Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (18 page)

[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.

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.

[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
]

[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.]

J
ULIE:
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.]

[His first morning since starting the book 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.]

[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.

[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
.

Yeah
. But it’s weird. One of the things I don’t like about myself is, I have a very low capacity for
enjoyment
. Of an actual thing that’s going on. ’Cause I manage to turn almost anything into something scary. My hope is that when you and I bid each other a fond farewell, and this phase is truly over, that besides just quivering …