Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (3 page)

The words are from Chris Fogle, a “wastoid” character in
The Pale King
, but they might as well be Wallace’s. He liked to get high at home before he studied. His parents tolerated the behavior. All the same, Wallace preferred to smoke standing on a chair in an upstairs bathroom blowing the smoke out with an exhaust fan so no one would notice. He may have had himself in mind when he wrote of Hal in
Infinite Jest
, another pothead,
that he was “as attached to the secrecy as he was to getting high.” His sister remembers his father looking up from his newspaper to ask his son, who was on the way out the door, not to smoke marijuana in the car. A fellow high school student introduced him to acid, and he tried tripping one weekend when his parents were away. But he felt sick to his stomach and went to bed for the next twenty-four hours. Afterward he told his sister he thought he was going to die. Pot was what worked, allowing Wallace both calm and emotional privacy. But he also knew it could cause its own anxiety, marooning him in a private, claustrophobic consciousnesss. In such moments nothing was clear or stable and thoughts circled in on themselves in a way that called unassailable truths—the meaning of words, the structure of reality—into question. In a later essay, he would remember the problem with getting high, recalling how under the drug’s influence one eats

The beginning of high school was a good time academically for Wallace. The work was easy; he got all his reading and papers done within a few weeks of the start of classes, which left him time for hanging out and tennis. His intelligence stood out more with each year—one English teacher remembers him as the brightest student she ever had. Other kids tried to cheat off him and he developed a peculiar tiny uppercase script to foil them, or so he would later say. One day he asked his father to explain what philosophy was about. Jim Wallace had his son read the
Phaedo
, Plato’s argument for an afterlife. Wallace grasped the philosophical reasoning of the dialogue immediately. It was the first time his father realized how brilliant his son was, his mind faster, his father remembers, than that “of any undergraduate I have ever taught.” His mother remembers realizing
around this time that David would just “hoover everything.” His grades put him near the top of his class. He was also on the debate team and won a prize for best student writing.

But there was a brittleness to this surge too. Within, Wallace was growing less and less happy. His childhood anxiety was back. He could be obsessive, unwilling or unable to leave whatever impinged on his world unexplored. Mostly it seemed funny more than anything else to those who knew him, character rather than disease. “My particular neurological makeup [is] extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I’m ‘lifesick,’” he wrote in a later essay. But by the end of high school his problems were hard to ignore. On his sister’s fifteenth birthday, Wallace refused to go out with his family. “Why would I want to celebrate that?” he asked pointedly. The family was confused and chalked it up to his always simmering competitiveness with Amy, but in fact—as they realized years later—he was having an anxiety attack. They went without him. He talked about painting his bedroom walls black and added a newspaper picture of Kafka to the wall of tennis stars on the corkboard in his room with the caption: The disease was life itself. By the end of his junior year, remembers Amy, he was often too upset to go to class, and by senior year, with college nearing, the anxiety that had been shimmering just below the surface of his life grew into full-blown panic attacks. He was not sure what set them off, but he saw that they quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more. This was a crucial moment for Wallace’s mental life and one he would never forget—he saw clearly the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself. From these experiences he would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation.

To cover his attacks, Wallace walked around school with his tennis racket and a towel. He was sweating because he was just off the court—that was the idea he was trying to convey. He took extra showers. He was nauseated often before going to class. He thought maybe he was just upset. In a culture and a place still less than comfortable with mental illness, he likely tried to diagnose himself (“ruminative obsession, hyperhydrosis, and parasympathetic nervous system arousal loop” are some of the diagnoses the phobic David Cusk comes up with in
The Pale King
.) His mother thought of his anxiety,
she would later tell an interviewer, as the “black hole with teeth,”
³
but neither she nor her husband knew what to do about it, beyond letting their son stay home from school when he had to. Perhaps they hoped the problem would go away when he went to college. Clearly biological changes were going on in Wallace—depression often first appears in puberty—but the young man may also have been responding to the environment he had grown up in, to the wide-open spaces and unstructured world of late-1970s midwestern America. If he was furtive or anxious, perhaps it was in part because he had a hard time figuring out what the rules were.

Though Wallace was growing sicker during the end of his high school years, no one saw it clearly, least of all Wallace. He was a top achiever and outwardly very functional. He got to school often enough. The intensity of his flashes of anger never quite called attention to themselves as symptoms. As a senior in high school, Wallace became interested in another Urbana High student, Susan Perkins. Perkins was dating another young man, Brian Spano, whom they were all friends with, but at a party that Wallace threw one night, Spano left early and something went on between Perkins and Wallace. He smashed his hand into the refrigerator. He appeared the next day in school with a cast on it.

Going to a prestigious private college was one of the ways the Wallaces differed from some of their midwestern peers. Wallace told friends he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps to Amherst, inventing a layer of pressure he hardly needed, but in fact, as Jim Wallace remembers, he thought Oberlin College might be a good match for his son and drove him east to Ohio to visit it first. Wallace dreaded interviews. Life for him had the quality of a performance, and being called on to perform within that performance was too much. At the admissions interview Wallace grew anxious. He would one day transform the scene into Hal’s breakdown at the opening of
Infinite Jest
:

When the interview was over, Wallace went back to his hotel and threw up in the ice bucket. Later in the fall, he traveled to his father’s alma mater. The longtime head of admissions at Amherst ran the process himself. He liked to admit promising candidates right at the interview—it was how he kept the school competitive with Harvard and Yale. Wallace had tremendous grades, a good tennis game, and a family connection. He was in before he had to say anything. Back home, he told his parents, “If I agree to go, does that mean I don’t have to go to another college interview?” Jim Wallace said yes. “Sold!” Wallace said.

During his last summer at home he taught tennis for the fifth summer in a row with Maehr and Flygare. What had gone on in the past year wasn’t clear to him; mostly he must have hoped it wouldn’t happen again, that he could leave his problems behind when he went east. He was eager to be a part of the larger intellectual world and equally eager to show that he was his father’s equal academically. So, as the summer ended, he packed his suitcase, put in his favorite bathrobe, a suit and tie for dress-up occasions, and headed east. Before leaving, he spent the last couple of days wandering around the neighboring cornfields saying goodbye.

At the opening convocation for the class of 1984, in Johnson Chapel, the president of Amherst urged the entering students to overcome ignorance and be tolerant of one another. He ended with a poem by Emily Dickinson, one of whose grandfathers had helped found the school:

Wallace had been assigned to room with Raj Desai and Dan Javit, two young men who wanted to be doctors. Wallace had already marked himself as a bit of an oddball by writing a letter to Desai in the summer, suggesting, because his future roommate lived near Amherst, that he should, as Desai recalls, bring “some of the larger items—the refrigerator comes to mind.” He ended by saying he looked forward to “a productive and inspiring year.” It was the kind of formality that sometimes seized Wallace in unfamiliar situations, part of the reason that, smart as he was, the move from high school to college was bound to be challenging.

The three young men had a two-room suite in Stearns Hall on the main quad. The building was crowded and flimsy, built to house the flood of GIs
enrolling after World War II, and so they could hear their neighbors through the wall.
¹
The three young men slept in one room, Wallace in the upper level of a bunk bed (he called it the “vag”), Javit below. Desai was in a twin bed across from them. The second room was where they were supposed to study, but Desai had brought a tarantula. The spider unnerved Wallace, who had a fear of bugs. The arachnid would expose its huge fangs, as if trying to bite him through the glass. Wallace quickly came to prefer the library.

Wallace was by turns thrilled and terrified to be at Amherst, but mostly he was just disoriented. He was at a school a thousand miles away from home, nearly all male, and preppy. The first class of freshwomen had not yet graduated and one-quarter of the students were children of fathers who, like James Wallace, had gone to the school. The closest Wallace had come to this sort of world before were the frat houses at the University of Illinois, which could not have been further from his family’s emphasis on the life of the mind. Wallace tended to dislike what he did not know and so he instinctively gave this culture a broad berth. (He would later nickname the Amherst of trust-fund children “Armrest.”) At the same time he was excited—excited to be away from home, excited to be among top professors with other hand-selected members of his generation, excited to be fulfilling what he saw as a challenge to meet his parents’ expectations for him. His self-image was still of a regular guy, a tennis player, a top student, and that was who he wanted to be at Amherst. The school was famous for its many singing organizations, and Wallace told his family he had joined the Glee Club, where another member was Prince Albert of Monaco.

But anxiety and the fear of anxiety were woven into his behavior by now too, and even as he tried to open himself up to the range of college experiences, he also protectively narrowed his life. He was happiest when things were predictable, when his work was under control and the people around him familiar. In Stearns he quickly developed routines. Every day he set his alarm for the same time to give himself the chance to climb down from the bunk and go to the hall bathroom to slick back his hair and then climb back in for a ten-minute catnap, stepping on the lower mattress twice—once coming and once going—and waking the sleeping Javit.

At first, he and his roommates ate together and socialized. They all joined the JV tennis team, whose practices were open to anyone interested. Wallace had lost his tennis ambitions—he told his old friend John Flygare the top players at Amherst were too good—and he never went out for the varsity. But against ordinary players he was still impressive. Desai and Javit were amazed at his big topspin strokes and the power he got out of his beaten-up racket. Otherwise Wallace made a slight impression as an extremely polite, strangely tentative, and very skinny classmate. His acne, which had first afflicted him late in high school, got suddenly much worse, and he treated it with a cream, the application of which involved a prolonged and careful examination of each pimple on his face. Behind his back he was sometimes called “mushface.” His roommates, without knowing precisely what, suspected him to be under some sort of unusual stress. Javit remembers being surprised when Wallace, whom he usually found cerebral and low-key, would once in a while open the window of their room in the morning and scream out into the quad, “I love it here!” There was a loneliness to him, too, in their eyes. The other two boys had visits from family; they had friends. Wallace gave off the impression of having neither; his mother had dropped him there and left. The regular care packages she sent seemed not to satisfy whatever need Wallace had. He did not make friends the way Javit and Desai did. (The good-looking Desai, Wallace would later grouse, had girls lining up to do his laundry.) One day, the three took prank photos on the campus. In one, Wallace, straight shiny bangs, Chicago White Sox T-shirt over a black turtleneck, holds a cupped hand under his empty school mailbox, while he regards the camera with a look of hurt. If home did not seem to miss Wallace, Wallace missed home. He dreamed of the Illinois farmland and the small city he had grown up in. He wrote his family, they remember, that the mountains in Massachusetts were “pretty” but the terrain wasn’t beautiful “the way Illinois is.”