Girl With Curious Hair

by David Foster Wallace

  ‘May I ask what exactly I’m to be hired to do?’ I asked, stepping back to give him room to rotate in front of the mirror, checking his coat.

  Lyndon looked at his watch. ‘You’re a mailboy.’

  I didn’t parse. ‘Isn’t that a little redundant?’

  ‘You deliver mail, boy,’ he said, bearing down on the door’s handle. ‘You think you can deliver some mail in this office do you?’ I trailed him through the noise and fluorescence of the staff’s office complex. There were cubicles and desks and Congressional Records and gray machines. The harsh doubled overhead lights threw the range of his shadow over every desk he passed.

  ‘The Senator places great importance on communication with citizens and constituents at all times,’ Dora Teane told me. I was handed an index card. Its heading, bold-face, read SAME DAY DIRECTIVE. ‘It is an office regulation for the staff that every piece of mail the Senator receives must be answered that same day it came in.’ She put her hand on my arm. I got a faint odor of luncheon meat. The card was filled with numbered instructions, the handwriting spiky and almost childish. I was sure it was not the penmanship of a secretary.

  ‘That’—Mrs. Teane indicated the index card—‘is an unprecedented regulation for offices of Senators.’

  She showed me the Dirksen Building’s basement mailroom, the mail boxes, mail bags, mail carts. Lyndon Johnson received seas of mail every day.

  “I’m a compromiser and a maneuverer. I try to get something.

  That’s the way our system in the United States works.”

  —In The New York Times, December 8, 1963

  Margaret and I found a pleasant walk-up apartment on T Street NW. I was able to walk to the Dirksen Building. Margaret, who had gumption and drive, landed a part-time job teaching composition to remedials at Georgetown. I quickly became familiar with a good many of the huge number of young staffers who swarmed yearly from eastern colleges to the Hill. I established a regular relationship with a shy, smooth young press aide to another senior Southern Senator in the Building. Peter, who lasted four months, had a marvelous Carolinian manner and was as interested in discretion as I.

  And I delivered mail. I emptied, thrice daily, gold-starred boxes, wire baskets, and dull-white sacks of mail into carts with canvas sides, trundled them over gray cellar stone into the freight elevator, and brought them up to Lyndon’s maze of wooden offices and glass cubicles. I sorted mail in the sweet-smelling mimeo room. I got to know quickly what classes of mail there were and which went to whom for response. I got to know Lyndon’s circle of assistants and researchers and aides and secretaries and public relations people, the whole upper-subordinate staff: Hal Ball, Dan Johnson, Walt Peltason, Jim Johnson, Coby Donagan, Lew N. Johnson, Dora Teane and her pool of typists—all pleasant, Southern, deeply tense, hardworking, dedicated to the constituency of Texas, the Democratic Party, and united in a complicated, simultaneous suspension of fear, hatred, contempt, awe, and fanatical loyalty to Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  “Every night when I go to bed I ask myself: ‘What did we do today that we can point to for generations to come, to say that we laid the foundations for a better and more peaceful and more prosperous and less-suffering world?’ ”

  —Press Conference, Rose Garden

  White House

  April 21, 1964

  “Oh he could be a bastard. He had it in him to be a beast, and it was widely known. He’d hide paper-clips on the floor beneath his desk, to test the night custodian. He’d scream. One day he’d be as kind as you please and the next he’d be screaming and carrying on and cursing you and your whole family tree, in the most vile language, in front of your public coworkers. We became accustomed to this and all stopped, gradually we stopped being embarrassed by it, because it happened to all of us at one time or another. Except Mr. Boyd. We had a policy of trying to stay out of the Vice President’s peripheral vision. He would go into rages for days at a time. But they were quiet rages. But oh that only made them more frightening. He prowled the offices the way a prowling storm will prowl. You never knew when it would hit, or where, or who. Rages. It was not a working environment I enjoyed, sir. We were all terrified much of the time. Except Mr. Boyd. Mr. Boyd, sir, never received an unkind public word from the Vice President from the first day he came to work when the Vice President was still a Senator. We believed that Mr. Boyd was a close relative at the time. But I wish to say Mr. Boyd never abused his position of immunity to the rages, however. Whether as a messenger all the way up to executive assistant, oh he worked as hard as we did, sir, and was as devoted to the Vice President as one man can be devoted to another. These are only the opinions of one typist, of course.”

  —Former typist in the office of LBJ

  November, 1963

  The truth made the truth’s usual quick circuit around the offices, the Building, the Hill. I was a homosexual. I had been a homosexual at Yale. In my last year before matriculating to the Business College, I met and became intimate with a Yale undergraduate, Jeffrey, a wealthy boy from Houston, Texas, who was beautiful, often considerate, wistful, but passionate, possessive, and a sufferer from periodic bouts of clinical depression so severe he had to be medicated. It was the medication, I discovered, that made him wistful.

  My lover Jeffrey ran with a group of synthetic but pleasant Texas socialites, one of whom was Margaret Childs, a tall, squarely built girl who eventually claimed, from unknown motive, to be in love with me. Margaret pursued me. I declined her in every sensitive way I knew. I simply had no interest. But Jeffrey grew inflamed. He revealed that his friends did not and must not know he was a homosexual. He pushed me to avoid Margaret altogether, which was hard: Margaret, gritty, bright enough to be chronically bored, had become puzzled, suspicious, of Jeffrey’s (quite unsubtle) attempts to shield me from her. She smelled potential drama, and kept up the pursuit. Jeffrey became jealous as only the manic can. In my first year in Business, while I was shopping for my father’s annual Christmas golf balls, Jeffrey and Margaret had it out, publicly, dramatically, in a Beat New Haven coffeehouse. Jeffrey put his foot through a doughnut counter. Certain information became public. Bits of this public information got back to my parents, who were close to the parents of two of my housemates. My parents came to me, personally, at Yale, on campus. It was snowing. At dinner with my parents and housemates, at Morty’s, Jeffrey became so upset that he had to be taken to the men’s room and calmed. My father swabbed Jeffrey’s forehead with moist paper towels in a cold stall. Jeffrey kept telling my father what a kind man he was.

  Before my parents left—their hands literally on the handles of the station wagon’s doors—my father, in the snow, asked me whether my sexual preferences were outside my own control. He asked me whether, were I to meet the right woman, I might be capable of heterosexual love, of marriage and a family and a pillar-type position in the community of my choice. These, my father explained, were his and my mother’s great and only wishes for me, their one child, whom they loved without judgment. My mother did not speak. I remember a distanced interest in the steam of my own breath as I explained why I thought I could not and so would not do as my father wished, invoking Fifties’ wisdom about deviancy, invoking a sort of god of glands as a shaman might blame vegetable spirits for a lost harvest. My father nodded continually throughout this whole very serious and civil conversation while my mother checked maps in the glove compartment. When I failed to present for next week’s holiday, my father sent me a card, my mother a check and leftovers in foil.

  I saw them only once more before my father dropped dead of something unexpected. I had left Jeffrey’s company, and had been befriended in my upset by a still grimly determined Margaret Childs. Jeffrey unfortunately saw, in all this, cause to take his own life, which he did in an especially nasty way; and he left, on the table beneath the heating pipes from which he was found suspended, a note—a document—neatly typed, full enough of absolute truth concatenated with utter fiction that I was asked by the administratio
n of the Business College to leave Yale University. Weeks after my father’s wake I married Margaret Childs, under a mesquite tree, the blue stares of my mother and a Houston sky, and a system of vows, promises of strength, denial, trial, and compassion far beyond the Childs’ Baptist minister’s ritual prescriptions.

  The truth, to which there was really no more than that, and which made its way through the Senator’s staff, the Dirksen and Owen Buildings, and the Little Congress of the Hill’s three-piece-suited infantry remarkably focused and unexaggerated, concluded with the fact that Margaret’s father, Mr. Childs, less wealthy than outright powerful by the standards of 1958’s Texas, had lines of political influence that projected all the way into the U.S. Senate, and that he, Mr. Childs, in a gesture that was both carrot and stick, slung his son-in-law on one line of that influence and had me hand-over-hand it into the offices of a risen and rising, uncouth and ingenious senior Senator, a possible Democratic candidate in the next Presidential election. Lyndon.

  I categorized and delivered mail. Business mail, official mail, important or letterheaded mail was all put into the hands of one or another of Lyndon’s eight closest advisors and aides. Intra-Senate mail went to one of three administrative assistants.

  All envelopes addressed by hand—automatically classified as letters from constituents—were doled out by Mrs. Teane and me among secretaries, interns, typists, low-level staffers. There was often far more of this constituents’ mail, these Voices of the People, full of invective or adulation or petition for redress or advantage, far, far more than the low-level personnel could handle in a physical day. I developed and got approval for a few standardized replies, form letters made to look personal, responding to some one or another major and predictable theme in some of this mail, but we were still barely ahead of the Same Day Directive’s demands. Backlogs threatened. I began staying at the offices late, telephoning Margaret or Peter to release me from the evening’s plans, working to finish up assembling the Senator’s replies to his people’s every voice. I enjoyed the night’s quiet in the staff room, one lamp burning, cicadas thrilling in rhythm out on the grounds. The staffers who handled mail began to appreciate me. A typist kept bringing me loaves of banana bread. Best, I now got access to Mrs. Teane’s dark and deeply bitter East Texas coffee; she’d leave me a chuckling percolator of it as she made the closing rounds, plump and clucking, turning off lights and machines. I enjoyed the offices’ night.

  And, most nights, Lyndon’s lights would glow from the seams in his heavy office door. I could sometimes hear the muffled tinniness of the transistor radio he listened to when alone. He rarely left the building before ten, sometimes later, slinging his coat over a shoulder, sometimes speaking to someone absent, sometimes jogging toward an abrupt halt that let him slide the length of the slick staffers’ floor, not a glance in my direction as I read crudely cursived letters, advancing a few to Mrs. Teane’s attention, determining which of the pre-prepared responses were appropriate for which of the others, applying the Senator’s signature stamp, moistening, fastening, metering, stacking, smoking.

  And one night I looked up in a lean shadow to find him stopped, puzzled, before my desk in the big empty staff room, as if I were a person unknown to him. It’s true we’d rarely spoken since that first interview four months ago. He stood there, cotton sportcoat over shoulder, impossibly tall, inclined slightly over me.

  ‘What on God’s green earth you doing, boy?’

  ‘I’m finishing up on some of this mail, sir.’

  He checked his wrist. ‘It’s twelve midnight at night, son.’

  ‘You work yourself pretty hard, Senator Johnson.’

  ‘Call me Mr. Johnson, boy,’ Lyndon said, twirling a watchless fob that hung from his vest. ‘You can just go on ahead and call me mister.’

  He hit another lamp and settled tiredly behind the desk of Nunn, a summer intern from Tufts.

  ‘This isn’t your job, boy.’ He gestured at the white castle of stacks I’d made. ‘Do we pay you to do this?’

  ‘Someone needs to do it, sir. And I admire the Same Day Directive.’

  He nodded, pleased. ‘I wrote that.’

  ‘I think your concern with the mail is admirable, sir.’

  He made that thoughtful, clicking sound with his mouth. ‘Maybe not if it keeps some sorry red-eyed boy up licking all night without remuneration it isn’t.’

  ‘Someone needs to do it,’ I said. Which was true.

  ‘Words to live my life by, son,’ he said, throwing a boot up onto Nunn’s blotter, opening an envelope or two, scanning. ‘But damned if most wives who had minds in their head would let most husbands stay out this late, leave them lonesome till twelve midnight at night.’

  I looked at my own watch, then at the heavy door to Lyndon’s office.

  Lyndon smiled at my point. He smiled gently. ‘I carry my Miss Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson in here, boy,’ he said, tapping at his chest, the spot over the scar from his recent bypass (he’d shown the whole office his scar). ‘Just like my Bird carries me in her own personal heart. You give your life to other folks, you give your bodily health and your mind in your head and your intellectual concepts to serving the people, you and your wife got to carry each other inside, ’matter from how far away, or distant, or alone.’ He smiled again, grimacing a little as he scratched under an arm.

  I looked at him over a government postal meter.

  ‘You and Mrs. Johnson sound like a very lucky couple, sir.’

  He looked back. He put his glasses back on. His glasses had odd clear frames, water-colored, as if liquid-filled.

  ‘My Lady Bird and me have been lucky, haven’t we. We have.’

  ‘I think you have, sir.’

  ‘Damn right.’ He looked back to the mail. ‘Damn right.’

  We stayed that night, answering mail, for hours, mostly silent. Though, before the air around the distant Monument got mauve and a foggy dawn lit the Hill, I found Lyndon looking at me, hunched in my loosened three-piece, staring at me, over me, somehow, nodding, saying something too low to hear.

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’

  ‘I was saying to keep it up, boy, is what. Keep it up. I kept it up. You keep it up.’

  ‘Can you elaborate on that?’

  ‘Lyndon Baines Johnson never elaborates. It’s a personal rule I have found advantageous. I never elaborate. Folks distrust folks who elaborate. Write that down, boy: “Never elaborate.” ’

  He rose slowly, using Nunn’s little iron desk for support. I reached for my little notebook and pen as he shook the wrinkles out of his topcoat.

  “I never saw a man with a deeper need to be loved than LBJ.”

  —Former aide, 1973

  “He hated to be alone. I mean he really hated it. I’d come into his office when he was sitting alone at his desk and even though you could tell it wasn’t me he wanted to see, his eyes would get this relieved light… He carried a little pocket radio, a little transistor radio, and sometimes we’d hear it playing in his office, while he worked in there alone. He wanted a little noise. Some voice, right there, talking to him, or singing. But he wasn’t a sad man. I’m not trying to give you that impression of him. Kennedy was a sad man. Johnson was just a man who needed a lot. For all he gave out, he needed things back for himself. And he knew it.”

  —Former research aide Chip Piesker, April 1978

  I began doing much of my quieter busywork in Lyndon’s inner office, on the red floor, among the stars. I sorted and categorized and answered mail on the floor in the corner, then on the long pine table when Piesker was remanded to my desk outside to put together Lyndon’s daily news summary. I answered more and more of the personal mail. Lew N. Johnson said I lent a special, personal touch. Mrs. Teane began to forward things to my attention instead of vice versa.

  Lyndon often asked me to jot things down for him—thoughts, turns of phrase, reminders. He showed, even then, a passion for rhetoric. He’d ask to see the little notebook I carried, and
review it.

  He did run in 1960, or rather canter, in the primaries, while still a Senator. His determination not to shirk duties in the Senate meant that he couldn’t really run more than halfway. But his Dirksen Building office still tripled its staff and came to resemble a kind of military headquarters. I took orders directly from Lyndon or from Dora. Mail became more and more a priority. I did some crude 1960-era mass mailings for the campaign, working with P.R. and the weird shiny-eyed men in Demographics.

  Aides and advisors and friends and rivals and colleagues came and went and came and went. Lyndon hated the telephone. Dora Teane would put only the most urgent calls through. Those who knew Lyndon well always came by personally for ‘chats’ that sometimes made or ended careers. They all came. Humphrey looked like the empty shell of a molted locust. Kennedy looked like an advertisement for something you ought not to want, but do. Sam Rayburn reminded me of an untended shrub. Nixon looked like a Nixon mask. John Connally and John Foster Dulles didn’t look like anything at all. Chet Huntley’s hair looked painted on. DeGaulle was absurd. Jesse Helms was unfailingly polite. I often brought, to whoever had to wait a few minutes, some of Mrs. Teane’s dark special blend. I sometimes chatted for a few moments with the visitor. I found my new French useful with the general.

  Margaret Childs Boyd, my wife of almost two years, had found undershorts of mine, in the laundry, ominously stained, she said, from the very beginning of our time on T Street. She threatened to tell Mr. Jack Childs, now of Austin, that certain elaborate and philosophical prenuptial arrangements seemed to have fallen through. She had entered into an ill-disguised affair with a syndicated cartoonist who drew Lyndon as a sort of hunched question mark of a man with the face of a basset. She enjoyed, besides mechanical missionary congress, drinking imported beer. She had always enjoyed the beer—the first image her name summons to me involves her holding a misted mug of something Dutch up to the New Haven light—but now she got more and more enthusiastic about it. She drank with the cartoonist, with her remedial colleagues, with other election widows. Drunk, she accused me of being in love with Lyndon Johnson. She asked whether some of my stained shorts should be tucked away for posterity. I made her some good strong East Texas blend and went to my room, where by now I frequently worked into the morning on itineraries, mail, mailings, the organization and editing of some of Lyndon’s more printable observations and remarks for possible inclusion in speeches. I became, simultaneously, a paid member of Lyndon’s secretarial, research, and speech-writing staffs. I drew a generous enough salary to keep my new companion, M. Duverger, a young relation to the Haitian ambassador to the United States, in a pleasant, private brownstone unit that seemed ours alone. Duverger too admired the autographed portrait of Vice President and Mrs. Johnson I had hung, with his permission, in one of our rooms.