At the bottom of such short essays, Wallace liked to practice signing his name: Dave W. David W. “Hi,” he introduced himself in a letter to his teacher when he was nine. “My name is David W. But just call me Dave.” “David Foster Wallace,” he put above another poem about Vikings when he was six or seven (“If you see a Viking today / it’s best you go some other way”), trying on his middle name—his mother’s family name—for size.
Wallace’s writing as a child was ordinary too, mostly, though when he had the opportunity, his sense of humor came out. He had a fondness for parody. “Dougnu-Froots,” he wrote in a grade school experiment in writing, are
“inexpensive, colorful, tasty little angels of mercy to your hungry stomach,” and Burpo Soda boasted “the taste of wetness—if you’re not thirsty, you better change the channel.” He had a mind that moved naturally to puns and satires, the obverse face of a thing.
The Wallace home was one where there was always room for an appeal. From the age of ten David would write memos to his parents detailing injustices, so it was natural for him to assume that the rest of the world would be as interested in his opinion. This approach led, predictably, to friction with many grown-ups. David’s cries of “Why?” and “That doesn’t make sense!” were familiar at Yankee Ridge Elementary, where he went from 1969 to 1974, and though teachers saw how smart he was, many found him a handful. One day at Crystal Lake Day Camp, where he and Amy went many summers, he grew tired of the counselors and their rules and simply walked several miles back to his house. (His mother drove back to the camp in a fury and asked them to produce her son. When they could not, she said, “Because he’s at home!”)
When David was ten, his mother began teaching English full-time at Parkland Community College. Their father might be home working on a book; other times a key was left under the mat. His hours were filled by reading. Wallace devoured the Hardy Boys and
The Wizard of Oz
, and Thornton Burgess’s
Old Mother West Wind
. He liked adventure and fantasy and inhabited the typical imaginative life of a young boy, enjoying the tension in the journey from threat to triumph. He studied books about sharks and memorized dates and places of attack. A book called
Bertie Comes Through,
about an awkward teenager who perseveres (“‘At least I’m in there trying,’ says Bertie to himself”), he read over and over. In sixth grade, when he was twelve, he helped his elementary school get to the championships in the Battle of the Books—an “interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competition,” as he fictionalized it in
Infinite Jest
. Dave was in the local paper with a picture, hand up, pouncing on a question. His name appeared again that same year when a poem he wrote about Boneyard Creek, an old irrigation ditch that passed behind the local library, shared first prize:
Did you know that rats breed there?
That garbage is their favorite lair.
Wallace won $50 for it. He read
Dune
, the long science fantasy novel, P. G. Wodehouse’s comedies, and went to a lot of movies, including
Jaws
, of course, which sealed his fear of sharks, and when he was older,
Being There
, starring Peter Sellers, which he saw over and over and which fascinated him with its portrait of a man who learns everything he knows from television. One Saturday afternoon a month Sally would drop her two children at the movie theaters in downtown Urbana or Champaign to see whatever they wanted. If there was an R-rated movie Sally would write them a note so they could get in.
And finally there was television itself. As a family, the Wallaces watched
Mary Tyler Moore
,
All in the Family,
and
M*A*S*H.
Jim and Sally believed in responsibility and autonomy, so when David was twelve he was given his own black-and-white set. Champaign-Urbana had only four stations—the three national networks and a public television one—but David would sit on the scratchy green couch in his bedroom for hours and watch and watch: reruns of
Hogan’s Heroes
,
Star Trek
,
Night Gallery
, and
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
. The cartoons on Saturday morning he loved too, and Saturday night’s
Creature Features
, which was so scary he’d take his little set into his closet. He even watched soap operas—
Guiding Light
was his favorite—and game shows,
The Price Is Right
. His TV watching was intense and extensive enough to worry his parents, and in later years he would acknowledge that television was a major influence in his childhood, the key factor in “this schizogenic experience I had growing up,” as he called it to an interviewer in his early thirties, “being bookish and reading a lot, on the one hand, watching grotesque amounts of TV, on the other.” He added, “Because I liked to read, I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me.”
1
Aggression was not welcome in the Wallace household—the only shows the parents restricted were violent ones—but David could be malicious. The preferred object of his anger was his sister. When she was three, he knocked out her front teeth in what was always known in the family as a tug-of-war accident. When he was in ninth grade, he got so mad at her after a slight dispute that he pushed her down and dragged her through the backyard through the excrement left by their dog. In exchange for her silence, Wallace traded her his beloved Motobécane, a bicycle that had taken him months of allowance and lawn mowing to buy.
2
He told his parents
an elaborate cover story that they never believed. Even when they were teens, he would taunt Amy mercilessly, telling her she was ugly or fat, or would make exaggerated gestures of shrinking from her as she walked down the hall or wry faces when she would take a second helping.
This meanness stands out in the context of the rest of Wallace’s life. His classmates remember him as cheerful, popular, funny, in the upper middle of the pack academically. But he saw himself as insignificant, unattractive, on the outside. Some of the things he wanted to be true weren’t. In later years he would claim his athletic skills had been formidable—he was, he would say, “a really serious jock”—but in fact he was not good at sports. He didn’t play football after school in the pickup games and was famously bad at basketball. He was graceless and used a hook shot to avoid contact. At night at home he would lie in bed and think of all the things that were wrong with his body. As he remembered in a later note:
Feet too thin and narrow and toes oddly shaped, ankles too thin, calves not muscular enough; thighs squnch out repulsively when you sit down; pecker too small or if not too small in terms of shortness too small in terms of circumference.
He called it his version of counting sheep. He sweated a lot and was embarrassed by it. But Wallace always had intense will—
David Comes Through
—and he managed to get on a Little League baseball team, the Meadow Gold Dairy squad, in fourth grade, a team widely remembered as terrible. He even got a toehold in the region’s most prestigious sport when he was eleven or twelve, playing on a flag football team. Sports were an important currency, even at the rather sheltered Brookens Junior High School, where Wallace went after Yankee Ridge, for seventh grade. Socially, Wallace was becoming more of a clown, someone good at imitations, at times a teaser who would lash out with his wit, then retreat into the pack. He threw snowballs at a classmate on his paper route, then ran away when the boy confronted him, then came back out and threw them again. He mocked the boy’s father’s love of flowers. He was usually good at assessing power dynamics, but one time he sassed some larger kids, who hung him up by his underpants from a coat hook in the locker room. When he got down, Wallace gathered up his dignity and left. The image
was not soon forgotten, neither by his friends nor by Wallace. (The cloying Leonard Stecyk suffers a similar wedgie in
The Pale King,
a novel Wallace would write more than twenty years later.)
There is another thread that weaves in and out of Wallace’s childhood. He believed in later years that the mental disease that would in many ways define his life began at this time. “Summer, 71 or 72”—Wallace was nine or ten—“First occasion of ‘Depressive, clinically anxious feelings,’” he wrote in a medical history summary toward the end of his life. He became excessively afraid of mosquitoes, especially of their buzzing. His parents say they did not notice problems this early, nor did his sister. “It’s a lot easier to fix something if you can see it,” a character comments in
Infinite Jest
. But in a family that prided itself on openness, Wallace never felt safe disclosing himself. He worried, then as he always would later, that to know him too well would be to dislike him. Or at least dislike him as much as he disliked himself. He felt a fake, a victim, as he would later write, of “imposter syndrome.” He believed his parents expected great things from him and worried he was not capable. The one member of the family he felt truly comfortable with was Roger, the family dog. Roger lived year-round in a doghouse in the family’s backyard, because David was allergic, and he would regularly go out to keep the dog company or to break the ice on his water bowl. He had, his sister remembers, “an incredibly keen sense of empathy” for the beagle-pointer-terrier mix.
Wallace made two important discoveries in his early teen years: tennis and marijuana. These were the twin helpers that carried him through high school. Because Brookens didn’t offer tennis, Wallace took lessons at the local park. He was the first among his peers to play the sport. He immediately took to it and found that calculating angles and adjusting for wind velocity gave him an advantage over other players. He could excel at the game even though he was not strong for his age. It wasn’t a cool sport; in fact for most midwesterners at the time, it existed only on television. “It wouldn’t have been any stranger if he had been good at jai alai,” one friend remembers. “No one else played tennis.” But Wallace loved it and brought
his focus to the game—the $50 he made from his Boneyard Creek essay went to a summer stint at John Newcombe’s tennis camp in Texas. The Urbana high school had a team, and when Wallace was in ninth grade, he joined. The group was among the best in the public schools of the region. They fashioned an outsider image for themselves, in cutoff T-shirts, bandanas, and colored shoelaces in an era when tennis players were still expected to wear white—they were the tennis-playing toughs from a big public high school even if at that school they were the sissies who played tennis. Wallace, who was the best among his friends before high school, continued to be one of the top players.
But biology cannot be outrun forever. Wallace was late entering puberty, and the others began getting bigger than he was. His game peaked early in high school. His habit of rationalizing every hit had its downside; his teammates played more by instinct and so were faster. If no longer as good as his peers, Wallace remained very good—his boast in a memoir in
Harper’s
more than a decade later that he was “near great” being only a slight overstatement. After senior year, he was still number eleven in the Middle Illinois Tennis Association, although his close friends John Flygare and Martin Maehr, who had started tennis after he did, were number five and number seven respectively. And he understood where things were headed. Flygare remembers their winning the finals of the eighteen-and-under doubles competition of the Central Illinois Open that summer of 1980 and Wallace’s comment afterward that it was the last tournament he would ever win. And so it was.
The three friends taught tennis beginning in the summer of 1976, Wallace then fourteen, in the same Urbana public parks where they had learned. As an instructor, Wallace let his pleasure in words play out. Noticing that in tennis manuals overheads were usually abbreviated OH, he started calling them “hydroxides.” And he would name his teams after sections of
Ulysses
: the Wandering Rocks and Oxen of the Sun. Another year he ran drills and any player who botched one had to listen to a section of Wallace’s life story (made up).
The tennis team was Wallace’s social life too. The sport drew a particular kind of kid, one for whom Wallace was more congenial than he was to many of the others in their large urban high school. He was odd to them but not unfathomable. When their children were freshmen, parents would
drive the players to tournaments around the state, but soon the older kids got their licenses and the group could go anywhere they wanted. They drove the circuit of tournaments, staying in hotels, eating in hamburger joints, and killing time playing mini-golf. One time they went to a Van Halen concert; another time the others all ditched Wallace, who was in the hotel room taking one of the long showers he was famous for. They slept two to a motel bed and did “woody checks.” Bonded into a team, no one was permanently in or out, blows were taken and given; if you weren’t careful your bed would be peed in. Wallace, with his teasing sense of humor and energy, was always in the scrum. He was not the leader but he was not the last either. These boys—his pals from the place he called Shampoo-Banana—would stay Wallace’s friends his whole life, able to approach him when he was famous the way few others could. His teammates were more successful with girls than Wallace, and, frustrated, he would try to solve the complexity of attraction the way he solved the trajectory of a tennis shot: “How do you know when you can ask a girl out?” “How do you know when you can kiss her?” His teammates told him not to think so hard; he would just know.
Marijuana—the other great find of his youth—helped Wallace with his self-consciousness and calmed a growing anxiety. Pot in the late 1970s was everywhere in the Midwest. Not quite legal, it was all the same barely hidden, a companion to beer as a recreational drug. One friend remembers the tennis team doing one-hitters in the back of the bus as they rode home from a match in Danville, the coach in the front pretending not to notice. Pot also deepened the consciousness of beauty—or at least they thought so. High, they listened to the stoner bands of the time: