Authors: David Foster Wallace
son?
Right? Am I right? Come here, kid. C’mere c’mere c’mere c’mere. That’s a boy. That’s
my J.O.I. of a guy of a joy of boy. That’s my kid, in his body. He never came once,
Jim. Not once. To watch. Mother never missed a competitive match, of course. Mother
came to so many it ceased to mean anything that she came. She became part of the environment.
Mothers are like that, as I’m sure you’re aware all too well, am I right? Right? Never
came once, kiddo. Never lumbered over all slumped and soft and cast his big grotesque
long-even-at-midday shadow at any court I performed on. Till one day he came, once.
Suddenly, once, without precedent or warning, he… came. Ah. Oh. I heard him coming
long before he hove into view. He cast a long shadow, Jim. It was some minor local
event. It was some early-round local thing of very little consequence in the larger
scheme. I was playing some local dandy, the kind with fine equipment and creased white
clothing and country-club lessons that still can’t truly play, even, regardless of
all the support. You’ll find you often have to endure this type of opponent in the
first couple rounds. This gleaming hapless lox of a kid was some client of my father’s
son… son of one of his clients. So he came for the client, to put on some sham show
of fatherly concern. He wore a hat and coat and tie at 95° plus. The client. Can’t
recall the name. There was something canine about his face, I remember, that his kid
across the net had inherited. My father wasn’t even sweating. I grew up with the man
in this town and never once saw him sweat, Jim. I remember he wore a boater and the
sort of gregariously plaid uniform professional men had to wear on the weekends then.
They sat in the indecisive shade of a scraggly palm, the sort of palm that’s just
crawling with black widows, in the fronds, that come down without warning, that hide
lying in wait in the heat of midday. They sat on the blanket my mother always brought—my
mother, who’s dead, and the client. My father stood apart, sometimes in the waving
shade, sometimes not, smoking a long filter. Long filters had come into fashion. He
never sat on the ground. Not in the American Southwest he didn’t. There was a man
with a healthy respect for spiders. And
never
on the ground under a palm. He knew he was too grotesquely tall and ungainly to stand
up in a hurry or roll screaming out of the way in a hurry in case of falling spiders.
They’ve been known to be willing to drop right out of the trees they hide in, in the
daytime, you know. Drop right on you if you’re sitting on the ground in the shade.
He was no fool, the bastard. A golfer. They all watched. I was right there on the
first court. This park no longer exists, Jim. Cars are now parked on what used to
be these rough green asphalt courts, shimmering in the heat. They were right there,
watching, their heads going back and forth in that windshield-wiper way of people
watching quality tennis. And was I nervous, young sir J.O.I.? With the one and only
Himself there in all his wooden glory there, watching, half in and out of the light,
expressionless? I was not. I was in my body. My body and I were one. My wood Wilson
from my stack of wood Wilsons in their trapezoid presses was a sentient expression
of my arm, and I felt it singing, and my hand, and they were alive, my well-armed
hand was the secretary of my mind, lithe and responsive and
senza errori,
because I knew myself as a body and was fully inside my little child’s body out there,
Jim, I was in my big right arm and scarless legs, safely ensconced, running here and
there, my head pounding like a heart, sweat purled on every limb, running like a veldt-creature,
leaping, frolicking, striking with maximum economy and minimum effort, my eyes on
the ball and the corners both, I was two, three, a couple shots ahead of both me and
the hapless canine client’s kid, handing the dandy his pampered ass. It was carnage.
It was a scene out of nature in its rawest state, Jim. You should have been there.
The kid kept bending over to get his breath. The smoothly economical frolicking I
was doing contrasted starkly compared to the heavily jerky way he was being forced
to stomp around and lunge. His white knit shirt and name-brand shorts were soaked
through so you could see the straps of his jock biting into the soft ass I was handing
him. He wore a flitty little white visor such as fifty-two-year-old women at country
clubs and posh Southwestern resorts wear. I was, in a word, deft, considered, prescient.
I made him stomp and stagger and lunge. I wanted to humiliate him. The client’s long
sharp face was sagging. My father had no face, it was sharply shadowed and then illuminated
in the wagging fronds’ shadow he half stood in but was wreathed in smoke from the
long filters he fancied, long plastic filtered holders, yellowed at the stem, in imitation
of the President, as courtiers once spluttered with the King… veiled in shade and
then lit smoke. The client didn’t know enough to keep quiet. He thought he was at
a ball game or something. The client’s voice carried. Our first court was right near
the tree they sat under. The client’s legs were out in front of them and protruded
from the sharp star of frond-shade. His slacks were lattice-shadowed from the pattern
of the fence his son and I played just behind. He was drinking the lemonade my mother
had brought for me. She made it fresh. He said I was good. My father’s client did.
In that emphasized way that made his voice carry. You know, son? Good godfrey Incandenza
old trout but that lad of yours is
good.
Unquote. I heard him say it as I ran and whacked and frolicked. And I heard the tall
son of a bitch’s reply, after a long pause during which the world’s whole air hung
there as if lifted and left to swing. Standing at the baseline, or walking back to
the baseline, to either serve or receive, one of the two, I heard the client. His
voice carried. And then later I heard my father’s reply, may he rot in a green and
empty hell. I heard what… what he said in reply, sonbo. But not until after I’d fallen.
I insist on this point, Jim. Not until after I’d started to fall. Jim, I’d been in
the middle of trying to run down a ball way out of mortal reach, a rare blind lucky
dribbler of a drop-shot from the over-groomed lox across the net. A point I could
have more than afforded to concede. But that’s not the way I… that’s not the way a
real player plays. With respect and due effort and care for every point. You want
to be great, near-great, you give every ball everything. And then some. You concede
nothing. Even against loxes. You play right up to your limit and then pass your limit
and look back at your former limit and wave a hankie at it, embarking. You enter a
trance. You feel the seams and edges of everything. The court becomes a… an extremely
unique place to be. It will do everything for you. It will let nothing escape your
body. Objects move as they’re made to, at the lightest easiest touch. You slip into
the clear current of back and forth, making delicate X’s and L’s across the harsh
rough bright green asphalt surface, your sweat the same temperature as your skin,
playing with such ease and total mindless effortless effort and and and entranced
concentration you don’t even stop to consider whether to run down every ball. You’re
barely aware you’re doing it. Your body’s doing it for you and the court and Game’s
doing it for your body. You’re barely involved. It’s magic, boy. Nothing touches it,
when it’s right. I predict it. Facts and figures and curved glass and those elbow-straining
books of yours’ lightless pages are going to seem flat by comparison. Static. Dead
and white and flat. They don’t begin to…. It’s like a dance, Jim. The point is I was
too bodily respectful to slip up and fall on my own, out there. And the other point
is I started to fall forward even
before
I started to hear him reply, standing there: Yes, But He’ll
Never Be Great
. What he said in no way made me fall forward. The unlovely opponent had dribbled
one just barely over the too-low public-park net, a freak accident, a mishit drop-shot,
and another man on another court in another early-round laugher would have let it
dribble, conceded the affordable, not tried to wave a hankie from the vessel of his
limit. Not race on all eight healthy scarless cylinders desperately forward toward
the net to try to catch the goddamn thing on the first bounce. Jim, but any man can
slip. I don’t know what I slipped on, son. There were spiders well-known to infest
the palms’ fronds all along the courts’ fences. They come down at night on threads,
bulbous, flexing. I’m thinking it could have been a bulbous goo-filled widow I stepped
and slipped on, Jim, a spider, a mad rogue spider come down on its thread into the
shade, flabby and crawling, or that leapt suicidally right from an overhanging frond
onto the court, probably making a slight flabby hideous sound when it landed, crawling
around on its claws, blinking grotesquely in the hot light it hated, that I stepped
on rushing forward and killed and slipped on the mess the big loathsome spider made.
See these scars? All knotted and ragged, like something had torn at my own body’s
knees the way a slouching Brando would just rip a letter open with his teeth and let
the envelope fall on the floor all wet and rent and torn? All the palms along the
fence were sick, they had palm-rot, it was the
A.D.
year 1933, of the Great Bisbee Palm-Rot epidemic, all through the state, and they
were losing their fronds and the fronds were blighted and the color of really old
olives in those old slim jars at the very back of the refrigerator and exuded a sick
sort of pus-like slippery discharge and sometimes abruptly fell from trees curving
back and forth through the air like celluloid pirates’ paper swords. God I hate fronds,
Jim. I’m thinking it could have been either a daytime
latrodectus
or some pus from a frond. The wind blew cruddy pus from the webbed fronds onto the
court, maybe, up near the net. Either way. Something poisonous or infected, at any
rate, unexpected and slick. All it takes is a second, you’re thinking, Jim: the body
betrays you and down you go, on your knees, sliding on sandpaper court. Not so, son.
I used to have another flask like this, smaller, a rather more cunning silver flask,
in the glove compartment of my Montclair. Your devoted mother did something to it.
The subject has never been mentioned between us. Not so. It was a
foreign
body, or a substance, not my body, and if anybody did any betraying that day I’m
telling you sonny kid boy it was something
I
did, Jimmer, I may well have betrayed that fine young lithe tan unslumped body, I
may very well have gotten rigid, overconscious, careless of it, listening for what
my father, who I respected, I
respected
that man, Jim, is what’s sick, I knew he was there, I was conscious of his flat face
and filter’s long shadow, I knew him, Jim. Things were different when I was growing
up, Jim. I hate… Jesus I hate saying something like this, this things-were-different-when-I-was-a-lad-type
cliché shit, the sort of cliché fathers back then spouted, assuming he said anything
at all. But it was. Different. Our kids, my generation’s kids, they… now you, this
post-Brando crowd, you new kids can’t like us or dislike us or respect us or not as
human beings, Jim. Your parents. No, wait, you don’t have to pretend you disagree,
don’t, you don’t have to say it, Jim. Because I know it. I could have predicted it,
watching Brando and Dean and the rest, and I know it, so don’t splutter. I blame no
one your age, boyo. You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk
or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair
lip-red. Kids today… you kids today somehow don’t know how to
feel,
much less love, to say nothing of respect. We’re just bodies to you. We’re just bodies
and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you.
I’m not saying something cliché like you take us for granted so much as I’m saying
you cannot… imagine our absence. We’re so present it’s ceased to mean. We’re environmental.
Furniture of the world. Jim, I could imagine that man’s absence. Jim, I’m telling
you you cannot imagine my absence. It’s my fault, Jim, home so much, limping around,
ruined knees, overweight, under the Influence, burping, nonslim, sweat-soaked in that
broiler of a trailer, burping, farting, frustrated, miserable, knocking lamps over,
overshooting my reach. Afraid to give my last talent the one shot it demanded. Talent
is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding
forever. Use it or lose it, he’d say over the newspaper. I’m… I’m just afraid of having
a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. It’s… potential may be worse
than none, Jim. Than no talent to fritter in the first place, lying around guzzling
because I haven’t the balls to… God I’m I’m so
sorry
. Jim. You don’t deserve to see me like this. I’m so scared, Jim. I’m so scared of
dying without ever being really
seen
. Can you understand? Are you enough of a big thin prematurely stooped young bespectacled
man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand? Can you see I was
giving it all I had? That I was
in
there, out there in the heat, listening, webbed with nerves? A self that touches
all edges, I remember she said. I felt it in a way I fear you and your generation
never could, son. It was less like falling than being shot out of something, is the
way I recall it. It did not did
not
happen in slow motion. One minute I was at a dead and beautiful forward run for the
ball, the next minute there were hands at my back and nothing underfoot like a push
down a stairway. A rude whip-lashing shove square in the back and my promising body
with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came
down on my knees this flask is empty right down on my knees with all my weight and
inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper surface forced into what was an exact parody
of an imitation of contemplative prayer, sliding forward. The flesh and then tissue
and bone left twin tracks of brown red gray white like tire tracks of bodily gore
extending from the service line to the net. I slid on my flaming knees, rushed past
the dribbling ball and toward the net that ended my slide. Our slide. My racquet had
gone pinwheeling off Jim and my racquetless arms out before me sliding Jim in the
attitude of a mortified monk in total prayer. It was given me to hear my father pronounce
my bodily existence as not even potentially great at the moment I ruined my knees
forever, Jim, so that even years later at USC I never got to wave my hankie at anything
beyond the near- and almost-great and would-have-been-great-