Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (4 page)

Over time, Desai and Javit, with their shared pre-med ambitions, separated from Wallace—he was the friendly but forlorn third roommate. They could not figure out what was going on in his head, though they suspected it was not what was going on in theirs. In fact, Wallace was probably not so sure what was going on either. No one had found out the things about himself he wished to keep private, but only because no one seemed to care enough to do so. He knew what he needed, what would make him feel better:
great grades. It would be satisfying to show everyone what he could do; his shyness did not preclude competitiveness. Getting straight As, as he would later tell
Amherst
magazine, was “a way to hide from people, to try to earn—through ‘achievement’ or whatever—permission to be at Amherst that I was too self-centered to realize I’d already received when they accepted me.”

Wallace had liked to study high when he was in high school. He reestablished the routine at Amherst, with two young men who lived down the hall from him. They would get together in their room most days in the late afternoon, do bong hits for forty-five minutes while listening to music, and then go to the dining hall as soon as it opened (they called themselves “the 5:01 brigade”). Wallace would eat his food quickly, with a tea bag dunked into a cup of coffee. At 5:45 he’d head for Frost Library, where he’d study for the next six hours until it closed. Over time he found study spaces on campus that stayed open all night—the Merrill Science Center, for instance, or Webster Library with its stuffed polar bears and botany books.

That first semester Wallace dug into introductory courses in English, history, and political science and one elective, Evolution and Revolution. Late at night he’d come back to Stearns with his books. Often he would then head off again to the room where the pot was. The discussion was light. Wallace was happy high, more like the Wallace of high school no one at Amherst had met. One member of the group remembers that the three friends would test each other’s knowledge of TV jingles. “
Hazel
?” he remembers the discussion. “Now how did that one go?” Munchies were satisfied by the boxes of Freihofer’s cookies in Sally Wallace’s care packages. Afterward, Wallace would clamber back to his room, take his bathrobe, and march off to brush his teeth or have another shower before retiring to “the vag” for the night.

There was a moment in many of his fellow students’ lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. One friend remembers looking over his shoulder in a class on twentieth-century British poetry after the professor returned their essays on Philip Larkin and seeing on Wallace’s, “A+—One of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read.” In epistemology, he was dominant, peppering the professor with so many advanced questions he had to ask
Wallace to keep them for his office hours. “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I ever had,” remembers Willem DeVries.
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For his freshman roommate Desai, the moment of awareness came one morning second semester around one a.m. when Wallace returned to their suite, likely stoned, and asked to borrow his paper on
Henry V
. Wallace, Desai remembers, had earlier glanced at the play for the freshman Shakespeare seminar they both were taking. Now he quickly scanned his roommate’s paper, put it down, went away, and worked for several hours, producing an essay that would earn him an A in the class. “I thought I was smarter,” Desai remembers thinking. “Now I was getting a glimpse of how much he could accomplish.” So were others at Amherst. The first semester Wallace got two other As and an A-minus. Second semester he won the prize for the freshman with the best grade point average. “Un veritable bijou,” his teacher wrote on reading his last paper for a class in the gothic.

Responses like these made Wallace happy, happier than he later felt they should have. And despite his shyness, over time he was piecing together the social puzzle and starting to make friends. Late first semester, he met another freshman, Mark Costello, a bright, mischievous boy who, like Wallace, lived in Stearns and spent every waking hour in the library. Both young men, from large public high schools, felt the gulf between their background and that of many undergraduates at a school that touted the well-rounded over the brilliant. (Costello had sent a photo of the star of his school track team to the freshman face-book in place of his own.) Neither was going to be invited to the DKE champagne party or the Psi U beach party, and both made it a point not to care. Costello had his own throwing-up-at-the-college-interview story: he had gotten sick on Route 9 on the way to the Amherst admission’s director’s office. Wallace responded by claiming he had thrown up in the bushes outside the Lord Jeff Inn en route to his own Amherst interview (and perhaps he had). There were differences, though. Wallace smoked pot; Costello didn’t even drink. Costello, from a large Irish-Catholic family, was considering becoming a priest; Wallace was desperate to get laid. All the same, a close friendship developed. Soon Wallace was letting Costello in on the locations of secret places where he liked to study.
Wallace asked Costello to room with him the following year, and his new friend agreed.

When the summer came, Wallace was relieved. Paradoxically, the home that had made him anxious in high school now felt like the place he could go to decompress. It was off the stage that college was to him, safe from observation. Most of his old friends were still there, including Flygare and Maehr. He spent the summer teaching for a sixth time in Blair Park, reading, and getting high. One of his new freshman friends, Fred Brooke, an aspiring writer who had lived in Stearns too, visited him at home, and the two went out late at night to play tennis in the park. They hit balls back and forth amid the mosquitoes and drank beer in the Illinois heat.

Sophomore year Wallace and Costello were assigned one of the worst rooms on campus, a tiny double next to the TV pit in Moore Hall. Once a week at 3 a.m. a truck came and emptied the dining-hall Dumpster outside their window. All the same, Wallace found he was happier than as a freshman. He had his routines down and a growing sense of himself as competent. He no longer worried about disappointing his parents or wasting their money. To have Costello at his side—to have near him another person whose behavior he could rely on—was a huge help. A happier Wallace began to emerge. In the mornings he wore his tattered bathrobe from home—he worried that the smears from Clearasil looked like semen stains—a Parkland College Cobras hoodie, and untied boots to stomp off to shower. “Dave, why don’t you ever tie the belt, walking around like this?” Costello would ask him. “You think I wanna look like a nerd or a jerk?” Wallace would answer. He always gargled and brushed for forty-five minutes, and then there came the microscopic examination and treatment of his acne. Back in the room, he would spread out his towels to dry, hanging them from shelves, chair backs, and bedposts. (Wallace’s fear of germs was typical of his phobic mind. It was at once real and exaggerated, with an overlay of self-deprecating comedy to both underscore and hide the hurt.) His collection of stoner tapes came out: Pink Floyd,
Switched-On Bach
, REO Speedwagon, Frank Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.” Wallace had watched little or no television his freshman
year, but with the TV pit right next door he could time his indulgences for when it was empty. He enjoyed
Hawaii Five-O
reruns and a new show,
Hill Street Blues,
on Thursday nights. Soap operas, though—another favorite with their exaggerated plots and larger-than-life personalities—he was too embarrassed to turn on. In general he did not like being watched watching, and if others were there he’d pass by. Yet it was a welcome bit of routine, a nice refuge from the excess of interactions that communal living brought.

Costello and Wallace sat down at 5:15 at the same table most nights in the Valentine Dining Hall, united in their need to study. During exam periods, Wallace added a second tea bag to his cup of coffee. He’d down the caffeinated drink and go off to the library. (On Sundays he’d be waiting on the steps for the librarians to open after brunch.) Then after the library closed, he and Costello would calm down with a shot of scotch. “I think this is a two-shot night,” Wallace would sometimes say. At various times, he gave up pot, saying it was bad for his lungs. He caught some of Costello’s enthusiasm for political history. He already knew trivia about Illinois politics, about Big Jim Thompson and the Stevenson dynasty that produced the two-time presidential candidate Adlai. Now he set his eye on interning for his congressman, Ed Madigan. With Costello, another friend, Nat Larson, and a fifteen-year-old freshman name Corey Washington, he joined the school debate team. Wallace was afraid of public speaking—his voice was reedy and got stuttery when he was nervous—but he participated because being on the team would look good on his transcript if he applied to law school. They traveled up and down the East Coast competing. Chris Coons, another member of team, remembers Wallace as brilliant and funny in competition, with “literally the worst delivery I have ever heard—mumbling and awkward and turned away from the judges and audience.” Wallace in turn denigrated him as the “Coonsgah” and amused his friends with a mean imitation of the future senator from Delaware.

The first semester Wallace again aced everything, with an A-plus in introduction to philosophy. He also got an A in his English class, his mother’s field. He told friends he wanted to please both parents.

Wallace came back to school early in January. He had left with high hopes and a sense of growing happiness, but when he got back he told Costello that Christmas had been “bad.” He would not be more specific. His banter, his roommate saw, had vanished. He seemed unresponsive. The impersonations were gone; Costello was surprised—he did not know that Wallace’s clowning and showing off were, if more than a façade, not quite a self. He was amazed—but Wallace was amazed too. He was familiar with his anxiety and may even have associated it with depression, but this was a more intense version of whatever he had routinely dealt with in high school; it was as if some switch in him had been flipped. He felt despair and thought of killing himself. He held on for a few weeks, trying to white-knuckle his way back to being himself. But one day William Kennick, a professor of philosophy who had been his father’s mentor, saw what was going on—he was familiar with depression from his own family—and took Wallace to see a therapist. Shortly after, Costello came into their room to find his roommate slumped over, his gray suitcase between his legs. Wallace was dressed in a Chicago Bears watch cap and tan parka. “I have to go home,” he told Costello. “What’s wrong?” Costello asked. “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with me,” he said. He was hugely apologetic and told Costello he was worried the college would slot someone awful into the room once he left. “I’ve let you down,” he told his roommate. Costello thought it was strange that Wallace kept focusing on him. Wasn’t Wallace the one in distress? In silence he walked his roommate to the bus to Springfield, which would take Wallace to the airport.

Wallace’s parents took their son in and put him back in his bedroom on the second floor. After his difficult senior year in high school, they could hardly have been surprised by such an outcome, but if they felt this, they did not say it. They were not unfamiliar with suicidal depression: Sally’s sister and uncle had both taken their own lives. The family let Wallace come and go as he pleased. “We didn’t press him,” his mother says. “We figured if he wanted to talk about it he’d talk about it.” But he began to confide in his sister, Amy, whom up until then he had mostly looked on as a nuisance. He told her how frightened and uncomfortable the world felt to him and how nothing seemed meaningful anymore. He wondered who he really was—the star Amherst student or a young man who would never make it out of the home on his own?—and his sister quietly worried the
same thing. Yet over time he began to heal, and by the spring he got a job driving a school bus. It was good to be back in the Midwest, experiencing the comforting flatness of the prairie. But when the kids mouthed off at him, he quit, left the bus behind, and walked home. In semi-mock outrage, he wrote Costello how appalled he was that Urbana would permit someone with a known history of mental disease to handle a motor vehicle with children on board. Never liking the phone, he instead established a lively correspondence with Costello, who was kept informed of his travails.

He also wrote some fiction. Wallace had written occasional comic stories in high school but any interest had dropped away when he got to Amherst.
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Fiction on campus was the province of, as he would later describe them, “foppish aesthetes” who “went around in berets stroking their chins.” They were sensitive, and his sensitivity was not something he wanted to emphasize. The cast of mind he thought it took to be a writer was scary to him. But home on his own he gave it another try. One story he worked on, according to Costello, was called “The Clang Birds,” about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass. In Wallace’s story, God ran an existential game show where contestants were asked impossible or paradoxical questions. God wielded the buzzer and no one could stop playing. He also tried writing in a more delicate vein. He started a prose poem about the cornfields of Illinois, which he sent to Costello to read, and also a story about a pretty girl whose drunk boyfriend kills her in a car crash. There may have been bigger efforts—certainly he conceived his goals ambitiously. Costello remembers getting a letter from Wallace announcing that he wanted to write fiction that would still be read “100 years from now.” He was impressed—he had no inkling either that his roommate wanted to write or could write fiction.
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