The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

  Though it’s not directly connected to my choice of the IRS as a career, it’s true that my father being killed in a public-transit accident in late 1977 was a sudden, horrible, and life-changing kind of event, which I obviously hope never to have to repeat in any way again. My mother took it especially hard, and had to go on tranquilizers, and she ended up being psychologically unable to sell my father’s house, and left Joyce and the bookstore and moved back into the house in Libertyville, where she still lives today, with certain pictures of my father and of them as a young couple still in the house. It’s a sad situation, and an armchair psychologist would probably say that she blamed herself somehow for the accident, even though I, more than anyone, would be in a position to know that that wasn’t true, and that, in the final analysis, the accident was no one’s fault. I was there when it happened—the accident—and there is no denying that it was one hundred percent terrible. Even today, I can remember the whole thing in such vivid, concrete detail that it almost seems more like a recording than a memory, which I’m told is not unusual for traumatic events—and yet there was also no way to recount for my mother exactly what happened from start to finish without almost destroying her, as she was already so grief-stricken, although just about anyone could have seen that a lot of her grief was unresolved conflicts and hang-ups over their marriage and the identity crisis she’d had in 1972 at age forty or forty-one and the divorce, none of which she got to really deal with at the time because she’d thrown herself so deeply into the women’s lib movement and consciousness-raising and her new circle of strange, mostly overweight women who were all in their forties, plus her new sexual identity with Joyce almost right away, which I know must have just about killed my father, given how straitlaced and conventional he tended to be, although he and I never talked about it directly, and he and my mother somehow managed to stay reasonably good friends, and I never heard him say anything about the matter except some occasional bitching about how much of his agreed-upon support payments to her were going into the bookstore, which he sometimes referred to as ‘that financial vortex’ or just ‘the vortex’—all of which is a whole long story in itself. So we never really talked about it, which I doubt is all that unusual in these sorts of cases.

  If I had to describe my father, I would first say that my mother and father’s marriage was one of the only ones I’ve seen in which the wife was noticeably taller than the man. My father was 5' 6" or 5' 6½", and not fat but stocky, the way many shorter men in their late forties are stocky. He might have weighed 170. He looked good in a suit—like so many men of his generation, his body almost seemed designed to fill out and support a suit. And he owned some good ones, most single-button and single-vent, understated and conservative, in mainly three-season worsteds and one or two seersucker for hot weather, in which he also eschewed his usual business hat. To his credit—at least in retrospect—he rejected the so-called modern style’s wide ties, brighter colors, and flared lapels, and found the phenomenon of leisure suits or corduroy sport coats nauseating. His suits were not tailored, but they were nearly all from Jack Fagman, a very old and respected men’s store in Winnetka which he had patronized ever since our family relocated to the Chicagoland area in 1964, and some of them were really nice. At home, in what he called his ‘mufti,’ he wore more casual slacks and double-knit dress shirts, sometimes under a sweater vest—his favorite of these was argyle. Sometimes he wore a cardigan, though I think that he knew that cardigans made him look a little too broad across the beam. In the summer, there was sometimes the terrible thing of the Bermuda shorts with black dress socks, which it turned out were the only kind of socks my father even owned. One sport coat, a 36R in midnight-blue slubbed silk, had dated from his youth and early courtship of my mother, she had explained—it was hard for her to even hear about this jacket after the accident, much less help tell me what to do with it. The clothes closet contained his best and third-best topcoats, also from Jack Fagman, with the empty wooden hanger still between them. He used shoe trees for his dress and office footwear; some of these were inherited from his own father. (‘These’ obviously referring to the shoe trees, not the shoes.) There was also a pair of leather sandals which he’d received as a Christmas gift, and not only had never worn but hadn’t even removed the catalogue tag from when it fell to me to go through his clothes closet and empty out the contents. The idea of lifts in his shoes would just never have occurred to my father. At that time, I had never to my knowledge seen a shoe tree, and didn’t know what they were for, since I never took care of any of my shoes, or valued them.

  My father’s hair, which had evidently been almost light brown or blond when he was younger, had first darkened and then become suffused with gray, its texture stiffer than my own and tending to curl in the back during humid weather. The back of his neck was always red; his overall complexion was florid in the way that certain stocky older men’s faces are florid or ruddy. Some of the redness was congenital, probably, and some psychological—like most men of his generation, he was both high-strung and tightly controlled, a type A personality but with a dominant superego, his inhibitions so extreme that it came out mainly as exaggerated dignity and precision in his movements. He almost never permitted himself any kind of open or prominent facial expression. But he was not a calm person. He did not speak or act in a nervous way, but there was a vibe of intense tension about him—I can remember him seeming to give off a slight hum when at rest. In hindsight, I suspect he was probably only a year or two from needing blood pressure medication when the accident occurred.

  I remember being aware that my father’s overall posture or bearing seemed unusual for a shorter man—many short men tend to stand ramrod straight, for understandable reasons—in terms of his seeming not slumped but more like slightly bent forward at the waist, at a slight angle, which added to the sense of tension or always walking into some kind of wind. I know that I wouldn’t understand this prior to entering the Service and seeing the bearing of some of the older examiners who spend all day for years at a desk or Tingle table, leaning forward to examine tax returns, primarily to identify those that should be audited. In other words, it’s the posture of someone whose daily work means sitting very still at a desk and working on something in a concentrated way for years on end.

  I really know very little about the reality of my father’s job and what-all it entailed, though I certainly now know what cost systems are.

  On the face of it, my entering a career in the IRS might appear connected to my father’s accident—in more humanistic terms, connected to my ‘loss’ of a father who was himself an accountant. My father’s technical area was accounting systems and processes, which is actually closer to data processing than real accountancy, as I would later understand. For myself, however, I am convinced that I would now be in the Service regardless, given the dramatic event that I remember totally changing my focus and attitude which occurred the following fall, during the third semester of my returning to DePaul and when I was retaking Intro Accounting, along with American Political Theory, which was another class I’d gotten an incomplete in at Lindenhurst through basically not knuckling down and putting in the work. It’s true, though, that I may have done this—retaking Intro Accounting—at least partly to please or try to pay back my father, or to at least lessen the self-disgust I had felt after his walking into the nihilistic scene in the living room which I just mentioned. It was probably only a couple days after that scene and my father’s reaction that I took the CTA commuter line down to Lincoln Park and started trying to reenroll for my last two years—in terms of credits, four terms—at DePaul, although due to certain technicalities I couldn’t officially reenter until the fall of ’77—another long story—and, thanks to knuckling down and also swallowing my pride and getting some extra help to deal with depreciation and amortization schedules, finally did pass, along with DePaul’s version of American Political Theory—which they called American Political Thought, although it and the Lindenhurst vers
ion of the course were nearly identical—in the Fall 1978 semester, though not exactly with final grades to write home about, because I largely neglected serious studying for these two classes’ final exams due to (somewhat ironically) the dramatic event, which occurred accidentally during an entirely different DePaul class, one I was not even really taking but sort of bumbled into through an inattentive screw-up during the final review period just before Christmas break, and was so dramatically moved and affected by that I barely even studied for my regular courses’ final exams, though this time not out of carelessness or sloth but because I decided I had some very important, sustained, concentrated thinking to do after the dramatic encounter with the substitute Jesuit in Advanced Tax, which was the class I’ve mentioned sitting in on by mistake.

  The fact is that there are probably just certain kinds of people who are drawn to a career in the IRS. People who are, as the substitute father said that final day in Advanced Tax, ‘called to account.’ Meaning we are talking about almost a special kind of psychological type, probably. It’s not a very common type—perhaps one in 10,000—but the thing is that the sort of person of this type who decides that he wants to enter the Service really, really wants to, and becomes very determined, and will be hard to put off course once he’s focused in on his real vocation and begun to be actively drawn to it. And even one in 10,000, in a country as large as America, will add up to a fair number of people—roughly 20,000—for whom the IRS fulfills all the professional and psychological criteria for a real vocation. These twenty or so thousand comprise the Service’s core, or heart, and not all of them are high-ranked in the IRS administration, although some of them are. These are 20,000 out of the Service’s total of over 105,000 employees. And there are no doubt core characteristics that these people have in common, predictive factors which at some point or other kick in and cause a genuine calling to pursue tax accounting and systems administration and organizational behavior and to devote themselves to helping administer and enforce the tax laws of this country as spelled out in Title 26 of the Code of Federal Regulations and the Revised Internal Revenue Code of 1954, plus all the statutes and regulations entailed by the Tax Reform Act of 1969, the Tax Reform Act of 1976, the Revenue Act of 1978, and so on and so forth. What these reasons and factors are, and to what extent they coexist with the particular talents and dispositions the Service is in need of—these are interesting questions, which today’s IRS takes an active interest in understanding and quantifying. In terms of myself and how I got here, the important thing is that I discovered I had them—the factors and characteristics—and discovered this suddenly, by what seemed at the time like nothing more than a feckless mistake.

  I’ve left out the matter of recreational drug abuse during this period, and the relation of certain drugs to how I got here, which in no way represents an endorsement of drug abuse but is just part of the story of the factors that eventually drew me to the Service. But it’s complicated, and somewhat indirect. It’s obvious that drugs were a big part of the whole scene in this era—this is well-known. I remember in the later seventies, the supposedly coolest recreational drug around Chicagoland college campuses was cocaine, and given how anxious I was at that time to conform, I’m sure I would have used more cocaine, or ‘coke,’ if I’d liked the effects. But I didn’t—like it, I mean. It didn’t cause euphoric excitement for me, it more just made me feel as though I’d had a dozen cups of coffee on an empty stomach. It was a terrible feeling, even though people around me like Steve Edwards talked about cocaine as if it was the greatest feeling of all time. I didn’t get it. I also didn’t like the way it made the people who had just done cocaine’s eyes bulge out and their lips move around on their face in strange, uncontrollable ways, and the way even shallow or obvious ideas suddenly seemed incredibly profound to them. My overall memory of this cocaine period was of being at some kind of party with someone on cocaine who kept talking to me in this very rapid, intense way, and of me trying to subtly back away, and of every time I take a step backwards they take a step forwards, and so on and so forth, until they’ve backed me against a wall of the party and my back is literally up against the wall and they’re talking very fast only inches from my face, which was something I didn’t like at all. This actually happened at parties during this period. I think I have some of my father’s inhibition. Close bodily proximity to someone who’s very excited or upset is something I’ve always had a difficult time with, which is one reason why the Audits Division was out of the question for me during the selection and posting phase at the TAC—which I should explain stands for ‘Training and Assessment Center,’ which roughly one quarter of today’s Service’s contract personnel above the grade of GS-9 have started out by attending, especially those who—like me—entered through a recruitment program. As of now, there are two such centers, one in Indianapolis and a slightly larger one in Columbus OH. Both TACs are divisions of what is commonly known as Treasury School, as the Service is technically a branch of the US Treasury Department. But Treasury also includes everything from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to the US Secret Service, so ‘Treasury School’ now stands for over a dozen different training programs and facilities, including the Federal Law Enforcement Academy in Athens GA, to which those posted to Criminal Investigations from the TAC are sent for specialized training which they share with ATF agents, the DEA, federal marshals, and so on and so forth.

  Anyhow, downers like Seconal and Valium simply made me go to sleep and sleep through whatever noise, including alarm clocks, happened to occur for the next fourteen hours, so these were not high on my list of favorites, either. You have to understand that most of these drugs were both plentiful and easy to get during this period. This was especially true at UIC, where the roommate I watched the foot and hung out so frequently at the Hat with was something of a human vending machine of recreational drugs, having established connections with mid-level dealers in the western suburbs, whom he always got extremely paranoid and suspicious if you asked him anything about, as if these were mafiosi instead of usually just young couples in apartment complexes. I know one thing he liked about me, though, as a roommate, was that there were so many different types of drugs that I didn’t like or that didn’t agree with me that he didn’t have to be constantly worried about my discovering his stash—which he usually kept in two guitar cases in the back of his half of the closet, which any idiot could have figured out from his behavior with the closet or the number of cases he had back there versus the one guitar he actually brought out and played his two songs over and over with—or ripping him off. Like most student dealers, he did not deal cocaine, as there was too much money involved, not to mention coked-out people pounding on your door at 3:00 in the morning, so that cocaine was handled more by slightly older guys in leather hats and tiny little rat-like mustaches who operated out of bars like the Hat and King Philip’s, which was another fashionable pub of the period, near the Mercantile Exchange on Monroe, where they also serviced younger commodity traders.

  The UIC roommate was usually generously stocked in psychedelics, which by that time had definitely passed into the mainstream, but personally psychedelics frightened me, mostly because of what I remembered happening to Art Linkletter’s daughter—my parents had been very into watching Art Linkletter in my childhood.

  Like any normal college student, I liked alcohol, especially beer in bars, though I didn’t like drinking so much that I got sick—being nauseated is something I essentially can’t stand. I’d much rather be in pain than sick to my stomach. But I also, like almost everyone else who wasn’t an evangelical Christian or part of Campus Crusade, liked marijuana, which in the Chicagoland area during that period was called pot or ‘blow.’ (Cocaine was not called blow by anyone I ever knew, and only hippie posers ever called pot ‘grass,’ which had been the hip sixties term but was now out of fashion.) This pot usage had peaked during high school, but I still sometimes smoked pot in college, although I suspect this was largely
a matter of just doing what everyone else did—at Lindenhurst, for instance, almost everyone smoked marijuana constantly, including openly on the south quad on Wednesdays, which everyone called ‘hash Wednesday.’ I should add that now that I am with the IRS, of course, my pot-smoking days are long behind me. For one thing, the Service is technically a law enforcement agency, and it would be hypocritical and wrong. Relatedly, the whole culture of the Examinations Division is inimical to smoking pot, as even rote exams requires a very sharp, organized, and methodical type of mental state, with the ability to concentrate for long periods of time, and, even more important, the ability to choose what one concentrates on versus ignoring, an ability which smoking marijuana would all but destroy.

  There was, however, sporadically throughout this whole period, the matter of Obetrol, which is chemically related to Dexedrine but did not have the horrible breath and taste-in-the-mouth thing of Dexedrine. It was also related to Ritalin, but much easier to get, as Obetrol was the prescription appetite suppressant of choice for overweight women for several years in the mid-seventies, and which I liked very much, somewhat for the same reasons I’d liked Ritalin so much that one time, though also partly—in this later period, with me five years older than high school—for other reasons which are harder to explain. My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling.’ It’s hard to explain. Take pot, for instance—some people report that smoking it makes them paranoid. For me, though, although I liked pot in some situations, the problem was more specific—smoking pot made me self-conscious, sometimes so much so that it made it difficult to be around people. This was another reason why smoking pot with my mother and Joyce was so awkward and tense—the truth is that I actually preferred to smoke pot by myself, and was much more comfortable with pot if I could be high by myself and just sort of space out. I’m mentioning this as a contrast with Obetrol, which you could either take as a regular capsule or untwist the halves of and crush the tiny little beads into powder and snort it up with a straw or rolled bill, rather like cocaine. Snorting Obetrols burns the inside of the nose something terrible, though, so I tended to prefer the old-fashioned way, when I took them, which I used to privately refer to as Obetrolling. It’s not like I went around constantly Obetrolling, by the way—they were more recreational, and not always easy to get, depending on whether the overweight girls you knew at a given college or dorm were serious about dieting or not, which some were and some weren’t, as with anything. One coed that I got them from for almost a whole year at DePaul wasn’t even very overweight—her mother sent them to her, along with cookies she’d baked, weirdly—evidently the mother had some serious psychological conflicts about food and weight that she tried to project onto the daughter, who was not exactly a fox but was definitely cool and blasé about her mother’s neurosis about her weight, and more or less said, ‘Whatever,’ and was content to offload the Obetrols for two dollars apiece and to share the cookies with her roommate. There was also one guy in the high-rise dorm on Roosevelt who took them by prescription, for narcolepsy—sometimes he would just fall asleep in the middle of whatever he was doing, and he took Obetrol out of medical necessity, since they were evidently very good for narcolepsy—and he would every once in a while give a couple away if he was in an expansive mood, but he never actually sold or dealt them—he believed it was bad karma. But for the most part, they were not hard to get, although the roommate from UIC never carried Obetrols for sale and squeezed my shoes about liking them, referring to the stimulants as ‘Mother’s little helper’ and saying that anyone who wanted them could just ring the doorbell of any overweight housewife in the Chicagoland area, which was obviously an exaggeration. But they were not all that popular. There weren’t even any street names or euphemisms for them—if you were looking for them, you had to just say the brand name, which for some reason seemed terribly uncool, and not enough people I knew were into them to make Obetrolling any kind of candidate for a hip term.