The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  That nobody who’s ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever. That bit is a metro Boston street term for a jail sentence, as in ‘Don G. was up in Billerica on a six-month bit.’ That it’s impossible to kill fleas by hand. That it’s possible to smoke so many cigarettes that you get little white ulcerations on your tongue. That the effects of too many cups of coffee are in no way pleasant or intoxicating.

  That pretty much everybody masturbates.

  Rather a lot, it turns out.

  That the cliché ‘I don’t know who I am’ unfortunately turns out to be more than a cliché. That it costs $330 U.S. to get a passport in a phony name. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even if those people are stupid. That you can obtain a major credit card with a phony name for $1500 U.S., but that no one will give you a straight answer about whether this price includes a verifiable credit history and line of credit for when the cashier slides the phony card through the register’s little verification-modem with all sorts of burly security guards standing around. That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish. That the term vig is street argot for the bookmaker’s commission on an illegal bet, usually 10%, that’s either subtracted from your winnings or added to your debt. That certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.

  That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.

  That ‘acceptance’ is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.

  That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.

  That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.

  That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously, without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody else know what it was you did or in any way or form trying to get credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.

  That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.

  That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.

  That it is permissible to want.

  That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.

  That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

  That God—unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both—speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.

  That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.

  That the smell of Athlete’s Foot is sick-sweet v. the smell of podiatric Dry Rot is sick-sour.

  That a person—one with the Disease/-Ease—will do things under the influence of Substances that he simply would not ever do sober, and that some consequences of these things cannot ever be erased or amended.71 Felonies are an example of this.

  As are tattoos. Almost always gotten on impulse, tattoos are vividly, chillingly permanent. The shopworn ‘Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure’ would seem to have been almost custom-designed for the case of tattoos. For a while, the new resident Tiny Ewell got first keenly interested and then weirdly obsessed with people’s tattoos, and he started going around to all the residents and outside people who hung around Ennet House to help keep straight, asking to check out their tattoos and wanting to hear about the circumstances surrounding each tattoo. These little spasms of obsession—like first with the exact definition of alcoholic, and then with Morris H.’s special tollhouse cookies until the pancreatitis-flare, then with the exact kinds of corners everybody made their bed up with—these were part of the way Tiny E. temporarily lost his mind when his enslaving Substance was taken away. The tattoo thing started out with Tiny’s white-collar amazement at just how many of the folks around Ennet House seemed to have tattoos. And the tattoos seemed like potent symbols of not only whatever they were pictures of but also of the chilling irrevocability of intoxicated impulses.

  Because the whole thing about tattoos is that they’re permanent, of course, irrevocable once gotten—which of course the irrevocability of a tattoo is what jacks up the adrenaline of the intoxicated decision to sit down in the chair and actually get it (the tattoo)—but the chilling thing about the intoxication is that it seems to make you consider only the adrenaline of the moment itself, not (in any depth) the irrevocability that produces the adrenaline. It’s like the intoxication keeps your tattoo-type-class person from being able to project his imagination past the adrenaline of the impulse and even consider the permanent consequences that are producing the buzz of excitement.

  Tiny Ewell’ll put this same abstract but not very profound idea in a whole number of varied ways, over and over, obsessively almost, and still fail to get any of the tattooed residents interested, although Bruce Green will listen politely, and the clinically depressed Kate Gompert usually won’t have the juice to get up and walk away when Tiny starts in, which makes Ewell seek her out vis-à-vis tattoos, though she hasn’t got a tattoo.

  But they don’t have any problem with showing Tiny their tatts, the residents with tatts don’t, unless they’re female and the thing is in some sort of area where there’s a Boundary Issue.

  As Tiny Ewell comes to see it, people with tattoos fall under two broad headings. First there are the younger scrofulous boneheaded black-T-shirt-and-spiked-bracelet types who do not have the sense to regret the impulsive permanency of their tatts, and will show them off to you with the same fake-quiet pride with which someone more of Ewell’s own social stratum would show off their collection of Dynastic crockery or fine Sauvignon. Then there are the more numerous (and older) second types, who’ll show you their tattoos with the sort of stoic regret (albeit tinged with a bit of self-conscious pride about the stoicism) that a Purple-Hearted veteran displays toward his old wounds’ scars. Resident Wade McDade has complex nests of blue and red serpents running down the insides of both his arms, and is required to wear long-sleeved shirts every day to his menial job at Store 24, even though the store’s heat always loses its mind in the early A.M. and it’s always wicked motherfucking hot in there, because the store’s Pakistani manager believes his customers will not wish to purchase Marlboro Lights and Mass. Gigabucks lottery tickets from someone with vascular-colored snakes writhing all over his arms.72 McDade also has a flaming skull on his left shoulderblade. Doony Glynn has the faint remains of a black dotted line tattooed all the way around his neck at about Adam’s-apple height, with instruction-manual-like directions for the removal of his head and maintenance of the disengaged head tattooed on his scalp, from the days of his Skinhead youth, which now the tattooed directions take patience and a comb and three of April Cortelyu’s barrettes for Tiny even to see.

  Actually, a couple weeks into the obsession Ewell broadens his dermotaxonomy to include a third category, Bikers, of whom there are presently none in Ennet House but plenty around the area’s AA meetings, in beards and leather vests and apparently having to meet some kind of weight-requirement of at least 200 kilos. Bikers is the metro Boston street term for them, though they seem to refer to themselves usually as Scooter-Puppies, a term which (Ewell finds out the hard way) non-Bikers are not invited to use. These guys are veritable one-man tattoo festivals, but when they show them to you they’re disconcerting because they’ll bare their tatts with the complete absence of affect of somebody just showing you like a limb or a thumb, not quite sure why you want to
see or even what it is you’re looking at.

  A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody’s general descriptions, a Biker.

  W/r/t the Stoic-Regret group within Ennet House, it emerges that the male tattoos with women’s names on them tend, in their irrevocability, to be especially disastrous and regretful, given the extremely provisional nature of most addicts’ relationships. Bruce Green will have MILDRED BONK on his jilted right triceps forever. Likewise the DORIS in red-dripping Gothic script just below the left breast of Emil Minty, who yes apparently did love once. Minty also has a palsied and amateur swastika with the caption FUCK NIGERS on a left biceps he is heartily encouraged to keep covered, as a resident. Chandler Foss has an undulating banner with a redly inscribed MARY on one forearm, said banner now mangled and necrotic because Foss, dumped and badly coked out one night, tried to nullify the romantic connotations of the tatt by inscribing BLESSED VIRGIN above the MARY with a razor blade and a red Bic, with predictably ghastly results. Real tattoo artists (Ewell gets this on authority after a White Flag Group meeting from a Biker whose triceps’ tattoo of a huge disembodied female breast being painfully squeezed by a disembodied hand which is itself tattooed with a disembodied breast and hand communicates real tattoo-credibility, as far as Tiny’s concerned) real tatt-artists are always highly trained professionals.

  What’s sad about the gorgeous violet arrow-pierced heart with PAMELA incised in a circle around it on Randy Lenz’s right hip is that Lenz has no memory either of the tattoo-impulse and -procedure or of anybody named Pamela. Charlotte Treat has a small green dragon on her calf and another tattoo on a breast she’s set a Boundary about letting Tiny see. Hester Thrale has an amazingly detailed blue and green tattoo of the planet Earth on her stomach, its poles abutting pubis and breasts, an equatorial view of which cost Tiny Ewell two weeks of doing Hester’s weekly Chore. Overall searing-regret honors probably go to Jennifer Belbin, who has four uncoverable black teardrops descending from the corner of one eye, from one night of mescaline and adrenalized grief, so that from more than two meters away she always looks like she has flies on her, Randy Lenz points out. The new black girl Didi N. has on the plane of her upper abdomen a tattered screaming skull (off the same stencil as McDade’s, but w/o the flames) that’s creepy because it’s just a tattered white outline: Black people’s tattoos are rare, and for reasons Ewell regards as fairly obvious they tend to be just white outlines.

  Ennet House alumnus and volunteer counselor Calvin Thrust is quietly rumored to have on the shaft of his formerly professional porn-cartridge-performer’s Unit a tattoo that displays the magiscule initials CT when the Unit is flaccid and the full name CALVIN THRUST when hyperemic. Tiny Ewell has soberly elected to let this go unsubstantiated. Alumna and v.c. Danielle Steenbok once got the bright idea of having eyeliner-colored tattoos put around both eyes so she’d never again have to apply eyeliner, not banking on the inevitable fade that over time’s turned the tattoos a kind of nauseous dark-green she now has to constantly apply eyeliner to cover up. Current female live-in Staffer Johnette Foltz has undergone two of the six painful procedures required to have the snarling orange-and-blue tiger removed from her left forearm and so now has a snarling tiger minus a head and one front leg, with the ablated parts looking like someone determined has been at her forearm with steel wool. Ewell decides this is what gives profundity to the tattoo-impulse’s profound irrevocability: Having a tatt removed means just exchanging one kind of disfigurement for another. There are Tingly and Diehl’s identical palmate-cannabis-leaf-on-inner-wrist tattoos, though Tingly and Diehl are from opposite shores and never crossed paths before entering the House.

  Nell Gunther refuses to discuss tattoos with Tiny Ewell in any way or form.

  For a while, Tiny Ewell considers live-in Staffer Don Gately’s homemade jailhouse tattoos too primitive to even bother asking about.

  He’d made a true pest of himself, though, Ewell did, when at the height of the obsession this one synthetic-narc-addicted kid came in who refused to be called anything but his street name, Skull, and lasted only like four days, but who’d been a walking exhibition of high-regret ink—both arms tattooed with spiderwebs at the elbows, on his fishy-white chest a naked lady with the same kind of overlush measurements Ewell remembered from the pinball machines of his Watertown childhood. On Skull’s back a half-m.-long skeleton in a black robe and cowl playing the violin in the wind on a crag with THE DEAD in maroon on a vertical gonfalonish banner unfurling below; on one biceps either an icepick or a mucronate dagger, and down both forearms a kind of St. Vitus’s dance of leather-winged dragons with the words—on both forearms—HOW DO YOU LIK YOUR BLUEYED BOY NOW MR DETH!?, the typos of which, Tiny felt, only served to heighten Skull’s whole general tatt-gestalt’s intended effect, which Tiny presumed was primarily to repel.

  In fact Tiny E.’s whole displacement of obsession from bunks’ hospital corners to people’s tattoos was probably courtesy of this kid Skull, who on his second night in the newer male residents’ Five-Man Room had shed his electrified muscle-shirt and was showing off his tattoos in a boneheaded regretless first-category fashion to Ken Erdedy while R. Lenz did headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap and Ewell and Geoffrey D. had their wallets’ credit cards spread out on Ewell’s drum-tight bunk and were trying to settle a kind of admittedly childish argument about who had the more prestigious credit cards—Skull flexing his pectorals to make the overdeveloped woman on his chest writhe, reading his forearms to Erdedy, etc.—and Geoffrey Day had looked up from his AmEx (Gold, to Ewell’s Platinum) and shaken his moist pale head at Ewell and asked rhetorically what had ever happened to good old traditional U.S. tattoos like MOM or an anchor, which for some reason touched off a small obsessive explosion in Ewell’s detox-frazzled psyche.

  Probably the most poignant items in Ewell’s survey are the much-faded tattoos of old Boston AA guys who’ve been sober in the Fellowship for decades, the crocodilic elder statesmen of the White Flag and Allston Groups and the St. Columbkill Sunday Night Group and Ewell’s chosen Home Group, Wednesday night’s Better Late Than Never Group (Nonsmoking) at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital just two blocks down from the House. There is something queerly poignant about a deeply faded tattoo, a poignancy something along the lines of coming upon the tiny and poignantly unfashionable clothes of a child long-since grown up in an attic trunk somewhere (the clothes, not the grown child, Ewell confirmed for G. Day). See, e.g., White Flag’s cantankerous old Francis (‘Ferocious Francis’) Gehaney’s right forearm’s tatt of a martini glass with a naked lady sitting in the glass with her legs kicking up over the broad flaring rim, with an old-style Rita Hayworth–era bangs-intensive hairstyle. Faded to a kind of underwater blue, its incidental black lines gone soot-green and the red of the lips/nails/SUBIKBAY’62USN4-07 not lightened to pink but more like decayed to the dusty red of fire through much smoke. All these old sober Boston blue-collar men’s irrevocable tattoos fading almost observably under the low-budget fluorescence of church basements and hospital auditoria—Ewell watched and charted and cross-referenced them, moved. Any number of good old U.S.N. anchors, and in Irish Boston sooty green shamrocks, and several little frozen tableaux of little khaki figures in G.I. helmets plunging bayonets into the stomachs of hideous urine-yellow bucktoothed Oriental caricatures, and screaming eagles with their claws faded blunt, and SEMPER FI, all autolyzed to the point where the tattoos look like they’re just under the surface of a murky-type pond.

  A tall silent hard-looking old black-haired BLTN-Group veteran has the terse and hateful single word PUSSY in what’s faded to pond-scum green down one liver-spotted forearm; but yet the fellow transcends even stoic regret by dressing and carrying himself as if the word simply wasn’t there, or was so irrevocably there there was no point even thinking about it: there’s a deep and tremendous
ly compelling dignity about the old man’s demeanor w/r/t the PUSSY on his arm, and Ewell actually considers approaching this fellow re the issue of sponsorship, if and when he feels it’s appropriate to get an AA sponsor, if he decides it’s germane in his case.

  Near the conclusion of this two-month obsession, Tiny Ewell approaches Don Gately on the subject of whether the jailhouse tattoo should maybe comprise a whole separate phylum of tattoo. Ewell’s personal feeling is that jailhouse tattoos aren’t poignant so much as grotesque, that they seem like they weren’t a matter of impulsive decoration or self-presentation so much as simple self-mutilation arising out of boredom and general disregard for one’s own body and the aesthetics of decoration. Don Gately’s developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can’t follow what Ewell’s saying and is unsure whether this is because he’s not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his fucking mind.