The David Foster Wallace Reader

by David Foster Wallace

  338. Ketorolac tromethamine, a non-narcotic analgesic, little more than Motrin with ambition—®Syntex Labs.

  339. International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

  340. Doxycycline hyclate, an I.V.-antibiotic—®Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals.

  341. Oxycodone hydrochloride + acetaminophen, a Schedule C-III narcotic oral analgesic—®Du Pont Pharmaceuticals.

  BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

  A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life

  WHEN THEY WERE introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

  The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  B.I. #14 08-96

  ST. DAVIDS PA

  ‘It’s cost me every sexual relationship I ever had. I don’t know why I do it. I’m not a political person, I don’t consider myself. I’m not one of these America First, read the newspaper, will Buchanan get the nod people. I’ll be doing it with some girl, it doesn’t matter who. It’s when I start to come. That it happens. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t even vote. I freaked out about it one time and called a radio show about it, a doctor on the radio, anonymously, and he diagnosed it as the uncontrolled yelling of involuntary words or phrases, frequently insulting or scatological, which is coprolalia is the official term. Except when I start to come and always start yelling it it’s not insulting, it’s not obscene, it’s always the same thing, and it’s always so weird but I don’t think insulting. I think it’s just weird. And uncontrolled. It’s like it comes out the same way the spooge comes out, it feels like that. I don’t know what it’s about and I can’t help it.’

  Q.

  ‘ “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” Only way louder. As in really shouting it. Uncontrollably. I’m not even thinking it until it comes out and I hear it. “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” Only louder than that: “VICTORY—” ’

  Q.

  ‘Well it totally freaks them out, what do you think? And I just about die of the embarrassment. I don’t ever know what to say. What do you say if you just shouted “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” right when you came?’

  Q.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it wasn’t so totally fucking weird. If I had any clue about what it was about. You know?’

  Q.…

  ‘God, now I’m embarrassed as hell.’

  Q.

  ‘But all there is is the once. That’s what I mean about it costing. I can tell how bad it freaks them out, and I get embarrassed and never call them again. Even if I try to explain. And it’s the ones that’ll act all understanding like they don’t care and it’s OK and they understand and it doesn’t matter that embarrass me the worst, because it’s so fucking weird to yell “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” when you’re shooting off that I can always tell they’re totally freaked out and just condescending down to me and pretending they understand, and those are the ones where actually I actually end up almost getting pissed off and don’t even feel embarrassed not calling them or totally avoiding them, the ones that say “I think I could love you anyway.” ’

  B.I. #40 06-97

  BENTON RIDGE OH

  ‘It’s the arm. You wouldn’t think of it as a asset like that would you. But it’s the arm. You want to see it? You won’t get disgusted? Well here it is. Here’s the arm. This is why I go by the name Johnny One-Arm. I made it up, not anybody being, like, hardhearted—me. I see how you’re trying to be polite and not look at it. Go ahead and look though. It don’t bother me. Inside my head I don’t call it the arm I call it the Asset. How all would you describe it? Go on. You think it’ll hurt my feelings? You want to hear me describe it? It looks like a arm that changed its mind early on in the game when it was in Mama’s stomach with the rest of me. It’s more like a itty tiny little flipper, it’s little and wet-looking and darker than the rest of me is. It looks wet even when it’s dry. It’s not a pretty sight at all. I usually keep it in the sleeve until it’s time to haul it out and use it for the Asset. Notice the shoulder’s normal, it’s just like the other shoulder. It’s just the arm. It’ll only go down to like the titty-nipple of my chest here, see? It’s a little sucker. It ain’t pretty. It moves fine, I can move it around fine. If you look close here at the end there’s these little majiggers you can tell started out wanting to be fingers but didn’t form. When I was in her stomach. The other arm—see? It’s a normal arm, a little muscley on account of using it all the time. It’s normal and long and the right color, that’s the arm I show all the time, most times I keep the other sleeve pinned up so it don’t look to be even anything like a arm in there at all. It’s strong though. The arm is. It’s hard on the eyes but it’s strong, sometimes I’ll try and get them to armwrestle it to see how strong it is. It’s a strong little flippery sucker. If they think they can stand to touch it. I always say if they don’t think they can stand touching it why that’s OK, it don’t hurt my feelings. You want to touch it?’

  Q.

  ‘That’s all right. That is all right.’

  Q.

  ‘What it is is—well first there’s always some girls around. You know what I mean? At the foundry there, at the Lanes. There’s a tavern right down by the bus stop there. Jackpot—that’s my best friend—Jackpot and Kenny Kirk—Kenny Kirk’s his cousin, Jackpot’s, that are both over me at the foundry cause I finished school and didn’t get in the union till after—they’re real good-looking and normal-looking and Good With The Ladies if you know what I mean, and there’s always girls hanging back around. Like in a group, a bunch or group of all of us, we’ll all just hang back, drink some beers. Jackpot and Kenny’re always going with one of them or the other and then the ones they’re going with got friends. You know. A whole, say, group of us there. You follow the picture here? And I’ll start hanging back with this one or that one, and after a while the first stage is I’ll start in to telling them how I got the name Johnny One-Arm and about the arm. That’s a stage of the thing. Of getting some pussy using the Asset. I’ll describe the arm while it’s still up in the sleeve and make it sound like just about the ugliest thing you ever did see. They’ll get this look on their face like Oh You Poor Little Fella You’re Being Too Hard On Yourself You Shouldn’t Be Shameful Of The Arm. So on. How I’m such a nice young fella and it breaks their heart to see me talk about my own part of me that way especially since it weren’t any fault of mine to get born with the arm. At which time when they start with that stage of it the next stage is I ask them do they want to see it. I say how I’m shameful of the arm but somehow I trust them and they seem real nice and if they want I’ll unpin the sleeve and let the arm out and let them look at the arm if they think they could stand it. I’ll go on about the arm until they can’t hardly stand to hear no more about it. Sometimes it’s a ex of Jackpot’s that’s the one that starts hanging back with me down at Frame Eleven over to the Lanes and saying how I’m such a good listener and sensitive not like Jackpot or Kenny and she can’t believe there’s any way the arm’s as bad as I’m making out and like that. Or we’ll be hanging back at her place in the kitchenette or some such and I’ll go It’s So Hot I Feel Like Taking My Shirt Off But I Don’t Want To On Account Of I’m Shameful Of The Arm. Like that. There’s numerous, like, stages. I never out loud call it the Asset believe you me. Go on and touch it whenever you get a mind to. One of the stages is I know after some time I really am starting to come off creepy to the girl, I can tell, cause all I can talk about is the arm and how wet and flippery it is but how it’s strong but how I’d just about up and die if a girl as nice and pretty and perfect as I think she is saw it and got disgusted, and I ca
n tell all the talk starts creeping them up inside and they start to secretly think I’m kind of a loser but they can’t back out on me cause after all here they been all this time saying all this nice shit about what a sensitive young fella I am and how I shouldn’t be shameful and there’s no way the arm can be that bad. In this stage it’s like they’re committed into a corner and if they quit hanging back with me now why they know I can go It Was Because Of The Arm.’

  Q.

  ‘Usually long about two weeks, like that. The next is your critical-type stage where I show them the arm. I wait till it’s just her and me alone someplace and I haul the sucker out. I make it seem like they talked me into it and now I trust them and they’re who I finally feel like I can let it out of the sleeve and show it. And I show it to her just like I just did you. There’s some additional things too I can do with it that look even worse, make it look—see that? See this right here? It’s cause there ain’t even really a elbow bone, it’s just a—’

  Q.

  ‘Or some of your ointments or Vaseline-type jelly on it to make it look even wetter and shinier. The arm’s not a pretty sight at all when I up and haul it out on them I’m telling you right now. It just about makes them puke, the sight of it the way I get it. Oh and a couple run out, some skedoodle right out the door. But your majority? Your majority of them’ll swallow hard a time or two and go Oh It’s It’s It’s Not Too Bad At All but they’re looking over all away and try and not look at my face which I’ve got this totally shy and scared and trusting face on at the time like this one thing I can do where I can make my lip even tremble a little. Ee? Ee anh? And ever time sooner or later within inside, like, five minutes of it they’ll up and start crying. They’re in way over their head, see. They’re, like, committed into a corner of saying how it can’t be that ugly and I shouldn’t be shameful and then they see it and I see to it it is ugly, ugly ugly ugly and now what do they do? Pretend? Shit girl most of these girls around here think Elvis is alive someplace. These are not girl wonders of the brain. It breaks them down ever time. They get even worse if I ask them Oh Golly What’s Wrong, how come they’re crying, Is It The Arm and they have to say It Ain’t The Arm, they have to, they have to try and pretend it ain’t the arm that it’s how they feel so sad for me being so shameful of something that ain’t a big deal at all they have to say. Oftentimes with their face in their hands and crying. Your climactic stage then is then I up and come over to where she’s at and sit down and now I’m the one that’s comforting them. A, like, factor here I found out the hard way is when I go in to hold them and comfort them I hold them with the good side. I don’t give them no more of the Asset. The Asset’s wrapped back up safe out of sight in the sleeve now. They’re broke down crying and I’m the one holding them with the good arm and go It’s OK Don’t Cry Don’t Be Sad Being Able To Trust You Not To Get Disgusted By The Arm Means So Very Very Much To Me Don’t You See You Have Set Me Free Of Being Shameful Of The Arm Thank You Thank You and so on while they put their face in my neck and just cry and cry. Sometimes they get me crying too. You following all this?’

  Q.…

  ‘More pussy than a toilet seat, man. I shit you not. Go on and ask Jackpot and Kenny if you want about it. Kenny Kirk’s the one named it the Asset. You go on.’

  Forever Overhead

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

  Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility.

  And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

  The smell is, more than anything, like this swimming pool: a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals. The pool has a strong clear blue smell, though you know the smell is never as strong when you are actually in the blue water, as you are now, all swum out, resting back along the shallow end, the hip-high water lapping at where it’s all changed.

  Around the deck of this old public pool on the western edge of Tucson is a Cyclone fence the color of pewter, decorated with a bright tangle of locked bicycles. Beyond this a hot black parking lot full of white lines and glittering cars. A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions’ downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops’ sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, an EKG of the dying day.

  The clouds are taking on color by the rim of the sky. The water is spangles off soft blue, five-o’clock warm, and the pool’s smell, like the other smell, connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins.

  Your party is tonight. This afternoon, on your birthday, you have asked to come to the pool. You wanted to come alone, but a birthday is a family day, your family wants to be with you. This is nice, and you can’t talk about why you wanted to come alone, and really truly maybe you didn’t want to come alone, so they are here. Sunning. Both your parents sun. Their deck chairs have been marking time all afternoon, rotating, tracking the sun’s curve across a desert sky heated to an eggy film. Your sister plays Marco Polo near you in the shallows with a group of thin girls from her grade. She is being blind now, her Marco’s being Polo’d. She is shut-eyed and twirling to different cries, spinning at the hub of a wheel of shrill girls in bathing caps. Her cap has raised rubber flowers. There are limp old pink petals that shake as she lunges at blind sound.

  There at the other end of the pool is the diving tank and the high board’s tower. Back on the deck behind is the SN CK BAR, and on either side, bolted above the cement entrances to dark wet showers and lockers, are gray metal bullhorn speakers that send out the pool’s radio music, the jangle flat and tinny thin.

  Your family likes you. You are bright and quiet, respectful to elders—though you are not without spine. You are largely good. You look out for your little sister. You are her ally. You were six when she was zero and you had the mumps when they brought her home in a very soft yellow blanket; you kissed her hello on her feet out of concern that she not catch your mumps. Your parents say that this augured well. That it set the tone. They now feel they were right. In all things they are proud of you, satisfied, and they have retreated to the warm distance from which pride and satisfaction travel. You all get along well.

  Happy Birthday. It is a big day, big as the roof of the whole southwest sky. You have thought it over. There is the high board. They will want to leave soon. Climb out and do the thing.

  Shake off the blue clean. You’re half-bleached, loose and soft, tenderized, pads of fingers w
rinkled. The mist of the pool’s too-clean smell is in your eyes; it breaks light into gentle color. Knock your head with the heel of your hand. One side has a flabby echo. Cock your head to the side and hop—sudden heat in your ear, delicious, and brain-warmed water turns cold on the nautilus of your ear’s outside. You can hear harder tinnier music, closer shouts, much movement in much water.

  The pool is crowded for this late. Here are thin children, hairy animal men. Disproportionate boys, all necks and legs and knobby joints, shallow-chested, vaguely birdlike. Like you. Here are old people moving tentatively through shallows on stick legs, feeling at the water with their hands, out of every element at once.

  And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

  The pool is a system of movement. Here now there are: laps, splash fights, dives, corner tag, cannonballs, Sharks and Minnows, high fallings, Marco Polo (your sister still It, halfway to tears, too long to be It, the game teetering on the edge of cruelty, not your business to save or embarrass). Two clean little bright-white boys caped in cotton towels run along the poolside until the guard stops them dead with a shout through his bullhorn. The guard is brown as a tree, blond hair in a vertical line on his stomach, his head in a jungle explorer hat, his nose a white triangle of cream. A girl has an arm around a leg of his little tower. He’s bored.

  Get out now and go past your parents, who are sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. Go right by, toward the tank at the deep end. Over the tank is a great iron tower of dirty white. A board protrudes from the top of the tower like a tongue. The pool’s concrete deck is rough and hot against your bleached feet. Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears.