks he gets the idea. If you can just want something bad enough, “to want” becomes factitive. Sternberg wants to heal himself. To act. He wants it more than anything.

  The opposing escalator carries the Oriental up at them. Mark declines to meet the man’s uncut eye. D.L. actually walks down the downward glide of their conveyor, the sort of girl who treats escalators like stairs, behavior which has always frightened and confused Sternberg. Her ass is disproportionately wide, flat, ungentle.

  But so, at least, notice, though the going is slow. It’s undeniable that they don’t even yet have transportation to the Funhouse, and that it’s awfully slow going, here. Not one of them would deny this, and they’re tired, and D.L. coming off meds, and Mark hungry and his bloodstream crying out for coffee. And Sternberg needs a b____ movement like nobody’s business.

  But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it’s frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what’s going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age. It probably gets less slow as you get older and more of the world is behind you, and less ahead, but very few people of our generation are going to find this exchange attractive, I’ll bet. Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr, over beers and a blossom at the East Chesapeake Tradeschool Student Union Bar & Grill, that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It’s then that they’ll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch—and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience—that life, instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.

  Meanwhile, oddly, here’s another of these well-dressed young guys, in the lower terminal, near Ground Transportation, young and bearded and groomed, giving away money like it’s going out of style, checking things off on a clipboard so full his slim hands strain to keep it together. Mark approaches him. He wants to verify the scam; he feels like he’s figured out who these guys are: they’re Mormons, it’s some irritatingly altruistic Mormon thing. He wants to check it out before giving D.L. their Visa card, but D.L. is edgy, coming off Dalmane, a member of the Valium family. And a surprisingly sharp-voiced argument ensues, about schedules and reliability and lateness and who’s responsible for what, in terms of various fuck-ups. It’s the kind of public-place argument between married people you don’t listen to, if you’re polite.

  A REALLY BLATANT AND INTRUSIVE INTERRUPTION

  As mentioned before—and if this were a piece of metafiction, which it’s NOT, the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned, a required postmodern convention aimed at drawing the poor old reader’s emotional attention to the fact that the narrative bought and paid for and now under time-consuming scrutiny is not in fact a barely-there window onto a different and truly diverting world, but rather in fact an “artifact,” an object, a plain old this-worldly thing, composed of emulsified wood pulp and horizontal chorus-lines of dye, and conventions, and is thus in a “deep” sense just an opaque forgery of a transfiguring window, not a real window, a gag, and thus in a deep (but intentional, now) sense artificial, which is to say fabricated, false, a fiction, a pretender-to-status, a straw-haired King of Spain—this self-conscious explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction “realer” than a piece of pre-postmodern “Realism” that depends on certain antiquated techniques to create an “illusion” of a windowed access to a “reality” isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths to which all authentically human persons stand in the relation of applicand—all of which the Resurrection of Realism, the pained product of inglorious minimalist labor in countless obscure graduate writing workshops across the U.S. of A., and called by Field Marshal Lish (who ought to know) the New Realism, promises to show to be utter baloney, this
metafictional shit… plus naïve baloney-laced shit, resting on just as many “undisclosed assumptions” as the “realistic” fiction metafiction would try to “debunk”—one imagines nudists tearing the poor Emperor’s clothes to shreds and then shrieking with laughter, as if they didn’t go home to glass-enclosed colonies, either—and, the New Real guys would argue, more odious in the bargain, this metafiction, because it’s a slap in the faces of History and History’s not-to-be-fucked-with henchman Induction, and opens the door to a fetid closetfull of gratuitous cleverness, jazzing around, self-indulgence, no-handsism, which as Gardner or Conroy or L’Heureux or hell even Ambrose himself will tell you are the ultimate odium for any would-be passionate virtuoso—the closest we get to the forbidden, the taboo, the odium, the asur…—and so the number of lines between won’t be mentioned, though its ass-pain would have been subordinate to and considerably more economical in terms of severely limited time than this particular consideration and refusal—there’s to be, today, a Reunion of everyone who has ever appeared in any of the 6,659 McDonald’s commercials ever conceived and developed and produced and shot and distributed by the same J.D. Steelritter Advertising that has sent myriad and high-technically seductive invitations, information packets, travel vouchers, brochures, and carefully targeted inducements and duressments (no maps, though, oddly) to everyone who’s ever appeared. And get this: the Reunion’s been so well conceived and promoted that everyone who’s still alive has promised to show up. One hundred percent positive response is, J.D. knows, no accident. This Reunion’s been in the works a long time. Besides things that spin, this gala’s conception and arrangement have been J.D. Steelritter’s central passion for years. He was predicting something like this right from the beginning. Converging on the sleepy, rose-scented town of Collision are close to 44,000 former actors, actresses, puppeteers, unemployed clowns: thousands of pilgrims from each of the great twelve market-determined classes of commercial actor: Caucasian, Black, Asian, Latin, Native American/Eskimo, plus finally those who wear bright mâché heads and costumes; with a dittoed six categories of child actors from child-spots aimed like cathode revolvers at the wide-eyed Saturday-morning and late-weekday-afternoon market. Free plane fare; complimentary LordAloft shuttle from O’Hare to Central Illinois Airport; clown-car transportation to the Reunion grounds (for the punctual); gold nametags, for keepsies; access to the flagship discotheque of a franchise that promises to thrive like carcinomae, to be the place to be seen, in the millennium ahead; free food (natch); a chance to meet and pal around with J.D. Steelritter and Ronalds 1 and 3, to chuck baseballs at the targeted dunk-tank over which will be suspended Ronald 2, to engage in general orgiastic Walpurgisrevel that would have just shot Faust’s rocks; and finally the appearance, at 12:00 sharp, directly overhead, of Jack Lord, star, with a bullhorn and plastic rifle, Jack Lord, a fucking icon, aloft, in a helicopter, waving. It’s going, the glossy brochure promises, to be a Reunion to end all reunions. Exclamation point. And it’s going to be made into the biggest McDonald’s commercial of all time. And they’re going to get paid all over again.