D. Max: Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

From Wallace’s autobiographical sketch, written sometime around fourth grade:

Dark, semi long hair dark brown eyes…. Likes underwater swimming football, T.V. reading. Height 55 inches weight 69 ½ pounds.

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. 2He 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.)